By Ankush
Today comes the answer to the question that we've all been pondering: The Times will indeed continue to have a public editor once the sleep-inducing Barney Calame's term is up.
My friend Rachel Sklar was very critical when there was talk that the public editor position might be eliminated. She made some compelling points, but I couldn't quite get behind the argument that the paper needed someone taking up prime, Sunday Times op-ed real estate prattling on about minutiae that are typically of very little interest to most readers.
Now Calame has, for the most part, been a bad public editor. There have been exceptions, but, as someone who's been in the newspaper business his whole life, he lacks the outsider's perspective that gave the writing of his predecessor, Daniel Okrent, some of its energy and curiosity. The thing is, though, that pretty much every ombudsman is both boring and ineffectual, and Calame is sort of the norm. Their colleagues view them suspiciously, and their readers are never quite able to view them as truly independent. (After all, the ombudsman's paycheck still comes from the publication he or she is criticizing, a fact that tends to be a rather simple way to explain why the criticism, when it occurs, tends not to be very aggressive.) Don't even get me started on Deborah Howell.
