Famed Editor Comes to Harvard

The journalist who broke ground as The New York Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent, will spend next semester at Harvard as one of five spring fellows at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

Okrent came to the Times in late 2003, in the wake of the scandal that began with a slew of fabrications by reporter Jayson Blair and culminated with change atop the newspaper’s masthead and an experiment with the ombudsman-like position of public editor.

By the time Okrent’s term ended last spring, he was noted for having established the job of public editor at the paper, getting the Times to reconsider its policies on anonymous sources, and influencing its decision to publicly re-examine its erroneous reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Okrent said yesterday that he would spend his semester at the Shorenstein Center working on two books—one a collection of his Times columns, and the other a longer-term project on the history of the U.S. during prohibition.

Okrent started his job at the Times in the midst of “widespread skepticism” in the newsroom about the necessity of a public editor, said Adam Nagourney, a political correspondent for the paper who was a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics this fall. Nagourney—himself a target of a 2004 Okrent column criticizing the Times’ coverage of the Howard Dean campaign—said much of that skepticism evaporated by the end of Okrent’s tenure.

“He just won people over by his honesty,” Nagourney said.

Byron Calame succeeded Okrent in May 2005, by which point Okrent had “made it very clear that the public editor at the New York Times was truly independent,” Calame said yesterday.

Okrent’s criticism of the Times’ reporting on Iraq’s weapons in the run-up to the war led the paper to print an extensive editor’s note addressing the matter, Calame said, even though the note ran before Okrent’s column on the issue appeared.

“His digging into the coverage of weapons of mass destruction caused the Times to acknowledge there were flaws in that coverage,” Calame said.

In an interview yesterday, Okrent said that “establishing the job” of public editor at the Times was among the most important achievements of his tenure there. While Okrent said the post has yet to be formally declared permanent, it will remain “certainly for the foreseeable future.”

Nagourney and Calame praised Okrent for being straightforward and unassuming. “He’s cool, open to all kinds of possibilities and very much fun to talk with because he has a very wide range of knowledge,” Calame said.

That range of knowledge encompasses not only journalism but baseball as well. In the offseason of 1979-1980, Okrent drew up the rules for a new type of fantasy baseball and pitched it to a group of friends at the Rotissérie Française restaurant in New York City. That game would become known as rotisserie baseball, familiar to the millions of fans who now play fantasy sports online. The invention would earn Okrent one of the first two spots in the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame.

Okrent said he still plays rotisserie baseball with a group of 11 friends, some of whom were part of its inaugural season in 1980. “We’re all a lot older and fatter,” Okrent said.

Alex Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center and a former media reporter for the Times who has written a history of the paper, said Okrent’s status as a founding father of fantasy baseball was not a factor in his selection as one of ten fellows for this academic year out of a pool of 75 applicants.

“I’m sure that was an achievement,” Jones said of Okrent’s invention, “but not the achievement we were interested in.”

The four other spring fellows joining Okrent are: Kimberly Gross, assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University; Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity; Robert Picard, professor of media economics at Jönköping University in Sweden; and Cristine Russell, a freelance science writer.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.