IT'S time to write Chapter 2 of the public editor chronicles at The New York Times. Recently retired after almost 40 years at The Wall Street Journal, I've agreed to become The Times's second public editor - an outsider dedicated to representing readers and serving as a watchdog over the paper's journalistic integrity. In this first column, I hope to provide a sense of who I am and how I intend to tackle the job. The first public editor, Daniel Okrent, boldly established the genuine independence essential to carrying out the job and elegantly dissected many of the major issues...