Our Advice to The New York Times About a Vexing Editorial Decision

In April 2024, The New York Times editorial board said it would stop making endorsements in local elections. This decision sparked a fair amount of derision amongst the chattering class. (For a prime example, see Harry Siegel’s savage take for Vital City: “New York Times to New York: Drop Dead.”)

Then, as the Democratic mayoral primary heated up, the paper on June 12 released what was pitched as a substitute for an endorsement, branded The Choice: A panel of 15 prominent New Yorkers chose their favorite candidate. (Comptroller Brad Lander came out as the top choice of seven panelists.)

But The Times wasn’t done. On June 16, the paper released a 1,853-word unsigned editorial entitled “Our Advice to Voters in a Vexing Race for New York Mayor” in which the paper kind of, sort of told readers who to vote for — or at least told them who not to vote for (and along the way flung calumnies against former mayor Bill de Blasio that read like a ventriloquized version of Michael Bloomberg complaints). The paper urged against ranking Zohran Mamdani while saying both kind and unkind things about Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander and Whitney Tilson, leaving many readers perplexed about what guidance to take away. (We ran the editorial through a few different AI bots to see who they thought it was recommending.)

Many believe The Times has squandered its unparalleled influence in New York City politics by failing to issue a direct endorsement this year. In May 2021, the paper boosted Kathryn Garcia to great effect. This year, many hoped the board would bring similar clarity to a race that has left many voters flummoxed 

What to make of it all, and what should The Times do next? We assembled our own panel to advise the paper on how better to advise the public.

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Better than silence

Errol Louis

I salute the staff of The New York Times opinion section and editorial board for attempting to correct the colossal blunder — made by the paper’s management, not the editorial board itself — of no longer endorsing candidates for local offices, including mayor. As the world’s financial capital and the nation’s biggest city (larger than 16 states, generating more than a trillion dollars’ worth of economic activity every year), the critical question of who should govern New York would be worth opining on even if The Times weren’t headquartered here. Getting local government right here matters.

Instead of a straightforward assessment of the candidates and a recommendation of who to vote for, The Times’s clunky workaround involved soliciting the views and opinions of 15 New Yorkers; publishing interviews with the leading candidates; and publishing a strangely-worded non-endorsement expressing disappointment with all the Democratic candidates (as well as life in the city over the last decade) and urging readers not to rank Zohran Mamdani in the party’s primary.

A parade of statistics refute the paper’s faulty baseline assumption that “quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade” and that politicians are to blame. Shootings and homicides are down so far this year, and the 377 homicides recorded last year are, like the 333 murders in 2014, near the lowest numbers in a century (the all-time low was reached in 2017). Our city’s formidable medical complex — from the 11 public hospitals to the groundbreaking research institutions affiliated with Columbia, Cornell and NYU — has made so much steady progress on chronic diseases and public health measures that life expectancy here reached an all-time high of 82.6 years in 2019, the year before COVID struck.

But instead of noting policy innovations like the creation of universal early education or the long-overdue curbside composting and containerization of trash, The Times (which scoffed at pre-K when then-candidate Bill de Blasio proposed it in 2013) has asked readers to reject Mamdani’s proposals for free bus service and a rent freeze, dismissing them as “an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” The board instead grudgingly sort of voted for Andrew Cuomo (whose resignation as governor The Times board called for in 2021) — though many interpretations of the inscrutable editorial concluded that maybe they were recommending Brad Lander.

So I don’t like the board’s logic and I think they have the facts wrong. But I’m very glad they decided to get back in the civic conversation, mistakes and all. 

Errol Louis is political anchor at NY1 News and a Vital City contributing writer.

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To opine is to choose

Richard J. Tofel

I hope we can all agree that The New York Times made a hash of its editorial page’s role in this year’s mayoral campaign. Last August it said it would end a 124-year-old practice and stop making endorsements in local races, even as it continued to do so in presidential campaigns, and even as many readers welcome the guidance locally, while the number of presidential undecideds who depend on The Times approaches the null set. Then, this month, two days before early voting began, the paper published the preferences of a group of 15 citizens purely of its own choosing, implying some sort of group preference.

