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Everybody's Got One
June 17, 2005
BOB GARFIELD:
While the New York Times' opinion page policy is facing some scrutiny, at least by Steve Aftergood, the Los Angeles Times' opinion page is undergoing a wholesale reshaping. This week, it was disclosed that, for the first time, editorial board members will, on occasion, be granted a dissenting opinion. A new series titled Thinking Out Loud will hash out editorial positions over time and incorporate the views of those outside the newspaper, and in one of the more unusual offerings, you, the reader, can tweak L.A. Times editorials on line as part of an experiment in interactivity.
Michael Kinsley is the editorial and opinion page editor of the L.A. Times, and he joins me now. Michael, welcome back to the show.
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
Thanks, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:
Okay, Michael. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I guess you think something in the current editorial, op-ed model is broken. What, exactly?
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
Well, what is the function of an editorial? It used to be that, you know, newspapers had proprietors, and the editorial was where the proprietor expressed his position, and it always was a him in the old days, on issues.
But now, the Los Angeles Times, for example, is owned by a company in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune Company has newspapers which express all sorts of different political views. So in what sense is this the opinion of the institution? And who cares what the opinion of the institution is, anyway?
Most people would say that a byline carries more authority now than an anonymous editorial, even if it's a byline of someone you haven't heard of, because they are willing to attach their name to it.
So, it seemed to me that we did need to do some rethinking.
BOB GARFIELD:
The institutional opinion of the paper, over the years, it has evolved from the cigar-chomping publisher, letting the world know what he thinks to the opinion of a board. At the L.A. Times I think there's 13 people on your editorial board, who discuss and debate issues and chew over them and research them and give rather considered opinion with the local community or the world community in mind.
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
And that is the position we sort of came to in the end of, of some discussions. You know, a columnist can write about anything he or she wants. Op-ed pieces are all over the lot. But editorials should, over the course of months and years, be addressing every issue that comes along from the same set of values.
BOB GARFIELD:
Which raises my second argumentative question - why are you bringing in freelancers to represent this vaunted institutional opinion of the paper?
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
Editorials will be written by employees of the Los Angeles Times. From time to time, we will ask experts to help us. It gets to be sort of a metaphysical distinction. An editorial writer is supposed to write about subject X. He finds out that there's a professor at Berkeley who's the world's living expert on X. He calls this professor and she talks to him for half an hour. He thinks about it, finds it persuasive and writes an editorial, as opposed to, we ask her to please send us a memo, and she writes the memo, and we rewrite it.
There's not really a big difference.
BOB GARFIELD:
One of the more unusual changes at the Times will be the introduction of online interactive editorials called wikitorials. What are wikitorials? How do they work, and why?
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
To put it very basically, they're web pages which readers can change, can add to, can rewrite. So we're going to put up our editorials in one place where, even on the web, you're going to read what we've written. But we're going to put 'em up in the second place where readers can go in and amend them.
This could be the answer to
[LAUGHTER]
what's distinctive about an editorial. Suppose that it really works well, and editorials become sort of the voice of a community? It might simply be amusing and interesting, or it might be completely pointless.
BOB GARFIELD:
If a wiki - a wikitorial should over a period of time actually change the editorial so much that it espouses exactly the opposite opinion to the one that was originally published, are you going to go back and reconsider all your paper editorial pages?
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
Well, you know, I think at any given time, the editorial, the real editorials on an editorial page ought to reflect the current thinking of the editorial board, and that thinking ought to reflect any input that's available. And editorial boards, like the Supreme Court, don't admit to changing their minds very often, but when you do admit to it, it ought to be on the basis of something you, you've read or thought. That can be an article in somebody else's publication, or it can be something of - in your own web site. That would be novel, but that would be terrific.
BOB GARFIELD:
Tim Noah, your former colleague at Slate, has suggested that the answer is the ultimate experiment - just get rid of the editorial page all together. He says it's just really outlived its usefulness. Is that the next shoe to drop if this experiment doesn't quite pan out?
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
We went down that road. We said we've got two pages here of the newspaper. That's valuable real estate. Maybe we should just fill them with the best articles we can find by whoever we can find to do them - basically have two op-ed pages. No ed for them to be op. Maybe we'll come around to that. But we're going to try a few things before we just give up.
BOB GARFIELD:
All right. Well, Michael, as always, it's been a delight. Thanks so much for joining us.
MICHAEL KINSLEY:
Thank you, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD:
Michael Kinsley is the editorial and opinion page editor for the Los Angeles Times.
[MUSIC]
copyright 2005 WNYC Radio
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