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In 2022, the New York Times Opinion desk published a video investigation that crystallized the section’s ambitions for original multimedia reporting. The video focused on Afghanistan, alleging that, in the first six months since the Taliban seized Kabul, they had approved the extrajudicial killing or disappearance of at least four hundred and ninety former security officials, in direct violation of the general amnesty the new regime had promised for Afghans who supported the US occupation.
As printed portraits of victims dangle from thread in a darkened room, a narrator intones, “The Taliban are on a campaign of revenge killings, slaughtering the Afghans who fought against them over the past two decades.” The video, which was produced by Sanjar Sohail, Barbara Marcolini, and Alexander Stockton, goes on to show graphic footage of the execution of a former security official named Haji Mullah Achakzai, a white scarf tied over his eyes, as well as the blood-splattered apartment where a female police officer named Nikie Daar and three others were killed. The narrator allows for the possibility that many of these killings were not officially sanctioned. Still, she says: “Make no mistake, the Taliban’s revenge campaign is deliberate and widespread.”
The day after the Times released the documentary, the Taliban issued a livid response. The “New York Times report on the assassinating of former security personnel is baseless and biased. No Mujahid has right to take revenge from anyone after the general amnesty announced by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Of course, there were reasons to doubt the Taliban’s honesty. There was also a reaction internally, since the Times bureau in Kabul had not been given a chance to review the video before its release. Soon, sources familiar with the Times’ operations in Afghanistan told me, news staff had to deal with incensed government officials, some of whom threatened to force the Kabul bureau to close. To take some pressure off the reporters on the ground, editors from Opinion got involved, trying to explain to Afghan leaders that the newsroom had nothing to do with the video. But the distinction between opinion and news was meaningless to the Taliban.
Dissension over what separates news from opinion coverage has been a constant far beyond that. At the Times, the liberal tilt of the editorial board has long complicated the work of the paper’s reporters, often on the Politics desk. What has changed lately, though, are the prominence and resources of Opinion in the digital era, as well as the scale of its original reporting, leading to more overlap between the Times’ divisions and, inevitably, more hard feelings. This spring, Nicholas Kristof’s report on Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees set off a major round of recriminations. Newsroom journalists offered anonymous quotes to Puck (“I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section,” an aggrieved Times employee said). Similar blowback greeted an Opinion profile by a freelance contributor, Ankush Khardori, of Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration and senior lawyer at Goldman Sachs, who had refused to talk with the newsroom’s reporters about her friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In both cases, outraged observers have sought to diminish Opinion’s reporting by stoking an abiding misapprehension that its writers do not have to follow the same standards of accuracy as their peers in the newsroom. That isn’t really the case: as a spokesperson for the newspaper put it, “Both news and opinion journalism at the Times is produced with deep journalistic rigor.”
When I asked Kathleen Kingsbury, the section’s editor, about these recent instances of opinion reporting triggering anonymous gripes from the newsroom, she affirmed that “news and Opinion do not coordinate editorially.” She continued, “That’s the system that we have built very purposefully, right? This is a long-standing idea, that the newsroom should be able to report independently without having to answer for the opinions in the Opinion section.” The so-called firewall ensures “that we feel confident that we can opine without necessarily worrying about, for instance, access to sources.”
As I spoke with editors, writers, and producers for the Opinion section this summer, it became clear how much stress the desk’s expansion has put on that firewall. Two decades ago, Opinion had only about fifty employees, namely columnists and the editorial board. The section’s role had evolved since the late nineteenth century, when Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher who bought the Times in 1896, wrote of his desire to turn the paper into “a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” It remained oriented around unsigned editorials issued by the board and articles by columnists, typically Times reporters such as Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and, yes, Kristof—journalists who had been rewarded for their strong track record on their respective newsroom beats with the ability to bring their personal perspective into their reporting.
Opinion has the same DNA today, even as the section now boasts some two hundred employees. Though still dwarfed by the Times’ newsroom (which has ten times the staff), the build-out of Opinion into a full-fledged newsroom within a newsroom means the section’s reporters are increasingly operating in the same arena as their down-the-middle colleagues. Opinion publishes two dozen guest essays every week, while more than a dozen columnists not only write but contribute to multimedia, with Ezra Klein and, until his recent departure, Ross Douthat hosting regular video podcasts; others rotate through a roundtable show called The Opinions. However influential Opinion columns remain, the section’s video side has far greater potential to reach people outside the Times ecosystem: The Ezra Klein Show regularly ranks in the top ten of the Apple Podcast subscriber chart, and some of the short documentaries have garnered more than ten million views on YouTube. In recognition of video’s growing prominence, Opinion recently consolidated its podcast and video operation into a single “Shows” team. Every year, that division continues to publish about a dozen enterprise video reports, which are produced in-house, and a similar number of “Op-Docs,” which are acquired from outside filmmakers.
