From a New Yorker interview by Clare Malone of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet headlined “Dean Baquet Never Wanted to Be an Editor”:
When Dean Baquet took over as the executive editor of the Times, in 2014—the first Black editor to fill the role—the paper, like so many around the country, faced layoffs and an uncertain future. Baquet is widely expected to step down this year, at the age of sixty-five, per company tradition. He will leave not just a thriving newspaper but a burgeoning media empire.
During his eight years at the helm, the paper won more than a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, the number of newsroom staff members increased from thirteen hundred to two thousand, and subscriptions soared. With increased revenues, the Times made forays into TV, podcasts, product reviews, and games. In the past two years alone, it bought Serial Productions, for twenty-five million dollars; the Athletic, a sports site, for five hundred and fifty million dollars; and the viral game Wordle, for an undisclosed sum in the low seven figures. “I think it’s a better news organization, as well as a more successful news business, than when I came in,” Baquet said. “I will take some credit for that.”
None of this is half bad for a college dropout. Baquet grew up in New Orleans, where his family owned a popular restaurant, Eddie’s. He started his reporting career at the age of nineteen, after three years at Columbia University. “I couldn’t go back to college,” he said in a 2020 interview. “I had found my life’s work and college felt boring.” His first jobs in journalism were in his home town, first at the New Orleans States-Item and then at the Times-Picayune. At thirty-one, he won a Pulitzer Prize, for his work on a six-month Chicago Tribune investigation into influence-peddling on the Chicago City Council. His brother Terry also received journalism’s top award, at the Times-Picayune, in 2006, for his part in the paper’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina. “I’ve got two boys with two Pulitzers,” Myrtle Baquet said that year. “Not many mothers can say that.”
Baquet insists that he was forced into becoming an editor. He joined the New York Times in 1990, as a Metro reporter, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer four years later, but the executive editor at the time, Joseph Lelyveld, asked him to move onto the editing track. Although he eventually acclimated to the job, he has always maintained that it was the “reporter instinct” that drove him. After a decade in New York, he left for the Los Angeles Times, where he served as the managing editor and later the executive editor. He was fired after a clash with the paper’s owners over mass layoffs. Baquet went back to the New York Times in 2007, first as the Washington bureau chief and then as the managing editor under Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor. Their tense relationship was well documented in the press—and later in Abramson’s book. When Abramson was fired, Baquet was chosen as her replacement….
In my conversation with Baquet, he seemed both reflective and defiant; one gets a sense of a man, at the twilight of his career, trying to protect his institution—not only the Times but journalism more broadly. “I think every generation thinks about these issues in a different way,” he told me. “My job is to try to convince my newsroom that they should not be overly influenced by criticism from Twitter, and that they shouldn’t be afraid of taking on subjects that are edgy and complicated. That they should report those subjects independently and fairly, and if Twitter doesn’t like it Twitter can jump in the lake.”
You won a Pulitzer in 1988, for investigative reporting, and your brother Terry won one in 2006. What was it about the Baquet household that made it so ripe for the Pulitzer committee?
I think we were encouraged to be ambitious. We did not come from a wealthy family, by any stretch. We grew up in a pretty modest house. When I was a kid, we lived in the back of the family restaurant. But you were pretty much encouraged to think big, to think ambitiously. And so, as a journalist—and I think Terry felt the same way—we thought ambitiously. We thought we could do anything we wanted to do. Even if, from outward appearances, the odds didn’t make that clear.
I’ve thought about that a lot. It went full swing. When I started, in the nineteen-seventies, the staff—the newsroom at the Times-Picayune or the States-Item, which was the afternoon paper—I mean, Walter Isaacson covered City Hall. But there were also a lot of guys from L.S.U. who were not just working-class, they were of the city and they had no intention of leaving.
My own view is that newsrooms are better now than they were then. Those newsrooms were not very diverse. They were very, very dominated by men, by white men. So, at the same time, newsrooms became a little more élitist, if you will, but they also became more diverse. Could somebody like me still make it in the newsroom? I think so. Look, I was driven. I’ll make no bones about it. I was—in ways healthy and not.
