Merrill Perlman, director of copy desks at The New York Times whom some of you may know from ACES, gets a turn to answer reader questions as part of the Talk to the Newsroom series.

She's already been confronted with a cranky query about the lack of serial commas in the Times. An anonymous source tells me that Merrill would rather not discuss grammar and punctuation all the time, so send her questions about other things.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out this Q&A. Merrill does a great job discussing fact checking and style issues. She also talks about editing and the Web. I was heartened to read that the Times is recognizing the role of copy editing — a big issue as we all head toward online.