Post Weinstein, How We Will Be Covering the Red Carpets

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Choire Sicha was hired in September as the new editor of The New York Times Styles section.

Red carpets have always been a clash of fame, sponsored content and super-cute shoes. The red carpet is where huge, powerful industries — celebrity, fashion, Hollywood, media, beauty, publicity — meet. Now that the curtain is finally being lifted on some of the grimy underbelly of Hollywood, we feel it’s more important than ever to not treat awards shows as silly things for silly people.

Given the enormity of our cultural reckoning in the last year with how women are treated in the workplace, on the internet and in Hollywood, we want to take a fresh look at how we cover this stuff. We have some plans about how to recognize the cultural moment — and would love to hear from readers about what you would like to see (and not see).

• For the first big event of the season, we’ve assigned Damon Winter to cover the Golden Globes red carpet. Damon won a Pulitzer for covering the 2008 Obama campaign. We will send other photographers like Damon who can capture the realities and personalities of the red carpet.

• We are going to begin the awards season by telling readers as much as we know about the business, joys and discomforts involved. Cara Buckley, the “Carpetbagger” reporter; Jodi Kantor, the investigative reporter who co-wrote the exposés of Harvey Weinstein and other articles on sexual harassment; Vanessa Friedman, our chief fashion critic; Jenna Wortham, The New York Times Magazine staff writer and co-host of “Still Processing,” and more will contribute.

• During red carpets, both Styles and Culture reporters and editors will be on hand all night, publishing timely stories as events unfold. The red carpet is now a prime soapbox to speak out about harassment, sexism, racism, industry practices — as well as Hollywood success — and we want to continue to cover that.

• We will also make sure we find a time for us all to look at cool dresses and tuxedos and think about how we might dress up if we had all the money in the world (and how we might get that look even without the money). We think this is more useful than exploitative, as red carpet coverage is mostly of women, about, by and for women. Two thirds of the online audience for pictures here of the 2017 Grammys and the 2017 Golden Globes were women. And an even higher percentage, 71 percent, of people coming in to look at the 2017 Met Gala pictures and 2017 Oscars pictures were women.

Most of all, we think folks enjoy the fantasies of Hollywood but also don’t want to endorse the lies and secrets.

What else should we know? How will you be looking at the red carpets differently? Please tell us in the comments.