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The New York Observer Observer stops publishing 'open letters' from employees about the paper and Trump

The New York Observer does not want to keep publishing open letters written by its own employees about the paper's relationship with Donald Trump, according to columnist and editor at large Ryan Holiday.

To be clear, the Observer is still publishing op-eds about Trump, just not navel-gazing personal essays about Observer publisher (and Trump son-in-law) Jared Kushner.

Last week, the paper received a great deal of publicity after it published a critical open letter from Observer entertainment writer Dana Schwartz to Kushner. Schwartz's letter was titled, "An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees," and went viral because it was an example of an Observer employee criticizing the paper's owner.

Holiday wanted to do something similar. In his own open letter, addressed to his father, he prominently noted Kushner's relationship with Trump.

"It’s fitting that I would write to you here anyway, because the Observer has its own father issues when it comes to Donald Trump (Mr. Trump is the publisher’s father-in-law.) ... Having been associated with my own fair share of controversial people, I empathize with the position, Jared Kushner, the paper’s owner, must be in," he wrote.

Holiday ended up publishing his open letter to his father on Medium. In a preface to the Medium post, he wrote that he originally wanted to publish the letter in the Observer but was told that the Observer would no longer publish such posts.

“I originally submitted this piece to the New York Observer where I am an editor-at-large and a columnist on media and culture. Editorial decided it would no longer accept columns of this nature on this topic. I have the utmost respect for the leadership at the Observer, but I respectfully disagree with that decision,” Holiday wrote in a preface to the Medium post.

Observer editor in chief Ken Kurson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new policy. But Observer politics editor Jillian Jorgensen tweeted that the Observer does not want to publish any more open letters that are about the paper itself.

"My understanding is that there is not a ban on open letters about Trump at the Observer," Jorgensen wrote in response to an earlier version of this post. "What I've been told was there was a decision not to publish open letter type stuff that is about the Observer. So, less navel-gazing."

The Observer’s relationship with Trump has been a recurring source of controversy this campaign season. Both Observer politics reporter Ross Barkan and restaurant critic Joshua David Stein resigned from the paper after it endorsed Trump in the Republican primary in April.

This post has been updated.