How was it unhealthy?
Oh, you know, you should always have a little balance in your life, and as a young journalist I didn’t necessarily have a lot of balance in my life. I was driven to succeed. I was driven by the story. I worked seven days a week. My first shift was 5 a.m. to 1 p.m., but I worked 5 a.m. to, like, midnight. Went home and took a nap and came back. I was a pretty ambitious young journalist.
Speaking of ambition, you once said you didn’t think that you were a careerist.
I really wasn’t careerist. I think of people who are careerist as though they’re plotting each step. I wanted bigger stories. I wanted better stories. I never wanted to be an editor. I was not one of those people who said, “I’ve got to cover City Hall because if I cover City Hall it will make it easier to cover national politics.” I really never thought like that. I probably didn’t have quite the same handle on how ambitious I was as I do now. But it was a little different from being careerist. I wanted to be really good, and I wanted to cover big stories….
You once said, “My racial and economic background influences the way I think about coverage and news.”And yet I think probably a lot of young Black journalists would quibble with some of your stances. I’m curious how you would describe those generational differences.
First off, the fact that I’m Black has had an enormous influence on my life and my career. It’s made me a better journalist, it’s made me an empathetic person, it’s shaped who I am. How could it not? The fact that I’m Black and from the South.
Newspapers have a lot more power, in my view, because of their deep belief in reporting. And I grew up having a deep belief in reporting—that you prove it. I think some people have misinterpreted that as my being too slow to take certain positions, but I have a skeptical mind and I believe deeply in reporting.
Each generation of journalists make their own journalism. And frankly make it better. And the next generation of Black journalists make certain demands of institutions—that they be more diverse, that they cover a broader range of stories—and I think that’s fantastic. I think that we should be more diverse and we should cover a broader range of stories.
I also have a very different job than the job I had when I was a twenty-year-old investigative reporter, investigating police abuses. One of my jobs is to be the empathetic leader of the New York Times. One of my other jobs is to make sure that the New York Times is a fair-minded institution, too.
At first, you sort of hated the decision to stop being an investigative reporter to become an editor. Do you ever regret it?
I didn’t want to do it. I was essentially ordered to become an editor. In those days, they didn’t give you a choice. And I hated it for the first year, because I wanted to be reporting. I don’t regret the decision. The best editors think like reporters. I believe deeply in reporting. I think reporting is, I don’t want to say endangered, but I think it’s under threat. And I think the fact that I grew up as a reporter makes me really protective of it. I was the national investigative reporter for the New York Times. But there were only three or four investigative reporters there. I feel like one of the things I was able to accomplish at the Timesis we do a lot of investigative reporting, and now we have, like, forty investigative reporters.
I think I really got comfortable with the decision to become an editor when I moved to Los Angeles. That, in a weird way, was like the make-or-break moment, right? When the L.A. Times came calling, it was, like, “O.K., if I go do this, I am now forever an editor. I’m entering the world of editors who work for news organizations, and maybe the job doesn’t work, maybe the job does work, but I’m now entering a different phase.”
Is there a reporter whose career or stories you’re jealous of?
I’m jealous of Eric Lipton. I was jealous of Sue Craig and Russ Buettner and Mike McIntire for getting Donald Trump’s taxes. I was jealous of Azmat Khanand Dave Philipps for the work they did getting the story about the air strikes. That was the kind of story I would have loved. I did a lot of national-security stories. In moments like that, when I’m in those discussions with them, yes, there’s a part of you that rises up and says, “Would you guys get away and let me have this story and give me your stuff?” Sure, yes, I’m jealous.
What were your assets as that particular kind of reporter? Was it temperament? Was it just perspicacity?
I always ask this of investigative reporters when I interview them for jobs. I was really good at getting people to talk to me. I was pretty relentless. For an era when documents meant tons of documents—the paper—I was very good at documents.
