A few years ago, while preparing to teach a copy editing course for the first time, I stumbled across a hidden gem in The New York Times digital edition: Copy Edit This!, an interactive quiz that tests readers on grammar and word usage errors from recent Times articles. The Times’s standards editor catches the errors and then explains why they are wrong. Here is an example … [Read more...] about To paywall or not? Young readers provide the answer
New York Times
Libel decision shut down segregationists clinging to Jim Crow
To understand why New York Times v. Sullivan is one of the great First Amendment victories of the past century, take a journey back to the segregated America of the1960s. America was a place where racial segregation and discrimination were the law of the land and a way of life in the South, Midwest and much of the North. Restaurants and hotels were segregated by law. … [Read more...] about Libel decision shut down segregationists clinging to Jim Crow
How many Muslim readers hath the New York Times?
A note on the paper’s decision not to show the Charlie Hebdo cover after the attack The decision of The New York Times not to depict the cover of Charlie Hebdo after ten of the French magazine’s journalists had been murdered by Islamic terrorists has drawn much deserved criticism in the United States and abroad, in comments from the editorial page editor of the Denver Post … [Read more...] about How many Muslim readers hath the New York Times?
Much Ado or Too Much Ado About Jill Abramson
Editor's note: the following is an opinion piece by George Salamon Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times since September 2011 and the first woman in that position, was fired by the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on May 14. It was ugly. Some journalists referred to it as a defenestration. Ms. Abramson, in a commencement speech at Wake Forest … [Read more...] about Much Ado or Too Much Ado About Jill Abramson
Let us now praise our paper of record: The New York Times confronts America’s unpleasant facts
Editor's note: the following is an opinion piece by George Salamon “The power of facing unpleasant facts is clearly an attribute of decent, sane grown-ups as compared to the immature, the silly, the nutty, or the doctrinaire.” Paul Fussell about George Orwell’s “power to face unpleasant facts.” Orwell would have been proud of the way The New York Times exercised its own … [Read more...] about Let us now praise our paper of record: The New York Times confronts America’s unpleasant facts