New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet has responded to last week’s post which criticized top editors who aren’t using Twitter actively, including Baquet.
I appreciate the response, which is below, combined from two emails. I don’t agree with his observation, but I welcome it. I had my say last week and I’m glad to give him his say here today, without insisting on the last word. I do hope, though, that this post will merit his third tweet:
I do think the fact that I have made so little use of Twitter is fair game for criticism. But I can’t resist an observation. One of the biggest criticisms aimed at my generation of editors is that we created a priesthood, that we decided who was a journalist and who was not. If you hadn’t done cops and courts you weren’t a journalist, etc. That characterization was right on. We deserved the hit.
As I observe the criticism nowadays, you will forgive me for noting that it sounds like a new priesthood is being created, with new rules for entry.
Don’t take that as saying I should not tweet more. I should. Just a warning that each generation of journalists seems so certain they know what it takes to be a journalist.
[…] I’m late to this round of a discussion that’s been going on intermittently since at least when I started advocating Twitter’s use by journalists in 2008. But I was tied up Monday when Mathew Ingram and some New York Times staffers discussed whether journalists need to use Twitter (on Twitter, of course). Ingram then blogged about the issue. The discussion was prompted by Buzzfeed’s “Quick Tour Of The New York Times’ Twitter Graveyard,” which exposed and mocked some Times staffers for their weak presence on Twitter, including Executive Editor Dean Baquet, who has tweeted twice. Update: Baquet has responded to this post. […]
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[…] court cases and police activity, says New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet to Steve Buttry. [Steve Buttry via […]
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I’m trying hard (for my reasons-included The one, that my opinion doesn’t worth much) not to agree with D.Baquet but… he has a point. Personally being journalist (freelancer after 28 years as a stuff editor) seems rather hard to do the job, tweeting and face booking at the same time, too many hours needed for all these things. It’s also rather annoying to be excluded from the “club of modern journalists” because you are not so active-or at all, on twitter. May be I’m getting old but I feel that is not enough anymore to do journalism, you need to be a kind of “multitool” or like to be you the tool being used by the S.Media. Anyway it is complicate for just a comment!
Sorry for the bad english! I’m greek.
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Your English is better than my Greek. Thanks for your comment!
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As it happens, the metaphor Baquet chose is one I know well: Back in 2009, when I met Arianna Huffington for the first time at the FTC, she asked me to write up our conversation for her site. So, I did. Its title? “Is Journalism Going Through Its Own Reformation?” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/is-journalism-going-throu_b_376345.html
Maybe I’ve misread the criticism of Baquet that I’ve seen elsewhere, but my view is exactly the opposite: the smartest young journalists coming up and the Generation X-ers (ahem) that preceded them, along with their wise elders, understand at visceral level that social media, online video and smartphones have shifted how newsgathering works, democratizing publishing to all and enabling any connected person to report and commit acts of journalism.
The people formerly known as the audience, per NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, certainly know and experiences this during every breaking news situation, with all the confusion and misinformation it creates For much of the public, a top editor publicly choosing not to participate in the hurly burly of online conversation, even to the point of not contributing, much less demonstrating listening or acting as a hub to redistribute confirmed reports, might look like he or she is remaining aloof, choosing to preach from in front of the cathedral, not minister to a circle of friends.
Personally, I look forward to Baquet joining these conversations. I have faith they will be better for having him in it.
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What intrigues me is the phrase, “…each generation of journalists….” In a book (by Deanne DeMarco) that I edited, she observed that there are now up to four generations in the workplace! Twitter and Facebook (and other social media sites) seem like they should level the playing field for each of the four cohorts. But do they? When “the kids” started Facebook, only “they” used it. Once the grandmas and grandpas discovered it, many of the kids left! Then Twitter came along and it seemed to attract people of all ages because of the fact that its word limit was a great “shut up now” factor! (By that I mean that everyone can take anything if it is in a small dose.) Steve, you are doing a wonderful job keeping your thumb on the pulse of communication styles right now. In fact, you are not keeping your thumb on the wrist (the most convenient way to take a pulse reading), by my estimation, you are keeping your thumb on the carotid artery! Thank you!
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Thanks for the kind words, Mary. As a grandfather who’s trying to learn new digital skills, I tend to shy away from generational generalizations.
