These two changes are profoundly altering the role of confidential sources.

For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making.

They held out no hope for a fuller explanation in the future.

I have had unusual difficulty getting a better explanation for readers, despite the paper's repeated pledges of greater transparency.

I see transparency as a default position for all those who want to do good journalism. I simply am not sure what the right degree of transparency is, and my not being sure is really a product of my some nine months now as the public editor at the Times.

The exchange is not always open-minded and raises the question of whether the transparency is ever going to have that great an effect if so many people have their minds made up on the left and the right. That gives me pause about transparency, because I've always believed that if you explain how you do your job, being careful to protect your sources, you will increase your credibility. I don't want to be put down as a nonbeliever, but I'm a little less certain.... I think that being in a job that's in the middle of an effort to be transparent has simply immersed me in it so much that it has raised questions in my mind about its magnificence.