NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent offers what should be a blindingly obvious suggestion:

Here's an idea: if the editors did the explaining themselves, maybe I wouldn't have to do it for them.

(Note: He was referring to his Nov. 28 listings column and the controversy that arose over changes to the NYT's arts listings.)

For decades, the Fraternal Order of Falsely Modest Newspaper People has marched under an indelible banner: "We're not the story," it says. "The story's the story."

While I was reporting the listings column, culture editor Jonathan Landman acknowledged that this might not be the most effective of attitudes. "We tend to shy away from self-promotion in these matters," he wrote in an e-mail message, "preferring to let the paper speak for itself. In the case of the changes in cultural coverage this may be O.K. in the long run, but it was clearly inadequate in the short."

I suppose the speak-for-itself trope made sense back when the image of the American newspaper was embodied in a freckled newsboy tossing a rolled paper onto a porch hung with geraniums. But in an age when the press is so widely regarded as a predatory and uncontrolled beast, the failure to allow readers a view inside the cage can only aggravate their worst suspicions.

This doesn't apply just to format changes, like the culture listings. Not a week goes by when mail from readers doesn't contain earnest queries about any number of practices and standards that a little explaining could make glowingly clear. Some newspapers do a very good job at this. James H. Smith, the executive editor of The Record-Journal in Meriden, Conn., often uses his biweekly column to explain his paper's practices: why, for example, it doesn't go out of its way to concentrate on "good news" or why it often includes unsavory details about someone's past in its obituaries.

In another blindingly obvious suggestion, Okrent suggests using the paper's website to communicate better with readers about the shudda-cudda- whudda aspect of stories.

By that I mean news stories in print and broadcast are often not allocated enough space to explore all points of view. Nuance is sometimes missed.

I'm of the opinion that a news article about an article or issue is just the starting point of becoming truly informed about it. The debate afterwards is perhaps even more important.

Journalists, however, like to shy from that debate. They tend to look on their articles as carved in stone and speaking for themselves, much like the judiciary.

Pardon me for not being a team player and not buying that.

A little more humility could buy the craft a lot more cred.