Item — HN Reader

Am I the only one who thinks NYTimes should be a little more explicit in marking editorials? I'm sure among those of us familiar with newspapers it should be clear within a sentence that this is an opinion piece, however nowhere does the word "editorial" show up on this page and I suspect a fair number of younger or less educated individuals may not even understand what editorials are in general.

It helps me understand why individuals might be skeptical of newspapers when an agenda'd opinion piece (basically a hosted blog) shows up in the nytimes domain.

2 comments

I looked for the word "editorial" or "opinion" and didn't see it anywhere, so I just assumed it was written by a staff writer for the regular news section. It's honestly got about the same ratio of fact/opinion as anything else they put out today. The only discernible difference is that it isn't 100% anti-Trump.

This is a hard news story, not an editorial. They are reporting on comments by global experts.

It looks like this is neither an editorial nor a hard news story, but rather a column[1]. The difference being an editorial is an opinion piece (typically?) representing the publication, and a column is a recurring opinion piece by named individuals. At least that's what wikipedia says--I can never keep these terms in my head.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-interpreter