Here is a Texas Tribune dispatch with which the New York Times covers, with an article in the March 23 paper, the news that the chancellor of the University of Texas announced back on February 10 that he is resigning:
An email in February by Paul Foster, the chairman of the board, indicated that this and other disagreements could have caused some regents to sour on the chancellor. (U.T.-Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. Mr. Foster is a major donor to The Tribune.)...But of the chancellor, Mr. Huffines said: "I think he deserves credit for pushing through the turmoil. He exceeded my expectations, and I set the bar pretty high." (Mr. Huffines is president of PlainsCapital Bank, which has been a corporate sponsor of The Tribune.)
Asked if he would have done anything differently in the last five years, Dr. Cigarroa could come up with only one thing. In 2012, security concerns prompted him to initially cancel a high-profile boxing match at the University of Texas at El Paso, prompting backlash from local politicians and community leaders. (U.T.-El Paso is a corporate sponsor of The Tribune.)
I'm all for transparency and disclosure, but at a certain point it becomes ridiculous. Never mind the basic question of why this guy's resignation is even news six weeks after it happened. It's not that long a news article, and nearly five percent of it is devoted to parenthetical disclosures about who is or isn't a sponsor or donor to the Tribune. If they're going to disclose who is a sponsor of the Tribune, should they also have to disclose the people who aren't sponsors, or who were hit up for money but said no? The article begins with the shocking news that the outgoing chancellor's mother "was not surprised" when her son announced he would step down. Why should Times readers care what the guy's mother thinks?
These disclosures are a regular feature of Texas Tribune coverage that appears in the Times. An article the other day about trying to make Texas cities more walkable included these passages:
Walkable communities offer more mobility for seniors no longer willing or able to drive, and many empty nesters now want to live closer to everyday amenities, said Tim Morstad, an official with AARP Texas, which has worked to make Texas communities more accessible to older pedestrians. (AARP is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)...In Harris County, which includes Houston, traffic and demographic changes have helped propel a shift in housing preferences, said Stephen L. Klineberg, a director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. (Rice is a corporate sponsor of the Tribune.)..."There's a struggle between the collective vision for the city and individual rights and desires that seems to be very pervasive in Texas," said Dean Almy, the director of the urban design graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin (a corporate sponsor of the Tribune).
Another short article, much of which is devoted to cumbersome explanation that three of the people quoted in it work for sponsors of the Tribune. If the Times is going to insist on this disclosure, it might as well go all the way, by explaining exactly how much money each "corporate sponsor" or "major donor" has given, and how far removed the person being quoted is from the decision on the sponsorship. Otherwise, the whole matter is probably best handled with some sort of general boilerplate at the end of each Texas Tribune article explaining that the article is provided by a nonprofit that accepts money from the institutions and people it covers, and that the full list of those donors is available at some hyperlinked annual report. Otherwise the whole thing seems less like disclosure and more like advertising.
The whole thing is a reminder that the copy provided to the Times at low rates by the non-profits often doesn't meet the paper's usual standards.