Maybe if 150 NYT employees sign an open letter saying it's harmful when the paper runs op-ed columns justifying authoritarian crackdowns on journalists in places where the NYT does business, the paper will apologize for having done that?
It's kind of amazing, the organization does not really appear to have management anymore. Only really acts in response to outside pressure (Caliphate) or inside pressure (McNeil).
I don't know all the details of what happened with McNeil, but it certainly appears that Dean Baquet knew the same things about the incident last week that he knew today, and he reached different conclusions before and now. So when did he screw up?
Anyway, you need management. I thought inviting Ben Shapiro to guest-edit Playbook was dumb (having guest-editors at all was dumb) but once they did that, Matt Kaminski was right to make clear that he's the editor of Politico and the place won't be edited by open letter.
Caliphate and McNeil provide two very reasons a weakly-led organization might be adrift. In one case, they're in a new & lucrative business where it's easy to end up doing "storytelling" instead of journalism. In the other, employees have new values that conflict with old norms.
Change is okay and sometimes necessary, including change in values. But you have to have a clear vision of what you are doing and for what reasons -- a strategy and a set of values -- so that you can make consistent and correct decisions.
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