Finally, on the third day of early voting, it advised primary voters directly, in an editorial which implicitly (but not explicitly) indicated that the non-endorsement policy announced 10 months earlier had been repealed. The proffered advice included denigrating the field as a whole, suggesting alternative top choices for “progressives” and “moderates,” attacking the leading candidate in the polls as unfit and his leading challenger as entirely unworthy, but refusing to specify its own choice — a luxury not available to citizens who feel an obligation to participate in our democracy while we still have one.

I have some sympathy for the argument against editorial endorsements in modern politics. Nationally, they have become unpersuasive. Even locally, they can undermine trust in the distinction between news and opinion, and strike an imperfect balance between emphasizing politics and policy. But you’re either in or you’re out. 

French Premier Pierre Mendès-France said that “to govern is to choose.” So it is with voters, who remain the rulers in a country whose foundational document begins, “We, the people.” It made no sense for the same editorial page to endorse two candidates at the same time for president in 2020 when primary voters could only make one choice. The approach taken in this election by The Times makes even less sense. 

Richard J. Tofel is the former president of ProPublica and assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of the Second Rough Draft newsletter.

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Put the ‘New York’ Back in The New York Times

Thomas Dyja

I’ve finally gotten over the New York Giants playing in New Jersey, but The New York Times becoming a national paper will forever drive me crazy. We needed The Times to endorse — really endorse — a candidate in the Democratic primary for mayor. We needed it to admit that it exists in New York City, that what happens next week matters on a day-to-day level to the people who write and publish it, that The Times has more responsibility to the city that named its prime gathering place after it than it does to folks clicking through to its site in Spokane, Davenport or London. While avoiding “a one-size-fits-all endorsement,” as its explanation claimed, sounds like a lofty goal, voting, whether we like it or not, is exactly that.

The solve is easy enough. Endorse next time! But if The Times is truly serious about helping New Yorkers “make their own decisions,” it would do the job every day and revive its City Desk. Its 2016 retreat from regular city reportage in favor of “larger, more consequential themes” has proven that watching New York function step by step, meeting to meeting, profoundly matters. Every morning when we opened The Times, we used to see our local democracy functioning — a messy, contentious business based more on process, involvement, and compromise than party platform slogans. Its shift to focus on “investigations of individuals and institutions that wield outsize power” and “deeply reported narratives” has delivered brilliant prize-bait journalism that tends to reduce New Yorkers to spectators and consumers. Issues are covered where there’s drama and characters, good guys and bad guys. Emergencies and conflicts are all that’s considered newsworthy. 

No wonder New Yorkers think the sky is falling. The onus, it appears, isn’t on us to make something with our city; it’s on someone else to come and fix it for us.

Gothamist, City & State, The City, Crain’s, Hell Gate and others: They’ve all stepped up to provide first-rate local coverage, but all together, they simply can’t move the needle the way The Times can. We need a free and powerful institution that tells us what’s happening this morning in City Hall, the boardroom, the street corner and the penthouse; that acts as our partner in the daily, collective mission that is New York City.

Thomas Dyja is author of “New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation.” ════════════════════════════════════════

A step back, then steps forward

Tim Tompkins

In the context of increasingly anemic metro coverage too often unburdened by nuance or history, The Times’ announcement last year that it would no longer endorse in local elections hit hard for those of us who love city government. My first response was a mix of bafflement and indifference when I heard about the oddly-reality-TV-named “The Choice. “A weird non representative panel of morons,” exclaimed a friend of mine. “They have no idea who lives in this city!!”   

But when I looked at the panel, I saw a racially and ideologically diverse group of people — eight of whom I know personally to be extraordinarily well-versed in the wants and needs and failings of the city. Is that a sign that this group is not representative of the average voter and instead representative of a highly informed civic class? Absolutely!  But that's what we need. The Times panel was composed of opinionated people who also understand how hard it is to govern and to make government work.  

