E-Mail This Article to a Friend Two hits, one big miss, continued
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First, the good news. Sidekick’s front-page graphics and look have been sharpened noticeably and are eye-catching enough to draw people to the product. In theory, the idea of inviting reader participation in the "You’re Up" pages helps to engage the audience and tie the paper to the Web site. And Matthew Gilbert’s brief but biting "Critic’s Corner" TV blurbs are understated gems.

But there’s a much bigger problem here and it goes to the core of Sidekick’s identity — or more accurately, its lack thereof. Its many moving parts just don’t seem to work together. Some features — those steering people to nightlife, music, and food — are apparently designed for younger, hipper folks ready to hit the town. But others — such as the comics and TV listings — were newspaper nomads looking for a home and happened to find one in Sidekick. Do the demographics of people who like crossword and jumble puzzles and bridge columns match those of readers who send in messages trying to hook up with people they spotted at Supercuts or Avalon? Or those debating whether Snoop Dogg or Metallica produced the best album of the last 20 years? I’d guess not.

The excess of gray pages of TV listings, comics, and puzzles simply doesn’t look appealing and doesn’t interact well with the colorful "You’re Up" pages that include photos of people posing with their favorite celebrities. And given the mélange of disparate elements in this package, a publication intended to be fresh and fun is virtually devoid of the kind of voice, attitude, or edge that would appeal to twenty- or thirtysomethings.

Ultimately, Sidekick conjures up the kind of dinner you had on those nights when mom or dad threw a bunch of leftovers into a pot and turned up the stove. You might have gotten a sampling from all four food groups. But it didn’t taste very good the first time and you weren’t particularly eager to try it again.

THE WORLD’S MOST PUBLIC EDITOR

In his inaugural June 5 column as the second-ever New York Times public editor, Byron (Barney) Calame praised his predecessor Daniel Okrent for having "elegantly dissected many of the major issues of journalistic integrity" but then characterized himself as "a bit more of a nitty-gritty newspaperman." Hard to quarrel with that.

While Okrent largely distinguished himself as an author and a magazine journalist (as well as the inventor of Rotisserie Baseball), the 66-year-old Calame, a former Naval officer, spent nearly 40 years at the Wall Street Journal before retiring at the end of 2004. And while Okrent could write with verve and a broad reach, Calame — at least to judge from his first few columns — is taking a narrower, Joe Friday, "just the facts ma’am" view of his job.

One column indicative of that approach was a July 17 piece dissecting in painstaking detail how some language improperly attributed to the author of an op-ed piece showed up in the paper. (Unfortunately, Calame made his own mistake in that column that required a correction.) In an effective piece of shoe-leather ombudsmanship, Calame wrote an August 14 column proving beyond a reasonable doubt that freelancers for the Times — despite a policy committing them to comply with the paper’s 54-page "Ethical Journalism" handbook — were not aware of those ethical guidelines.

"I can’t say anybody told me anything," one freelancer told Calame, who exposed the difference between official journalistic standards and real-life practices, a crucial dichotomy that often gets media outlets into trouble.

On September 11, Calame did write a more sweeping column on Hurricane Katrina in which — after reviewing a decade of Times coverage — he concluded that "given the dimensions of poverty in New Orleans and the city’s dependence on a levee system, the Times’s news coverage of these problems over the past decade falls far short of what its readers have a right to expect of a national newspaper."

In a business that has enough trouble reporting on actual events accurately, Calame essentially took the Times to task for not predicting, or at least foreshadowing, the disaster in New Orleans. That no doubt left some in the newsroom rolling their eyes. And even some letters to the public editor published in last Sunday’s Times complained that Calame was too tough on the paper, a rare public criticism about an ombudsman. Calame was off the mark here. But in his job, overreaching is better than timidity.

As the first public editor at a newspaper that had long and bitterly resisted the concept, Okrent had the tougher job. But Calame, who also writes a Web journal, appears to have the tenacity and guts to keep the franchise in worthy hands.

Mark Jurkowitz can be reached at mjurkowitz[a]phx.com.