Whether it be in a reported article or video dispatch, Opinion writers and newsroom reporters are increasingly producing overlapping work. Michelle Goldberg’s coverage of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party—from Maine to Michigan to New Jersey—parallels the reporting of the Times’ Washington bureau, just as M. Gessen’s dispatches from Ukraine and the West Bank do the newsroom’s international efforts. Muddying the matter further, reporters on the other side of the firewall occasionally produce articles labeled “news analysis,” while writers for the Sunday magazine can make forceful arguments. How is the audience supposed to distinguish one section from the other?
“Fundamentally, the thing that makes New York Times opinion journalism distinctive from punditry,” Kingsbury said, is that the section’s columnists are often doing field reporting. “They’re gathering information, and that is what I think of as the evidence that supports the argument.” Even if it’s operating at a far greater scale, Kingsbury believes, Opinion is still very much filling its founding mandate. “If the newsroom tells you how to understand the world,” Kingsbury said, “the work of the Opinion desk is to give you clarity and context around it.”
When Kingsbury took over the Opinion desk, her job was to establish strong safeguards. She had been hired as deputy editorial page editor in 2017 by James Bennet, whose tenure running the section had culminated in an op-ed from Sen
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In 2022, the New York Times Opinion desk published a video investigation that crystallized the section’s ambitions for original multimedia reporting. The video focused on Afghanistan, alleging that, in the first six months since the Taliban seized Kabul, they had approved the extrajudicial killing or disappearance of at least four hundred and ninety former security officials, in direct violation of the general amnesty the new regime had promised for Afghans who supported the US occupation.
As printed portraits of victims dangle from thread in a darkened room, a narrator intones, “The Taliban are on a campaign of revenge killings, slaughtering the Afghans who fought against them over the past two decades.” The video, which was produced by Sanjar Sohail, Barbara Marcolini, and Alexander Stockton, goes on to show graphic footage of the execution of a former security official named Haji Mullah Achakzai, a white scarf tied over his eyes, as well as the blood-splattered apartment where a female police officer named Nikie Daar and three others were killed. The narrator allows for the possibility that many of these killings were not officially sanctioned. Still, she says: “Make no mistake, the Taliban’s revenge campaign is deliberate and widespread.”
The day after the Times released the documentary, the Taliban issued a livid response. The “New York Times report on the assassinating of former security personnel is baseless and biased. No Mujahid has right to take revenge from anyone after the general amnesty announced by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Of course, there were reasons to doubt the Taliban’s honesty. There was also a reaction internally, since the Times bureau in Kabul had not been given a chance to review the video before its release. Soon, sources familiar with the Times’ operations in Afghanistan told me, news staff had to deal with incensed government officials, some of whom threatened to force the Kabul bureau to close. To take some pressure off the reporters on the ground, editors from Opinion got involved, trying to explain to Afghan leaders that the newsroom had nothing to do with the video. But the distinction between opinion and news was meaningless to the Taliban.
Dissension over what separates news from opinion coverage has been a constant far beyond that. At the Times, the liberal tilt of the editorial board has long complicated the work of the paper’s reporters, often on the Politics desk. What has changed lately, though, are the prominence and resources of Opinion in the digital era, as well as the scale of its original reporting, leading to more overlap between the Times’ divisions and, inevitably, more hard feelings. This spring, Nicholas Kristof’s report on Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees set off a major round of recriminations. Newsroom journalists offered anonymous quotes to Puck (“I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section,” an aggrieved Times employee said). Similar blowback greeted an Opinion profile by a freelance contributor, Ankush Khardori, of Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration and senior lawyer at Goldman Sachs, who had refused to talk with the newsroom’s reporters about her friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In both cases, outraged observers have sought to diminish Opinion’s reporting by stoking an abiding misapprehension that its writers do not have to follow the same standards of accuracy as their peers in the newsroom. That isn’t really the case: as a spokesperson for the newspaper put it, “Both news and opinion journalism at the Times is produced with deep journalistic rigor.”
When I asked Kathleen Kingsbury, the section’s editor, about these recent instances of opinion reporting triggering anonymous gripes from the newsroom, she affirmed that “news and Opinion do not coordinate editorially.” She continued, “That’s the system that we have built very purposefully, right? This is a long-standing idea, that the newsroom should be able to report independently without having to answer for the opinions in the Opinion section.” The so-called firewall ensures “that we feel confident that we can opine without necessarily worrying about, for instance, access to sources.”
