Paul Krugman: Departing the New York Times - I left to stay true to my byline

[Celerity]

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times



As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure. If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay.

Charles Kaiser has written a fair-minded article in the Columbia Journalism Review about my departure. What I want to do in this post is add more context. Let’s be clear: I am not planning to have a running feud with the Times: I came, I saw, I felt I had to leave, and I moved on. But I believe that the story of why I left says something important about the current state of legacy journalism. The background: until 2017 or so, I felt extremely happy with my role at the Times, for a couple of reasons.

One, I felt that I had finally cracked the code of opinion column-writing. When the Times hired me at the end of 1999, I was an economics professor who wrote occasionally for a broader audience. And crafting 800-word plain-English essays for readers with no background in economics is, shall we say, a bit different from writing 5000-word academic journal articles full of equations and diagrams for a small professional community. For a while, I struggled with the transition.

But eventually I figured it out. I actually took pleasure in the craftsmanship, in boiling an argument down to its essentials, expressing it in ordinary language, and making it interesting. Furthermore, I believe that my writing affected the national discourse, especially over issues such as George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, the march to the Affordable Care Act (despite Obama’s initial reluctance), and the unjustified fiscal panic of the early 2010s.

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[applegrove]

1. "What a man, what a man what a very good man".