So, the piece here wants to frame this as an ideological issue, but the kernel of it seems to be:
* the Times employed Krugman to generate content, originally on terms that included a Times-branded blog where he could write with minimal editorial oversight.
* The Times consolidated their opinion content and eliminated the blog, leaving Krugman only venues with extensive editorial oversight, notably including how often he wrote about specific subjects (that is: with an editorial calendar).
* He started a Substack; the Times freaked out; he ended up leaving.
This feels like a lot of Substacker stories. He will probably have a bigger and more lucrative audience on Substack, and the Times probably won't suffer much from his departure.
From my own vantage point, the less the Times can index on punditry, the better. I don't pretend this change is strategic for them, but I think it'll probably work out to their benefit so long as they don't immediately go hire another economist.
What's wrong with economists? Not a huge Krugman fan, but I feel economists bring important insights from data that tend to escape regular journalists. If Krugman wore his economist hat more and stayed away from general political punditry, I would probably like him more.
The writing of Emily Oster is a great example of what economists can bring to analysis of current events. I wish we could clone her.
Nothing at all in particular, just: I don't think the Times needs another Krugman. I'm a subscriber who thinks they should do more reporting and less, at least a little bit less, opining.
I’m a subscriber who thinks that opinion pieces offer points of view - that you won’t get in regular reporting. I only read a couple of NYT op-ed writers and rarely Kaufman anymore (a The Atlantic level of devotion to Israel that I cannot stomach), but I still think that they perform an important journalistic function.
Does it make you feel better that the AI and I engaged in an iterative process to identfy what, precisely, in Krugman's long career was so irritating? The AI couldn't figure it out at first.
The link you shared says bots are banned. I am not a bot. No one down voted me because they misunderstood I was a bot.
The link also says single-purpose users are not in the HN spirit either. I recognize many people here use throwaways for legitimate privacy reasons, but ... c'mon, telling me bots can't post here is not in the spirit of that tradition.
The post says "...bots or generated responses..." so you are incorrect. If you have concerns about the specifics, the HN moderators can be contacted at the email address in the FAQ and guidelines page.
> The Times consolidated their opinion content and eliminated the blog
From my reading of the article, you're conflating two seperate events, perhaps due to knowledge of additional facts it doesn't contain, or conjecture, or misreading - it isn't clear.
The blog was shuttered, yes, but on his opinion column he just mentions an increase in editorial oversight and getting notes. You call this "consolidating their opinion content" - can you share details? Otherwise it sounds mostly like an euphemism for "they adopted a stronger (guide)line", which is what the piece seems to bemoan.
Krugman says here though that the heavier editing of his opinion columns only started a ~year ago, which was 6 years after the blog ended. So presumably those six years were fine enough.
I overall agree with you on punditry and I didn’t much read Krugman; I don’t much read any of their opinion columnists. But a point to Krugman in that he can write about actual facts whereas Ross, Bret, and David can only write about vibes.
But "the piece here" is from the horse's mouth so if he wants to frame it like an ideological issue, maybe it is? He claims to have been pressured to tone down his articles to avoid offending people. Not much of a debate if anything that could possibly offend someone is not allowed to be expressed.
I’ve been reading opinion columnists at the New York Times for nearly a half century. My opinion is that the paper should stop giving de-facto lifetime tenure to columnists. All of the long-term columnists I remember—with the possible exception of Russell Baker—became predictable and repetitive.
Paul Krugman was not the worst in that regard by any means. The champion was A. M. Rosenthal: Israel good, China bad, drug legalization bad, again and again and again. But I still became able to predict with confidence what position Krugman was going to take—and what positions he wouldn’t take—without reading his columns.
Our politics might not line up perfectly, but we got the same subtext from Krugman's complaint: when he suggests he needs many columns to convey the ideas he's trying to convey, I put myself in his editor's shoes and think "this content isn't selling well".
If this was reporting, I'd be alarmed, but it's not; it's opinion content, which is epsilon from entertainment. Krugman wants an unfiltered feed of his takes for his audience, and the good news here is that there's a facility perfectly matched for that: his Substack. I wish him all the best.