Could the panel have been more of a mix? Certainly. But finding folks not already firmly in one candidate’s camp (or fearful of it) out of institutional or ideological loyalty is likely very hard. For me, the panel is a fascinating —  and radical — experiment, in much the same way that The Times’ “America in Focus” pieces about the presidential race last fall were. Exhausted by The Times’ often-unsubtle and intrusive framing of political issues by reporters, I found the direct thoughts of very different people about the candidates to be incredibly refreshing and clarifying.  

And then there was the editorial board’s unexpected editorial. Cue the eye rolls. “A non-apology apology for dropping endorsements” noted a former colleague (she may have a point). But dammit, that clumsiness itself takes courage. It’s more than a little embarrassing, but they did it because someone somewhere snapped back into reality about how much this matters, not just for New York, but for the country, and frankly, for all cities in the world. It provided additional complexity and context to the already abundant amount of opinion in The Choice. While meandering, it stated some strongly held opinions in a thoughtful and understated way. In a world of rigid oversimplification, I like that.  

Most importantly, The Times editorial board broke through the alluring fog of “what if” to see the clear reality of “what is.” Attention must be paid. Not tending to the messy mechanics of government is political suicide for Democrats.  

The Times has spoken, and I am glad: take note, get your nose to the grindstone and your ass off the grandstand and do something. 

Tim Tompkins is an NYU Marron Institute fellow, where he leads the Sustaining Places Initiative.

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There’s no going back

Alexis Grenell

The New York Times declared itself no longer a local paper when it dramatically scaled back its Metro coverage in 2016. It scaled back local editorial coverage as well, which routinely used to weigh in on timely matters of substance. Eleanor Randolph, who led that coverage for the board, and later Mara Gay, wrote prolifically about city and state issues, providing necessary insight to give readers more than just the facts ma’am: They offered clear-eyed judgment too. 

That’s the very opposite of the whinging, scattered non-endorsement the paper ran on the candidates for mayor. I could barely follow the logic, let alone the point. It read like a publisher’s tantrum and perhaps regret, for previously deciding not to endorse in local races. It undermined the oddly composed panel the paper called “The Choice,” which at least made a decision about who would be the best mayor — rating Brad Lander best overall. The editorial effectively contradicted this by claiming there were no good choices. Welcome to politics, Punch. Elections are the bus where we have to choose the candidate that gets us closest to where we’re trying to go. This isn’t Uber. The Choice panel understood the assignment. The editorial board did not. 

Voters have to make a choice, and historically The Times has helped them do so in local elections. As dubious as some of their endorsements have been, the board at least performed the task that it expected of its readers. What’s so absurd about this week’s screed is that not only did the paper abdicate that role — and the power and prestige that go with it — but it reversed its own positions. “The past decade has been disappointing,” the editorial read, referring to a time during which Andrew Cuomo was governor, and The Times called for him to resign, but he’s better for New York’s future than many alternatives? Brad Lander, who The Times endorsed for comptroller in 2021, and who this editorial said “exudes competence,” doesn’t get the nod this time? “Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality,” but let’s take another look at the guy who defunded them?

Get a grip. 

As the paper acknowledged, ranked-choice voting is the silver lining for voters struggling with the field. But then it didn’t offer any rankings, just more grumbling and griping better suited to a Second Avenue coffee shop. Next time, somebody just get Sulzberger a donut.

Alexis Grenell is a columnist for the Nation and the co-founder of Pythia Public Affairs.

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Callow Times

Robert A. George

The New York Times’ editorial board’s “original sin“ (as it were) was its announcement last year that it would no longer endorse in local races — including in mayoral elections, as it had done since 1897. It was preemptive abandonment of a vital civic role which New Yorkers of diverse backgrounds had come to rely upon. Candidates saw a Times endorsement as something valuable to seek out and a mediating force in the city’s rough-and-tumble politics. 

Rather than consider the value of its own institutional voice during a particularly complex time — the second mayoral race with ranked choice voting and the first with Donald Trump as president on top of that — The Times outsourced policy assessment to 15 intellectuals, activists and political strategists, hoping collective wisdom might form a guiding consensus (seven of them picked city comptroller Brad Lander). No offense, but that panel’s insights were no substitute for a board that had the power to command interviews from every candidate to assess vision, policies and character. 