As I spoke with editors, writers, and producers for the Opinion section this summer, it became clear how much stress the desk’s expansion has put on that firewall. Two decades ago, Opinion had only about fifty employees, namely columnists and the editorial board. The section’s role had evolved since the late nineteenth century, when Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher who bought the Times in 1896, wrote of his desire to turn the paper into “a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” It remained oriented around unsigned editorials issued by the board and articles by columnists, typically Times reporters such as Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and, yes, Kristof—journalists who had been rewarded for their strong track record on their respective newsroom beats with the ability to bring their personal perspective into their reporting.
Opinion has the same DNA today, even as the section now boasts some two hundred employees. Though still dwarfed by the Times’ newsroom (which has ten times the staff), the build-out of Opinion into a full-fledged newsroom within a newsroom means the section’s reporters are increasingly operating in the same arena as their down-the-middle colleagues. Opinion publishes two dozen guest essays every week, while more than a dozen columnists not only write but contribute to multimedia, with Ezra Klein and, until his recent departure, Ross Douthat hosting regular video podcasts; others rotate through a roundtable show called The Opinions. However influential Opinion columns remain, the section’s video side has far greater potential to reach people outside the Times ecosystem: The Ezra Klein Show regularly ranks in the top ten of the Apple Podcast subscriber chart, and some of the short documentaries have garnered more than ten million views on YouTube. In recognition of video’s growing prominence, Opinion recently consolidated its podcast and video operation into a single “Shows” team. Every year, that division continues to publish about a dozen enterprise video reports, which are produced in-house, and a similar number of “Op-Docs,” which are acquired from outside filmmakers.
Whether it be in a reported article or video dispatch, Opinion writers and newsroom reporters are increasingly producing overlapping work. Michelle Goldberg’s coverage of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party—from Maine to Michigan to New Jersey—parallels the reporting of the Times’ Washington bureau, just as M. Gessen’s dispatches from Ukraine and the West Bank do the newsroom’s international efforts. Muddying the matter further, reporters on the other side of the firewall occasionally produce articles labeled “news analysis,” while writers for the Sunday magazine can make forceful arguments. How is the audience supposed to distinguish one section from the other?
“Fundamentally, the thing that makes New York Times opinion journalism distinctive from punditry,” Kingsbury said, is that the section’s columnists are often doing field reporting. “They’re gathering information, and that is what I think of as the evidence that supports the argument.” Even if it’s operating at a far greater scale, Kingsbury believes, Opinion is still very much filling its founding mandate. “If the newsroom tells you how to understand the world,” Kingsbury said, “the work of the Opinion desk is to give you clarity and context around it.”
When Kingsbury took over the Opinion desk, her job was to establish strong safeguards. She had been hired as deputy editorial page editor in 2017 by James Bennet, whose tenure running the section had culminated in an op-ed from Sen
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In 2022, the New York Times Opinion desk published a video investigation that crystallized the section’s ambitions for original multimedia reporting. The video focused on Afghanistan, alleging that, in the first six months since the Taliban seized Kabul, they had approved the extrajudicial killing or disappearance of at least four hundred and ninety former security officials, in direct violation of the general amnesty the new regime had promised for Afghans who supported the US occupation.
As printed portraits of victims dangle from thread in a darkened room, a narrator intones, “The Taliban are on a campaign of revenge killings, slaughtering the Afghans who fought against them over the past two decades.” The video, which was produced by Sanjar Sohail, Barbara Marcolini, and Alexander Stockton, goes on to show graphic footage of the execution of a former security official named Haji Mullah Achakzai, a white scarf tied over his eyes, as well as the blood-splattered apartment where a female police officer named Nikie Daar and three others were killed. The narrator allows for the possibility that many of these killings were not officially sanctioned. Still, she says: “Make no mistake, the Taliban’s revenge campaign is deliberate and widespread.”
The day after the Times released the documentary, the Taliban issued a livid response. The “New York Times report on the assassinating of former security personnel is baseless and biased. No Mujahid has right to take revenge from anyone after the general amnesty announced by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.” Of course, there were reasons to doubt the Taliban’s honesty. There was also a reaction internally, since the Times bureau in Kabul had not been given a chance to review the video before its release. Soon, sources familiar with the Times’ operations in Afghanistan told me, news staff had to deal with incensed government officials, some of whom threatened to force the Kabul bureau to close. To take some pressure off the reporters on the ground, editors from Opinion got involved, trying to explain to Afghan leaders that the newsroom had nothing to do with the video. But the distinction between opinion and news was meaningless to the Taliban.
