A Critical Error at 'The New York Times'

By: Allan Wolper Kejal Vyas, one of my best journalism students at Rutgers-Newark, in Newark, N.J., was in Delhi completing some academic work when he received this Feb. 1 e-mail from Nancy Sharkey, senior editor/recruiting for The New York Times, responding to his inquiry about an internship:

?Hi Kejal, Based on what Allan Wolper has written about us, I cannot imagine that he would want one of his students to intern here. I guess if we need students from New Jersey, we will go elsewhere. Best, Nancy.?

Vyas was devastated. His hopes of working for America?s most influential newspaper had been shattered because his professor had criticized the New York Times for several years in Editor & Publisher.

Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, an organization that monitors censorship on college and high school campuses, was as stunned as I was when I told him Vyas' story.

?The message here for journalism professors is that if you want your students to get an internship at The New York Times, you don?t criticize the Times in what you write,? Goodman told me. ?It seems grossly inappropriate and unfair. I?ve never heard of anything like this happening before.?

Vyas first wrote to Sharkey on Jan. 31 stating his journalism credentials and that same day received a polite, encouraging reply which said she had ?not yet reached out to Rutgers.?

Sharkey asked whether Vyas could give her the name of a journalism professor who could discuss the Rutgers-Newark program with her.

The student recommended that Sharkey contact Robert W. Snyder, an associate professor of journalism and a former director of the R-N journalism and media studies program, and ?Allan Wolper, who is the professor who deals with internships for the students.?

The next day, at 10:57 p.m., Sharkey sent Vyas the e-mail informing him she would be looking ?elsewhere? in New Jersey for New York Times interns, without any additional explanation beyond his connection to me.

When Vyas sent me his e-mail exchange with Sharkey, I thought there might be some misunderstanding. So I telephoned her to sort things out. I asked her whether my student had been guilty of student hyperbole, or had not provided me with the entire e-mail ?string? between them.

Sharkey laughed and said she was being ?snide? when she wrote to Vyas. Then, to my amazement, she virtually repeated what she had written to him: ?I don?t see why you?d want your students to work at the Times, considering what you?ve written about us.?

It was something that I thought I would never hear from a New York Times news executive. Afterwards, I called Catherine Mathis, the Gray Lady's vice president of corporate communications, briefed her on what Sharkey had said, and sent her a copy of the Sharkey-Vyas e-mails.

Later, she wrote me this response: ?If we offer this program in the future, as you know it is a pilot program, we will continue to consider students at Rutgers.? I asked whether she might be able to arrange an interview with Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., but she said that he had ?declined? to speak with me. I had also hoped that someone high on the Times masthead would respond to the searing criticism by Mark Goodman. But no one would.

Instead, Mathis and William E. Schmidt, an assistant managing editor at the Times, telephoned Greg Mitchell, my editor at E&P. After they spoke, Mathis sent E&P an e-mail that suggested Sharkey was being ?facetious? when she spoke to me, and repeating that there was no ?ban? on Rutgers students at the Times.

In that same e-mail, Mathis indicated the program was only for graduate students, so Vyas could not qualify this time anyway. But he was applying for a position next fall.

In any case, that was not what Sharkey said in her e-mail. Instead, she pointed her finger at me. She wrote to my student that he should look elsewhere because of what I had written about The New York Times. That?s making an editorial judgment about my work, not an editorial decision about a student.

When the Times started its internship program three years ago in the Newark bureau, the newspaper had found our students to be both mature and highly competent young journalists, winning praise from the professionals who worked with them.

Vyas told Sharkey in his first e-mail for her that he had served his
journalism apprenticeship for an internship as an editor for The Rutgers Observer, the campus newspaper, and spent 18 months as an editorial assistant at the The Star-Ledger in Newark -- collecting a batch of bylines along the way. It was a strong indication that he qualified for the internship.

He lost out two years ago when the Times temporarily suspended its entire program while it worked out a payment plan for the students. When he learned it was re-instituted, Vyas applied again.

The Times certainly could have made its displeasure with my writing known sooner. The paper?s executives could have written letters to E&P or spoken with one of my editors. But they didn't do that until after I began questioning them about Sharkey?s memo.

If the Times had done either of those things, I might know which of the columns or articles I had written about them in past years had caused them to ?look elsewhere? for interns. Here is a summary of some of them:

-- A column detailing how the Times published a huge ad in the sports section promoting Crestor, a cholesterol drug, on the same day they ran a much smaller front page story on its serious side effects.

-- A column that questioned whether the Times Co.'s $100 million stake in the Boston Red Sox had anything to do with its weak coverage of the steroid issue in baseball.

-- An article in Columbia Journalism Review followed by a column in E&P disclosing that the Times gave a reporter covering the CIA permission to write a book that was edited, in part, by the secret agency.

-- A column last week pointing out that for 14 months the Times had obscured the fact that one of its sports writers was a central figure in a messy sexual harassment suit against Madison Square Garden.

There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest it was the last column that provoked Sharkey?s e-mail to Vyas. That e-mail was sent only hours after I asked Mathis and other Times executives and reporters to respond to my questions about its coverage of the sexual harassment case.

But it doesn?t really matter which story made the newspaper squirm. In the eyes of my students at Rutgers, The New York Times has lost some of the luster that has made it an integral part of our regular classroom conversation.

How can we trust them to tell us the truth if some of their editors can?t handle criticism? For me, this is one of the saddest episodes in my journalism life. For my student, too.

I have written dozens of stories about the ethical missteps of newspapers and television stations, and my students had not been held accountable for them.

Several years ago I wrote a column criticizing The Jersey Journal for downsizing its editorial staff to a skeleton crew. The Jersey Journal -- part of Advance Publications, a chain that includes The Star-Ledger and The Trenton Times, barely blinked. None of the them felt the need to discipline my students for something I had written.

Perhaps newspaper skins are thicker on the West Side of the Hudson River.