“It’s Quite an Upheaval”: In an Ongoing Makeover of the Times Opinion Babel, the Old Editorial Voice of God Is Being Rationed (original) (raw)

Every four years, politicians make a pilgrimage to the New York Times for a ritual that’s been ingrained in the institution since Abraham Lincoln’s day: the presidential endorsement. For a few generations, it’s been a sober affair—a mix of on- and off-the-record discussion with the paper’s editorial board. But this is 2020, and the old mode of talking, listening, deciding, writing, publishing, seemed too simple—a regular old endorsement, and everything that goes into it, perhaps, wouldn’t reach as many people in as compelling a way as it could. So the Times adjusted its rodeo accordingly. The boardroom on the 15th floor was transformed into a makeshift television studio, with five cameras beaming into an adjacent office that served as a control room for a dozen or so producers. One by one, starting with Bernie Sanders on December 3 and concluding with Cory Booker two weeks later, nine of the 2020 Democratic hopefuls sat down for their close-ups.

In a first for the Times, the full transcripts were published this week as part of a slick multimedia series. The Times says the idea is to make the whole thing more transparent, but it doesn’t hurt to build buzz in the run-up to another first, a special episode of the _Times_’ Sunday evening FX docuseries, The Weekly, this Sunday’s installment of which will culminate in a small-screen reveal of the chosen Democrat. And what modern media moment would be complete without an audio tie-in? In this case, it’s a “pop-up podcast” that promises to take readers behind the scenes of it all.

The multiplatform-endorsement bonanza—which I’m told has furrowed a few brows to the extent that it bears a passing resemblance to a reality-TV competition—is seen as yet another sign of the ways in which Opinion has been reimagined (for better or for worse, depending on who you talk to) since James Bennet was appointed to run it four years ago. (Ironically, Bennet, arguably the second-most powerful journalist at the Times after executive editor Dean Baquet, has nothing to do with endorsements; his brother, Colorado senator Michael Bennet, is still in the race, so he’s had to recuse himself from 2020 coverage.) His tenure has been bumpy, with a series of Twitter-fueled mega-controversies obscuring what many see as positive and interesting change. Now, the Bennet era is at an inflection point, as Opinion prepares to implement a major overhaul that will streamline the operation while also breaking with decades of Times tradition.

In many ways, the planned makeover, which is scheduled to take effect sometime in February, has everything to do with the department’s structure and org-chart—who reports to whom, who oversees what, etc. At its core, however, is a notable departure from the way things have been done.

“We are, in essence, interweaving the editorial board with the Op-Ed team,” Bennet and his two deputies wrote in a memo announcing the reorg to staff last month. The former group, to be clear, is a cabal of journalists who write unsigned editorials espousing the positions of the paper; the latter includes Times columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Bruni and Paul Krugman, as well as outside contributors who are invited to take positions that can either align with or oppose those of the editorial board.

Both groups will now be organized into subject-specific verticals, and, “Members of the editorial board will work as Opinion writers within the verticals, weighing in under their own bylines.” (The board “will continue to meet regularly to debate positions we should take in unsigned editorials.”) Instead of having one deputy editor who oversees Op-Ed—currently Jim Dao, a long-standing member of the department—and one who oversees the editorial board—Katie Kingsbury, who joined the Times in 2017 from the _Boston Globe_—Dao will now be “responsible for anticipating and reacting to news,” and Kingsbury will be responsible for “overseeing long-range enterprise.”

This inside baseball is actually a big deal. “The editorial department has grown and been reorganized many times and it has constantly been evolving,” said Bennet’s predecessor, Andy Rosenthal. “But this is the biggest structural change since the Op-Ed page was created in 1970. The separation of the Op-Ed page and the editorial page wasn’t just because of tradition. It reflected the fundamental principle of how opinion is best organized and produced, meaning that we had chosen to avoid any suggestion of a conflict of interest between those who form the opinions of the New York Times, and those who select and edit the opinions of outsiders.” Another former member of the department told me, “A division between Op-Ed and editorial could be frustrating, but it was as sacrosanct, in some ways, as the division between opinion and the newsroom itself.” Said a third, “It’s quite an upheaval for that operation.”

One of the things the department is wrestling with is the notion of when, and how often, the institutional voice of the Times should be utilized. It’s something that has been on the mind of Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who succeeded his father, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., at the end of 2017. Sulzberger Jr. had wrestled with this as well, going back five or six years, when the question of whether anyone was even reading the editorials led him to consider eliminating them all together, according to sources familiar with the discussions. (The Times conducted some online audience research, which told a different story, and the editorials remained.)

Under Bennet, a former Times correspondent who became editor of the Atlantic before returning to the Times, editorials have been significantly scaled back, and there will be more of that to come under the new structure. “We intend to ration the institutional voice further,” the reorg memo says, “to use it in reaction to news only in instances of great importance."

