I hope the Times will quit writing about prison labor in Texas without including the North and the Federal Government. If you read "Slavery by another Name" you should know that Northern investors were well aware of the labor force, and many complaints were made to Washington D.C., which were ignored. Demonizing the South gets us nowhere.
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As a television journalist of forty years, starting in a Los Angeles local station of 380 newsies, I had little appreciation of the marshaling of information into a "lede-all". Management calls it 'resources'.
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Frankly, I'm not buying this. And what have tech issues to do with the thrust of a story especially in these first graphs? What I see is the Times on a glide path where it is slipping into infotainment at a steady pace. Where we learn the key elements of important stories only long after the event. Take the vetting of Trump for example. A notorious denizen of New York on the front page for months and the Times totally failed to capture and render the essential components of the story. And this even though other outfits were doing the work for them. Don't want to get into Clintons emails but the Times completely screwed that up too. And it goes on and on. As I stated before upper level management at the Times has lost sight of the mission — informing/educating the public via factual information, not conjecture, speculation, and opinion. Please just stop telling us what it means. We can work that out for ourselves if the Times would ever give readers the opportunity, and not this brain dead attitude of "What You Need To Know. The Times sees itself as the information gatekeeper, "Printing All the News That Is Fit To Print". But what we see are important stories and aspects of stories ignored. While we are treated to Linsey Lohan for a week or more along with massive amounts of filler, just dead wood. People like me who care about the Times are, or should be concerned as we greet the day reading the Times and see that we read half of it days ago.
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Thanks for this great little piece. Makes my heart beat faster at the excitement of the chase for facts and the lengths some must go to get those facts to the public -- and in a compelling way.
Trump and his ilk will NEVER be able to delegitimize journalists -- particularly those at the Times -- who often risk their lives on our behalf. Thank you all.
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