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Departing the New York Times
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Departing the New York Times
I left to stay true to my byline
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As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an
opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. Despite the
encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure. If you check out
my [15]Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or
topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship
with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay.
[16]
[https]
Charles Kaiser has written a [17]fair-minded article in the Columbia Journalism
Review about my departure. What I want to do in this post is add more context.
Let’s be clear: I am not planning to have a running feud with the Times: I
came, I saw, I felt I had to leave, and I moved on.
But I believe that the story of why I left says something important about the
current state of legacy journalism.
The background: until 2017 or so, I felt extremely happy with my role at the
Times, for a couple of reasons.
One, I felt that I had finally cracked the code of opinion column-writing. When
the Times hired me at the end of 1999, I was an economics professor who wrote
occasionally for a broader audience. And crafting 800-word plain-English essays
for readers with no background in economics is, shall we say, a bit different
from writing 5000-word academic journal articles full of equations and diagrams
for a small professional community. For a while, I struggled with the
transition.
But eventually I figured it out. I actually took pleasure in the craftsmanship,
in boiling an argument down to its essentials, expressing it in ordinary
language, and making it interesting. Furthermore, I believe that my writing
affected the national discourse, especially over issues such as George W.
Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, the march to the Affordable Care
Act (despite Obama’s initial reluctance), and the unjustified fiscal panic of
the early 2010s.
During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few
editorial constraints on how and what I wrote. For most of that period my draft
would go straight to a copy editor, who would sometimes suggest that I make
some changes — for example, softening an assertion that arguably went beyond
provable facts, or redrafting a passage the editor didn’t quite understand, and
which readers probably wouldn’t either. But the editing was very light; over
the years several copy editors jokingly complained that I wasn’t giving them
anything to do, because I came in at length, with clean writing and with
back-up for all factual assertions.
This light-touch editing prevailed even when I took positions that made Times
leadership very nervous. My early and repeated criticisms of Bush’s push to
invade Iraq led to several tense meetings with management. In those meetings, I
was urged to tone it down. Yet the columns themselves were published as I wrote
them. And in the end, I believe the Times — which eventually [18]apologized for
its role in promoting the war — was glad that I had taken an anti-invasion
stand. I believe that it was my finest hour.
So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors
and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors
appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper’s
history and my role in it.
Two, previous Times management and editors had allowed me to engage in the
higher-level economic debates of the time. The aftermath of the 2008 financial
crisis led to a great flowering of economics blogs. Important, sophisticated
debates about the causes of the crisis and the policy response were taking
place more or less in real time. I was able to be an active part of those
debates, because I had an [19]economics blog of my own, under the Times
umbrella but separate from the column. The blog, unedited, was both more
technical — sometimes much more technical — and looser than the column.
Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile
for me were taken away. The Times eliminated the blog at the end of 2017.
Here’s my [20]last substantive blog post, which gives a good idea of the kind
of thing I was no longer able to do once it was eliminated.
For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on
Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an
awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts. So in 2021 I opened a Substack
account, as a place to put technical material I couldn’t publish in the Times.
Times management became very upset. When I explained to them that I really,
really needed an outlet where I could publish more analytical writing with
charts etc., they agreed to allow me to have a Times newsletter (twice a week),
where I could publish the kind of work I had previously posted on my blog.
In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only
reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was
writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my
newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper.
Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.
Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to
extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an
immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes
doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost
invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I
saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence
of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I
was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial
damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the
back and forth often felt flat and colorless.
One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could
not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as
if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that
had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to
press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization,
and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion
writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the
kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied
into war.”
I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer
mine. So I left.
That’s my story. What are the broader implications?
“Words,” [21]John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “ought to be a little wild, for
they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” That was always my
attitude toward opinion writing. Newspaper columns should be controversial,
rubbing some people the wrong way, because the main point is to get people to
rethink their assumptions. I used to say, only half-jokingly, that if a column
didn’t generate a large amount of hate mail, that meant that I had wasted the
space.
Yet what I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness,
toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some
people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those
are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?
Maybe there was a time when readers would sit still for sober, dull opinion
pieces — history’s [22]most boring headline, “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative,”
was the title of a Times op-ed — because they were seen as representing the
views of The Establishment. And I have the feeling that Times management still
thinks it’s living in that world. But in today’s wide-open information (and
misinformation) environment, boring writing just vanishes without a trace.
On a somewhat different issue, it became clear to me that the management I was
dealing with didn’t understand the difference between having an opinion and
having an informed, factually sourced opinion. When the newsletter was
canceled, I tried to point out that I was almost the only regular opinion
writer doing policy. Their response was to point to other writers who often
expressed views about policy, economic and otherwise. I tried in vain to
explain that there’s a difference between having opinions about economics and
knowing how to read C.B.O. analyses and recent research papers. It all fell on
deaf ears.
So that’s the story of my departure from the Times. Despite the difficulties of
the last year, I remain deeply grateful to the Times for hiring me and giving
me decades of freedom to express my views to such a large audience. And I feel
sorry about abandoning loyal readers who still rely on legacy media and who may
not follow me to Substack. But my situation had become intolerable, and I
haven’t felt a moment’s regret over the new direction and recovering my
freedom.
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A guest post by
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[https] Professor, CUNY Grad Center, Nobel laureate and former to Paul
columnist, NY Times
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[46]Meg
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Liked by Domenica Alioto
Good to hear the background. And good for you for leaving. Its not the same
paper I’ve been reading for decades. Your word is your truth.
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[52]Gary
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As a previous subscriber to both the NYT and WAPO, I am delighted to see two of
my favorites, Paul Krugman and Jen Rubin, here on Substack. Unleashed opinions
from knowledgeable editorialists work best here. Mr. Krugman is a truly
professional economist with valuable insights.
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[17] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/paul-krugman-leaving-new-york-times-heavy-hand-editing-less-frequent-columns-newsletter.php
[18] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html
[19] https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
[20] https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/leprechauns-of-eastern-europe/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body
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