My posting here has fallen off this week, but for pretty good reasons. I’ve been focused on two things. The first is on giving the commencement address Friday morning for the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. It’s a great honor, and I thought it would be good to come up with something slightly more original than “wear sunscreen,” although that’s excellent advice.
In addition, I’ve been writing a column for Sunday Review on the topic of The Times’s changing views with regard to deferring to government requests to withhold reported information. The recent Senate torture report provides the news peg for the column with revelations about a withheld story in 2002.
In the meantime, though, it’s been an emotional and difficult week at The Times, with more than one hundred staff members leaving or making plans to leave because of buyouts or layoffs. There’s huge ability and institutional knowledge walking out the door, and many staff members are saying goodbye to old friends. To mention just a few people among those who’ve taken the buyout and whose work will be especially sorely missed: the longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse; a deputy national editor, Ethan Bronner; an editorial writer, David Firestone; and the former Book Review editor and writer at large Sam Tanenhaus. These — and many others — are irreplaceable talents.
Meanwhile, Joe Pompeo, a media reporter at Capital New York, has a thorough summary of the tumultuous year almost passed at The Times. His piece covers all the bases, from Jill Abramson’s firing to the start of native advertising.
Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post provides some news about how The Times is handling the information coming out of the hacked Sony emails.
And Josh Gerstein at Politico has the latest on the Times reporter James Risen’s legal difficulties over refusing to testify about a confidential source. (The Times itself has not covered it as heavily, which seems puzzling to me, but may make sense in some mysterious Timesian way.)
All are worth reading. And I’ll be back.
Update, Friday: Here’s brief coverage of my CUNY commencement from Capital New York’s Jeremy Barr. (I include this at the risk of doing exactly what I advised graduates not to do.)