I was good at sitting in courthouses for hours, reading everything and finding one thing. I was good at going to the story, and I was always pretty good at thinking—keeping my eye on the ball of the story and not getting distracted.
How do you think the Times should handle incorporating into newspaper culture young reporters who might not have come up in daily newsrooms like you did, who come from outlets that have a political point of view?
I feel very strongly—and I know this is not embraced by everybody—that nobody is objective. The system of “objectivity” was designed to create a system—Wesley Lowery is right when he describes that—in which the organization’s job was to make sure that whatever your perspective was it didn’t get in the way of reporting the truth. I believe in that very strongly. That’s not the job of every institution. But the job of the New York Times should, in the end, be to come out with the best version of the truth, with your own political opinion held in check by editors and editing. Not everybody believes that, but I believe that. And I think that if you come to work for the New York Times—if you really want to work for the New York Times—you have to embrace that, because that’s what the New York Times is. Independence means being independent of everybody and of ideology—it just does.
And I know people want to beat up that view, but, I mean, the reason those stories about the air strikes had so much power is because people read them as the truth. And I never had a conversation with Azmat or Dave or Eric Schmitt about whether they believe in drone strikes or air power. I could care less what they believe in. Those stories have power because they’re the truth and they’re deeply reported. And I think if you want to work for the New York Times in the newsroom you have to embrace that.
Have you experienced challenges with, let’s say, younger millennials coming in?
Oh, sure….They have something big to bring to the table—that’s why we hire them, that’s why we’re not simply hiring people who are just like me. What they bring to the table is passion. What they bring to the table is an understanding of, frankly, the Internet era we’re in and how to write for it, how to think about it.
What we bring to the table is the power that they get when they produce a New York Times story. And I think we just got to do some trading. You get the power, but you’ve got to accept that we are what we are, which is an independent institution, independent of party and ideology.
Have you felt culturally or generationally out of step in the past couple of years with your vocal newsroom?
No, no, I feel extremely comfortable in my newsroom. Now, I mean, is there dissent? Sure, there’s dissent. Are there things that I feel strongly about that some people disagree with me about? Sure. I bet you the same thing happened to Abe Rosenthal [the former executive editor of the Times] during the Vietnam War.
Newsrooms should reflect the country, the world that they are covering, and the world is in the middle of some dissent and disagreement and debate right now. I don’t know how we’re supposed to escape that. We are supposed to manage and lead our way through it, but it’s perfectly reasonable that we’d have some of that in our newsroom….
This is sort of a different variation of the objectivity question, but is America such a different country now, compared with when you came up, that a different tenor of journalism is needed? That is, is the right wing of the country so extreme that the tone of newspaper coverage should be different? Maybe more muscular and polemical, rather than empathetic?
I don’t think we should cover racists with empathy. I think we should try to explain and have people understand how the world works so they can make their own decisions.
But let me back up a little bit. Has the world changed? I don’t know. I grew up in the South in the nineteen-sixties, where it was O.K. to run a racist political campaign. My South was a pretty rugged place in terms of race. So, yes, the world has changed, but it doesn’t look that different from the South I grew up in, to be perfectly frank…
I think you and I probably agree on the importance of narrative. But I am also curious if some of the backlash that stories like that get is because newspaper stories are actually changing. Even if you look at the Times, a lot of the stories aren’t narrativized—they’re live bullets of a breaking story. So, in some ways, readers maybe don’t want the narrative that’s showing, not telling.
Yes. And readers of Southern papers didn’t always want to read about their neighbors and their attitudes, too. Part of journalism has always been giving readers a mix of the things that they need to know to understand the world, and not being totally swayed by what they tell you they want. Because sometimes people don’t fully know what they want.
These papers have to make you eat your vegetables a little bit?
The difference between newspapers of my era and newspapers today is we’re trying to make your vegetables really good. I mean, you can’t say, “Goddammit, read about Ukraine.” The world is at a tense moment. You’ve got to make it interesting.
