Paul Krugman is a Nobel-Prize winning economist who wrote a regular column for The New York Times for 24 years. Recently he left the Times and now writes at Substack.

On Substack, he wrote about why he left. For many years, he wrote, the Times had edited his work very lightly. Recently, his editors had been heavy-handed.

Krugman wrote::

During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote. For most of that period my draft would go straight to a copy editor, who would sometimes suggest that I make some changes — for example, softening an assertion that arguably went beyond provable facts, or redrafting a passage the editor didn’t quite understand, and which readers probably wouldn’t either. But the editing was very light; over the years several copy editors jokingly complained that I wasn’t giving them anything to do, because I came in at length, with clean writing and with back-up for all factual assertions.

This light-touch editing prevailed even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous. My early and repeated criticisms of Bush’s push to invade Iraq led to several tense meetings with management. In those meetings, I was urged to tone it down. Yet the columns themselves were published as I wrote them. And in the end, I believe the Times — which eventually apologized for its role in promoting the war — was glad that I had taken an anti-invasion stand. I believe that it was my finest hour.

So I was dismayed to find out this past year, when the current Times editors and I began to discuss our differences, that current management and top editors appear to have been completely unaware of this important bit of the paper’s history and my role in it.

Two, previous Times management and editors had allowed me to engage in the higher-level economic debates of the time. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis led to a great flowering of economics blogs. Important, sophisticated debates about the causes of the crisis and the policy response were taking place more or less in real time. I was able to be an active part of those debates, because I had an economics blog of my own, under the Times umbrella but separate from the column. The blog, unedited, was both more technical — sometimes much more technical — and looser than the column.
Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away. The Times eliminated the blog at the end of 2017. Here’s my last substantive blog post, which gives a good idea of the kind of thing I was no longer able to do once it was eliminated.
For a while I tried to make up for the loss of the blog with threads on Twitter. But even before Elon Musk Nazified the site, tweet threads were an awkward, inferior substitute for blog posts. So in 2021 I opened a Substack account, as a place to put technical material I couldn’t publish in the Times. Times management became very upset. When I explained to them that I really, really needed an outlet where I could publish more analytical writing with charts etc., they agreed to allow me to have a Times newsletter (twice a week), where I could publish the kind of work I had previously posted on my blog.

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied into war.”

The story is told in the Columbia Journalism Review, though not in the same detail, by Charles Kaiser. It is not behind a paywall.

Kaiser wrote (in part):

CJR emailed half a dozen Times columnists to ask if they had noticed any difference in the way their columns were edited last year. The three who responded—Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, and Tom Friedman—all said they hadn’t noticed any change in editing. Friedman also said, “I have a terrific editor in Patrick Healy and have not experienced any change in the editing of my column since we started working together in 2020.”

Krugman said, “I don’t have a feud here. All I know is that I was in fact being treated very differently from the past.”

Krugman was particularly valuable to progressive readers because he was often a lone voice in the wilderness. That was especially true early in his columnist career when he strayed from his brief—to write about economics—in order to strenuously oppose the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was striking at a time when the news department allowed Judith Miller to lead the charge on the unproven allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and most of Krugman’s colleagues—especially Friedman—were strongly in favor of the invasion.

Just six days before America invaded, Krugman wrote, “The original reasons given for making Iraq an immediate priority have collapsed. No evidence has ever surfaced of the supposed link with Al Qaeda, or of an active nuclear program. And the administration’s eagerness to believe that an Iraqi nuclear program does exist has led to a series of embarrassing debacles, capped by the case of the forged Niger papers, which supposedly supported that claim. At this point it is clear that deposing Saddam has become an obsession, detached from any real rationale.”

He served a similar function during the Biden administration, when the media in general and the White House correspondents of the Times in particular exhibited what Krugman called “a real negativity bias. You know, if the price of gas goes up to five dollars, that’s all over the pages. If it comes back down to three dollars, not a peep, right?”

Unlike most of his Times colleagues, Krugman believes Biden “actually was a very, very good president. The fact that Democrats, like every other incumbent party in the democratic world, lost the election should not allow us to overlook the fact that we got the best economic recovery in the world, that we made the first serious efforts to do something about climate change, and we have followed, actually, a quite aggressive foreign economic policy against China that was much more effective than anything Trump did or is likely to do. The Biden administration has basically been trying to cut Chinese advanced technology off at the knees.”

Times watchers are always wary of any sign that the newspaper might be doing anything to bow to its legions of right-wing critics. This is especially true when, as Oliver Darcy put it this week, “Trump has largely bent media and technology companies to his will.”

Kingsbury said it was ridiculous to suggest that the paper made Krugman’s life miserable last year because she wanted to stifle one of the newspaper’s strongest liberal voices on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House. 

“Obviously I do push back on the notion that Paul’s views are now missing from the page,” the opinion editor said. “You can come to our pages today and find either other columnists making the arguments he was making or guest essays, or newsletters, or podcasts,” she continued. “For nine months we pounded away at the idea of Trump coming back into office. We were the only major newspaper that endorsed in the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris. There’s no part of my report that didn’t routinely tell readers about the dangers and risks of electing Trump.”

All of that is true. But it is also the case that the greatest change that Kingsbury and Sulzberger have made has been the sharp shrinking of the institutional voice of the Times. The number of unsigned editorials has gone from three a day, when Kingsbury took over, to just one a week—even as she has increased the number of columnists by roughly 50 percent. The paper’s editorial voice should be reserved “for the most important arguments,” she said. “We break through more than we did when we editorialized on a daily basis.”

Many New Yorkers were distressed when the paper announced last fall that it would stop making endorsements in local races. More alarm bells went off last week when Semafor reported that the paper was considering abandoning all endorsements. Kingsbury told Semafor there was no plan to eliminate the editorial board, but she did not flatly deny the no-endorsement scenario. “We’re in the process of considering ways to modernize endorsements,” she said, “and while we’re excited about the ideas we’re discussing, there’s nothing substantive to say about it yet.”