It's one of the reasons why I stopped reading most nonfiction books (outside of history or biographies), they all take way too long to make their point. It feels like most modern books can get their message across in 20 pages but I suppose not many people would buy a thick pamphlet.
Bari Weiss left for the same reason Krugman did (you can make more money for less hassle with a Substack) even though her politics were the opposite and she didn't have as good a gig as Krugman did.
Since the NYT had a web site everybody there knows they live and die based on the usage stats, and the usage stats says that people would rather read Krugman, Klein, Brooks and Blow blow it out their ass rather than read a meticulously researched story (actually news) about some person they never heard of in some town they never heard of about some issue they never heard of that doesn't justify some pre-existing moral conclusion the reader already made.
Substack can steal away the heavy hitters of the opinion page, but it's not going to replace boring journalism, the real news that readers need even if they're indifferent to it [2]
[2] ever note on Fox News they have a crawler that says "ALERT ALERT ALERT" when they camera leaves the studio? Because they know the viewers are only comfortable when some folks are sitting around the table talking about the way things are spozed to be.
Bari Weiss is center left by the way. Prior to her New York times stint, she was at wsj editorial pages where she was to the left of basically everyone. If you read her actual political beliefs, she's more of a classical liberal.
I'll agree with the criticism of "anti-fascism" and similar trends, but she has way too much enthusiasm Peter Thiel, Joe Rogan and such.
I think The Economist should be center right thanks to its consistent insistence on free trade (founded to oppose the Corn Laws in 1843) or rather it is what the center right should be. Between the current Tories and Labor it is politically homeless in the current UK. I'd argue that its rating here
is a sign of the US political spectrum itself being hopelessly biased, but maybe any American taking an interest in a foreign publication is left leaning, but then I remembered
Full disclosure: I read The Economist and The Guardian regularly and I'd say the latter really is lefty. I was introduced to The Economist by someone who was a conservative at the time but switched sides but has enough sense to not to talk about "anti-fascism" around me.
I agree The Economist should be center right, however if you believe it to be anywhere right of center, that’s really just a sign of the center shifting far to the left IMO.
>just a sign of the center shifting far to the left IMO
When I was a kid the right wanted free trade and and the left wanted everything controlled by government. Now the right like Trump are big on tariffs and the great leader making things great. I think they are the ones who have moved more. Although I'm not sure this fits well on a one dimensional left right scale.
The old left right scale doesn’t really describe modern politics very well, but I don’t think its hard to argue against the Democrats under Bill Clinton in the 1990s being much closer to the Republicans 20 years later than the current Democrats (i.e. the Overton window shifting far to the left). The same phenomenon can be observed in many Western countries, very recent reactionary shifts to the right notwithstanding.
Famously, most people are to the left of the WSJ editorial page. That's not a dunk; that's literally what the WSJ is selling. You can be pretty far to the right of the American consensus and still to the left of the WSJ opinion staff.
> she was at wsj editorial pages where she was to the left of basically everyone
That's like saying Weiss must be very tall, because you saw her standing next to a classroom of primary school children. The WSJ's editorial reputation is so poor that WSJ's own journalists asked their publisher to do something about it.
This is her news outlet: https://www.thefp.com/. 99% of the articles are expositions of right wing talking points; and the same goes for her personal columns.
I'm not saying that's wrong or bad. I'm pointing out there's a group of people masquerading as "free thinkers" despite their overwhelmingly right wing views, and Weiss is in this group (Batya Ungar-Sargon is another).
which has a pretty good analysis of "How did online trolls get so nasty?" that would pretty obviously apply to the anti-vax fringe that the FP panders to but never makes the connection, for instance.
The silliest detail to me (and one of my major gripes about many new sources) is that the Times seemed to resist use of charts in his articles? I've read so many articles on the housing crisis, inflation, immigrations, etc. that would be 10x better with a FRED chart.
> The silliest detail to me (and one of my major gripes about many new sources) is that the Times seemed to resist use of charts in his articles?