You’ve been described as very even-tempered and warm, but also as someone who’s punched holes in walls.
But I did it in such an even-tempered way.
I’ll trust you on that. You’ve been described as someone who can sidestep confrontation, but also as someone who got into a confrontation with the L.A. Times owners over layoffs and was fired. So I’m curious: When his back is against the wall, when is Dean the nice guy and when is he the bastard?
That is a great question. I don’t think of myself as a nice guy or a bastard. I’m passionate. I’m passionate about stories. I’m passionate about coverage. I don’t like to be pushed around. But I also have a lot of power, and I don’t think I’m supposed to go slapping people around with the power.
I thought that the owners of the L.A. Times at the time were really hurting the institution. I thought they wanted to make cuts that the paper would never come back from. And, frankly, I think I was right. In the end, they fired me because I wouldn’t let them do it without a fight. Really, that was one of the hardest moments in my career. I didn’t want to leave the paper. I loved it. I hired a bunch of people there. My family was happy there. But I thought that if I continued I couldn’t be an honorable leader in the place.
So I think there are times that every leader has to be resolute and tough—I wouldn’t call it being a bastard. And I thought that was one of those moments.
Have you ever had moments edging up to that at the Times?
No. The place is so different. The family that controls the New York Times really believes in the place. And they want the place to thrive and survive. They’ve sacrificed their own wealth, so, no, never came close. I mean, I had a tense relationship with Jill [Abramson]. I think that’s widely known. But, in terms of the ownership, the same—parallel to what happened in L.A.—never, never.
The editors of big papers are often asked by the government to hold off on publication of certain stories. Do you look back at any decisions throughout your career and think that you were too credulous of the government’s side?
I can think of some decisions I made that were wrong.
What are those?
There was one night on deadline when I was managing editor, and it was when the United States had just killed [Anwar al-] Awlaki, who was the American-born cleric.
In Yemen.
Yes, that’s right. The U.S. killed him. And we’re editing this story on deadline, and the C.I.A. called and said, “Could you not say that the drone took off from whatever base it took off from?” It felt like a minor part of the story. And they made the case that they would lose their base. And I was on deadline and I took it out of the story. And I woke up the next morning and realized that it was a dumb move. I shouldn’t have taken it out of the story. I made a mistake. I just sort of fell for the C.I.A.’s case. By and large, I’ve never done that. I was in charge of the New York Times’ WikiLeaks coverage and listened to the State Department make the case not to publish. We published.
What about the coverage that doesn’t live in black and white, that is more ambient? The obvious story that everyone brings up, which I almost feel duty bound to ask about, is Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.
I know this is going to get everybody riled up again, but I don’t have regrets about the Hillary Clinton e-mail stories. It was a running news story. It was a serious F.B.I. investigation. The stories were accurate. My God, we were writing stories about Donald Trump harassing women—we did the first of those. We wrote the first story about Donald Trump where we got a sheet of his taxes—or Sue Craig got a sheet of his taxes. I don’t buy that we were tougher on Hillary Clinton than we were on Donald Trump. There were a lot of stories where I think, if I had to do them over again, I would have done them differently. There are a lot of people on Twitter who like to parse out everything I say. There’s nothing I can do about that.
I don’t think that anybody had their arms wrapped around the mood of the country that allowed for the election of Donald Trump, including us. I don’t think people—including the New York Times—quite had a handle on the anger, the amount of racial animosity. I don’t think any of us thought that Donald Trump was going to be elected President. Anybody who says they did, I don’t buy it.
If I had to do that over again, oh, my God, I would do that very, very, very differently. I mean, we treated Trump seriously. We treated him as an investigative story. But I would have covered the country a lot differently in the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump.
I want to ask about the Times under you. The Times has, I would say, something of a cutthroat cultural reputation.
Which I’m going to push back at, but go ahead.
