Last week—just before the Las Vegas shootings—New York Times columnist Joe Nocera told readers that he was ending "The Gun Report," the popular daily rundown of gun violence in America he'd created in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre. The reason, insiders say, was that the Times didn't want to give his assistant a pay raise for writing it.

The mighty, omniscient "journalistic tone" is largely a convenient myth. Newspapers and other media outlets long adopted this self-assured institutional writing style which admitted no doubt as a way to appear more knowledgeable than they really were. The internet, with its radical transparency and focus on personality, has eaten away at this obfuscating tone. Which is good. Sometimes.

New York Times staffers just received the following exciting memo from editor Bill Keller and editorial page boss Andy Rosenthal. The paper is reinventing the "Week in Review" section! We've read this memo twice, and it sounds to us like the new section will be... exactly like the current one? But maybe with more letters to the editor? See if you can spot what the fuss is about.