“PUBLIC EDITORS” AND MEDIA GOVERNANCE AT THE GUARDIAN AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

Abstract

This paper examines the columns of Ian Mayes, the first Readers' Editor of The Guardian, and of Daniel Okrent, the first Public Editor of The New York Times, to provide an empirically grounded and theoretically informed analysis of the emergent role of newspaper public editors. To do this, the paper positions the emergence of public editors as part of a wider trend towards the adoption of mechanisms of media accountability, and engages with academic literature that has positioned this trend within an emergent paradigm of “media governance”. The empirical dimension of the paper is grounded in quantitative and qualitative analysis of columns written by Mayes and Okrent during their tenure as public editors at the two newspapers, as well as key organisational documents. The findings of the data analysis suggest that, in the context of debates around media accountability and governance, there is a need to consider forms of governance such as public editors in the context of broader social and organisational concerns with declining trust, managing corporate risk and providing external demonstrations of legitimacy, and a renewed and targeted emphasis on journalistic professionalism.

Keywords:

• accountability
• journalistic practice
• media governance
• public editor
• The Guardian
• The New York Times

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the Small Grants Scheme of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne. We thank Violeta Politoff for research assistant work. An earlier version of this paper was presented at The Australian Sociological Association Annual Conference 2009. Tim Marjoribanks was in the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Melbourne when this paper was written.

Notes

1. For ease of reference, we have chosen to group both positions under the single heading of “public editors”, only referring to the distinct titles when addressing each position individually. While we acknowledge these different titles invoke different connotations, discussing these differences is not the primary concern of this paper.

2. It is important to note that forms of self-regulation are not merely internal, but may also include internal and industry-wide co-operative frameworks such as Press Councils, a point McQuail later acknowledges (2003, p. 106).

3. This habitual usage of government contrasts with the way in which this term is used in work influenced by Michel Foucault's analytic of “governmentality”, which expands the usage of government to include practices both by state agencies and agencies “beyond the state” (Rose and Miller 1992). While this expanded definition appears closer to an engagement with “governance”, there remain marked differences between the normative and descriptive tendencies of “governance” paradigms and the Foucauldian ambition to analyse critically the effects of power engendered through governmental assemblages (see Rose, 1999, pp. 15–22 and Dean, 2007 for discussions of such differences).

4. Ian Mayes, “Open Door columns”: 195, 19 June 2004; 196, 26 June 2004; 215, 27 November 2004; 225, 19 February 2005; 230, 7 May 2005; 234, 2 July 2005; 245, 31 October 2005; 246, 7 November 2005; 247, 14 November 2005; 249, 28 November 2005; 274, 3 July 2006; 279, 28 August 2006; 285, 9 October 2006; 296, 8 January 2007; 306, 19 March 2007; http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/ianmayes, accessed March 2010. Daniel Okrent, “Public Editor columns”: 001, 7 December 2003; 006, 15 February 2004; 008, 14 March 2003; 012, 9 May 2004; 014, 30 May 2004; 015, 13 June 2004; 019, 12 September 2004; 027, 12 December 2004; 028, 26 December 2004; 032, 20 February 2005; 034, 27 March 2005; http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/thepubliceditor/okrent/index.html, accessed June 2009.