Less than a week later, The Times took another bite at the apple — only to throw their hands up in an opaque non-endorsement. It bemoaned a field which “lacks any candidate who seems likely to be the city’s next great mayor. For that reason, we are not endorsing a candidate” (emphasis added).

That’s a cop out. An editorial board isn’t seeking “New York City’s next great mayor,” as if it were some kind of reality show. Its responsibility is to identify the best to lead the city for the next four years.

Beyond that, it’s disingenuous not to even give a nod to the real reason for their lack of an endorsement. Why blame the field for the board’s squandering of its endorsement power? 

In similar incomprehensible fashion, while making clear its disdain for Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, the editorial lands on a half- (quarter-) hearted “recommendation” (whatever you do, don’t call it an endorsement) that voters, maybe, possibly could consider Brad Lander.  

At a moment when New Yorkers most needed its voice, the old Grey Lady frittered away a 128-year legacy — for what, exactly?  

Robert A. George is a veteran of the New York Post, Daily News and Bloomberg editorial boards. 

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Endorse again, with names attached

Josh Greenman

No, The Times never should’ve stopped making endorsements in local political races. The paper’s editorial board had for generations played an indispensable role in these elections, helping educate and guide millions of New Yorkers on the most important democratic choice they make. Then it scurried away from the podium like a kid with stage fright, while bizarrely choosing to continue to endorse at the national level, where the paper’s voice is relatively predictable and redundant. Insult to injury, they made a hash of things this year by publishing two non-endorsement endorsements — first presenting The Choice panel collecting the recommendations of 15 handpicked New Yorkers, then offering an incoherent editorial lamenting the quality of the candidates while especially warning against Zohran Mamdani. This is behavior befitting a non-voter sitting on a barstool; the paper of record has a responsibility to assess an imperfect field and choose.

But we are where we are. What should happen now?

There’s nothing wrong with The Times keeping something like the Choice panel — there are probably a handful of readers who are truly burning to know restaurateur Danny Meyer’s opinion of who has the best policing strategy — but The Times should simultaneously return to good old-fashioned local endorsements, with a twist. 

Editorial board endorsements can have real value. They help voters cut through the clutter of transactional trades and single-issue advocacy groups and see the big picture. But they’ve always been a strange animal. They’re made “in the voice of the paper,” but in reality, they’re the judgment of a small group of opinion journalists, or maybe really just the publisher. They represent the opinion, not the news, side of the paper, but many readers don’t understand the difference. 

So when the members of the board are making a call, they should be transparent about who they are and how they chose. When Mort Zuckerman owned the Daily News, he had us endorse Mitt Romney for president in 2012, and an unprepared upstart named Oliver Rosenberg over Rep. Jerrold Nadler (Mort was angry with Nadler over Nadler’s support for the Iran nuclear deal). Neither was a choice the board would have made on its own. 

Readers are understandably confused when they read a disembodied “we” at a newspaper declaring one candidate to be superior and the other inferior, so advice should have names attached. For accountability and clarity, news stories have bylines; endorsement editorials should too.

Josh Greenman is managing editor at Vital City and former editorial page editor of the New York Daily News.

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A debacle through and through

Tom Allon

One of the few remaining powers print media has is the power of the endorsement in local political races.

The New York Times decided last summer to squander that vestigial role and instead experimented this year with a few different ways of weighing in on the mayoral race in New York City. The Choice feature, asking 15 diverse but prominent New Yorkers to rank their personal choices for mayor, was ineffectual and confusing. Comptroller Brad Lander “won” that mini-primary, meaning the choice of The Times-chosen experts aligned with that of the stereotypical Times reader, a resident of brownstone Brooklyn like Lander.

Then, sensing that its abdication of responsibility in endorsements might contribute to a Zohran Mamdani victory, The Times editorial board took out its sledgehammer to pummel the 33-year-old surging Assemblymember/Democratic Socialists of America candidate. The Times also trashed the whole field, including front-runner Andrew Cuomo, and, with faint praise, implied that Lander was the best of the worst. They concluded with a hope that in four years, New Yorkers will have better choices for mayor.