O.K. And there was an internal report from 2021 on the workplace culture of the Times, which found that a lot of your minority employees felt overlooked. Does the Times culture privilege the loudest voices in the room over, say, smart ones who are a little quieter? In other words, do you have to be cut from a certain cloth to succeed at the Times?
First off, the one thing that people always tell me after they’ve been at the Times for a while is that they came expecting a cutthroat culture and didn’t find it. I think that’s really sort of an older interpretation of the Times.
I think the people who succeed at the Times are the people who do really good stories. And not everyone at the Times who succeeds is, you know—Ellen Barry, who is one of the finest writers at the Times who gets nominated for Pulitzer Prizes constantly, who I hired to the L.A. Times and work with now at the New York Times, Ellen Barry does not fill my in-box with complaints.
People survive at the New York Times and do well based on the work. I mean, I’m sure some people would tell me I’m naïve, but, frankly, the work is what counts. It’s an internally competitive place in the sense that people want to work on really big stories and good stories.
Do you think different people metabolize that competitive atmosphere differently? In other words, you might have someone who is a bulldog reporter who really responds to it, and someone else who is also a great reporter but maybe is a less politically in-the-fray person or can’t as easily get the attention of an editor.
In every big institution, there are people who run the risk of falling by the wayside. And I think one of the jobs of a leader is to always have in mind who some of those people are and reach out to them and make sure that that doesn’t happen.
What did you make of the racial aspect of the workplace report, in which a lot of minority employees said that they felt like they couldn’t stay at the Times?
I think that they had some legitimate complaints. I mean, we embraced that report. I think they had some legitimate complaints that we’ve tried to respond to. Those were not just complaints of minority employees. I think they were questioning a culture, and I’m not sure I would call it cutthroat. I think they were questioning a culture where people had a language and a way of talking to each other, and where, if you didn’t figure out that language and that way of talking to each other, you felt like you were left out.
What does that mean? What’s the language?
Oh, you know, people know which [assistant managing editor] to go to to get their story attention. People know how to write a lede in a certain kind of way. People know how to craft the story in a way that the New York Times embraces it. Some people know which beats hold the greatest cachet. And I think that was true. I mean, we heard that and took that seriously. We have had to break that up and we have to continue to break that up. We have to make sure that—covid has made this harder, by the way—people feel comfortable coming into my office and pitching a story. We have to make sure that we don’t say, “O.K., these hundred people can write the lede of the paper and we’re not going to teach other people to do it.” I think we have to make sure that a lot of people know how to do that.
We were talking earlier about institutionalism and the power of institutions. There has been a star system that’s developed at the Times, and there have also been some public face-plants that have come out of that star system. The podcast “Caliphate” comes to mind here. Is part of changing the workplace culture of the Times trying to change that star culture a little bit, to try to put the institution a little bit above personalities?
I don’t have any trouble with the New York Times having stars….I just think that we have to make it so that everybody has got a shot at being a star.
Let’s take someone like Maggie Haberman. Maggie Haberman became a stand-in for the Times during a certain period. Doesn’t it cause problems when certain people become the face of the Times and then, as fallible human beings, do something that puts egg on their face, and then the unnuanced masses on Twitter say, “Look at the failing New York Times . . .”
My view is that Maggie worked extraordinarily hard to become a star journalist in America and earned it. I could care less about the unnuanced voices on Twitter. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about what our readers think, but I don’t pay as much attention to Twitter as Twitter might want me to.
Some of the employees at the Times are not classic journalists, or are not practicing classic journalism. What’s it been like for you to manage people and oversee projects where you couldn’t do their job? I’m thinking of the video investigations, the podcasts.
Picture sitting down with the video-investigations unit and watching what they can produce—I levitate out of my seat when I see that. That’s like a new kind of investigative reporting. I can’t do what they do. I can help them with their standards, and I can help them pick their stories. That’s exciting….
It used to be that, in order to run the Times, you had to have a certain pedigree. You had to have won a Pulitzer. Maybe you had to have worked overseas. Do you still need that pedigree?
