In a memo to the newsroom, Dean Baquet, the executive editor,
and Joseph Kahn, the managing editor, said the current system of copy editors and “backfielders” who assign and shape articles would be replaced with a single group of editors who would be responsible for all aspects of an article.
New York Times Will Offer Employee Buyouts and Eliminate Public Editor Role -
By DANIEL VICTORMAY 31, 2017
offered buyouts to its newsroom employees on Wednesday, aiming to reduce layers of editing and requiring more of the editors who remain.
Another editor would be “looking over their shoulders before publication.”
“Our goal is to significantly shift the balance of editors to reporters at The Times, giving us more
on-the-ground journalists developing original work than ever before,” they said in the memo.
In a separate memo, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, said the company would be eliminating the position of public editor, which was established to receive reader complaints
and question Times journalists on how they make decisions.
Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla., said
that copy editors — who, in addition to editing for grammar, spelling and style, check facts, correct faulty logic and make sense of garbled prose — have frequently been targeted in cost-cutting efforts in newsrooms across the country.