[8] When Ad Age named him Editor of the Year in 2001, the writer Jon Fine called the Times Magazine "one of the best reads in the business.
In 2001, the writer Michael Finkel was discovered to have created composite characters for a story he had written on the African slave trade, a small scandal that was quickly eclipsed at The New York Times by the much larger one involving Jayson Blair.
Its 2001 story “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong”[11] revealed former senator and one-time presidential candidate Bob Kerrey to have led a particularly brutal attack on a peasant village in Vietnam that one of his fellow team members described in terms that invoked some similarities to the My-Lai massacre.
Northwestern Journalism professor David Abrahmson credits Moss's work at Esquire in assigning a series of pieces on the business of entertainment with "having a serious effect on what we all regard as the normal content of the mainstream media today, with its unremitting emphasis on not only celebrity, but also the economics of the celebrity-driven industries.
"[15] Moss first came to media attention as the founder of 7 Days, a weekly news magazine covering New York City arts and culture.
Moss is widely credited with restoring the luster the magazine enjoyed during its early years under legendary founder Clay Felker.
[19] Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz noted in a 2009 profile, "Moss' signature accomplishment may be the development of a thriving Web site.
"[21] Almost a year later, in another one of his Times columns, Carr remarked, "One of the charms of the publishing business is that a single person can have an outsize effect, and many would suggest that Mr. Moss, with his deft hand for provocative covers and smart assignments, is one of the best editors working in a hybrid age.
[27] He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from his alma mater Oberlin College in 2005,[28] and the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism in 2012.
[29] Moss is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing, which Ari Shapiro described as a "visual feast, full of drafts, sketches, and scribbled notebook pages.