PressEthic

The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly are two venerable magazines that court the same readership. The former likes to spice things up by inserting twee cartoons, and the latter likes to scare the bejesus out of you every couple of months by speculating about a coming war with China. On a cursory glance at the two magazines, however, one would come away with the marked impression that the Atlantic's readers have a lot more to say about what they've read.

In the November issue of the Atlantic, the magazine devotes 19 pages to letters to the editor. Some of the letters are so long that their authors could rightfully go around claiming that they've had a byline in the magazine.

The magazine obviously takes bravado in its approach; "our writers are willing to answer your charges", it seems to say, "so do your best." When readers question the facts or conclusions regarding a past article, a reply from the author runs to counter or clarify any charges made.

In this week's New Yorker, there is one page, with three letters. Comparing apples to apples, the magazine runs an average of 4 pages of letters a month against the Atlantic's 19. The New Yorker's relative reticence, however, plays into its own type of bravado. Not only will you not find many letters to the editors (and scant replies), you will also come up short in finding a masthead. The magazine, it seems, was edited by the hand of God.

For readers, then (and this is the point), the difference is how much back and forth one should expect with the magazine. Is it inherently better to print more letters that criticize your publication? Does this, in turn, lead to better journalism?

The argument can be made that journalists writing for a publication like the Atlantic will be more wary to watch that they don't play fast and loose with the facts. But this seems a little too tidy: not every journalist is a Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair, just as not every story is Watergate. Journalists, despite the bad rap that they receive (and interesting side note, it's curious that journalists themselves are the ones who are yelling loudest the fact they're trusted about as much as used car salesmen), are professionals. Thirty pages of letters to the editor wouldn't have stopped a fabrication scandal, ipso facto, without a strong editor at the helm.

Perhaps a cure for what ails journalism is not 20 pages of letters to the editor, but more editors who are ready to question 20 pages of notes. Scandals and ethical lapses don't just happen; they are an indictment of an organization's culture. If news outlets focused more on training editors to craft solid journalism then on self-flagellation, then the profession of journalism could get back around to reporting stories, rather than being the subject of them.