Readers like “Bill” were having none of it, and as Jim Roberts, the editor of the Web site, read their comments, he began to think they had a point. “Indiscriminately shooting civilians seems on its very face to be an act of terror,” he said. How, Roberts wondered, could you separate the act from the actor?

He conferred with Kannapell, Paul Winfield, the news editor, and Phil Corbett, Winfield’s deputy. Winfield talked with Ian Fisher, a deputy foreign editor. “Terrorist” became an acceptable term in the Mumbai story. “We jointly decided we didn’t need to be throwing the word around flagrantly, but we didn’t need to run away from it, either,” Roberts said…

James Bennet, now the editor of The Atlantic, was The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2001 through 2004. After his return, he wrote a two-page memo to Chira on the use of “terrorism” and “terrorist” that is still cited by editors, though the paper has no formal policy on the terms. His memo said it was easy to call certain egregious acts terrorism “and have the whole world agree with you.” The problem, he said, was where to stop before every stone-throwing Palestinian was called a terrorist and the paper was making a political statement…

The memo said he settled on a rough rule: He would use the words, when they fit, to describe attacks within Israel’s 1948 borders but not in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, which Israel and the Palestinians have been contending over since Israel took them in 1967. When a gunman infiltrated a settlement and killed a 5-year-old girl in her bed, Bennet did not call it terrorism. “All I could do was default to my first approach and describe the attack and the victims as vividly as I could.”