Teaching with The New York Times

NYT: Gun Debate Yields Page One Editorial

The New York Times is running an editorial on its front page on Saturday, the first time the paper has done so since 1920, calling for greater regulation on guns in the aftermath of a spate of mass shootings.

[...]

The front page of The Daily News on Thursday collected Twitter posts from Republican politicians offering their prayers to the victims, around the headline “God Isn’t Fixing This.”

“The global G.D.P. pie is shrinking,” said Raoul Pal, a former Goldman Sachs executive, now based in the Cayman Islands, who produces the Global Macro Investor, a monthly financial report that caters to hedge funds and other sophisticated investors.

Discussion prompts:

What is the “global G.D.P. pie”?

How does it affect you?

... and a week into classes, I received the topics for what would be my first college paper, in an English course on the modern novel. I might as well have been my non-English-speaking grandmother trying to read and understand them: The language felt that foreign. I called my mom at work and in tears told her that I had to come home, that I’d made a terrible mistake.

She sighed into the phone and said: “Just read me the first question. We’ll go through it a little at a time and figure it out.”

I read her the topic slowly, pausing after each sentence, waiting for her to say something. The first topic was two paragraphs long. I remember it had the word intersectionalities in it. And the word gendered. And maybe the phrase theoretical framework. I waited for her response and for the ways it would encourage me, for her to tell me I could do this, that I would eventually be the first in my family to graduate from college.

“You’re right,” she said after a moment. “You’re screwed.”

"We can't entirely leech the New York-ness out of The New York Times," said Keller. "If we somehow achieved absolute objectivity, it would be kind of tedious to read. ... Watching The New York Times try to be even-handed on some issues is like trying to watch somebody dance their kids' dance styles. We look like we're trying too hard. Yes, we should be even-handed, we should certainly follow the basic rule of reporting, challenging your assumptions, and we should be ruthless about having a public editor or an editors' note to call ourselves out. ... But it is possible to be fair and still radiate a cultural persona." 

Why you should read every page, every day:

Page D6, bottom of the page -- buried, some readers might suggest -- Science section, 8/25/2015. 

Tracked down the “Proceedings” article: “Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences.” PNAS. September 16, 2014. vol. 111.

Print headline: “The Gradual Extinction of Accepted Truths”

Online, digital-version headline: “The Widening World of Hand-Picked Truths”

NYT After Deadline:

Questions about where to put hyphens — and more often, where not to — may seem trivial, even pedantic. But small errors can distract and annoy readers who should be focused on the substance of our reporting. And getting the little things right contributes to the overall polish and intelligence of our journalism.

Unfortunately, perfection has proved elusive on the hyphen front recently. Some examples:

•••

In 2010, he and his wife, Melati Pohan, were living in suburban Sparta, N.J., and unhappy about a morning commute by car into Manhattan that could take two-and-a-half hours. …

On last year’s state exams, 10 percent of third-graders met standards in English, and the same percentage did in math.

No hyphens needed in either spot. The first is a very common error, probably arising because hyphens are needed when an expression like that is used as a modifier: a two-and-a-half-hour commute.

The second point is in The Times’s stylebook:

grader. Do not hyphenate in reference to school classes: first grader; sixth grader; 10th grader; etc. But:third-grade pupil.

•••

The hearing came two-and-a-half weeks after the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee released the sixth government report on the Benghazi attacks.

Same problem as above.

Leave it to the NYT for providing a class-discussion prompt:

Why was NYT’s executive editor Jill Abramson fired today, and replaced by managing editor Dean Baquet, less than three years after she was appointed the first woman in the top job? 

"Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.

Sulzberger [the paper’s publisher] is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. (I was also told by another friend of hers that the pay gap with Keller has since been closed.) But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. [Update: A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”]”

"Even though she thought she was politely asking about the pay discrepancy and about the role of the business side, and that she had a green light from management to hire a deputy to Baquet, the decision to terminate her was made. Sulzberger met with her last Friday, and reportedly told her that it was time to make ‘a change.’"

The New Yorker

Fun fact:Jill Abramson once admitted to having a tattooof the “amazing ‘T’ in The New York Times newspaper” on her back.

Pity.

NYT: "Dotting the Parks, Monuments to the Famous or Forgotten"

This is the kind of multimodal platform that I wish we could make available to students to help with analysis -- textual, contextual, visual, hypertextual -- and gives them some real, genuine digital-literacy applications. ("Analyzing de Blasio’s Inaugural Address." January 1, 2014)

Another example: Lhota, October 8, 2013

NYT/Lens/Thomas Alleman: "A Fashion Fetish in Los Angeles"

One day last summer, while average Californians were lazing poolside or flipping burgers on the backyard grill, Thomas Alleman was cruising a run-down section of Hollywood. He was searching for things to photograph. Alongside sat his toy Holga camera, with which he created “Sunshine and Noir,” a series that presented a decidedly unglamorous vision of Los Angeles.

On Fountain Avenue,Mr. Allemannoticed a billboard for the local clothing manufacturer American Apparel. That he took notice of the billboard is not itself surprising, because the company has drawn extensive news coverage — several adshave been banned in the United Kingdom— for featuring highly sexualized, young, real-girl models. Defying — or enraging — its critics, the company also maintains a page on its website featuring stills and animated gifs of many of the pictures.

Mr. Alleman’s attention was drawn to the four repeating photos in the advertisement, which perfectly matched four identical satellite dishes nearby. Unfortunately, he was busy and couldn’t return for a week, during which he fretted that the company would change the billboard before he could get back.

NYT/Gerald Howard: "Triumph of the English Major"

The point is truth and beauty, without which our lives will lack grace and meaning and our civilization will be spiritually hollowed out and the historical bottom line will be that future epochs will remember us as a coarse and philistine people who squandered our bottomlessly rich cultural inheritance for short-term and meaningless financial advantage.