There are two ways of looking at it. One, as characterized by people who are skeptical of the change, is that Bennet’s approach appears to be a gradual erasure of the _Times_’ institutional role in advocating for public policy and social good. The other, to paraphrase people who think all of this is a good idea, is that the institutional voice will now have even more of an impact on the fewer occasions when it is used. Someone with deep knowledge of how the editorial board works said, “A long time ago, that editorial page really set the course for the main ways people would think about the world, and what was happening in Congress and so on, but there are just so many more places for that right now.”

The composition of the editorial board also has changed significantly under Bennet. Of the board’s 15 members, seven have joined since 2018, and a number are relatively new to the Times altogether. There was widespread agreement among my sources that the current board feels younger, fresher, more diverse, as does the overall department, which has grown from around 70 full-time journalists in 2016 to roughly 115 now, including progressive stalwarts like Michelle Goldberg and Jamelle Bouie, not to mention a small army of new contributors—high-profile gets like Kara Swisher and Roxane Gay. “There’s a lot of new voices in general,” one journalist who works there told me, “and that’s really important.”

There’s one area in particular that Bennet and his deputies are doubling down on. “We’ll be creating dedicated pitch meetings for enterprise teams,” the memo says. “We’ll have to be attentive to balancing workloads so that writers and editors across the department can support the work of enterprise while also contributing to news.”

On December 19, the Opinion section published something that seemed like a perfect example of its ambitions in this realm. It was the first installment in a massive, seven-part deep dive into privacy and smartphone tracking, by Stuart A. Thompson, a visual data journalist, and Charlie Warzel, a writer at large. At thousands of words, interactive online, “One Nation, Tracked” looked and read like the type of assiduously reported investigation that would appear on the front page of the newspaper. In fact, the newsroom’s investigative team had produced a very similar feature one year earlier, except the data they had obtained was limited to the New York metro area, whereas Thompson and Warzel had gotten their hands on what they described as “by far the largest and most sensitive” such data set ever “to be reviewed by journalists.”

But the biggest difference between the two pieces was that the Opinion writers expressed, well, their opinion. They described a “sense of alarm” about what the data revealed, and crafted sentences that could never be written by a journalist from the newsroom: “The companies profiting from our every move can’t be expected to voluntarily limit their practices. Congress has to step in to protect Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.”

Still, readers were confused about why the piece had run in Opinion instead of the news pages, and the _Times_’ communications department went on Twitter to clarify the matter: “After Opinion launched its Privacy Project, a source came to @nytopinion with the largest known leak of smartphone tracking data…. Times Opinion journalism, like all Times journalism, is grounded in reporting…. Our Opinion journalists have a long history of rigorous, groundbreaking reporting.”

To cite the examples offered up by @NYTimesPR, here’s Nick Kristof with a gripping dispatch from inside North Korea, and there’s Mara Gay and Emma Goldberg probing the abuse of impoverished New Yorkers; and Brent Staples, a 30-year editorial board member, on race and the suffragist movement.

The privacy investigation, on the other hand, felt like more of a sea change. “It brought to the forefront a lot of tensions about what Opinion is doing and whether it’s redundant,” a Times editor told me, “and I think people in the newsroom, especially in the tech area, were puzzled by it, and some people were unhappy. The broader question is, what is the identity of Opinion, and how similar is it to the newsroom?”

That’s another tension the Times is working through, and it’s the opposite tension of past years, when it was usually people from Rosenthal’s camp complaining to Bill Keller or Jill Abramson that certain news articles sounded too opinionated. In 2013, speaking to the New Yorker about the files that Edward Snowden leaked to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, Keller declared, “If one of our columnists had come up with a story of that magnitude…we would have turned it over to the newsroom reporting staff.” If Opinion had published a feature like “One Nation, Tracked,” say, when Abramson was executive editor, a source told me, “There would have been a fight about it.”

But times are changing. “I’m very much in support of it,” said executive editor Dean Baquet. “I’ve never bought the notion that Opinion couldn’t do big reported projects. So I don’t see it as competition. The world needs more great journalism.” A.G. Sulzberger, for his part, has said privately, “I’m always worried about opinion creeping into news, I’m not worried about solid journalistic techniques creeping into Opinion.”

The official reason the Sulzbergers hired James Bennet was because they thought Opinion needed new blood. Rosenthal had been in charge of the department for nine years, during which time it won Pulitzers, created the Emmy-winning Op-Docs series, launched a number of blogs, and published news-making pieces like Angelina Jolie’s breast cancer essay, a Vladimir Putin op-ed, and “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” By the spring of 2016, Sulzberger Jr. decided it was time to shake things up. The brass wanted someone who could take Opinion’s digital evolution and modernization to the next level, much as Bennet had been credited with doing at the Atlantic. More specifically, they thought Bennet had edited and published the finest single piece of opinion journalism of the past several years: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” That’s the guy they wanted to run Opinion at the Times.

