Categories: OLD Media Moves

NYT tech writer's story sourced from friends, acquaintances

The NYTPicker site has a great dissection of a story by New York Times tech writer Brad Stone where every quoted source was a friend of the reporter or someone linked to the paper.

NYTPicker writes, “We don’t yet know to what extent Stone made his editors aware, if at all, of the various personal and professional connections that tied his sources to each other, to him, and/or to the NYT itself. We emailed Stone and Larry Ingrassia, the NYT business editor, to whom Stone reports, for comment earlier today.

“But we do know that readers expect, when they read a page-one NYT trend story, that the reporter has made ample effort to prove his thesis by casting a wide net for examples and evidence.

“Readers don’t presume — unless told otherwise — that the sources quoted in a story have worked with the reporter, have made regular appearances in the NYT, or (as in Glaser’s case) have been paid by the NYT.

“It may not violate the paper’s rules, but in our view it betrays the reader’s trust for a NYT reporter to have made so little effort to find examples outside his own insular world, and to have failed to thoroughly identify his sources for readers. Those failures diminish the value of a trend story dependent primarily on anecdotes, especially one given such prominent display on the NYT’s front page.”

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Diane says:
August 12, 2009 at 1:47 am
This is not at all unusual, for the NYT or any other media outlet. If you read almost any story that requires examples of "real ordinary people" (e.g. lifestyle features, career advice stories) you will very often see that an unrepresentative portion of those quoted are somehow connected with the extended publishing and media world: freelance writers, website workers, magazine editors, authors and, somewhat more distantly, marketing directors, public relations people, communications directors, etc. These will usually heavily outweigh what you would think was a true random sample -- which could be anything from architects, police officers, math teachers and waitresses to airline pilots, accountants and engineers. It's hard not to conclude that the reporter -- even if they don't personally know all the people quoted as friends -- is simply using their extended media network.
Bad Economy Jobs says:
August 12, 2009 at 5:46 am
I understand that newspaper articles have bias in them but this one is truly low. It becomes so blatantly obvious. Can't we as readers expect objective reporting anymore? It's getting sad how online bloggers can dig deeper to find more reputable sources than a major newspaper.