Paul Krugman on Leaving the New York Times

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For two and a half decades, Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times were beacons of intelligence and common sense. Particularly for progressives inured to the work of many of his colleagues, Krugman offered a liberal gospel that was also a reliable refuge from mediocrity. 

The star economist—he won the Nobel Prize in 2008—was hired at the Times in 2000 by Howell Raines, then the editorial page editor, because he was “someone who knew economics, who wasn’t a terrible writer,” Krugman told CJR in an hour-long telephone interview from Saint Croix. 

When Krugman left the paper, last December, his departure attracted little notice, apart from some standard encomiums from his boss, Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. “It really has been an honor and a privilege to work with someone of Paul’s stature,” she wrote. 

Kingsbury, her deputy, Patrick Healy, and publisher A.G. Sulzberger all told CJR that they wished that Krugman had stayed at the paper—a desire none of them expressed last week, when an internal memo announced that Pamela Paul and Charles M. Blow would soon stop writing their columns.

“Paul is a terrific columnist and a valued colleague,” Sulzberger told CJR. “I’m grateful that he lent his voice to our pages for all these years, and we’ll all be cheering him on with whatever comes next.” In a telephone interview from London, Kingsbury said, “I thought Paul should stay, and I wanted to have his voice as part of the mix, and I did everything I could to keep him.”

Krugman agreed that he could have stayed at the paper. But in an interview, he said the circumstances of his job changed so sharply in 2024 that he decided he had to quit. He had been writing two columns and a newsletter every week, until September, when, Krugman said, Healy told him the newsletter was being killed.

“That was my Network moment,” Krugman said. “‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore’”—a quote from the Howard Beale character in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film.

Kingsbury said it was “patently untrue” that Krugman’s newsletter had been killed, although it stopped appearing last October. She emailed him on September 30 to urge him to stay at the paper, and offered to let him keep the newsletter, but without guaranteeing its weekly frequency. She told him he could “use it to weigh in when you and your editor agree that it’s necessary.” And there was a condition: if he wanted to keep the newsletter, the frequency of his column would have to be cut in half, to once a week. 

Krugman rejected that offer.

Times opinion columnists traditionally wrote twice a week, but Kingsbury noted that most now appear only once a week.

The offer to reinstate the newsletter did nothing to placate Krugman, who had another serious complaint. “I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he said. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” And, increasingly, attempts “to dictate the subject.”

“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” Krugman continued, “and often spent the afternoon in a rage. Patrick often—not always—rewrote crucial passages; I would then do a rewrite of his rewrite to restore the original sense, and felt that I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from his editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.”

Healy denied he had done anything to muffle Krugman’s voice. “He never called or emailed me saying I was changing his meaning or censoring his views, and he never lodged an objection to me that I overrode,” Healy wrote in his email to CJR. 

Healy added that Krugman was one of “our strongest voices studying, explaining and warning about the dangers of Trump’s economic plans and policies in 2024, and he used language and built arguments that were memorably searing about Trump’s ‘lies’ and ‘lying,’ ‘radical’ plans, ‘Trumpflation’ approach, and ideas that would ‘wreck our economy.’”

Krugman replied, “I guess it’s he said, he said. Despite my attempts to convey my unhappiness, they may not have realized just how much my experience had been degraded.”

Kingsbury acknowledged that the columnists had become more heavily edited when she succeeded James Bennet as opinion editor. Bennet resigned in 2020 after the paper published a controversial column by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, which advocated the use of military force against those who committed acts of violence after the death of George Floyd.

But Kingsbury insisted that Krugman had not been treated differently from any of his colleagues.

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.”

Almost everyone outgrows the Times eventually. I did when I was twenty-nine—mostly because of intrusive editing of my sentences by the metro desk. Just forty days after his last column appeared there, Krugman feels no regrets. He has moved his column to Substack, where he is writing two or three times as often as he was at the Times.

Of his former employer, he said, “I’m sure they were sorry to lose me. I never had the sense that they were trying to push me out. But they were exerting a very heavy hand on what went out under my name.”

For Krugman, “leaving has been a total liberation; no regrets at all. I hope it’s obvious from the Substack that I’m having fun.” He’s lost some of his “reach,” but his new column is now at 100,000 subscribers and growing quickly; a recent piece lauding California’s liberalism—at a time when the Golden State is a foil for pro-Trump conservatives—had more than 180,000 readers. “I’m getting a lot of feedback from readers who’ve found my Substack about how much better it is than the columns I was allowed to publish—no euphemisms, room for some humor, and yes, graphics where they help,” he said. “I think my California piece has been the best so far, and I shudder to think of what would have happened if I had tried to say anything like that at the Times.”

Yesterday Krugman sent a note to his Substack readers saying he planned to introduce a new paid tier for his blog for $7 a month, which “might include long-form explainers on things like the economics
of tariffs.”

But his nearly daily postings will remain free indefinitely.

His hope is that “in a few months I may have as much influence on the conversation as I did during that last awful year, because I can now speak freely.”

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