The New York Times Public Editor

Daniel Okrent, a longtime magazine editor and author who has served as managing editor of Life and editor of Time Inc.'s new media operations, has been appointed the first public editor of The New York Times.

Mr. Okrent's selection as the designated representative of the newspaper's readers is to be formally announced today.... The appointment, for an 18-month term, is effective Dec. 1 [2003].

As public editor, or ombudsman, Mr. Okrent, 55, will operate outside the management structure of the newspaper's newsroom and its editorial page.... He will be given an unfettered opportunity to address readers' comments about The Times's coverage, to raise questions of his own and to write about such matters, in commentaries that will be published in the newspaper as often as he sees fit.

[Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times,] said he and the newspaper's other senior editors had waived any right to review Mr. Okrent's commentaries before they are published....

The appointment of a public editor was a primary recommendation of a committee of 25 journalists -- including three from outside The Times -- who were charged last spring with examining how a reporter, Jayson Blair, had managed to slip fabrications and the words of other reporters into at least three dozen articles from last October until April. As a result of the scandal, and the fissures it exposed within the newsroom, the newspaper's two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, stepped down in early June.

In recent years, The Times's top editors had resisted periodic external calls that they hire an ombudsman -- at a time when about three dozen other papers created variations of such positions. The Times editors contended that the monitoring of reader concerns about accuracy and fairness was part of their duties.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the newspaper and chairman of The New York Times Company, said in an interview that the creation of the public editor's job and the installation of Mr. Okrent in it were "stepping stones" toward the goal of "making The New York Times less opaque as an institution."

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