Time for some inside baseball. And not just inside baseball. This could be dugout baseball. Watching the manager signal the third-base-coach baseball. Trying to figure out whether to tell your best hitter to bunt with no outs with runners on first and second baseball. We're talking deep into the weeds.
The New York Times--arguably the most important newspaper on the planet, and only "arguably" by those working at The Washington Post--has changed some of its opinion page templates. And the change was recognized. Because the paper of record had its new opinion chief write a whole column about it.
Kathleen Kingsbury wrote that the paper is giving up on the title "op-ed." For 50 years, it has meant "opposite page of the editorial column," and other papers followed suit. (We still like our "Voices" and Sunday "Perspective.")
The reasoning for the Old Gray Lady's change of dress, according to Ms. Kingsbury, is that in this digital age, when folks aren't "opening" up a print edition, opposite-of-the-editorial doesn't have much meaning.
Okay. Every new opinion boss is going to bring in new ideas to a newspaper. Which brings us to why Kathleen Kingsbury is the new opinion boss.
In the summer of last year, while protesters clashed with police across the country in response to police killings of Black men, The New York Times reportedly asked Tom Cotton (R-Around Here) if he would write an op-ed about all the action. He did.
He advocated sending in the troops, the military troops, to restore peace. Which surprised exactly nobody who knows Sen./Capt. Tom Cotton, who served honorably in the U.S. Army in overseas combat before moving to politics.
But after Tom Cotton's column appeared, the newsroom at The New York Times mutinied.
An opinion section is best when it includes all kinds of opinion. But the staff at The Times didn't cotton to Tom Cotton's piece. Reporters revolted. The publisher and EPE pushed back for a few days, but after the staff popped a rivet on social media, they eventually caved.
The publisher said Tom Cotton's column was "contemptuous," and the editorial page editor resigned. At the time, the brass at the newspaper said it would cut back on the number of op-ed columns in the wake of the scandal. Although the only scandal some of us recognized was the reporting staff telling the opinion section how to do its job.
At this newspaper, we have a separation of church and state. That doesn't mean we can't say hello to city editors in the elevator, but it does mean that we don't tell them what to cover, or how, and they don't tell us what opinions we should have on the news. Nor do they tell us what is acceptable on the Voices page opposite this one. That can no longer be said, or at least believed, at The New York Times.
So now the new editorial page editor says the term "op-ed" is verboten. It's a "relic" of another age. It doesn't fit the digital age. So from now on, the opinions that don't speak necessarily for the newspaper are "Guest Essays."
Uh, fine.
But will the newsroom still have veto power over Guest Essays?
Changing the labels of guest commentary doesn't change much, we'd suggest. The far bigger issue is whether soi-disant Guest Essays will include voices that disagree with the official editorial position of the paper. One must wonder, after reading the new EPE's column.
In the column announcing this change, Kathleen Kingsbury added this bit of news, which caught our eye, like a cinder around a campfire:
"We want not only individual essays to have intention, but also the collective report itself to have intention. We like the people we invite to write essays for us to sometimes be surprised by the offer. We like to experience the same surprise when we read submissions from voices who are new to us, on topics we may not yet understand. And we have our thumb on our scale in the name of progress, fairness and shared humanity."
And we have our thumb on our scale in the name of progress, fairness and shared humanity.
Doubtless Tom Cotton would be very much surprised to get another invitation to write. Especially now that the editors have their thumb on the scale in the name of progress. Perhaps having thumbs on scales will keep the newsroom from erupting in fury. And the best way to do that is to avoid conservative commentary like pink pork.
Changing the labels of outside commentary might give copy editors and paginators headaches for a week. But it's not likely to make much of a difference in how the public views the opinion pages of The New York Times.
And that's another blow to American journalism across the board.