“I’ve lost the capacity to gauge the opprobrium—what’s irrational versus what’s a reasonable amount of Internet outrage these days,” said James Bennet, editorial-page editor of The New York Times, and someone talked about as a future contender for the Times’s top newsroom job. “Look,” he went on, “we’re recruiting different types of writers than we have traditionally, and I’ll make some mistakes. It’s just gonna happen.”

It was early Thursday afternoon, February 22, and Bennet had just finished the second in a trio of internal town-hall meetings that he was hosting to quell brewing discontent over the Opinion section. The previous week, Bennet had announced the hiring of a new Opinion writer and member of the editorial board, Quinn Norton, a tech journalist with a distinctly un-Timesian background. Norton was a provocative recruit, the kind that Bennet had been brought on board to make. But as frequently happens in the current combustible era, the provocation produced epic blowback. Norton’s Internet history was quickly exposed, with Twitter sleuths publicizing her well-documented friendship with a neo-Nazi, and surfacing old tweets in which she tossed around racial and sexual epithets. (It appears those terms weren’t used in the spirit of hate-mongering, but still.) In what may go down as the shortest Times career in history, Bennet announced just several hours later that Norton and the organization had “decided to go our separate ways.”

Norton’s Web-speed arrival and departure couldn’t help but create a sense of crisis at the Times. Bennet has been somewhat of an activist Opinion editor, and a surprisingly large amount of his activity has produced outrage, even from inside the building. The hiring of former Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens—a never-Trumper and Pulitzer-winning writer, but also a climate-science skeptic—would bring down a savage backlash from the left. Fellow new recruit Bari Weiss, a neocon with a background in Israel activism, has been a flash point, too. (Weiss recently celebrated U.S. Olympian Mirai Nagasu, who was born in California, by tweeting, “Immigrants: they get the job done.”)

There was an episode last March when two prominent national security reporters at the Times took the unusual step of publicly disparaging a Times op-ed, written by the former British M.P.-turned-contentious Twitter phenom Louise Mensch, who has been criticized for fanning conspiracy theories pertaining to Russia. Another eruption involved an op-ed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, which was alternately lambasted as a “pro-mercenary,” “advertorial,” and a “sales pitch for more mercenaries.” On the anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Bennet devoted the entire editorial page to letters from Trump supporters. And Bennet himself committed the sort of unforced journalistic blunder that can bruise careers at a place like the Times when he inserted an editing error that led to a lawsuit, later dismissed, by Sarah Palin.

The Times newsroom can be a perpetually aggrieved place where reporters and editors often can’t help themselves from keeping tabs on their colleagues’ misfortune. And after the Norton fallout, some Times journalists went from skeptical consternation regarding Opinion’s latest iteration, to outright concern that some of Bennet’s decisions were damaging the paper’s credibility. “Until yesterday,” a senior newsroom figure told me in the aftermath of the contretemps, “people felt like [Opinion] was a shakeup. Now people are worried. The newsroom feels embarrassed.” Likewise, another senior Times journalist said that the Norton affair “was like rocket fuel.” Bennet’s town halls were an opportunity to get in front of the controversy. A couple of the sessions were largely constructive, but during Thursday’s meeting, Times journalists “came right at him,” I was told. Some attendees thought Bennet appeared shaken, though he told me the discourse had been valuable. “It was way overdue,” he said.