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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: 1/30/25 [1]
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Date: 2025-01-30
It seems like years ago that I cancelled my WAPO subscription, turning to the New York Times, which I have subscribed to for many years now. I’ve been unhappy with the TImes for quite some time now, but unable to take the step of bowing out because I just don’t know where else to go for breaking news. I read The Guardian, Reuters, the BBC, Unchartered Blue, The Contrarian and various other substacks, but this break with the NYT is going to be a tough one. It’s a break I feel more aligned with now after reading Paul Krugman’s disturbing overview of why he left the New York Times, claiming he left “to stay true to my byline.” His relationship with the paper had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer stay.
Krugman writes about his writing experiences from the very beginning of his work there and says things started going downhill in 2024.
From his substack:
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. -snip- 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?
Where are you going for your news?
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