On Wednesday, Feb. 24, there were two journalism-related announcements in New York. The first, by Long Island University, unveiled the winners of the 73rd annual George Polk Awards in Journalism. The second was the public release by the New York Times of an internal staff report whose “central finding,” as described by Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger in an introductory note, was that the “Times is too often a difficult place to work for people of all backgrounds — particularly colleagues of color, and especially Black and Latino colleagues.” The juxtaposition of the two announcements, as well as the reaction to them, nicely sums up the story of the contemporary New York Times. The diversity report declared that the Times would pay extra to its employees who sit on diversity committees or “lead employee resource groups (E.R.G.s), like Black@NYT, the Latino Network, the Asian Network, the Arab Collective and others.” It attracted lots of social media attention, especially in the wake of the ouster of a star Times reporter who had been the subject of protests by colleagues after uttering a racial slur while leading a Times-branded educational trip for high school students. The incident took place two years ago and was examined by the company at the time, but some of those students recently gave a Daily Beast reporter nasty quotes about it, and the Times seemingly got spooked by a round of Twitter denunciations....