Bill Keller’s regrets

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller participated in an online Q&A with the public this week. Some of his answers touched on accuracy, credibility and corrections. Here’s one relevant exchange:

Q. You’ve been the face of The Times through the very roughest times for The Times. Anything you regret?

— C.D. Monroe, Washington

… On Page 4 every day we publish some of our regrets in the form of corrections and editor’s notes. Every misspelled word, every unchecked fact, every time we failed to give someone a fair shake makes me wince. When we blunder in a bigger way — some of the credulous stories The Times published en route to the war in Iraq, for example — I ache for our precious credibility. Even worse is when we get it wrong and then insist on sticking to our guns. (I waited a year after getting this job before I wrote a mea culpa about some of our pre-war W.M.D. coverage.) I take some consolation in the fact that we try, as a rule, to own up to our mistakes and even learn from them. There is no worse feeling in this business, however, than the feeling that you have let readers down.

So, yes, regrets, I’ve had way more than a few. Thankfully they are outweighed by the thrill I get working with some of the most talented, conscientious, honorable people in journalism.

Keller also addressed questions about the paper’s public editor:

A number of news organizations have ombudsmen, independent representatives of the readers, who handle complaints and critique journalistic performance, often in the pages of the paper. The Times had long resisted the idea, largely because we thought it was our job as editors to represent the interests of readers. But after the famous Voldemort scandal of 2003, we realized we could use additional safeguards for our credibility. We created the job of “standards editor,” to make sure our policies on accuracy and fair play were rigorous and to help enforce them, and a “public editor” to serve as a kind of independent auditor, with freedom to air his judgments on the Web site and in the Sunday paper. (We also tightened our policies on corrections, anonymous sources and other issues important to our credibility.) The publisher and I hire the public editor for a fixed term. We recently announced that we were giving the current public editor a one-time-only one-year extension. I have long felt the two-year term was too short for someone who came to this complicated place from outside; it takes a while to learn your way around, and by the time one public editor has figured out the job I’m scouring the landscape for a successor.

Clark Hoyt is the third journalist to hold this largely thankless job — an assignment that makes you few friends in the newsroom, and inevitably leaves some readers dissatisfied. I find him very thorough in his reporting, fair-minded in his analysis, and unafraid of hard subjects. I think he does the job as well as it can be done. Sometimes I agree with his conclusions, even if he is calling us on the carpet. And yes, I sometimes disagree with him. He’s not my commanding officer, or the Supreme Court. He’s an independent critic, an outsider with a hall pass and a platform. He is entitled to respect, but I don’t think he expects conformity.

To answer Mr. Lucey, I hope Mr. Hoyt will stay put until his term expires in June 2010, and I fully support his independence.

Whether we have a fourth and a fifth and a sixth public editor is a question we’ll answer when the time comes. The idea of a public editor has never won universal acclamation in the newsroom. There are still some who believe we have enough independent checks in the legion of self-appointed press critics without paying one of our own. There are still some who think a public editor does more to undermine our credibility, by poking small holes in important stories, than to shore it up.

The other day in a meeting of senior editors I asked for an informal show of hands on the question of continuing the role of public editor. The room was about evenly divided. I’m keeping my own hand down until 2010.

But his most amusing response came after a question about how he spends a typical day:

Really? You’d be interested in that? Well, I think my life is pretty much what you would imagine it to be.

I wake up most mornings to the telephone, invariably some world leader or international celebrity seeking my counsel. Lately it’s been a lot of President Obama — again with the damn puppy? — but sometimes it’s Richard Holbrooke to pick my brain about Afghanistan, or Bruce Springsteen asking if it isn’t time for another Arts and Leisure cover story about Bruce Springsteen. The valet brings breakfast with the handful of newspapers that have not gone out of business. In the limo on the way to the office, I help Warren Buffett sort out his portfolio and give trading advice to George Steinbrenner, not that he ever listens.

At the office, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and I have our morning conference call with Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — plus Fidel Castro when he’s compos mentis. Dictating the world’s agenda entails a lot of conference calls. I’ve been encouraging the cabal to save some money by using iChat, but first we have to persuade Putin to wear a shirt.

Lunch at the Four Seasons is always a high point. Today it’s my weekly tête-à-tête with Bill O’Reilly. He’s really not the Neanderthal blowhard he plays on TV. He’s totally in on the joke. After a couple of cosmopolitans, he does a wicked impression of Ann Coulter. We usually spend the lunch working up outlandish things he can say about The New York Times and making fun of Fox executives. (Once Rupert Murdoch showed up for a lunch date, and O’Reilly had to hide under the table for half an hour.)

I spend most of the afternoon writing all the stories for the front page. (You knew those were all pseudonyms, right?) I write Tom Friedman’s column, too, but, I swear, Bill Kristol wrote all his own stuff.

By then it’s time for drinks and dinner. If you’re reading this, Julian, I think the duck tonight. I had the foie gras for lunch. And no time for dessert. The Secretary of State is coming by to give me a back rub.