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[…] most intriguing first-wave of responses to the Baquet emailed comments shared at the Steve Buttry blog end is this response from Alexander […]
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[…] accounts of some New York Times journalists. On Tuesday morning, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet responded to criticism that the paper’s editors were not using Twitter […]
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Talk about a non-sequitur. The argument isn’t about who is and who isn’t a “real” journalist, it was about news leadership actually doing (and understanding) what they’ve told their subordinates to do: innovate and experiment. The fact that Baquet sees the debate as “should I tweet more or not?” shows he doesn’t understand the bigger point of actually *learning* how the communication models have changed. The chore of the actual tweeting is not the only end goal here.
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Excellent points, Dan! I fully agree.
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This whole discussion relies on the notion that Twitter is a major force in the gathering and dissemination of news, and an absolutely essential tool for every journalist in every job. All the data suggest otherwise.
But then, fundamentalists tend not to be impressed by data and observation. Twitter, for all its many, many drawbacks and annoyances, can in many circumstances be a very powerful tool. Yes, most if not all journalists (and certainly reporters on subject-based beats) should at least be following quality Twitter feeds if not tweeting a lot themselves. And of course all publications should tweet their stories and watch out for (serious and important) reader response.
But judging journalists based on whether they use it — and judging in particular top editors of major global newspapers — is just clueless sloganeering.
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[…] « Dean Baquet’s response: Beware creating a new journalism ‘priesthood’ […]
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Yes to the priesthood comments. Although in my experience as a journalist we’re not talking about celibate priests.
The part of this I struggle with is that there are values and skills from the old days that are worth sticking with, some worth jettisoning. I don’t think any of us have found the best path through this yet.
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[…] Since I’ve made a big deal lately about why editors and newsrooms need to use Twitter, maybe this is a good time to criticize Twitter. It might bolster my position that I don’t see Twitter use as a “rule for entry” for any journalism priesthood. […]
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Reblogged this on owloffline and commented:
“Just a warning that each generation of journalists seems so certain they know what it takes to be a journalist.” – Dean Baquet, NYTimes
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This is an interesting debate. One thing that I noticed this week that feels relevant is there was a huge outpouring of farewells for Kinsey Wilson from NPR, with a lot of people saying what a wonderful digital leader and advocate he’d been.
People like Brian Boyer: “You brought many of us here. You’re the only executive I’ve ever believed in. Make more great things.”
Until this week, Kinsey had not tweeted for 15 months.
Twitter usage may be one indicator of whether people are embracing change, but it’s certainly not comprehensive or foolproof.
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I think that’s a valid criticism of Kinsey. He’s been a digital leader for years, though. A leader with strong print roots seeking to lead innovation faces different challenges leading by example.
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The obvious question that goes unanswered in all these evangelical calls for every journalist to be on Twitter: why? What, precisely, is gained? I mean precisely, not squishy phrases like “reader engagement,” but rather concrete details and examples of why it’s absolutely necessary for every journalist to have a strong Twitter presence. It’s just stated as a given, but never really explicated.
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If you have to ask that question, Dan, I suspect you’ve chosen not to pay attention to the last several years in journalism and social media. I mentioned one example in last Thursday’s post: Baquet and Alessandra Stanley were dismissive and clueless about the reaction to Stanley’s insulting piece about Alessandra Stanley because they weren’t engaged (it’s actually a pretty specific word, not a squishy one) on Twitter. Journalists engaged on Twitter understood the importance of the Ferguson story faster than anyone else. Twitter puts you ahead on nearly every breaking story, locally or internationally. Livetweeting events and breaking news into a liveblog on a news site gets deeper engagement (measured specifically by time spent with a story) than pretty much anything else a news organization can do. The benefits for journalism are many, obvious and measurable. You can ignore or deny them if you wish. If you want more explication, I blogged a few of the reasons here: https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/10-ways-twitter-is-valuable-to-journalists/
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You misread my question, though I suppose if you skimmed it I could see why you interpreted it the way you did.
I’m not questioning whether Twitter has value — I’m wondering why a certain group of dogmatic-sounding platform enthusiasts are so evangelical about it, and so insistent that *every* journalist — including the editor of The New York Times — *must* have a strong Twitter presence. And why the worth of journalists should be measured by how active they are on Twitter. I think it’s supremely silly, as there are all kinds of journalists doing great work who either aren’t on Twitter or don’t tweet a lot of stuff (some might, like me, use it a lot, but mostly for reading.)
I don’t totally dispute any of your 10 reasons for Twitter being a valuable tool. I’ve been on there for more than five years, and I manage five different accounts, two of them actively (though the value for me is mostly in following particular topics. I don’t spend a ton of time yammering.)
