The first person makes an unusual and arguably jarring appearance in the top front-page news article of today's print New York Times. In an article about the coronavirus, Donald G. McNeil Jr. writes:
In mid-October, I surprised some New York Times readers by shifting from pessimism to optimism, with the epidemic in the United States most likely ending sooner than I expected. Now that at least two vaccines with efficacy greater than 90 percent have emerged, I am even more hopeful about what 2021 holds.
It's all a bit too meta- for my taste. I'd rather hear about the virus and the vaccines than how the virus and vaccine matches the prior expectations of the Times reporter, or the reporter's vacillation between "pessimism" and "optimism," however those are defined. At least in the front-page news articles. But I am even less hopeful than I was about the possibility of the New York Times adhering to longstanding journalistic conventions.
I guess to some extent it's refreshing that the Times is dropping the pretense of the invisible neutral narrator. But now that this has crept into the virus coverage, one wonders about where the Times will draw the line. Do all reporters get to interview and quote themselves as experts on their beats, or just some of them? Can we expect to see this in sports articles, in political articles, in business articles: "Two weeks ago, the stock market surprised me by doing better than expected. I'm even more bullish about next year." It would be useful to get a public list issued by the Times of which reporters the editors trust enough to get away with this sort of thing, and which they do not.