On Thursday afternoon, hundreds of staff members of The New York Times decided their model was Black Lives Matter, staging a 20-minute walkout over cuts to the paper’s staff and the elimination of its copy desk while some of them chanted “no editors, no peace.”
Black Lives Matter’s use of the mantra of “no justice, no peace,” became common at its rallies and marches.
The protesters also chanted, “They say cutbacks, we say fight back,” and held signs reading, “This sign wsa not edited.”
The day before the protest, copy editors sent an open letter to Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, and Joe Kahn, the managing editor, which stated, “We have begun the humiliating process of justifying our continued presence at The New York Times.”
That letter was echoed on Thursday in a letter from Times reporters, which asserted:
Like nearly everyone we know in the newsroom, we believe that the plan to eliminate dozens of editing jobs and do away with the copy desks is ill-conceived and unwise, and will damage the quality of our product. It will make us sloppier, more error-prone. It will undermine the reputation that generations have worked to build and maintain, the reputation that keeps readers coming back. You are reducing the number of people doing the work of editing, which would be harmful enough in itself. But you plan to take work away from people who do it well, and give it to people who have not developed the same skills, and who are already over-burdened.
We writers are not in need of a companionable read before someone hits the send button on our articles. We don’t need a stroke and a purr. We want forceful, focused intellects brought to bear on our work. We realize that painful change is afoot. We’ve accepted and borne the brunt of many rounds of layoffs and buyouts. None were as destructive to morale – nor, we fear, as destructive to The Times – as this one. It is something different in kind.
The Times currently employs over 100 copy editors; that number is expected to shrink to 50. The Times itself noted:
As part of the restructuring, management plans to replace the current, layered system of copy editors and “backfielders” — editors who assign and work with reporters on articles — with a single layer of editors who will handle all aspects of an article, including conception, sentence-level editing and fact checking.