Dissension over what separates news from opinion coverage has been a constant far beyond that. At the Times, the liberal tilt of the editorial board has long complicated the work of the paper’s reporters, often on the Politics desk. What has changed lately, though, are the prominence and resources of Opinion in the digital era, as well as the scale of its original reporting, leading to more overlap between the Times’ divisions and, inevitably, more hard feelings. This spring, Nicholas Kristof’s report on Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees set off a major round of recriminations. Newsroom journalists offered anonymous quotes to Puck (“I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section,” an aggrieved Times employee said). Similar blowback greeted an Opinion profile by a freelance contributor, Ankush Khardori, of Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration and senior lawyer at Goldman Sachs, who had refused to talk with the newsroom’s reporters about her friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In both cases, outraged observers have sought to diminish Opinion’s reporting by stoking an abiding misapprehension that its writers do not have to follow the same standards of accuracy as their peers in the newsroom. That isn’t really the case: as a spokesperson for the newspaper put it, “Both news and opinion journalism at the Times is produced with deep journalistic rigor.”
When I asked Kathleen Kingsbury, the section’s editor, about these recent instances of opinion reporting triggering anonymous gripes from the newsroom, she affirmed that “news and Opinion do not coordinate editorially.” She continued, “That’s the system that we have built very purposefully, right? This is a long-standing idea, that the newsroom should be able to report independently without having to answer for the opinions in the Opinion section.” The so-called firewall ensures “that we feel confident that we can opine without necessarily worrying about, for instance, access to sources.”
As I spoke with editors, writers, and producers for the Opinion section this summer, it became clear how much stress the desk’s expansion has put on that firewall. Two decades ago, Opinion had only about fifty employees, namely columnists and the editorial board. The section’s role had evolved since the late nineteenth century, when Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher who bought the Times in 1896, wrote of his desire to turn the paper into “a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” It remained oriented around unsigned editorials issued by the board and articles by columnists, typically Times reporters such as Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and, yes, Kristof—journalists who had been rewarded for their strong track record on their respective newsroom beats with the ability to bring their personal perspective into their reporting.
Opinion has the same DNA today, even as the section now boasts some two hundred employees. Though still dwarfed by the Times’ newsroom (which has ten times the staff), the build-out of Opinion into a full-fledged newsroom within a newsroom means the section’s reporters are increasingly operating in the same arena as their down-the-middle colleagues. Opinion publishes two dozen guest essays every week, while more than a dozen columnists not only write but contribute to multimedia, with Ezra Klein and, until his recent departure, Ross Douthat hosting regular video podcasts; others rotate through a roundtable show called The Opinions. However influential Opinion columns remain, the section’s video side has far greater potential to reach people outside the Times ecosystem: The Ezra Klein Show regularly ranks in the top ten of the Apple Podcast subscriber chart, and some of the short documentaries have garnered more than ten million views on YouTube. In recognition of video’s growing prominence, Opinion recently consolidated its podcast and video operation into a single “Shows” team. Every year, that division continues to publish about a dozen enterprise video reports, which are produced in-house, and a similar number of “Op-Docs,” which are acquired from outside filmmakers.
Whether it be in a reported article or video dispatch, Opinion writers and newsroom reporters are increasingly producing overlapping work. Michelle Goldberg’s coverage of the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party—from Maine to Michigan to New Jersey—parallels the reporting of the Times’ Washington bureau, just as M. Gessen’s dispatches from Ukraine and the West Bank do the newsroom’s international efforts. Muddying the matter further, reporters on the other side of the firewall occasionally produce articles labeled “news analysis,” while writers for the Sunday magazine can make forceful arguments. How is the audience supposed to distinguish one section from the other?
“Fundamentally, the thing that makes New York Times opinion journalism distinctive from punditry,” Kingsbury said, is that the section’s columnists are often doing field reporting. “They’re gathering information, and that is what I think of as the evidence that supports the argument.” Even if it’s operating at a far greater scale, Kingsbury believes, Opinion is still very much filling its founding mandate. “If the newsroom tells you how to understand the world,” Kingsbury said, “the work of the Opinion desk is to give you clarity and context around it.”
When Kingsbury took over the Opinion desk, her job was to establish strong safeguards. She had been hired as deputy editorial page editor in 2017 by James Bennet, whose tenure running the section had culminated in an op-ed from Sen
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