Right! I think this could be an example of skeuomorphism at its worse. I imagine the thought process as being: "We are a newspaper, therefore space is limited and we can't devote precious inches to charts and graphs. Even though most people read us online, and space is actually unlimited, we still cling to the antiquated newspaper format."
I would like to go a level deeper into the author's experience: why did that change occur? Why did media become so interested in sanitized, toned down opinions and heavy editing?
The post was bought by Bezos, so changes are more explainable. What about the times?
My pet theory is that these things happened once the feedback loop for what got clicks kicked in (early 2000s perhaps).
a) The clicks were fake but treated as real to prop up the advertising market, and then fed into the editorial decisions.
b) The clicks were real but we discovered, as others did, that more people click on literal 'clickbait' then on harder to consume, but more authentic content. Short attention spans might also factor in here.
I jump to the oft-repeated story about Google A/B testing a shade of blue (IDK if it's true), versus someone just making a goddamn decision and owning it. We should optimise on our best behaviours, not our average ones.
Perhaps said more succintly, we replaced leadership with local-maxima.
Having read Krugman's reasoning for leaving the Times, I find myself sinking even deeper into pessimism about the future of news media and, more broadly, the future democracy.
My interpretation of Krugman's departure is that higher-ups edited and re-edited his columns to reduce the possibility of calling up a kerfuffle. They wanted him to soften his words and blunt his message because they were sensitive to calls of media bias. I think that's exactly the wrong response.
This is what it looks like when an Overton window moves. In particular, this is how it looks when critical media insights are dulled in an attempt to appease an audience that probably isn't interested anyway. How many hard-core Trumpers do you know that started reading the New York Times after the editorial board made an effort to "expand their message"? For better or for worse, the world is leaving the New York Times behind. The older generation turns to Fox News, the younger generation to TikTok (or its successor), and the board's attempt to dull its message will only bore to death whatever remaining readers they have. If real news and real journalism wants to remain relevant, they should make sure their message is above all interesting, not boring, not muted; and they should choose an appropriate medium, which, sad to say, is probably not dead trees.
[edit:] Another depressing aspect of this is that Krugman isn't just a pundit, some talking head: he's a legitimate expert. This is exactly the kind of person who needs a bigger audience. Krugman draws attention to this fact in this piece, and I like the way he said it: there's a difference between an opinion and an informed opinion. In the age of the internet, there is no trouble hearing someone else's opinion on any topic imaginable, but it's a lot harder to hear from someone who actually knows what they are talking about, and is able to communicate well. Krugman was one of those, and now the Times has none.
People shout about "bias" as if it's a bad thing. But yet, every human being has biases, formed by their experiences. It's impossible to write anything interesting about anything without potentially being accused of bias. The deeper vice, of which we should be aware and try to combat, is corruption. The difference is this: if someone expresses a sincerely-held opinion based on evidence, they're biased; if someone expressed an opinion that they do not in fact hold, but express only because it is their job to express it, they are corrupt.
> Having read Krugman's reasoning for leaving the Times, I find myself sinking even deeper into pessimism about the future of news media and, more broadly, the future democracy
My spicy take is that the new media has been a net negative for 10+ years. But the positive side is that the 18-24 demographic stopped paying attention. We’re less federated now which comes with pluses and minuses.
> My interpretation of Krugman's departure is that higher-ups edited and re-edited his columns to reduce the possibility of calling up a kerfuffle. They wanted him to soften his words and blunt his message because they were sensitive to calls of media bias. I think that's exactly the wrong response.
This seems to be how Krugman is framing it, but is editorial oversight actually bad?
In the past this kind of pundit class could basically make things up and papers like the Times would just regurgitate whatever they claim.
We know what Krugman is claiming about the editors, but I could imagine a counterfactual where they were striking misleading or unsupported statements from his posts.
Sure, why not. Krugman could be lying about the reason for his departure. In fact, maybe he left to avoid embarrassment from the public revelation of his illicit economist-on-editor sex affair.