I do think several of your reasons are overblown, though. Particularly the bit about “engagement,” which indeed is a squishy word that demands explication. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t all kinds of avenues for “engagement” already — and “engagement” itself is already an overblown concept. Most people just want to read the news and move on. As any pre-Internet op-ed editor knows, most (though certainly not all) of the people who want to “engage” with journalists are cranks. That doesn’t mean we should ignore readers, but this whole idea that journalists need to spend a lot of time interacting with them is based on a theory that hasn’t been supported by facts or data. “Engagement” sounds nice, and now that we have the tools to make it easy, well, then, that must mean we have to make heavy use of them. But this notion is just that — a notion, based on a feeling, and apparently unexamined by people who approach this topic (weirdly enough) as if it were a religion.
Relatively speaking, hardly anyone uses Twitter. And among those who use Twitter, hardly anyone uses it for news. And among those who use it for news, hardly anyone interacts with journalists on a regular basis. And among those who interact with journalists on a regular basis, hardly anyone is a normal, well-intentioned, well-adjusted adult. On top of all that, on the rare occasion when a reader tries to interact thoughtfully, it’s at 140 characters at a time, which means the interaction is by its very nature shallow and stilted (aside from asking a quick question or something). Twitter, for all its value, is a *terrible* medium for conversation (or, sigh, “engagement.”). That of course hasn’t stopped its most fervent obsessives — many of them journalists — from messing around on Twitter all day, arguing and yammering a sentence at a time.
How on earth would reading a bunch of complaints on Twitter make Alessandra Stanley less clueless and dismissive? You insisted that if she and Baquet read the “hashtag” (meaning, a bunch of disconnected bleats from a bunch of different people of varying degrees of thoughfulness and sanity) they would have come away with a deeper understanding of the complaints. But why? There were several smart, cogent, coherent columns and blog posts written about the Rhimes piece, which Stanley and Baquet could have read, even if they didn’t. How are a bunch of tweets, many of them nasty and/or illiterate, better than that? They clearly aren’t. It’s the difference between watching an episode of Frontline and listening to the population of South Park yelling “RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE.”
Bottom line, we need to keep this stuff in perspective. Twitter is often incredibly useful — and for journalists (like me) who follow particular beats, probably essential. When wisely filtered, it’s the best real-time newsfeed there is. But this insistence that it’s revolutionary in a whole bunch of different ways, and that every journalist in every circumstance must be active on it, amounts to religion.
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You’re welcome to your opinions, Dan. I just don’t share them. But the purported facts you said about Twitter were completely blown away by Ferguson. And you completely mischaracterized the #lessclassicallybeautiful hashtag.
I won’t address all your points. You clearly have your mind made up about Twitter and engagement, and I don’t feel any need to change your mind. But you’re completely wrong about the ability to converse or say anything meaningful in 140 characters. Scan the nearest newspaper. Do the headlines tell you anything meaningful? Are any of them longer than 140? Go to Bartlett’s and see how many memorable questions, some of which I’m sure you know by heart, are shorter than 140. I did a whole series of blog posts on wisdom of the ages in tweet length: https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/category/twitter/wisdom-in-tweets/
You also misrepresented what I said. I didn’t — and haven’t — said that the worth of a journalist should be measured by how active they are on Twitter. You can’t find an instance of me ever saying that. I simply said that inactivity on Twitter is the most reliable indicator of someone who’s refusing to embrace change. I didn’t even say it was a perfect indicator of that, and I certainly didn’t say that embracing change is how the worth of a journalist should be measured. It’s a factor, but not the only factor or the most important factor.
And I didn’t say the editor of the New York Times *must* be active on Twitter. I said the editor of the New York Times undercuts his own organization’s emphasis on innovation by his obvious and public inactivity on Twitter. And I know that to be true.
I think you have some valid points in your comment, but it’s hard to find them among the errors and misrepresentations.
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I’ll just pick out one thing from that set of puzzling assertions: Neither Bartlett’s quotes nor headlines are conversations. I don’t think, and I didn’t say, that every single tweet-bleat is worthless, but most of them are. Or at least so many that it makes wading through all the crap pointless, at least for me. As I explicitly stated, I think Twitter’s great for headlines (and links). I think it’s terrible for conversations – to the point of obnoxiousness. Inherently so. And indeed, I’ve argued that at some length here:
http://fortune.com/2013/08/29/twitter-is-wrecking-twitter-to-make-twitter-more-popular/
When somebody starts with “you’re welcome to your opinions,” what follows isn’t likely to make a ton of sense. I mean – what’s the point of that observation, anyway?
