Today in The Backstory, we’re taking you to Mississippi to explore how we covered a historic Senate race, and on a 10-hour flight with King Charles to go inside royal travel. Plus, we answer one of your questions about how the newsroom uses A.I. But first, we explain how we approach giving credit to the reporting of our competitors.
Credit where credit’s due
Twice this week, I faced a question that has bearing on our ethics and reputation: When do our articles recognize the work of other news organizations?
One case involved the former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro’s life in prison. Our reporters found out that he was spending most of his time reading, including the Bible and the Quran. But before our article ran, there was a deeply reported piece in The New Yorker on the same subject that also mentioned his Bible reading. The New Yorker wasn’t our source; should we have acknowledged it anyway?
We decided to do it — both as a gesture of generosity and because we didn’t want to imply that we’d been the first or only reporters to discover the Bible detail.
The second situation was trickier. We wrote a 1,300-word article about Republicans who lost dozens of races across North Carolina. It included two sentences about a sheriff who had made anti-immigrant remarks and lost to a pastor who wanted to build trust with immigrants. Our reporter in Raleigh had learned about that election through interviews and social media.
Here’s the rub: A nonprofit political news site, Bolts, had done extensive reporting on that sheriff’s race months ago. After our article was published, the editor of Bolts pointed that out on social media and noted that one of our sentences about the race was similar to a line atop a Bolts article. We had seen the Bolts headline but hadn’t read the article.
I decided against adding a credit. Doing so after the fact would have suggested that we had relied on Bolts but failed to acknowledge it, or that our stories were similar, neither of which was the case.
The issue of giving credit is no small thing in journalism, particularly when we’re in the midst of a local news crisis. Forgoing credit can open you up to accusations of ripping off another news organization. When outlets elsewhere break a story, I believe that they deserve to be named. Just this week, we mentioned reporting by Punchbowl News as part of an article about White House threats against Democrats in Congress. Likewise, it was gratifying to see a recent Wall Street Journal article about Jensen Huang and Nvidia credit us several times for our reporting.
Other news organizations have criticized The Times for years for not recognizing their work often enough. When she was our public editor, Margaret Sullivan wrote about this topic and said our practices in this area were “a work in progress.”
Discussions about giving credit are more common now than when I first joined The Times as a reporter in 2005. Our track record isn’t perfect. But citing your peers for their original work is a journalistic strength. Over the last week alone, Times articles mentioned reporting by The Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Jersey Globe, Agence France-Presse, Axios, The Associated Press, The Financial Times, Politico, The Cornell Daily Sun and Reuters as well as specialized sites like Cord Cutters News, Ars Technica and The North Carolina Rabbit Hole.
I asked our executive editor, Joe Kahn, about all of this. He said his approach to giving credit was that “we should be generous rather than grudging.”
“That’s especially true if a story we’re reporting builds on work done earlier by others,” Joe told me. “Disclosure in that case strengthens rather than weakens that original journalism we do.
“Guiding readers to previous work can be valuable even when it’s not strictly required as a disclosure,” he added. “It can point people to relevant reporting that might allow them to go deeper on a subject, or to understand better how coverage of an issue has evolved.”
Covering unexpected twists in Mississippi
With so many midterm campaigns and elections this year, how did The Times decide which ones to cover deeply? And how did we tackle reporting on the Mississippi Senate race — with its surprising result this week, but no one’s idea of a battleground a year ago?
For more perspective, I consulted with Michael Cooper, who leads our politics coverage; Jonathan Weisman, who has been editing articles about the race; and Emily Cochrane, who covers the American South.
The Times is sometimes accused of parachuting into a place. Emily, you cover the South from Nashville. What on-the-ground work did you do before Election Day, and how is it different to cover this kind of story for a global audience?
Emily: I still find it pretty challenging to wrap my arms around such a big region. We’re lucky that we have some strong local outlets doing great work that I can keep up with. But nothing replaces being there in person and seeing things for yourself. It’s almost always worth the drive.
Jonathan: Emily loves a long drive and logged a lot of miles. But we also used local stringers and partnered with Jackson-based Mississippi Today. We had some sharp eyes on the state.