To run the New York Times—I don’t want to call myself a great journalist, other people will have to decide what kind of journalist I am. But I think to run the New York Times you have to be a great, thoughtful journalist. That comes first. That’s before everything else.
And then you have to be a leader. But you can’t be the editor of the New York Times, the leader of the New York Times, without being a committed, thoughtful journalist. You have to walk into a room of other journalists and be listened to….
What have you liked the least about being the editor of the Times?
I don’t know if this is going to answer that question, but it’s something I want to say. I worry a lot that we’re in an era where people don’t fully respect the power of reporting. Social media rewards snark and nastiness and off-the-cuff opinionating. And I worry about that. So what I’ve liked least is watching that develop within journalism. Watching smart people make fools of themselves on social media.
Obviously, things like the Daily, the Cooking section, and potentially something like the Athletic are good business opportunities to diversify the audience for the Times. But are there downsides to the journalistic mission when people start to view the Times and its products as part of a life-style brand, or a cultural signifier of class and politics and taste, rather than a news-gathering institution?
I don’t think so. I think that at the heart of the New York Times is its news-gathering operation. Truth be told, we’ve always done all of those things. And it’s always been a myth that people read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the L.A. Times only for their news. I mean, there are people who read us just because of our arts coverage, people who read us just because of our books coverage, people who read us because of our sports coverage. I think that all of these developments—the building out of a potential franchise for Cooking, Games, all those things—are completely consistent with what the New York Times has been for forever. It’s just that technology allows us to do them in a very different way. And at the core is the news report.
The Times has flourished in this nationalized news environment. How does it feel to be in that position of success when so many others are floundering?
First off, people have short memories. It wasn’t that long ago that a major magazine raised the question “Can the New York Times survive?” When I became editor, in 2014, we had to do layoffs and buyouts. The newsroom in 2014 was about thirteen hundred people. The newsroom is over two thousand now. The New York Times has built what it built through hard work. That’s only eight years ago when we were doing buyouts and layoffs. The New York Times has turned the corner in recent years.
To see us as this behemoth that’s, like, swallowing the world—I think we need to do this many, many more years before anybody can say that. We’ve sort of licked the new economics of the news business recently, and with great success. I’m proud that I was part of it. I care deeply for local news. I grew up in local news. I believe that the New York Times has got to be good at local news itself, but I also think that the New York Times has to have its ducks in order and its own salvation before it can help other people.
Are you going to retire from the Times in April?
What?
You heard me.
At my age, your hearing gets . . .
All right, O.K. Speaking of your age, what are you going to do when you retire? Because you’re not that old. Are you going to retire-retire? Are you going to still do something in journalism?
I have a lot of energy, I’m healthy. I don’t expect to go off and write a memoir or give speeches around the country. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I’m not going to completely retire from journalism. I care about journalism. Journalism took a nineteen-year-old kid with not a lot of money and transformed his life. I owe some things to journalism. I wouldn’t mind thinking about ways to pay back some of that debt, but I’m not going to learn to play the ukulele or anything like that.
Are you going to leave New York? I know that you purchased a home in L.A.
Whenever I do retire…I am going to spend time in Los Angeles. I have a son who lives in Los Angeles. I love Los Angeles. I also love New York, by the way.
You were saying that you feel like you’ve mostly accomplished the things that you wanted to do during your time. What were those things in 2014? And what didn’t you get done that is unfinished business?
I wanted to stabilize the place. In 2014, we had morale issues. We were doing buyouts and layoffs. So I do take credit for helping to transform the New York Times into a place that could survive and thrive, the way it is now. I think I’m the first investigative reporter to run a major news organization, and I think it shows. I do think that I helped make the New York Times a great investigative paper. I would argue the best investigative paper, whether it’s the air-strike stories or it’s getting Trump’s taxes. I mean, that’s been important to me. We are more visual. What did I not get done? Frankly, if I look at the list of things I wanted to accomplish back then, I think we did pretty well. I can’t think of anything big we didn’t pull off.
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