Putting the ‘Public’ Back in Public Editor.

When the NYT eliminated its Public Editor position, it said that ‘readers across the internet’ could do the same job, better. Here is what I learned from unexpectedly giving that system a try.

The US Politics online home page of The New York Times one week ago, the morning after millions of people turned out at some 2,700 ‘No Kings’ demonstrations across the US. Why this low-key coverage of the biggest American public gathering in more than 55 years? I asked the paper’s representatives and will share their reply. (JF screenshot, 11:20am on October 19, 2025.)

This post is on a familiar topic—press ‘framing’ of our current emergencies—but with an unfamiliar twist. My purpose today is to present, for the record, a recent back-and-forth I had with representatives of The New York Times. This exchange came after I complained online about the Times’s coverage of last weekend’s ‘No Kings’ protest.

Here’s the plan for what follows. I’ll start with background on why I complained. Then I’ll quote at length from the Times’s on-the-record responses. I’ll close with some things I’ve learned, and still wonder about, from this interaction.

And, yes, we’re all aware that a lot of other things are going wrong at this moment. For today I’m concentrating on the Times, as the most influential organization in one of the sectors most crucial to defense of democracy.

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1) Background: Seven million people show up, but don’t make the front page.

Last weekend, the largest collection of public gatherings in modern US history took place, across all 50 states.

Only once in all of American history have more people turned out in demonstrations on a single day. That was on April 22, 1970, as part of the original Earth Day movement. But Earth Day events had been planned for more than a year and had organizational support from labor unions, hundreds of universities and thousands of public schools, some state and local governments, and even a few companies. This year’s ‘No Kings’ protests, pulled together in these past few months, were the most significant mass events in the lifetimes of most of today’s Americans.

Nearly all US publications treated this as the big civic news it unquestionably was. The Washington Post ran it as a front-page banner headline. [Update: I’ve added a screen shot at the end of this paragraph.] So did most other papers, large and small, all across the country and in much of the rest of the world. Check any newspaper’s online archives for illustrations.

This made the NYT’s approach a notable outlier. When I got my home-delivered Sunday print paper the next day—one week ago, on Sunday—I found a “below the fold” box on its front page concerning ‘No Kings.’ (It’s highlighted in red.) The box directed readers to a story on page A23.

The “lead story” placement for that same day’s paper, at the right-hand top of the front page (highlighted in blue), was a “Dems in disarray” account. It criticized the party for using the “well-worn playbook” of urging voters to “stop Trump.” Who, as it happens, is still in power and needs stopping.

Just for comparison, one month earlier the paper had presented the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, which drew 100,000+ people, as its front-page lead story, with a big photo and “above the fold” headline.

Why? What explained the ‘No Kings’ presentation that was so different from that of most other news organizations, and from the Times’s own presentation of many other mass political events?

I asked a version of that question, and complained about the framing, in a Bluesky post the day I saw the coverage, one a week ago.

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2) More background: The ‘modern watchdogs.’

For fourteen years, from 2003 to 2017, the Times staff included a “Public Editor,” who was empowered to ask editors and reporters about decisions they had made—and to get the answers on the record. Some Public Editors were excellent and others were not, and the system caused understandable friction within the paper. But overall, I thought for readers it was a huge plus.

When the paper’s then-publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., announced the end of the Public Editor system, he said that readers and online commentators could take over that duty. As he put it then:

Our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person [the Public Editor] could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.

All these years later, and without realizing it, it turned out that in the ‘No Kings’ case I had been acting as one of those ‘modern watchdogs,’ asking questions and registering disagreements online.

I was then able to take a further step not available to most such volunteer watchdogs. I had previously been in touch with a Times spokesperson, who wrote me after I’d criticized another theme in the paper’s coverage. He invited me to contact him and his colleagues when I had questions about their stories.

So a week ago, after seeing the ‘No Kings’ coverage, I took up the offer. Why, I asked in an email, had the paper framed the story the way it did?

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3) One response: The on-the-record official statement.

I heard back quickly from one of my contact’s colleagues, a Times spokesperson named Nicole Taylor. She sent me the lines below as the paper’s official response, and said I could attribute it to her. I quote with her permission, and in full:

The Times had more than 20 reporters and a dozen photographers covering the ‘No Kings’ protests in 28 locations around the U.S. and the world on Saturday. We displayed that comprehensive journalism prominently on our homepage, where millions of readers spent time with our live coverage, articles, photo slideshows, and video pieces. Others sought out our live blog or read about the demonstrations in our flagship newsletters.

While we did have our two front-page photos on the protests, using print alone to measure a story’s significance, impact, or reach is a partial and outdated assessment. Altogether, this was comprehensive on-the-ground coverage, in line with how we would approach documenting other comparable events.

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4) Further responses, for ‘context.’

For me the most interesting part of Nicole Taylor’s response was all the additional material she sent beyond the formal statement. She said that I was free to “draw on it for context.” I have since clarified that I can quote it directly, as in some samples below.

How did coverage decisions look from the paper’s point of view? She started with a timeline of coverage before the Sunday print-and-online presentation I was complaining about:

Our news editors believed that the thousands of “No Kings” protests deserved significant coverage…

On Friday [the day before the protests] we published a preview of the protests. On Saturday morning, we published our day-of article and placed it in a prominent position on our home page, where it stayed for about 24 hours….

On Saturday afternoon, we published a collection of imagery from around the world that fed into a slideshow on our home page, and eventually a video. Most of our audience reads, watches, and listens to our coverage online, and this protest coverage on our platforms was robust. All these efforts fed into two images from the protests on our print front page Sunday, and were pushed to our millions of followers on social media…

Our digital subscriber audience is 20 times larger than our print subscriber base, and many non-subscribers saw and read this coverage over the weekend as well.

She addressed my complaint about the layout of that Sunday print front page in particular:

—On Sundays we tend to showcase reporting that readers can only find at The Times, in this case, the results of a monthslong investigation into how members of a murderous regime have escaped justice…

—Having two photos on the Sunday front page and deep nationwide reporting on most of an inside page is significant print coverage…

—We covered the “No Kings” protest in June on the Sunday print front page, as well as inside the paper. We covered the July protests as well.

And she said this about framing decisions more generally:

As you know, editorial judgment calls on ongoing protests draw on a lot of factors. The “No Kings” protests last weekend made similar arguments as the “No Kings” protests in June that we covered on the front page. We decided that the October protests also warranted prominent treatment, and we provided it through two photos on the front page, which is significant real estate, and then had robust coverage inside the paper.

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5) What have we learned here?