The problem here is that this is — for whatever bizarre reason — religion to you people, so it’s impossible to have a rational conversation with you about it. This response of yours is, frankly, a load of nonsense that has little to do with the points I made or the questions I asked. If you don’t want to address them, that’s fine – it’s pretty much what I expected. But typing out a bunch of words that amount to “I don’t like what you wrote” was probably a waste of time.
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Nothing squishy about engagement. Check out this example, Dan: https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/planet-princeton-shows-how-engagement-improves-journalism/
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It’s not religion, Dan. I’ve never seen a religion metaphor about journalism that was accurate, including Baquet’s claim of a priesthood and especially your ridiculous suggestion. Journalists play the religion card when the facts aren’t on their side.
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But which facts are those? Back to my original question. You don’t back up anything you say with any facts, just more assumptions and proclamations. That you take such great personal umbrage at someone daring to point these things out is about as religious (or political, if you prefer) as can be.
Here’s a fact: As powerful and as useful for journalists as Twitter can be (I don’t disagree with you about that!), its overall impact on the enterprise of journalism is basically nil. The people you think we should all be “engaging” with aren’t there. And hardly anyone uses Twitter for news. These statements are backed up by solid facts — by which I mean numbers, data, cold observation:
http://fortune.com/2013/03/06/twitter-for-news-not-so-much/
Another fact, albeit anecdotal: I recently had a story of mine linked to by, of all things, AOL. The resulting traffic absolutely trounced — by orders of magnitude — anything I’ve ever gotten from Twitter, including when I’ve been retweeted by famous people. For all the talk about “engagement” and so forth, Twitter-besotted journalists are way more insular and closed off from the general population than most others.
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I notice you continue to steer clear of Ferguson, but that’s one of the facts: The people you claim aren’t on Twitter actually are, and they were talking and posting photos before most of the professional media realized what a big story that was. I’m not talking about Twitter’s value for driving traffic. I’m talking about its value for doing better journalism. Like not missing out on big stories like Ferguson.
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I’m not steering clear, and like I said, I think every one of your 10 points has some validity, including that one. One story (or a handful) out of the thousands that get published every day doesn’t prove much of anything. Of course news organizations should monitor social media, and take it seriously. Any publication that doesn’t have people dedicated to social media, including Twitter, is clueless. (It’s almost worse that so many publications think so little of social media that they put interns and junior staffers in charge of it — they wouldn’t have done that for their front pages 20 years ago, and they wouldn’t do it now.)
You seem to think (or want to believe, since it would be easier to counter) that I’m arguing against Twitter, when I’m explicitly not. I’m arguing only against dogma, and for perspective. It might (or might not) be a good idea for the editor of The New York Times — or this or that TV critic — to be active on Twitter. But in the scheme of things, it’s simply not important, or emblematic of anything. And yet, I now know of four widely circulated (among journalists, at least) arguments that it’s somehow a big deal that Dean Baquet doesn’t tweet. The man puts out a giant global newspaper every day and manages a staff of 1,300 people. And he has tons of people on his staff who are on Twitter, some of them devoted to just that. I’m still wondering why this is such a big deal to you and your cohorts. It’s like arguing that he’s out of touch because he’s not line-editing sports roundups.
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(I don’t know why some of my comments are not appearing in direct response to comments I’m addressing. I’m hitting “reply” in the email notification)
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There might be a limit on how many comments you can have in a thread. I’ve been hitting “reply” above the comment in my browser, and a few comments ago, it didn’t offer me that option.
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Ah, that’s probably good so the columns don’t get unreadably narrow.
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Yeah, it was getting pretty narrow when it cut me off. Maybe a sign that we’ve both made our points and should, as the cliche goes, agree to disagree. 🙂
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No, it’s not. His company undertook a big study on innovation and he has said innovation is important to the company. Twitter is a tiny slice of innovation, but it’s, as I’ve said before, a reliable indicator of someone’s willingness to change personally what he or she is doing as a journalist. Other editors of large newsrooms — Marty Baron, Davan Maharaj and Greg Moore, to name three — have taken the time to use and learn Twitter, a visible message to their staffs that change even involves them. Baquet has not. And so people like his TV critic think it’s OK for them to continue doing business as usual. So they both were pretty clueless to the depth of reaction to a deeply embarrassing Times piece. It’s OK for you to be clueless about the reaction (which was nothing at all like “RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE”) because you’re not the TV critic or executive editor at the New York Times. But that was an embarrassment to the Times, rightly called out by the public editor and many more people.
