How’s this for the job of a lifetime?
Mr. Okrent’s columns will appear primarily in the Week in Review section on Sundays, beginning in early December, though not necessarily every week. Mr. Keller said he and the newspaper’s other senior editors had waived any right to review Mr. Okrent’s commentaries before they are published, though the newspaper will make available a copy editor to review his work for technical issues like grammar and style.
(Italics mine, of course). So the guy has to write one column a week, but only if he feels like it. Because, you know, a paper with over a million subscribers will have weeks where the folks just don’t have any justifiable gripes. That’s how good the Times is, folks. And the Times is so proper that the copy editor assigned to handle the Public Editor’s copy will not have to do any actual editing. Rimmers at the Times should stage a walkout over this alone: they are among the most highly skilled newspaper editors on the planet, and they’re being told, “just clean up the typos and make sure the style’s right.”
In a way it’s refreshing to see the Times bumbling along like the rest of us, but there’s such a thing as too much refreshment.