The New York Times abdicates its responsibility to New York City
The Times isn’t The New York Times any more.
That’s the upshot of its editorial board’s decision this week, laundered through a story reported in its business section, to stop endorsing in local races including for mayor and governor.
The news story quoted a statement attributed to opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury that, the paper’s reporters correctly noted, “did not give a reason for the shift.”
It’s worth quoting in full only because it’s so kludgy — using “institutional” twice in one sentence and then “institution” two sentences after that, using “both” to refer to past, present and future — and simultaneously pompous and pathetic:
“As the institutional voice of The Times, the editorial board serves our mission to help our global audience understand the world by providing a consistent, independent view of the world based on time-tested institutional values. While elections everywhere remain critical to the lives and experiences of our audience, the editorial board is ceasing the endorsement process for New York elections. We remain a journalistic institution rooted in New York City, both historically, today and in the future. Our newsroom will continue to report aggressively on New York electoral races, and Opinion will continue to offer perspective on the races, candidates and issues at stake.”
Area Paper Tells Area: Meh.
There was no announcement of the move other than the story elsewhere in the paper; the 13 editorial board members and the rest of the 150 or so journalists working for the paper’s opinion operation mostly read the news there like everyone else.
And just about everyone else was appalled:
“One of the most influential players in New York politics has benched itself without much explanation.”
“It’s bad for the Times and worse for the city” to have the board “abdicating the only thing anyone actually, really listened to them on, and leaving NYC politics to continue to drift along, more or less controlled by tiny interest groups.”
“Another way of saying New York matters less. Period.”
“I love the NYT but this is a terrible decision, an abdication of its civic responsibilities. And ironically its endorsements are nowhere particularly crucial except in NYC and NJ.”
I’m quoting here from people who know and love New York without listing their names in the spirit of a Greek chorus or an editorial board, but should note that the last line is from Michael Powell, a former metro columnist for the paper before it pretty much gave up on metro columnists.
The New York Times hasn’t had a separate New York section except on Sundays since 2008.
Indeed, the Times hasn’t had a separate New York section except on Sundays since 2008, when that was folded inside the A section. The paper insisted the move “will not reduce the number of pages devoted to city coverage” and that “the physical arrangement of the paper matters less in an age when a growing proportion of its audience is online.”
That was bullshit, of course.
As veteran City Hall reporter Paul Moses detailed in 2017, incidentally the last year the Times bothered making endorsements in City Council races, the number of stories the paper ran about its namesake city declined by more than 50% in that stretch, and by more than 67% since 2001.
So much for “all the news that’s fit to print.”
Three years after that, the Times used COVID to quietly kill Metro as even a sub-section, with a brief editor’s note in March about how “New York coverage is included as part of the Tracking an Outbreak section on pages A4-A13.”
It wasn’t until June that the New York Post — a paper that for worse and better has never pretended to separate news and opinion — noticed that the section had never returned.
Asked on Twitter this week if the end of endorsements was of a piece with the Times long retreat from its namesake city, Powell replied “it is, but this is worse. It’s relatively easy and very important for those who live in NYC and it’s as if they are just washing their hands of the city,”
The Strengths (and Limits) of Endorsements
None of this is meant to praise endorsements, or editorial boards, two weird institutions intimately tied to one another and to a print era in near-terminal decline.
There’s no disembodied voice of a website like newspapers regularly have.
And the voice of the paper is always in the end the vaguely camouflaged, Elmer-Fudd-in-the-woods voice of its owner.
The views of editorial board members matter right up until they don’t. I know this from experience, having spent two-and-a-half years on the Daily News editorial board.
The Times walking away from local endorsements is the Times walking away from the city it takes its name from.
In the case of the Times, that may account for how the same paper could endorse Tiffany Caban and Kathryn Garcia in back-to-back elections. Or staunchly support term limits — right up until Michael Bloomberg sat down with the paper’s owner and the board saw the new light.
What matters, and what the Times is abdicating here, is the obligation of people who care about a city to put its would-be leaders through serious paces, and perhaps then render a verdict on their efforts.
Editorial board endorsement meetings are places where politicians and public officials used to maintaining their own narrative have to answer to informed and intense questioners, and prove they can do more than just run through the script that’s enough for a TV spot or debate riff. And they’re what force papers and opinion pages to put their own cards on the table, and openly state the judgements that are implicit in their coverage more generally.
The endorsements themselves even matter at times for elections, especially given the value of each vote in New York City’s almost cartoonishly low-turnout primaries that in practice decide almost every consequential election here.
In a world of infinite opinions, there’s no justifying a half-assed editorial, let alone endorsement. It’s probably better for the paper of record to stop dabbling in local races rather than mail them in — but those shouldn’t be the alternatives.
As it happens, the Times news came out the same day that WCBS announced it would be ending its decades of all-news coverage. Losing a New York institution that was the only station on the air during Sandy hurt, and having the Times bench itself felt like a smack in the face.
Being the voice of the New York Times, a paper that’s still totemic in much of Manhattan and various corners of the city, comes with special access.
Surrendering that access as a cost-trimming measure rather than investing the resources and attention to do something with it that builds the emotional and intellectual connection between the publication and its readers is a damn shame.
The Times walking away from local endorsements is the Times walking away from the city it takes its name from — not to mention the tax benefits it won for the billion-dollar new headquarters it opened back in the aughts — and insists it’s still “rooted in,” whatever that means when there’s less and less news here it deems fit to print.
It’s embarrassing to see one of the only winners in journalism’s hunger games surrender a core function that it has the resources to perform but not, apparently, the interest.
This is the Times losing interest in its immediate surroundings, the same way more and more people seem to do online now — with their grip on reality often loosening somewhere along the line.
Back in the print era, A.J. Liebling famously wrote that “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
That came from a 1960 essay in The New Yorker about industry consolidation and local monopolization, a warning about one-paper towns back when a no-paper town seemed unimaginable.
He almost could have been writing about the internet giants today when he warned of “a privately owned public utility that is Constitutionally exempt from public regulation, which would be a violation of freedom of the press.”
Those giants have sucked up much of the money that used to support journalism, creating a handful of national winners like the Times even as local coverage nationwide has become a sinkhole that a relative handful of true believers are working furiously and against the tide to fill.
It’s embarrassing, and telling, to see one of the only winners in journalism’s hunger games surrender a core function that it has the resources to perform but not apparently the interest, and to do so without even pretending to explain, let alone justify, that decision.
There are still newsstands in Times Square, named in honor of the New York Times after its owner pressed the mayor to construct a subway station there and moved its headquarters to a skyscraper there in 1904, the same year the first electric sign went up there and three years before the first New Year’s Eve ball dropped.
The name stuck even after the Times moved offices again, a block west of the former Long Acre Square. But the newsstands in Times Square haven’t sold newspapers for at least a decade, making the news part of their name feel nearly as anachronistic as New York does to the Times.