I left a message with the public editor, Clark Hoyt, and sometime later his assistant, Michael McElroy, called back. “I know the number and so obviously it’s easy for me,” he said, in attempting to explain why the Times was too obtuse to put its main number where people would see it. (It’s 212–556-1234, by the way.) “I’m looking right now,” McElroy said as we talked. He rummaged around the Times site for a while and then gave up, allowing that he couldn’t find it. “That’s something I’ll tell Clark. That’s not a good thing.” Human contact “certainly has been pared down a lot,” McElroy conceded. “The biggest thing is more of a preference for e-mail. They try to make it where an editor’s not having to answer phone calls.”