'Not a happy departure': Famed NY Times columnist sounds off after abrupt exit

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Raw Story

January 28, 2025 9:01PM ET


Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who recently retired from The New York Times after 25 years, tried to set the record straight Tuesday about his abrupt exit, blasting the paper for what he felt were increasingly unnecessarily tight editorial controls — that resulted in "sober, dull opinion pieces."

Krugman — who gave a bleak farewell last month — minced no words in opening his latest piece, posted to his blog "The Contrarian." "Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure," he said.

Krugman said his relationship with the Times "degenerated to a point" where he felt he couldn’t stay. The economist said for his first 24 years he faced few editorial constraints, and his drafts mostly received lighter copyedits, even as some of his positions unnerved leadership at the paper. "So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper’s history and my role in it.

Krugman lamented that his popular blog where he could dive deeper into topics with charts and graphs got the axe from the Times in 2017. Twitter threads, he said, proved to be an insufficient substitute, leading him to launch a Substack blog for the more "technical material." But the Times pushed back, ultimately caving to allow him to publish the more in-depth content in the Times newsletter twice a week. Until September, when his newsletter "was suddenly suspended by the Times."

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/paul-krugman-2671016299/

[Ray Bruns]

1. Sorry Paul. The party leaders at the Ministry of Truth no longer require your services.

[Deminpenn]

2. Blogs and websites are

still available. Heck you can even set up old school forums like this one.

Maybe Krugman should consider affiliating with a site like Talkingpointsmemo. I'm sure Josh Marshall would love to host him.

[littlemissmartypants]

3. All at his own expense. That's...

A cost, not a benefit.

[Deminpenn]

5. It's not that expensive

for a domain name or server.

[littlemissmartypants]

6. I'm pretty sure he'd rather be getting a paycheck and

That's not the point. It's the principle surrounding the elimination of a long standing relationship. It's not about the money.

[Deminpenn]

9. Seemed to me he wants to keep

getting his message out or he wouldn't have gone to substance. I doubt at his age he needs the money from a regular column.

There are ways to reach a greater audience than a substack blog or even the NYT op ed page is all I pointed out.

[eShirl]

4. to bring back a classic Krugman meme...

[PJMcK]

7. Newspapers are Big Business

They do not represent journalism. They do not seek out truth or government corruption. They are in business to make money. Period.

They are in the business of selling advertising. Just like broadcast news, these businesses are beholden to their stockholders and owners. Since those interests represent upper-income earners, I.e., the upper 5%, their publications/broadcasts reflect the interests of the outlets’ owners.

Journalism is dead in America. The only reliable sources of news and facts are found online. Unfortunately, most citizens don’t do their due diligence in comprehending current events. That’s why we end up with Trump, W, Reagan, etc.

[Lovie777]

8. Correct..................

journalism in the USA is dead.

[MadameButterfly]

12. i don't understand how newspapers would make most of their money off of

the top 5%. Those 5% are only going to buy so many newspapers compared to the rest.
Stockholders and owners are another thing. I don't recall stockholders being a problem at WaPo when Woodward and Bernstein became famous. What mattered was not the politics of the stockholders but whether the story proved to be true, and therefore worth reading.

The difference to my mind is the owner.
Neither then or now does the owner need the income from the paper. WaPo is insignificant in Bezos holdings.
It is ultimately about what Bezos thinks he can gain from cow-towing to Trump, separate from the actual finances of the paper.
It's less about the finances of the newspaper business and more about oligarchy.

I know less about NYT but I suspect oligarchy is at play here. Less blatant because there has been a mix of results from NYT, but definitely moving in the direction of afraid to speak to power.

[harumph]

28. Astute. I've made the case that MSM including print is a "loss leader" for the plutocracy.

MSM propaganda is just the cost of doing business. It's really NOT about informing the public, but rather a means of social control.
Any truthful information conveyed must not be harmful to the main goal (controlling public opinion and framing the issues).
People talking about "advertising $" don't fully understand the motivations involved.

[FakeNoose]

23. Sometime in the early 80's the advertising sales departments took over the news industry

That's when the old-style editors and reporters started getting the boot. I think it happened in TV news first, but newspaper publishing was quick to follow. Just as you say, investigative journalism is never their goal. All they care about are profits and bonuses to the sales department execs.

If Nixon had been president in the 1980's, the Woodward and Bernstein story about the Watergate break-in would have never made it to print.

[hunter]

10. Rawstory rejects me and I reject it, so here's other sources:

Original:

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.

--more--

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

Another:

Paul Krugman on Leaving the New York Times

For two and a half decades, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times were beacons of intelligence and common sense. Particularly for progressives inured to the work of many of his colleagues, Krugman offered a liberal gospel that was also a reliable refuge from mediocrity.

The star economist—he won the Nobel Prize in 2008—was hired at the Times in 2000 by Howell Raines, then the editorial page editor, because he was “someone who knew economics, who wasn’t a terrible writer,” Krugman told CJR in an hour-long telephone interview from Saint Croix.

When Krugman left the paper, last December, his departure attracted little notice, apart from some standard encomiums from his boss, Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. “It really has been an honor and a privilege to work with someone of Paul’s stature,” she wrote.

Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper—a desire none of them expressed last week, when an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns.

--more--

Columbia Journalism Review

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/paul-krugman-leaving-new-york-times-heavy-hand-editing-less-frequent-columns-newsletter.php

[BumRushDaShow]

11. I spend much of the day

clearing cookies periodically from CNN, Reuters, Raw Story, Daily Beast, Fortune, and a few others. These will usually allow a couple "free" views before the paywall gets thrown up. I can sometimes find their stories through aggregators like Yahoo!, msn, Aol, etc.