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Fair enough. But that strongly implies that Baquet should be engaged in all forms of “innovation,” however tiny a slice they might represent. Does he need a Tumblr and a Snapchat account, too? Should he learn JavaScript?
I don’t know that Twitter needs to be used to be understood on a basic level, at least at this point. It’s not all that complicated. I assume he basically gets what it does, but — like covering the Mets or designing interfaces — he delegates the actual work of it. It still doesn’t strike me as a failing, even a minor one, that he doesn’t tweet. Hopefully, he’s encouraging those staffers who would be more productive by tweeting to do so. I assume he is. If he spent any substantial amount of time on Twitter, I’d worry for the paper’s future.
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I don’t think an editor should do everything, but an editor using Snapchat (or fill in any new tool here) probably would have good benefits for a newsroom seeking to be more innovative. He or she would certainly be making the point that we all need to be learning and get beyond our comfort zones. I know when I was editor (of a much smaller newsroom than Baquet, but also without five deputies), my use of Twitter was invaluable in keeping me on top of community news and responding to community concerns. I gave tips to my staff that came from Twitter and resulted in page-one stories (you are completely wrong that no one is using it). My staff’s use of Twitter — for news gathering, not just driving traffic — soared under my leadership. The editor’s example matters. I go back to the Times innovation report, which criticized the Times for not having a strong enough culture of innovation, and which Baquet embraced. If the editor is leading innovation in other visible ways (Baquet was mentioned once in the report), maybe Twitter’s not that important. It’s certainly not enough. But it’s a valid indicator.
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I addressed the idea of Twitter as a newsgathering tool a few times above – lest you think I’ve only addressed its traffic-generating aspects, as appears to be the case. In fact, I think its utility as a source of news *for* journalists is its strongest one. I use it all day for that, at least when I’m at my desk and not on the phone.
Not to diminish your experience as an editor, but the smaller the paper, the more sense it makes for the top editor to be on Twitter. If section editors at the NYT aren’t on twitter, that’s worthy of comment for sure (though still not a huge deal as long as the paper in general is making good use of the platform.)
Baquet is dealing with a gargantuan budget that’s constantly under assault, staffing and managing bureaus around the world, dealing with what must be incredibly fraught office politics, formulating long-term strategy, dealing with coverage of ISIS, ebola, and looming national elections, etc. etc. Snapchat? I mean, c’mon. Twitter at least is arguable, and I’m not even arguing that he shouldn’t be on Twitter, only that it doesn’t matter much either way.
Even that idiotic BuzzFeed thing allowed that NYT staffers in general are all over Twitter (which should have been an indication that the “story” was utterly invalid, but since when has that mattered?). And whatever the Innovation Report might say, the NYT has generally been pretty good with tech, at least over the last decade. It’s doing better online than most newspapers — many of which can’t even come up with a readable, navigable Web site. (I noticed yesterday that the Mercury News, like many newspapers, doesn’t even link to its own stories when it refers to them. The NYT is light years ahead of that.)
That said, in the mid-90s there were lots of “innovation reports” like that one telling newspapers — based on little more than intuition and tech dogma — that they had no choice but to put everything online for free, and that banner ads and online classifieds would prove to be goldmines.
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[…] I criticized Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet for not being active on Twitter and he responded, warning against creating a new “priesthood” for journalism, some have raised questions […]
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[…] a discussion in the comments on a blog post this week, Dan Mitchell dismissed “reader engagement” as a “squishy phrase” with vague meaning and no true value. He called engagement an “overblown […]
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[…] do think the fact that I have made so little use of Twitter is fair game for criticism,” hewrote. “But I can’t resist an observation. One of the biggest criticisms aimed at my generation of […]
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[…] up on the discussion of New York Times Twitter use started by Buzzfeed and continued by me, Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and […]
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[…] the way was Baquet’s guest post questioning whether I and others were creating a “new priesthood” with “new rules […]
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[…] Times made no notice of Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet’s response to my criticism of him and other top editors who don’t use Twitter. But the exchange was […]
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[…] invited responses from Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and other Times staffers mentioned in the post. None of them responded on the record, except an […]
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