cowling story

Mike Cowling, assistant professor at UW-Oshkosh and an editor at the The New York Times, spoke of the new committees the Times put together after the Jason Blair incident.

“The culture of the newsroom has changed since Jason Blair,” Cowling said.

The new committees put together in the past three years are to help make decisions at the Times. One of the ideas the new committees introduced was for the paper to have a public editor. The idea of a public editor was something the Times didn’t believe in before Blair.

Due to Blair’s fabrication and plagiarism the paper is also to give credit to everyone who contributed to a story, who the photographer was, and list where everyone was the time the story was written.

“No matter who you are, you have as much in stake in a story as anyone else,” Cowling said.

There is also a confidential new source policy that contains three different levels of confidentiality to sources.

Cowling, who has worked at the Times for eight years, discussed his sabbatical project on the Times’ Pulitzer Prizes.

“People put a lot of value into winning a Pulitzer Prize at the Times,” Cowling said.

The Times has won 90 Pulitzer’s since winning its first Pulitzer on June 3, 1918. The Times’ in-house publication, Times Talk, won seven Pulitzers alone, in 2002 for its coverage of 9/11.

“The Times expects excellence from someone who works there,” Cowling said.

He also stated that in order to be an executive editor an employee must work there for many years and every editor accept for one has won a Pulitzer.

Cowling also discussed how particular the Times is about its style and nature of corrections.

“The New York Times will correct things that most papers won’t,” Cowling said. “They ran a correction on a story from 50 years earlier.”

Another topic of discussion was the treatment of Times’ employees.

Cowling discussed the good pay, seminars and workshops offered and Publisher’s Awards. The Publisher’s Award is given to an employee every month. He gave the example that his headline won him $300 one month.

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