BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield. In 2012, The New York Times hired its first-ever female public editor, then-editor of the Buffalo News, Margaret Sullivan. Now, four years later, having become The Times’ longest serving ombudsperson, Sullivan is leaving for a job as media columnist at The Washington Post. In a pair of swansong pieces, she expressed some ambivalence about public editorship because, it turns out, being part reader advocate and part internal affairs investigator takes its toll.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  I've heard the public editor job described as the worst job in journalism, but it actually was a great job and an incredible privilege. And I, on balance, had a pretty good time doing it.

BOB GARFIELD:  No one ever keyed your car or slashed your tires or anything like that?

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  I made sure to get rid of my car, so there was no opportunity to do that.

  [BOB LAUGHS]

But that could easily have happened.

BOB GARFIELD:  Nonetheless, some ambivalence. You did a blog post that was titled, “Five Things I Won't Miss at The Times -- and Seven I Will."

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  Well, let’s first discuss what was just fantastic about your experiences.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Trend stories in the Style section, which I've actually had a little bit of fun with, lightly mocking, on something I called my Monocle Meter. The original monocle meter inspiration was a story about the supposed resurgence of the monocle being worn, largely in Brooklyn, but elsewhere in the  greater New York area. There was actually pretty good data in the story about this happening. But, again, I never did see this on the street or the subway or anyplace else.

BOB GARFIELD:  So thank God for The New York Times.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  To tell us.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now then, let us turn to The Times habits or tics that seem to irritate you quite a bit. The first is the question of New York Times exceptionalism.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BOB GARFIELD:  The second being the complaints that insufficient editorial resources sometimes keep us from covering everything that the paper of record needs to cover.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Well, there is a feeling that when The Times decides to cover it, then it becomes news. I mean, that's true, to a certain extent. And I don't want to exaggerate but I pick some of that up.

BOB GARFIELD:  For example, the Panama Papers very recently.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  The Times took a pass for about 48 hours, while the rest of the world was goin’ nuts.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  And then you could ask why wasn't The Times part of that consortium? The answer to that lies in something that they require from news organizations called radical sharing, and I don't know that radical sharing is actually something that The New York Times is all that interested in.

BOB GARFIELD:  And resources?

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  You know, one issue that came up was the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which The Times wrote an early story or two on but never really dug into. The answer I got was, we can't cover every local story. And that's true. But I thought they missed an opportunity to really do some good there.

BOB GARFIELD:  Now, that's diplomatic. In your piece, you twisted the knife a little bit and said, well, you didn’t have  resources to give Flint but you did manage to cover Hillary Clinton's campaign three years before the first primary.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Now, would that same reporter have done a story on Flint? I mean, I don't really think you can draw a straight line. But I think at times better choices could be made.

BOB GARFIELD:  Did you find that reporters and editors were grudgingly accepting of your judgments, were churlish about it?

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Oh, not churlish.

BOB GARFIELD:  Regarded it as a teachable moment and they felt gratified?

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  [LAUGHS] No.

BOB GARFIELD:  How would you describe it?

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  I would say that there was something like grudging acceptance of the idea that their readers have had something to say and the public editor may be seeing their point of view, but if it's your thing - and this is human nature, including my own - no one likes to be criticized, so that's no fun.

BOB GARFIELD:  In your farewell piece, you talked about - my words, not yours - the slippery slope in the matter of social distribution, letting Facebook Instant Articles and similar social platforms –

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BOB GARFIELD:  - have an increasing role in getting New York Times stories – and, by the way, The Washington Post is very bullish on this, as well - in front of readers. Good news is the stories get much larger audiences. And even better news is it fetches fairly handsome ad rates, which otherwise have been plummeting for 10 years. But there's a very great risk to that.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Well, Facebook is going to present things to you based not on an editor's judgment of what's newsworthy or what’s important or what has social value, but according to algorithms which say –

BOB GARFIELD:  I have demonstrated an interest in that particular kind of story before.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Yes.

BOB GARFIELD:  Or my social graph has shown an interest in it, or the general Facebook audience thinks it's just plain fascinating.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  That's right, all those things. We start to see only the things that we are already interested in and that we already agree with. You know, it's an echo chamber for yourself, and that can feed our own prejudices and keep us from being as well informed as we need to be to be good citizens.

BOB GARFIELD:  The slippery slope is a bit slippier still because The New York Times management, which will make more money from click-baity stories that fly through social media than it will from perhaps the more good-for-you doctor’s-ordered stories, will have a very real decision to make about whether to continue to produce the kind of high-quality, low-pyrotechnic journalism that we need as a society because nobody’s lookin’ at it anyway because the Facebook algorithm isn’t feeding it to anybody.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  There’s evidence that consumers of news are very interested in high-quality journalism, as well. Sure, they’re interested in kiddie videos and Kardashians but, you know, the story that ran a few months ago in The Times by Sonny Kleinfeld called, “The Lonely Life of George Bell,” (“The Lonely Death of George Bell”) which was about a man who died alone in his apartment in Queens, was extremely detailed and long and extraordinarily well read. So it gives me hope that great work is appreciated work, as well.

BOB GARFIELD:  So you’re going to The Post, where you will be not an ombudsperson but a columnist.  

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Yes, that's a very important distinction. [LAUGHS]

BOB GARFIELD:  And - but I imagine that periodically you'll be writing pieces that very much involve The Washington Post, as well. And I got an idea for you.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Okay.

BOB GARFIELD:  [LAUGHS] I just saw a piece. It was the best read story on The Washington Post that day.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  Mm-hmm.

BOB GARFIELD:  And the headline was this:  “Doctors Were Startled to Find the Cause of This 24-Year-Old’s Excruciating Pain.”

  [SULLIVAN LAUGHS]

And it turned out that the cause was a tumor, the least startling cause. You can imagine. And it was, you know, so clearly following the social media formula of generating audience. And where you’re going, there’s no public editor to yelp about it. Are you going to take up the cause on this kind of thing?

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  I’m – I am going to resist the role of public editor or ombudsperson in every way I can, but there could be a broader piece about many news organizations doing the kinds of stories that are intended to drive audience and what that's doing to the journalism. The Times now has something called the Express Team, which sets out to do stories that are in the social media conversation. The Times will have a version of that story, so that you're not reading about it on BuzzFeed. News organizations are struggling to figure out what works.

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD:  Margaret, thank you very, very much.

MARGARET SULLIVAN:  You're welcome.

BOB GARFIELD:  Margaret Sullivan is the former public editor for The New York Times. Her job as media columnist for The Washington Post starts Monday.

Coming up, two candidates and two very different kinds of disgrace. This is On the Media.