Josh Barro Profile picture
6 Feb, 6 tweets, 1 min read
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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More from @jbarro

7 Feb
How broadly are we expanding this list of words that cannot even be mentioned? It’s becoming genuinely confusing to read accounts of what Bad things were said when they cannot actually be reproduced.
There is a plausible enough case about the unique role and rhetorical power of the n-word meriting avoidance even of mentions, and with just one such word, that’s not confusing. But if there are going to be dozens of words you’re not allowed to even reproduce, that’s confusing.
Also, if you're going to level an accusation that (you consider to be) serious against someone about what they said, you should be pretty sure about who was speaking.
Read 4 tweets
5 Feb
The manner in which Mills brushes past the central error in Caliphate -- a very big error that he presided over! -- makes me quite distrustful of whatever else he has to say.
He says in this letter that he "helped create and produce" Caliphate. The show's credits give him standalone credit as "producer." When it won a Peabody, he posed holding it with Rukmini Callimachi. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/medi…
But when the podcast was wrong, he says he's not to blame, because his bosses told him that. What?
Read 6 tweets
5 Feb
Look it was a cute joke but don’t actually go into the pillow business okay?
Liberals do not actually need an alternative to MyPillow. The alternative is every other brand of pillow.
This is sadder than meme stocks
Read 6 tweets
4 Feb
Were the votes counted on Dominion equipment?
Matt Gaetz looks like the villain in a Claymation film
He looks like a bobblehead of himself
Read 4 tweets
1 Feb
Rather alarmingly, both Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang say they want to rely on converting newly-depressed hotel and office properties into housing as a key part of a housing strategy. Shouldn’t Plan A be to reboot the economy so those hotels and offices are busy again?
I don’t think conversions should be prohibited but those investments are based on a timeline of many years and I certainly hope we will be getting occupancy back up. Office and hotel uses are essential to our economy and our tax base.
Also a lot of office buildings don’t even work well as residential conversions because the footprints are too large. Yes, you can convert a hotel, but that doesn’t mean you should.
Read 4 tweets
31 Jan
“Butch Bowers and Deborah Barbier” sounds like a pair of will-they-or-won’t-they characters leading a procedural show.
Ideally played by David Boreanaz and Mariska Hargitay.
Read 4 tweets

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