In a sprawling interview with the German paper Der Spiegel, New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet is described as “unusually self-critical.”

In the interview, the Grey Lady’s editor is probed over his paper’s controversial decision to refuse to publish the cartoons that led to the slaying of Charlie Hebdo’s editors or even the paper’s defiant post-massacre cover. Baquet is also asked why The Washington Post has begun to regularly scoop the Paper of Record, the most prominent recent case being the release of Edward Snowden’s NSA documents. All of these might have prompted The Times’ editor to concede that he and the paper he leads had been “arrogant.” But they did not. What sparked this uncommon moment of samokritika was Baquet’s admission that his paper should have been more like BuzzFeed when they had the chance.

SPIEGEL: Digital competitors like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post offer an extremely colorful mix of stories and have outperformed the New York Times website with a lot of buzz.

Baquet: Because they’re free. You’re always going to have more traffic if you’re a free website. But we’ve always admitted that we were behind other news organizations in making our stories available to people on the web. BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are much better than we are at that, and I envy them for this. But I think the trick for the New York Times is to stick to what we are. That doesn’t mean: Don’t change. But I don’t want to be BuzzFeed. If we tried to be what they are, we would lose.

SPIEGEL: In May, your internal innovation report was leaked along with its harsh conclusion that the New York Times‘ “journalistic advantage” is shrinking. Did you underestimate your new digital competitors?

Baquet: Yes, I think we did. We assumed wrongly that these new competitors, whether it was BuzzFeed or others, were doing so well just because they were doing something journalistically that we chose not to do. We were arrogant, to be honest. We looked down on those new competitors, and I think we’ve come to realize that was wrong. They understood before we did how to make their stories available to people who are interested in them. We were too slow to do it. [Emphasis added]

If the BuzzFeed-ification of the New York Times is a project that the executive editor is interested in pursuing, he will find he has all the support in the world from the paper’s public editor.

When reporter Jonathan Martin was forced to “jump through hoops,” as New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan characterized it, in order to avoid using a profane word that was nevertheless part of a story, readers complained that they felt infantilized by The Times.

If we were to print vulgarities every time a politician, or a sports figure, or even a newspaper editor uttered one, we would print quite a lot of them. Some readers think that would be fine; others might find such a barrage off-putting, distracting or offensive.

Under our guidelines, we try to limit use of vulgarities or other potentially offensive language to situations where the specific language is crucial to the story. Otherwise, we avoid the vulgarity — sometimes by paraphrasing, or by choosing a different quote.

Occasionally, we’ll do something like this — preserving the quote but avoiding the vulgarity. In such cases, we must make clear to the reader what we’ve done, as was the case here, so no one will be misled.

BuzzFeed has some excellent journalists on staff and has opened bureaus around the world. The outlet publishes hard-hitting and news-making reports on a fairly regular basis. The tired knock on this institution is that much of that journalism is funded by LOL Cat listicles and .gif-laden guest posts. But that’s the business model, and it has been wildly successful. What’s more, it seems to have rescued investigative reporting from an early grave. The editorial culture at The Times was understandably protective of its brand as a stodgy, dead tree paper for curmudgeonly subscribers, but the business of journalism has changed in the 21st Century. It’s good to see The Times’ brass catching up with, well, the times.

As for profanity in reporting, almost everyone in the journalism business with a laudable aversion to blue copy is perfectly comfortable throwing a few asterisks into a four-letter word. The meaning is conveyed to readers and reporters don’t have to twist themselves into knots trying to work around the offending word. If The Times goes BuzzFeed, however, they can probably forget the asterisks.