Executive editor Bill Keller approved the photo spread offhandedly. While he hadn’t particularly noticed the pictures at the time the magazine was presented to him, “I think that they are within bounds for an edgy fashion magazine published by The New York Times,” he said.

But Craig Whitney, assistant managing editor, responsible for maintaining the Times’ standards, would have disagreed had he seen the magazine prior to publication. He would have recommended that they be deleted “because I thought they were tawdry.”

In this column, Clark Hoyt, public editor of the Times, exposed this internal editorial debate. On one hand, T is given a lot more editorial room and advertising is blurred with content in ways that wouldn’t occur in the paper.

“T has different editing standards from the rest of the newspaper. It blurs the line between editorial and advertising in a way that most of The Times does not. Unlike the news sections, it seldom turns a skeptical eye on its subject,” wrote Hoyt.

However, and this applies to newspapers in general as they publish supplements and special editions, there is still a requisite of brand quality that T must uphold.

“In the end, what counts for The Times is whether photographs of a semi-nude teenager with a certain Lolita quality to them are appropriate for the newspaper, regardless of their artistic merit,” wrote Hoyt.

Hoyt concluded:

“I think they were neither pornographic nor tawdry — those terms go too far — but I am with Whitney in believing that The Times made a mistake in publishing them. The problem with being edgy is that, sometimes, you fall over the edge.”

Any thoughts?

Source: Editor & Publisher – New York Times