Mile
Zero

I think most of us can imagine the frustrating experience of sharing a newspaper with the New York Times op-ed page. It must burn to do good reporting work, knowing that it'll all be lumped in with Friedman's Mighty Mustache of Commerce and his latest taxi driver. Let's face it: the op-ed section is long overdue for amputation, given that there's an entire Internet of opinion out there for free, and almost all of it is more coherent than whatever white-bread panic David Brooks is in this week.

But even I was surprised by the story in the New York Observer last week, detailing just how bad the anger between the journalists and the pundits has gotten:

The Times declined to provide exact staffing numbers, but that too is a source of resentment. Said one staffer, “Andy’s got 14 or 15 people plus a whole bevy of assistants working on these three unsigned editorials every day. They’re completely reflexively liberal, utterly predictable, usually poorly written and totally ineffectual. I mean, just try and remember the last time that anybody was talking about one of those editorials. You know, I can think of one time recently, which is with the [Edward] Snowden stuff, but mostly nobody pays attention, and millions of dollars is being spent on that stuff.”

First of all, the Times still runs unsigned editorials? And it takes more than ten people to write them? Sweet mother of mercy, that's insane. I thought the only outlet these days with an actual "from the editors" editorial was the Onion, and even they think it's an old joke. You might as well include an AOL keyword at the end.

And yet it's worth reading on, once you pick your jaw up off the floor, to see the weird, awkward cronyism that's not just the visible portions of the op-ed page, but its entire structure. Why is the editorial section so bad? In part, apparently, because it's ruled by the entitled, petty son of a former managing editor, who reports directly to the paper's publisher (and not the executive editor) because of a family debt. Could anything be more appropriate? As The Baffler notes:

What a perfect way to boil tapioca. Dynasties kill flavor. A page edited by a son because dad was kind of a big deal is a page edited with an eye to status and credentials. Hey, Friedman must be good—he won some Pulitzers. That’s a prize, you see, that Pulitzer thing. Big, big prize. We put it up on the wall. (Pause) Anyway, ready for a cocktail?

The Observer argues that the complaints from the newsroom at large are professional, not budgetary: reporters are angry about shoddy work being published under the same masthead as their stories. But it's hard to imagine that money doesn't enter into it at all. A staff of ten or more people, plus hundreds of thousands of dollars for each of the featured op-ed writers, would translate into serious money for journalism. It would hire a lot of staff, pay for a lot of equipment. You could use it to give interns a living wage, or institute a program for boosting minority participation in media. Arguably, you could put it into a sack and sink it into the Hudson, and still end up ahead of what it's currently funding.

Of course, most papers don't maintain a costly op-ed section, so it's not like this is an industry-wide problem. I don't know that I would even care, normally, beyond the sense of schadenfreude, except for the fact that it's such a perfect little chunk of journalistic mismanagement: when finances get strained, the cuts don't get made from politically-connected fiefdoms, or from upper-level salaries. They get taken from the one place that should be protected, which is the newsroom itself.

Call me an anarchist, but the most depressing part of the whole debate is that it's focused on how big the op-ed budget should be, or how it should be run, instead of whether it should exist at all. What's the point of keeping it around? Or, at the very least, why populate it with the same bland, predictable voices every day? One of the things I respect about the New York Times is the paper's forays into bucking conventional wisdom, from the porous subscription paywall to its legitimately innovative interactive storytelling. There's a lot of romance and tradition in the newsroom, but the op-ed page shouldn't be a part of it. I say burn it to the ground, and let's see what we can grow on the ashes.