“She was like, ‘Yeah, I think there’s something going on here. “Darnella Frazier turned herself into enough of a journalist that the Pulitzer Prize organization gave her a special citation,” Sullivan notes, referring to the teen who captured the murder of George Floyd on her smartphone. Very much so.” She has 141,000 followers on Twitter and embraces the innovations wrought by the digital realm, from online newsrooms like the Marshall Project and the Texas Tribune to the rising phenomenon of “citizen journalism.” That heading takes in everything from the painstaking forensic digital investigations (also called “open-source intelligence”) pioneered by Bellingcat to the bystanders who lift their cell phones and begin recording when an arrest happens in front of them. But I’m also a creature of the current era. “I am who I am, a creature of my era,” Sullivan shrugs. Small wonder that she writes, “I never had a completely comfortable day as Public Editor.” It was during her first months on the job that Sullivan questioned the wisdom of the Times hiring a CEO, Mark Thompson, who had run the BBC when it employed a sexual abuser of children. In clear-voiced posts and columns, she gonged her employer for allowing officials to vet quotes, for overindulging in unnamed sources, and for, as she puts it in the book, covering the campaign of Hillary Clinton as if she had already been elected and needed to be held to account. Sullivan was the paper’s penultimate, and arguably most impactful “public editor,” or in-house critic. She worked her way up to editor at the Buffalo News, enjoyed the respect of journalism’s top tier signaled by service on the Pulitzer Prize Board, then made herself conspicuous at the New York Times. It helps that Sullivan is a bit of a throwback herself, a Lackawanna, N.Y., native drawn to journalism by the combination of civic duty generated by the Watergate scandal and by the movie, All the President’s Men, that made it glamorous.
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