[hunter]

16. Raw Story subscription here:

https://www.rawstory.com/st/Rawstory_Plus_Signup

Unfortuanately I can't subscribe to everything, and I have a great intolerance for advertising that moves, flashes, or makes noise -- basically any advertising you wouldn't see in an actual printed newspaper.

[BumRushDaShow]

25. I have a huge pile of subs

(recently did a full sub to The Guardian) so since I don't use this site as much as I use others, I haven't yet bothered.

[MiHale]

17. Use this site...

to get articles behind a paywall. First thing you gotta do is grab the URL of the page you want. Paste it into the lower search, the article may already be archived…chose the latest date and begin to read or copy the archive URL and share…paywall removed.
The top search finds and archives the article for future use by you or others.

https://archive.ph/

[BumRushDaShow]

26. I have been attacked on DU for using that

so it's not worth it for me.

[MiHale]

31. K

[hunter]

29. If someone makes it difficult for me to read their stuff...

... by putting it behind a paywall for a price I'm not willing to pay, or by plastering their web sites with advertising I find obnoxious, then I simply don't read their stuff.

I pay so I can read sites like DU and The Guardian without advertising. There are other sites I regularly visit, mostly technical sites, that are supported by unobtrusive advertising from the technical industries they represent. I don't block those ads.

In a gray area, there are a few sites I occasionally visit where I've found it easy enough to block the sorts of advertising I find most annoying, leaving the rest of their advertising intact.

If I'm just following links to sites I rarely visit, like many links posted here on DU, my ad blocking privacy software is set to full strength.

I don't watch any advertising supported television at all.

Tunneling through paywalls isn't the kind of freedom I'm fighting for.

[CrispyQ]

30. I run a cleaning program every night & I love it.

I've used it for years. You can customize how it cleans, too. I use two browsers, Chrome for some stuff & Opera for other stuff. I have it set up so every time I close Chrome it gets a thorough cleaning but Opera only gets a partial cleaning at night & I have to do that one manually. So financial sites I visit on Chrome & social sites I visit on Opera. It has some other great drive/OS tools too, like checking for & updating outdated drivers & apps & doing some registry cleanup. I have the professional version which gave me three licenses so I have it on my desktop, laptop, & Android phone. I really like it. It's called CCleaner & I don't work for them.

[BumRushDaShow]

33. I have so far avoided "automated" cleaners

because I have a bunch of subs (some of which like Conde Nast stuff and now even Disney, which owns National Geographic) cross link between their magazines/other content. And since some even make me change PWs every "x" months, it can become a nightmare. I currently use Firefox on my laptop and various browsers on my phone(s) and iPad(s).

I have heard of the tool you are talking about though! I think I was using it back in the day on my old Samsung S4 (now they are up to the S25 )!

[aggiesal]

19. Thank you. I don't like posts that reference RawStory ...

They're not a publication of record.
The original story is out there instead of going through a wannabe periodical.
Thanks for posting the link to the original story.

[BumRushDaShow]

27. They have started doing some of their own reporting

but what happens is that the articles that they are referencing have often ended up outside of LBN's 12-hour criteria (and weren't "featured" and viewable on their websites at the claimed publication time), so I try to find sites that will reference those stories - at least with a summary, particularly when they are seemingly important, but got buried under other bullshit at the originator site.

[aggiesal]

34. I'd look for the original source and post that. ...

If the story is that important, I've seen them elevated coming out of General Discussion.

Thanks for the post.

[BumRushDaShow]

35. I normally do that but as I noted

many of the "original source" articles end up outside of the LBN 12-hour criteria and I am trying to encourage people to post NEWS in LBN! So much news gets lost in General Discussion because of all the other types of threads that are posted there.

Each forum has 30 pages with 80 threads per page (which is 2400 OPs) and GD only goes back to a week's worth of threads, so it moves fast.

[JohnnyRingo]

13. Where can I find "The Contrarian"?

Is in in a forum like FB or X?

[evemac]

14. Substack nt

[JohnnyRingo]

36. Now I just have to look up what a substack is.

hahaha
Betraying my age.

[MontanaMama]

18. The Contrarian

has an all star line up of contributors both liberal and conservative. It is headed by Norm Eisen and Jennifer Rubin.

[Kid Berwyn]

15. The Paper of Record went MAGA

Corporate McPravda serves NAZI gangsters.

Thanks, Putin.

[PortTack]

20. Stop supporting the nyt...they are not our friend, or a friend to democracy

[Paladin]

21. Fuck the NY Times editorial pimps.

The only "tight editorial control" I noticed during the campaign was the NYT's non-stop trashing of Democrats and the daily blow-jobbing of the trump candidacy. Unforgivable behavior, from what used to be a beacon of liberal advocacy---just days into the trump regime, and our democracy is already hanging by a thread. Lose Paul Krugman, keep Ross Douthat---thanks for nothing, NYT.

[OrwellwasRight]

22. Sorry, but Clinton and the Gingrich Republicans bear much blame here.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 accelerated media concentration and cross ownership, ensuring that media outlets from local papers to cable networks to AM and FM radio became part of ever larger conglomerates, ever more beholden to the lords of Wall Street.

Yes, there has always been a profit motive in media, but the profit motive faced by medium sized and regional corporations doesn’t hold a candle to today’s shareholder activism that only cares about constant and accelerating growth.

It’s the enshittification of the American economy, media version. Add that to the President’s politics of revenge and you get media companies only too happy to comply with the official story the White House wants told. PRAVDA ain’t got nothing on the Times and the Post these days…

https://billmoyers.com/story/twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-has-not-been-good-for-our-democracy/

[FakeNoose]

24. By 1996 it was already too late to save them

Journalism died in the 1980's.

[dalton99a]

32. Kick