The only thing The Times accomplished in this wildly inconsistent opinion coverage is ensure that it will avoid endorsing another mayoral loser. It’s been more than a quarter century since The Times backed a candidate who eventually became mayor. Bravo to The Times editorial board. Mission accomplished!

Tom Allon is the founder and publisher of City & State and the co-founder of the 5Boro Institute.

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A pang of Gray Lady regret?

Daniel Okrent

When The Times announced last year that they would be endorsing for president, but no longer for state or local offices, I imagined there were three possible reasons:

1. They wanted to declare to their national and international readership that the “New York” in their name was no longer a relevant descriptor.
2. They believed their New York (and Connecticut and New Jersey) readers to be so well-informed, so public-spirited, and so plugged-in that the paper wouldn’t need to tell them whom to vote for in a contested Democratic primary in, say, the 32nd State Assembly District, or the 17th Congressional District, or a statewide primary for attorney general — and in every other similarly irrelevant (in their view) election. BUT the editors also believed these readers, despite their many civic virtues, had no idea whom to vote for in a presidential election; thus, their shocking — and immeasurably helpful! — endorsement of Joe Biden.
3. They just don’t give a shit about New York.

The first of these reasons is apparently true. And because reason No. 2 couldn’t be (as it is completely preposterous), you have to go with No. 3. Regarding the current mayoral race, one might say that the paper’s whipsawing publication of recommendations from a panel of other New Yorkers, coupled with their nearly simultaneous non-endorsement endorsement, suggests that The Times may be regretting its egregious abdication of civic responsibility. I doubt it, but one can always dream.

Daniel Okrent is former public editor of The New York Times.

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Please come home

Julie Sandorf

For decades, advertising revenues and robust print subscriptions allowed local news outlets to thrive financially, hold powerful institutions accountable to the public, and exert considerable influence on our body politic with editorials and endorsements of candidates for public office. The collapse of this business model has significantly degraded this essential pillar of our civic health, and the impact has been well documented: declines in voter turnout, and increases in corruption, municipal borrowing and polarization. 

The Daily News Editorial Board, with a total staff of around two people, continues to punch far above its weight class, but last year, its hedge fund owner nixed all but local endorsements. And while nonprofit outlets such as The City, Documented, New York Focus, City Limits and WNYC/Gothamist are working valiantly to fill the breach with significantly less resources, these tax-exempt 501-c-3 organizations are prohibited by law from making endorsements.  

With savvy business decisions, The New York Times has rescued itself from financial ruin to become one of the most profitable news organizations in the world, and I am among millions who benefit from their good fortune and vast resources. Their opinion section alone, with 200 people on staff, is likely larger than the city’s other newspaper newsrooms in aggregate.  

This makes their decision in 2024 to end local endorsements all the more confounding, especially when followed by a confusing “Advice” editorial that put its toe back in the endorsement water. Readers like me have relied on The Times’ deep knowledge of local public affairs, diligence in research and knowledge of the candidates to craft an endorsement that we could trust to be fully vetted.  

In 2021, The Times Editorial Board published their interviews with mayoral candidates, which were revelatory. Their information-rich endorsement of Kathryn Garcia catapulted her from single-digit polling to coming a little more than 7,000 votes short of winning the election. The 2021 endorsement also devoted at least a paragraph to each of the other candidates. In contrast, this year’s “Advice” editorial dedicated less than one sentence each to Adrienne Adams, Scott Stringer and Zellnor Myrie, all of whom have significant experience and track records. Did they meet with all the candidates? And if they did, why give such short shrift to their readers? 

New York City’s civic infrastructure is being battered by a tsunami of forces, both from within and beyond the five boroughs. We desperately need to restore our collective civic well-being. The New York Times couldn’t be more well-positioned to step up and do their part. They have the template: Their own 2021 election endorsement.

Julie Sandorf is president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, which has helped fund Vital City, The City, Documented and other nonprofit local media enterprises. The views represented are solely those of the author.

