Tom Scocca is deputy editor of the Special Projects Desk at Gizmodo Media.

The public editorship of the New York Times was always a fictitious job. That essential truth was made clear on Wednesday morning, when the paper's publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., announced that he would be terminating the position, less than a year into the term of its sixth and final occupant, Liz Spayd.

Spayd’s columns were widely mocked and despised, especially by other people in the media. Still, she was probably not the worst public editor the Times ever had. She produced only one valuable column, in an otherwise unbroken string of dumb and wrong ones, but that was one more than readers ever got from Byron Calame or Arthur Brisbane or that other guy, whoever he was. Clark Hoyt?


The majority of the public editors were bad because the public editor's job was designed to be badly done. It was created after the Jayson Blair scandal and the collapse of Howell Raines' executive editorship, as a means of showing that the Times was serious about managing the institutional damage. The first public editor, Daniel Okrent, was sharp and rigorous, befitting a newspaper that saw its mission as a sacred trust and had obvious lessons to learn from its failures. Once the crisis had passed, though, Sulzberger seemed to approach the routine duty of holding his paper accountable the same way a surly 12-year-old approaches the task of mowing the lawn—if he could do it badly enough, maybe people would decide he shouldn't have been made to do it at all.

So the work of minding the Times fell to a series of timid people, dull-witted ones and bores. Only the fifth public editor, Margaret Sullivan, broke with that pattern and did her job energetically enough that she ended up being hired as a real media columnist, at the Washington Post. Sometime between Sullivan's tenure and the end of Spayd's, though, the boilerplate on the public editor's web page was revised so that the word "independently" disappeared from the phrase, "The public editor works independently, outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper."

It was an honest enough change. All along, the public editor had been hired by the publisher—and therefore could be shut down by the publisher. Like a president facing a nettlesome attorney general or FBI director, Sulzberger had the power to end the scrutiny whenever it suited him.

From a certain angle, then, Spayd was the most successful public editor of all, achieving harmony with her boss. The overriding message of her brief time in the position was that the job, as she conceived it, was a foolish one and not worth doing.

Sulzberger felt the same. Announcing the early end of Spayd's job, he wrote that the paper must now take its guidance from the mass voice of social media and the internet. "Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office," he wrote.

This deference to the dubious wisdom of the online crowd was Spayd's guiding principle as public editor, spelled out in the headline of her debut column : “Want to Attract More Readers? Try Listening to Them.” In that introductory piece, she disparaged journalists’ “reflexive aversion to interacting with readers” and wrote that the Times newsroom was “too distant from the people it serves”:

Take reader comments on stories. This is arguably the most elemental way The Times can let its audience engage. Yet only about 10 percent of articles on any given day are open for comment.

This morning, Sulzberger neatly echoed the message:

Currently, we open only 10 percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.

The idea that online comments will be a force for improvement is an odd one to encounter in 2017. But Spayd had a powerful faith in the public, made more powerful because she had no coherent idea of what the public was. She was a deeply conventional journalistic insider—managing editor of the Washington Post, then editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review—trying to imitate an outsider.

As counterpoint to her familiar, sacred professional journalist’s viewpoint from nowhere, she offered a mangled, imaginary viewpoint from everywhere. No complaint was too bogus or vapid to merit serious consideration :

One reader from California who asked not to be named believes Times reporters and editors are trying to sway public opinion toward their own beliefs. “I never thought I’d see the day when I, as a liberal, would start getting so frustrated with the one-sided reporting that I would start hopping over to the Fox News webpage to read an article and get the rest of the story that the NYT refused to publish,” she says.

Here’s frustration as it crests, from James, an Arizona reader: “You’ve lost a subscriber because of your relentless bias against Trump — and I’m not even a Republican.”

You can imagine what the letters from actual conservatives sound like.

Most people with experience writing about politics online did know exactly what letters like conservatives would sound like—they would sound just like those letters, complete with suspicious disclaimers of bias on the letter-writers’ part. Spayd, though, operated as if the contents of her inbox were some reasonable sampling of public sentiment, rather than the weaponized claims of various pressure groups.

Some amount of this confusion was a built-in hazard of the job. The much-admired Sullivan once devoted a blog post to a letter criticizing the Times’ indifference to the March for Life, a complaint copied straight from a Catholic League press release . But Spayd had, if anything, an affirmative preference for chaff over wheat.

If there was a unifying concept to her work, it was that the newspaper should above all cater to the sensibilities of people who don't like the newspaper—culminating in a flabbergasting column earlier this month in which she worried that not enough people were suing the New York Times for libel. It would be “disconcerting,” Spayd wrote, if the shortage of lawsuits “suggests that those with a legitimate claim feel too intimidated to even try.”

But even Spayd's best column was undermined by her inability to defend real values against bogus sentiment. Back in December, she presented an unflinching, reporting-based indictment of the Times’ failure to diversify its newsroom, under the ruthless and accurate headline “Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It.” It was a model of what an aggressive internal watchdog could do:

Only two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were black. None were Latino or Asian. That’s less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far. Of The Times’s newly named White House team, all six are white, as is most everyone in the Washington bureau...

The executive editor, Dean Baquet, is African-American. The other editors on his masthead are white. The staff with the most diversity? The news assistants, who mostly do administrative jobs and get paid the least....

Given The Times’s ambitions across global cultures and languages, it would seem that instead of being a lagger, it would insist on being a leader—and make that an explicit goal. I see no sign that this is happening.

Three months later, Spayd devoted an entire 690-word column to the fact that the Times culture writer Sopan Deb had made a joking quote-tweet around a tweet in which the rapper Bow Wow had insulted First Lady Melania Trump—a complicated nest of referents that nevertheless set off a right-wing complaint campaign. Spayd wrote:

Deb accurately pointed out that some far-right conservative groups have latched onto his tweet for their own purposes, and in fact some of the letters I’ve received may be the result of that.

On the other hand, you don’t have to be a conservative to look at the language and imagery in the original tweet from Bow Wow and be offended. I was. As a journalist it would seem to have a red flag staked through the middle of it.

Even though she concluded there was no malice behind Deb's tweet, Spayd warned that “mainstream readers … might easily take offense.” The Times needed to hire more minorities, but those minority employees risked being dressed down by the public editor if they did anything to upset “mainstream” sensibilities.

Spayd's reportorial view of the inside workings of the Times apparently commanded less of her attention than the vision of the paper she attributed to outsiders. So, too, in April, when the op-ed section announced it was hiring Bret Stephens from the Wall Street Journal, Spayd could only respond to reader outrage with bromides about “hiring people who don't conform to a liberal orthodoxy of thought” and “whether The Times should be a paper for all of America.”

Spayd did mention that Stephens was “yet another white male” in the op-ed department, but not that he was, in fact, the section's third self-identified anti-Trump conservative columnist. The idea of promoting ideological diversity was what mattered, not the resulting lack of diversity of ideology.

Nor did she mention that the opinion editor who hired Stephens, James Bennet, was a white man, who had been hired by Sulzberger to replace a white man, Andrew Rosenthal, who was the son of the former Times top editor A.M. Rosenthal, also a white man. The elder Rosenthal had been hired by Arthur O. Sulzberger Sr., the father of Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Some institutional problems were less open to discussion than others. The public editors were a flagellating instrument, meant to sting the paper on its surface, never to cut to the bone.