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Imagine this sentence getting past a New York Times copy editor: "The ACLU has shown through its government FOIA requests of WikiLeaks published cables, pretending secrets are secret after they are public isn’t easy." Yet a piece about WikiLeaks purportedly by former Times executive editor Bill Keller clanging with such clunkers fooled "pretty much everybody," as a Gizmodo headline put it.

WikiLeaks tweeted Sunday that it had perpetrated the hoax piece. The fake was successful in part, Ed Pilkington writes in the Guardian, because "Visually, it was immaculate – replicating perfectly the typographic style of his column down to the author's photograph, tool kit and Times adverts." (more...)

Women's Wear Daily
Bill Keller says it was his decision to end the magazine column, which started in March with editor Hugo Lindgren’s redesign of the magazine. “The magazine column has been fun - and I’ve loved being part of Hugo’s relaunch - but op-ed has greater license to have opinions, and a day-before deadline,” Keller tells John Koblin. Lindgren says Keller's columns "were smart, well-written, fun to read.” What did he think of ">the criticism of Keller's pieces?

“If you have a columnist that everyone loves — what is that? Is there one of those in the world? I enjoyed some of the controversy that he kicked up.”

Koblin points out that of the 12 magazine columns Keller wrote, five had corrections (including one column that had two) -- a correction rate of 41.6 percent. (Jayson Blair’s annual correction rate at the Times ranged from 5 to 6.3 percent -- high enough to bring warnings to improve. Keller tells Koblin: “Thanks for noticing the corrections. I don’t think any of them undermined the point of the column, but every one made me wince. And I’ve gotten better with practice, so there’s probably hope for me.”

Reuters.com
"Some of it comes from people who haven’t paid close attention to what I’ve said on the subject," says Bill Keller, "and some of it, I think, comes from people who know better but who have made a reputation for themselves by being digital evangelists and cyber-puritans, who treat any hint of skepticism as heresy."

My view of social media is that it is a set of tools, not a religion. Twitter and Facebook are brilliant tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible. They provide a kind of serendipity, a sense of discovery, that some people thought would be lost as print periodicals declined.

The New York Times executive editor also tells Anthony DeRosa:

* "In our newsroom, I’ve been an enthusiastic promoter of aggregation. I think readers come to us not just for our original reporting, but for our judgment."
* "I follow Twitter and pay attention to it, but I rarely Tweet because I have a rather large platform here, called The New York Times."
* "If I had to pick one challenge we met with lasting impact, it would be our successful adaptation to the digital world."

(Emma Gilbey Keller tweets that DeRosa's interview with her husband was "great.")

Several New York Times staffers objected to Executive Editor Bill Keller's recent controversial columns about the media, which he wrote knowing he would shortly step down from his leadership post, according to reports. Keller wrote a magazine column in March questioning the value and journalistic practices of The Huffington Post specifically and aggregation in general. He later started a firestorm on Twitter by suggesting Twitter makes you stupid and followed it with a like-minded column. "I think it’s fair to say that knowing that I was going to be announcing that I was moving on made me feel just a little bit liberated in what I said in the column," Keller told Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. Some Times' staffers, however, were not pleased. Media writers and social media staffers complained to him that because he was writing as the top editor of the Times, his rants were making their jobs more difficult, reports Gabriel Sherman for New York Magazine:

(more...)

Esquire.com
"It's been a fair amount of that -- every kind of crisis you can imagine, starting with a crisis of morale and credibility that I inherited, then going through one [m-----f-----] of a recession," Bill Keller tells Scott Raab. "It was pretty brutal, more brutal in the news business than in the average business."

Plus, there's a sort of existential question about the whole business model of news brought on by the digital revolution, and in tandem with that there's the question of how you adapt a newsroom of people who grew up doing print to the audience and opportunities of the Web. There's also reporter-in-danger crises, of which I've had a fair share. Then there's other stuff that I sometimes think of as an in loco parentis role. You have these people who work for you, but they're also people. They have families and people in their family get cancer and die, and there's a lot of being there for people. That was not something I had anticipated.

Keller talks about....
* His relationship with publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.: "[We've] developed a great deal of trust and mutual respect. ... As time goes on and I look around the country, I can't see another publisher on earth that I'd trade him for."
* Meeting Rupert Murdoch for the first time: "I couldn't understand a damn thing he was saying. A whole bunch of people were meeting and greeting, and he's got a very thick Australian accent and he kind of mumbles, and so we had about 15 minutes of incredibly awkward conversation."
* The Times being a Fox News punching bag: "There are commentators on Fox News who, if they didn't have The New York Times, would be selling exercise equipment on late-night TV."
* The "Page One" documentary: "I found it kind of boring. ...Then I realized that one reason I found it boring is that it seems very familiar."
* His worst moment on the job: "I remember getting the phone call one morning that David Rohde had been kidnapped by the Taliban. And this was the stage when the Taliban tended to cut the heads off people they kidnapped."
> "Nice job, Bill Keller," writes American Journalism Review's editor
> NYT newsroom changes draw jokes, congratulations on social networks

New York Observer
That's what Emma Gilbey Keller's tweets offer, writes Kat Stoeffel. Bill Keller's wife says she likes Twitter because "it allows me to be simultaneously gregarious and antisocial. And it makes me laugh."