However, that's what might be politely called "unsupported speculation" aka "just making things up." Without evidence to the contrary, I see no reason not to take Krugman at his word.
> Having read Krugman's reasoning for leaving the Times, I find myself sinking even deeper into pessimism about the future of news media and, more broadly, the future democracy.
FWIW, his articles have been just as good or better on his substack. At their best, newspapers could be very good, but we might be able to do better than a fixed set of opinion writers covering an infinite number of topics.
While I have a personal dislike of Krugman's writing style, I think the Times needs people of his calibre on staff. Ideally he would have handed the torch over some time ago (the long arm of boomerism) but at this stage it seems that the Times, and most similar organisations are going the way of daytime television: Focusing entirely on a naturally eroding generation until one day they just vanish.
Journalism is too important a task to go down with them though. I wonder if the Hindenburg research model could be a way to fund it?
I watched "Dear Kelly" the other day, and while the movie isn't all that interesting, I couldn't help but feel like it was the absolute essence of a GenZ take on investigative journalism. I think that's what we got now.
I hope the NYT gives up on opinion writers. People have their own opinions, and the NYT even has a comment section for them. Maybe they can use that money to hire an investigative journalist.
It seems weird from Times to bully one of their prominent authors. First thing that came into my mind is that motivation was politics as he is somehow critical to right and Trump proposed policies but it just don't make a lot of sense.
For a long time, many large US newspapers have had a fundamental and critical internal inconsistency:
1. They proclaim the intention to report on all the relevant news with as little subjective bias as reasonably possible.
2. They make money through advertisements and subscriptions, the amount of which is proportional to the magnitude of their readership.
Maximizing point 2 above competes with netflix, books, movies, etc... anything on which Americans spend their disposable time. This leads newspapers to continue to have crosswords, comics, wordle, etc. and opinion/editorial pages.
Opinion and editorial pages are not relevant news with little subjective bias.
> They proclaim the intention to report on all the relevant news with as little subjective bias as reasonably possible.
I don't think that's ever been the case.
> Opinion and editorial pages are not relevant news with little subjective bias.
Even if it were somehow possible to produce a piece of reporting totally devoid of subjectivity, it wouldn't be interesting and no one would care, because most people aren't subject matter experts in the area of whatever the piece is about.
That's the value provided by expert editorialists, which Krugman was: they frame events in a meaningful way, be it historical, personal, based on experience in whatever field, or with other meaningful comparisons. Yes, such framing is necessarily subjective, but it adds value. Subjectivity doesn't imply corruption.
> > They proclaim the intention to report on all the relevant news with as little subjective bias as reasonably possible.
>
> I don't think that's ever been the case.
>
> > Opinion and editorial pages are not relevant news with little subjective bias.
>
> Even if it were somehow possible to produce a piece of reporting totally devoid of subjectivity, it wouldn't be interesting and no one would care, because most people aren't subject matter experts in the area of whatever the piece is about.
>
> That's the value provided by expert editorialists, which Krugman was: they frame events in a meaningful way, be it historical, personal, based on experience in whatever field, or with other meaningful comparisons. Yes, such framing is necessarily subjective, but it adds value. Subjectivity doesn't imply corruption.
A bit from left field. So, framing your idea with AI. What can we expect when we look at biases in our selves?
You and the New York Times Company don't agree on what the point of newspapers are. These are always sorta BS but you can just Google their mission statement if you want to know what they think their purpose is.
* the Times employed Krugman to generate content, originally on terms that included a Times-branded blog where he could write with minimal editorial oversight.
* The Times consolidated their opinion content and eliminated the blog, leaving Krugman only venues with extensive editorial oversight, notably including how often he wrote about specific subjects (that is: with an editorial calendar).
* He started a Substack; the Times freaked out; he ended up leaving.
This feels like a lot of Substacker stories. He will probably have a bigger and more lucrative audience on Substack, and the Times probably won't suffer much from his departure.
From my own vantage point, the less the Times can index on punditry, the better. I don't pretend this change is strategic for them, but I think it'll probably work out to their benefit so long as they don't immediately go hire another economist.