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In the late 1960s, theNew York Times granted the business and organizational scholar Chris Argyris unprecedented access to its newsroom and the newspaper’s management, agreeing to let Argyris assess the paper’s leadership structures and to make recommendations. Argyris found theTimes to be the most sclerotic, unchangeable organization he had ever worked with, and the newspaper abandoned the idea of adopting his reforms. Nevertheless, Argyris ended up forcing theTimes to examine itself when the book he wrote about his experiences—which he published without revealing the newspaper’s name—was decoded by a journalism review called(MORE). Though his press criticism was accidental, Argyris’s work still fits squarely in the traditions of newsroom ethnography and in Wendy Wyatt’s discourse model of press criticism.

In 1972, The New York Times adopted the policy of running daily corrections in a fixed part of the paper. The idea of corrections, and a call for increased accountability more generally, had been circulating for a few years. This article examines internal communication from theTimes that sheds light on how the paper's editor, A.M. Rosenthal, made the decision to turn the idea into policy. A number of factors, including an essay by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and prodding by the journalism reviews(MORE) andThe Columbia Journalism Review, influenced Rosenthal. Wendy Wyatt's discursive theory of press criticism and Daniel Hallin's spheres of consensus, controversy, and deviance inform this article's discussion of how outside influence works. Coming from the “paper of record,” theTimes's decision to enact the corrections policy had a snowball effect, and within a few years, running a regular corrections box became commonplace among American newspapers.