Michael: Since Mississippi was not front of mind for many pollsters, handicappers or the major party committees, this was a case where The Times benefited hugely from having a National desk with reporters who live in the regions they cover.
How did you assess which 2026 campaigns and races to devote the most reporting resources to?
Jonathan: We are somewhat captive to people whose living is made handicapping races. We do watch the political prognosticators and how they are shifting their ratings. We also watch fund-raising. And we talk to people in both parties working the campaigns.
Michael: On the Politics desk, we tried to focus our attention on the states that were seen as the battlegrounds most likely to decide control of the Senate. Figuring out just which states was not always easy, and the map changed quite a bit over the course of the year. The Democrats initially focused on flipping Senate seats in just four states — Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio — while defending the seats they held, which was seen as posing its own challenges.
By the fall, it became clear that they were competitive in many more states. Democrats seemed so likely to flip the North Carolina seat that our polling team decided to focus on other states, and they conducted surveys showing that long shots like Kansas and South Carolina were very much in play. And we watched how donors, the party committees, other pollsters and handicappers were assessing the race.
Read the full interview.
Traveling with the king
Michael Shear, our chief U.K. correspondent, took his first international trip with King Charles III. Here’s a taste of his essay about the experience.
“I’m flying with King Charles today,” I said into the phone on the wall.
It was 6:15 a.m., and I was standing outside an unmarked door in an out-of-the-way hallway at Heathrow Airport.
I usually cover politics and European diplomacy. But that day, I was joining the king on a seven-day trip as part of the Royal Rota, the pool of reporters who cover Buckingham Palace. The Times is not a part of the rota, which largely limits permanent membership to members of the British media. But the palace agreed to let me join.
I am not unaccustomed to traveling with someone famous and powerful. For 16 years, I traveled around the world with U.S. presidents as a White House correspondent. I was on President Trump’s first Air Force One flight. I even got an early case of Covid, likely by flying on the iconic blue-and-white 747.
So I was curious how the experience of royal travel would compare.
Click to read the rest of Michael’s essay.
Your questions about our journalism
Rey Rosales of Edmonton, Alberta, asks:
Can you describe a few ways you use A.I. in your journalism work?
Zach Seward, the editorial director for A.I. Initiatives, answers:
We find that A.I. is most useful behind the scenes as an aid to our reporting. We don’t allow writing articles with A.I. and always make editorial judgments ourselves. But it can be a great tool for research and investigations.
This year we’ve used A.I. to help tally offshore tax-dodging (the numbers are disclosed in hard-to-parse footnotes), search through leaked documents from the Cornell rape investigation (more than 1,000 pages) and tag responses to requests for reader contributions to our coverage (we get a lot of them!). Right now our team is also helping colleagues search body-cam footage; make sense of messy documents from Freedom of Information Act requests; transcribe and translate leaked audio recordings; and monitor public appearances by government officials. We build many tools ourselves to make sure we can check everything, uphold our standards and protect the confidentiality of our work.
A lot of A.I. methods proved useful earlier this year after the Epstein files were released. We helped reporters sift through more than three million pages of text and images using “semantic search,” which can find related material that a strict keyword search would miss. Staff can also use A.I. to produce reports on people or more specific questions about the files, and the results can be powerful in the hands of an experienced reporter with well-informed questions.
Have a question about Times journalism? Submit it here.
Pop quiz
Something is wrong in the bold part of the line below, according to our stylebook. Click to choose the version that you think is correct and to read the Metropolitan Diary. See the explanation in the P.S. of this newsletter.
This week, the Metropolitan Diary column is celebrating its 50-year anniversary. It first appeared on Nov. 10, 1976.
Correction of the Week
A review made an imprecise comparison between the muscular arms of Rocky and Popeye. Rocky has bulging biceps; Popeye has muscular forearms.
We welcome your feedback. Email us at thebackstory@nytimes.com. And see you next week. — Patrick
P.S. “Year” is represented in the Latin roots of the word “anniversary.” Thus, make it 50th anniversary, not the redundant 50-year anniversary.
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