Daniel Okrent, the NYT public editor, wrote his year-ender last week. I missed it while dealing with a tsunami of tsunami coverage:

An excerpt of some of the improvements he noted:

1. The Op-Ed columnists for the first time operate under a formal corrections policy, and if you haven't been seeing tons of corrections on the page, it may be for the best of reasons: judging by the shrinking volume of complaints I receive from readers, columnists' errors have become much less frequent.

2. The science desk has instituted a policy of full disclosure of potential conflicts of interest among individuals cited in articles. Execution hasn't been perfect, but it's getting there.

3. Those damnable anonymous sources -- or ''anonymice,'' in the term coined by my partner-in-whine, media hound Jack Shafer of Slate.com -- haven't begun to disappear in meaningful numbers, but at least they've begun to scurry toward the exits. Far fewer are being cited to support matters of small consequence. Additionally, the effort to explain why anonymity is granted to certain sources is accelerating, though I do think the rimshot ''because of the sensitivity of the topic'' is close to useless -- especially when the real reason is ''because the White House imposes a gag rule on staff'' or ''because the senator doesn't want anyone in his office mentioned in the press except himself'' or ''because the board member wants to advance his own agenda without paying a price for it.''

4. Recognizing that much of the country doesn't look the way it may sometimes appear from West 43rd Street, the paper assigned reporter David D. Kirkpatrick to cover political and social conservatives. (I will not deny that there is a certain irony in what may seem an affirmative action effort aimed at the political right.) And I'm absolutely convinced that the national desk has been making a clear and increasingly effective effort to scrub stories for evidence of bias.

5. Assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal believes that communication with readers has improved: ''I think desks and many individuals are less likely to disregard reader complaints, or to procrastinate in replying, because 'he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake.''' You're welcome.

6. In one small victory for a vocal readership (but a giant leap for the idea of responsiveness), the editors of the Book Review, actually heeding a chorus of complaints, will be dropping their recently instituted ''Contributors'' box next Sunday and returning writer ID's to the place they belong -- on the same page where the writer's review appears.

7. Many reporters, most notably those covering extremely sensitive beats, have engaged fruitfully with partisans and other critics. I especially want to single out Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Erlanger, whose every word is strip-searched for nuance and implication by thousands, but who yet shows a willingness to listen; his colleague Greg Myre; and most of the reporters in the Baghdad bureau, whose responsiveness to reader inquiries while they labor under frightening conditions is truly astonishing.

The last development I'll cite is still gestating, but potentially more important than all the others. At the instigation of Bill Keller and under the direction of Al Siegal, several working groups have begun to examine issues at the very heart of journalistic practice: how to improve communication between readers and the editors; whether and how to cut down on the use of anonymous sources and how to justify their use when it's deemed unavoidable; how, in the words of one internal document, to create ''a shield against bias''; and how to ensure accuracy.

I can imagine a critic of The Times (or a critic of committees) blowing this off as a public relations dodge, or as a futile exercise doomed to a slow death-by-bureaucracy. But I can tell you that many of the paper's finest and most honorable journalists are engaged in this effort, and the existence of various press reports about it (including, I hope, this one) mean that they are to a certain extent doing it in public. I've reprinted the memo that announced the committee's formation on my Web journal (posting No. 40). Readers should expect results three or four months down the road; if you don't see them, demand them.

Bizarrely, he dissed the Bark Mitzvah story, saying, "...in just the last two weeks I was led to wonder why on earth the paper would publish a pointless and, to many readers, offensive article on a dog's 'bark mitzvah,' ..."

Some people obviously inserted their seriousness suppository with a little too much gusto if they were offended by that.

However, it somehow seemed inappropriate to me that the NYT's infamous editor's note on its botched coverage of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction wasn't mentioned.