What is happening with editorial boards is not normal. You need to understand this first.
They are not part of the newsroom, so anyone telling you that is lying. What happened at the LAT and WaPo are the beginning. Have you not read history? They come for you. You just think it’s more steps away.
Congratulations for running newspapers.
I think the world at large has figured out that it’s wrong. 200,000 people have cancelled their WaPo subscriptions so far, and some people have written some pretty in-depth essays about exactly why it is such a huge problem:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/26/anticipatory-obedience-newspapers-endorsement-refusal
https://www.cjr.org/political_press/the-washington-post-opinion-editor-approved-a-harris-endorsement-a-week-later-the-papers-publisher-killed-it.php
The CJR’s previous piece about anticipatory obedience also, as The Guardian notes, looks highly prescient now:
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-potter-scheppele-orban-trump-hungary-media-punish.php
There have also been some pieces about how to try to keep good media alive now that conditions are becoming hostile to it:
https://www.citationneeded.news/i-am-my-own-legal-department/
Glad to have you in the conversation, I guess. Yes, it’s not normal, it’s very bad.
I wasn’t trying to brag; this is just appalling, and when one speaks about the failure of journalism, it helps to have run a few papers.
CJR sounds great at first, but it’s about as useful as Poynter. A lot of bluster with no real direction. Both put out some good stuff, but you have to have the same salt cellar.