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Whose voices count?

Bhairavi Desai

The New York Times seems terrified that the working-class people who make up New York City might not follow the lead of their hand-picked elite opinion makers. First, they put together a panel that excluded poor and working-class New Yorkers in favor of their own former journalists, a couple of rich guys, a few academics, and the head of a rightwing think tank, with two token community leaders to round out the group. Where were the voices of the poor and working class whose struggles The New York Times reports on? I want to hear from people living in public housing, from people in rent-stabilized buildings, from cabbies and home care workers, from janitors and delivery workers. Why aren’t they given a platform to talk about what changes they’d like to see? Poor people, too, have visions for society. Then The New York Times ran a fearmongering editorial that seemed straight out of the Giuliani era, blaming the “liberalism” of former Mayor de Blasio for the city's woes. To the paper of record, working-class people skipping out on paying subway fares is apparently as “menacing” as felony assaults. The editors asserted that New Yorkers’ “quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade,” and used that as fodder to argue that anyone besides the leftist should be elected. Here, they contradict the findings of their own elite-dominated panel that ranked Zohran Mamdani number one for quality of life. But once again, I want to know what poor New Yorkers think. At the same time that The New York Times editorial board is talking itself in circles to assert the agenda of the rich and ignore the voices of the poor and working class, billionaires and corporate donors are throwing an obscene amount of money into this election. Michael Bloomberg has now poured $8.4 million into Cuomo’s super PAC, a group representing landlords has put in $2.5 million, DoorDash $1 million, and Pro-Trump billionaire Bill Ackman $250,000. Never one to miss a party, the gig lords at Uber have poured $1.3 million to seemingly redesign the City Council. With these corporate and billionaire voices attempting to dictate who we elect to govern New York City, The New York Times’ failure to listen to working-class people is even more abhorrent. 

Bhairavi Desai is a founding member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. 

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A pulled punch

Jere Hester

When it comes to writing editorials, saying exactly what you mean is easier said than done.

You need to speak with clarity — and nuance. And no matter how good a job you do, you're probably going to anger half your audience (which is a sign of doing a good job).  

So what then to make of The New York Times' non-endorsement editorial — and The Choice panel piece leading up to it — in the crucial New York City Democratic mayoral primary?

The paper of record offered a puzzling punt in its June 16 editorial as voters grapple with their ranked-choice ballots.

The Times Editorial Board’s mixed messages, delivered under the banner of “advice,” boil down to: Don't vote for Zohran Mamdani. You can be forgiven for opting for Andrew Cuomo, despite the sexual harassment allegations that drove him from Albany. And, hey, Brad Lander's a solid (if not exciting, pre-ICE clash) guy — a plurality of our Choice panel members think so.

Invoking the panel’s candidate assessments in the editorial had the odd effect of elevating the 15 prominent New Yorkers The Times’ Opinion team assembled — ranging from restaurateur Danny Meyer to former state senator Iwen Chu — to de facto editorial board member status.

It’s not The Times’ job to tell people what to think, but rather to give folks information and viewpoints to help them make decisions. But there was both substantive and symbolic heft to the paper’s announcement last summer that it wouldn't regularly make endorsements in local races.  

The Times is a key, influential player in New York's civic life. Case in point: the paper’s endorsement of Kathryn Garcia in the 2021 mayoral primary, which helped showcase the once low-profile bureaucrat’s record of public service, nearly catapulting her to City Hall. 

This time around, The Times Editorial Board could have said, straight out, hold your nose and make Cuomo your top pick. Or it could have said to go for Lander, positioning him as this race’s Garcia. Or here’s our top-five slate for your ranked-choice ballot. 

But The Times’ failure to take a definitive stand (beyond its no-way-Mamdani stance) amid what it deems a lackluster candidate lineup risks the unintended consequence of exacerbating apathy among some potential voters (and firing up Mamdani fans).

That The Times published a non-endorsement editorial at all perhaps opens the door a crack to an endorsement in November's general election.

But by the time The Times says what it means, will it be too late mean anything?  

Jere Hester is director of the Local Accountability Reporting Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.