These two stories, put together, make for an interesting situation. They promote Landman just as he unloads on the paper.
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Story One
Times Picks Metropolitan Editor as Director of Enterprise Projects
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jonathan Landman, metropolitan editor of The New York Times, has been appointed assistant managing editor for enterprise.
Mr. Landman's appointment, to a new position, was announced yesterday by Bill Keller, executive editor.
In his new position, Mr. Landman, 50, will oversee long-term coverage of major news events and reporting projects involving multiple newsroom departments. He will report to Mr. Keller and Jill Abramson, managing editor for news gathering.
Mr. Landman joined The Times as a copy editor in 1987. After serving as an assistant editor in the national and metropolitan departments, he became an assistant editor in the Washington bureau in late 1991 and deputy editor there in 1992. He was editor of the Week in Review section from 1994 until 1999, when he became metropolitan editor. As a special assignment, he served as acting Sunday Business editor in 1995, during which he supervised the creation of the new Money & Business section.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Landman served as deputy city editor at The Daily News in New York and as a reporter for Newsday. He has also worked as a reporter and editor for The Chicago Sun-Times.
Mr. Landman received a B.A. degree in American history from Amherst College in 1974 and an M.S. in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1978.
In an e-mail message to the staff, Mr. Keller said Mr. Landman would assume his new duties as soon as a successor had been named.
nytimes.com
Story Two
Society of Professional Journalists
NYT editor said top brass was irresponsible in Blair case
by Renee Petrina
A New York Times editor appearing at an SPJ ethics panel Saturday said
top editors at the Times brushed aside warnings about Jayson Blair’s
journalistic shortcomings, contradicting a principal finding of the
paper’s investigation into the former reporter’s actions.
“There was a massive amount of communication going on” between editors,
said metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman. “There was a sweeping aside
by the top guys.”
Landman’s comments surprised many attendees because the Times report,
titled the Siegal report for committee leader Al Siegal, said a lack of
communications between editors was the main problem in the Blair
incident.
Landman was the editor who sent the now-famous e-mail about Blair’s
performance to two higher-ranking editors. “We have to stop Jayson from
writing for The New York Times. Right now,” it read. According to the
Siegal report, that note never reached former executive editor Howell
Raines.
Landman said communication was in no way a problem, and described the
memo as simply one part of newsroom discussions about Blair.
“It was really a punctuation point at the end of a long, long sentence,”
he said prior to the session. Blair, a 26-year-old national desk
reporter and rising star at the paper, left the Times in the spring
after instances of falsified datelines and plagiarism were discovered in
his stories.
Landman’s comments during the session sparked gasps, muffled chatter and
declarations that this had not been previously acknowledged in the
Siegal committee report, or in media coverage of the downfall of Blair
amid plagiarism charges and resignation of the papers two top editors,
Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd.
Reached at his New York home Saturday, Boyd declined to address
Landman’s comments, saying that he did not know the context in which
they were made and that there was no transcript of the session for him
to review.
“I have no idea of the context,” said Boyd, asking who made the link
between him and Landman’s comment. “I don’t understand the logic of that
at all.”
Boyd would not say if he considered himself one of “the top guys,” and
said he wanted evidence of a direct link to him before he could comment.
Numerous attempts to contact Raines were unsuccessful Saturday.
No one from New York Times corporate communications office could be
reached for comment, though messages were left on an office and cellular
phone.
The Blair incident damaged the Times’ credibility as the nation’s
newspaper of record, and sent shockwaves through the ranks of early
career journalists. Cari Hammerstrom, a senior journalism major and SPJ campus chapter member at the University of Texas at Austin, asked Landman during the panel if Blair’s actions had changed the way the Times views interns. He responded that they had not. “I’m glad Jayson
Blair didn’t ruin it for the rest of us,” she said after the session.
Landman was a member of the Siegal committee, so his comments that did
not match the committee’s report appeared to catch the audience by
surprise. However, the other members of the discussion panel, the
Poynter Institute’s Bob Steele and Freedom Forum First Amendment Center
chair John Siegenthaler, Sr., said it was not surprising that Times
staff would have differing opinions. “I think it’s a healthy thing,”
said Siegenthaler, a former editor of the Nashville Tennessean and USA
Today, who likened it to two reporters covering the same event but
writing different stories. “I’m sure that different people inside the
Times have a different take on what took place,” said Steele, ethics
scholar at the St. Petersburg institute.
spj.org |