Unofficially, the sense I got from talking to an array of current and former Opinion staffers, as well as a number of knowledgeable Times insiders outside of the department, was that a lot of people perceive Bennet’s mandate as one that has made Opinion more provocative, more attention-grabbing, more of a conversation-starter—“to get the New York Times Opinion pages noticed and to get people talking about them,” as one of these sources put it.

“We get accused of trolling and being provocative for the sake of being provocative, and I don’t think that’s our role,” Bennet told me. “This isn’t a frivolous exercise, this isn’t about page views. It’s about seriously trying to engage really hard questions. We’re in an age where all sorts of institutions and ideologies are kind of cracking apart. We have to really be able to wrestle with these questions, and that can make us uncomfortable…. I’m not advocating civility. I’m advocating respectful engagement, and respect means taking ideas seriously enough to rebut them and not simply ignore them.”

There’s a large and largely Twitter-dwelling population of anti-Bennet antagonists, whose critiques tend to be most visible when the section is engulfed in some controversy or other. There’s been no shortage of those over the past couple of years, some involving seemingly unforced errors, others erupting over Opinion features that are anathema to the _Times_’ core readership of liberals and progressives.

The most recent dustup, and arguably the most universally condemned, was Bret Stephens’s December 27 “The Secrets of Jewish Genius” column, partly based on a white nationalist’s 2005 research paper trafficking in race science. “After publication,” reads a lengthy editor’s note that was appended to the piece, “Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically.”

Despite the swift mea culpa, the damage—a crush of social media outrage and negative press—had been done. Stephens, an anti-Trump conservative and Pulitzer winner who joined the Times from the _Wall Street Journal_’s famously red-blooded opinion pages, has always been seen as a divisive hire, from his opening Times salvo challenging climate science, to his supercharged spat with a George Washington University professor that spilled into public this past summer. But he had been on the _Times_’ radar even before Bennet poached him in 2017, at which point he was also being scouted by the Washington Post, sources confirmed. More than once during Rosenthal’s tenure, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. suggested Stephens as a potential recruit, but Rosenthal wasn’t moved, and they instead agreed on Ross Douthat when a conservative Op-Ed slot opened up in 2009 upon William Kristol’s departure.

Some Times columnists consider Stephens a friendly and generous colleague despite the controversies that have put him in the spotlight. But for many Opinion staffers, the December 27 column crossed a line, and emotions over the piece were still running high as of last week. Journalists in the department aired their grievances during a monthly town hall with Bennet on January 8, questioning how the column made it into the paper in the first place, as well as vocalizing their exasperation with the embarrassment it had caused. Several people, according to sources familiar with the meeting, expressed to Bennet that feeling comfortable in a work environment where such a column could make its way through the editing process was a lot to ask. (Neither Stephens nor Bennet had a comment.)

Through all of the tumult, A.G. Sulzberger has remained staunchly supportive of Bennet, who is one of several senior Times journalists in the running to succeed Baquet as executive editor within the next two years. You could argue that most of the outrage directed at Bennet’s Opinion section happens on Twitter, a toxic echo chamber where scandals flower in seconds thanks to the high concentration of influential media and politics types who magnify viewpoints on the platform. Those #cancelnyt campaigns don’t seem to have taken a toll—the company announced this week that it added more than 1 million net digital subscriptions last year, as well as hitting its goal of $800 million in digital revenue a year ahead of schedule. It’s also fair to point out that all of Opinion’s good work doesn’t get nearly the same level of media attention as the screwups: a multiplatform series on women and sports that shattered NDA’s and forced Nike to investigate abuse allegations; a harrowing exposé on gang murders in Honduras; the body of work on race and racism for which Staples won a Pulitzer Prize last year.

All the same, no one at the Times wants to keep having to get out in front of the Twitter mobs whenever there’s some poorly conceived column or stupid tweet or any of the other land mines Opinion seems prone to stepping on—that anti-Semitic cartoon, the botched editing of a Kavanaugh book excerpt. Maybe, as one of my various Opinion sources suggested, the “more rational management system” now being implemented in the department could help “reduce the frequency of these things.”

Not everyone is convinced. “There’s not a lot of satisfaction that lessons are being learned or that this isn’t just gonna happen again in 10 weeks,” another member of the department told me. “At a certain point, it’s testing the limits of good faith. The screwups are super notable and they obscure the fact that a lot of interesting work is being done and a lot of reimagining of how this place should operate. There’s so much ambition, and it just seems like things keep getting derailed.”

I asked Bennet for his response to that. “It’s hard on all our people, and I do worry about them a lot,” he said. “Look, I share the frustration, of course. But I do think of it as a long game. We publish hundreds of pieces in a given month, and when I look at all the work that this team is doing, it’s awesome. I feel very good about the direction we’re headed in.”