The only section of The New York Times that I read is the Opinion section and occasionally the Magazine section. Today—or, rather, tomorrow—op-ed editor David Shipley has written an article on what gets printed, how and why pieces are decided for plubication, and when:
To understand Op-Ed, it helps to understand how the page fits into The Times. The paper is divided into two worlds: news and editorial. News is big. With the exception of advertising, it is responsible for just about everything you read in The Times: the national, foreign and metropolitan reports, the Book Review, the magazine and so on. Editorial is tiny. Everything it produces appears on the page you're reading now and the one to its left.
(The last sentence is funny because there is no "left" when looking at an individual article's online version.) I've always prefered the editorial sections of newspapers because, while the news presents itself—falsely, since many "experts" quoted in news articles express the reporter's opinions but with an official seal—as objective, the editorial writers suffer from no such delusions. Partisanship is a scourge, granted, but at least in editorial writings, positive and negative statements are the norm and are expected. Plus, however disagreeable an argument might be, at least on the editorial pages an argument is explicitely being made. The editorial pages usually feature letters to the editor (or, as I call them, unofficial corrections), but I don't pay them too much mind.
