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Millions of readers know David Leonhardt as — until recently — the voice of The Morning, The New York Times’s flagship newsletter that he founded in 2020.
But his byline goes way back. In his 25-year career at The New York Times, Mr. Leonhardt has held more than half a dozen titles. He joined the paper in 1999 as a Business reporter, covering management and the workplace. He became the Washington bureau chief in 2011, reshaping the desk’s operations to become more digitally focused. He helped start The Upshot, The Times’s data-driven arm, in 2014. He had a stint with The Times’s Opinion section, from 2016 to 2020, before starting The Morning that May.
It was yet another instance of him reimagining an aspect of the newspaper business in an innovative way.
“One of the things that’s been really exciting for me is that you can reinvent your own job at this place without leaving,” said Mr. Leonhardt, 52, who won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011 for his columns on the financial crisis, health care and other subjects.
Now, after five years as a constant presence in readers’ inboxes explaining issues such as the side effects of Covid vaccines and whether it makes more sense to rent or buy a home, he began a new role earlier this month with Times Opinion: editorial director. In that capacity, he will oversee the editing and writing of The Times’s editorials, essays that reflect the opinions of members of the editorial board.
In a recent interview, he reflected on what he has learned in his role guiding readers through the biggest issues of the day. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
The Morning has more daily readers than ever — six million. Why leave now?
I was in no rush to leave. In some ways, it happened sooner than I expected. I just got really excited about this new project.
What appealed to you about the role with Opinion?
One of the main things I’ve done in my career at The Times is that I’ve tried to invent new forms of journalism that are consistent with our values at The Times, or to reinvent things.
The Morning was trying to reimagine what a daily news product should be in a digital era.
That’s really what Kathleen Kingsbury, the Opinion editor, wants from editorials. She wants us to take the enduring strengths that editorials have always had, and then to think about: How do we do that in this moment? And how do we do it in a way that also uses different forms of journalism that weren’t available to us in the past, like video, like graphics, like audio?
What are you most proud of about The Morning?
It was really gratifying when my colleagues and I heard from readers, “Now I understand that topic better than I used to.” I was proud when we could take the deep expertise of Times reporters and put that knowledge in front of readers in a way that allowed them to understand really complicated topics.
You pride yourself on making complex topics clear while maintaining accuracy. What have you learned over the years about how to do that most successfully?
I try to put myself in the shoes of readers as often as possible. I try to ask questions that naturally occur to me when I’m reading a story, like, “Wait, why exactly did this one thing cause the other thing?” Or, you come across a number in a story, like $30 million — well, is that a lot or not a lot? In the context of someone’s annual salary, $30 million is obviously a lot. In the context of a government program, though, maybe it’s not.
I would often find myself calling up experts and asking questions that were all a version of: “I don’t understand the following. Can you explain it to me?” I’ve found that when you ask really knowledgeable people to talk in accessible ways, it can often provide a pretty direct road map for how to write in accessible ways. Although I will confess, when you’re talking to experts, it often involves asking the same question again and again and again. I’ll say, “OK, I think I understand this part, but can you explain this other part again?” And I find that can help.
Finally, The Morning couldn’t be The Morning without incredible collaboration. We ask beat reporters to edit us, we ask editors to edit us, and it really becomes a crowdsourced newsletter in which the crowd is the staff of The Times. That’s incredibly powerful.
When you started the newsletter in 2020, you wrote the lead item every day. But in the past year, beat reporters have served as guest writers. Why?
The Morning launched in May 2020, right in the middle of Covid. Covid was this unusual story in that it was both an extremely important story, by any definition, and it was a story that was directly affecting nearly all of our readers’ lives.
Because of that, it was a subject that we felt comfortable writing about a lot. It made sense for me to spend a lot of time reporting on Covid, getting comfortable with Covid and then writing about Covid. Over time, there was no one story that dominated the way Covid did, and our leads covered a broader variety of subjects. It made sense to expand the variety of people who were writing The Morning.
The editors of The Morning meet every weekday to do a postmortem on the previous day’s newsletter, dissecting word choices and even comma usage. Why was it so important to you to get into such granular detail?
We take really seriously the size of the audience. Five to six million people open this newsletter every day, and the way we write a single sentence about a news story might be the only way that millions of people are hearing about that story. So we think it makes sense to devote a lot of time to thinking about: Did we write that one sentence clearly?
We have a conversation: What worked? What didn’t work? What can we do differently? We’ve tried to build a culture in which we all like and respect one another, and that makes it easier to be critical, and self-critical. If someone says to me, “David, I think you wrote that sentence in a way that wasn’t easy to understand,” I don’t worry that they think I’m a terrible writer. They just think I wrote a bad sentence. It increases the chance that, next time, I’ll write a better sentence.
What’s a particularly memorable piece of reader feedback you’ve received?
Lauren Jackson, one of The Morning’s editors in London, was at a dinner in England, and Bill Clinton was there. He told her that reading The Morning was the first thing he did each day. Then he’d discuss it with Hillary.
After the meal, he found her to say he was frustrated with something The Morning had recently done: remove the answer to the Spelling Bee. Fortunately, we had done so only temporarily, and had already restored it by that point. President Clinton told Lauren that he was very glad that we had.
It was quite striking to hear a former president of the United States say that he was not only a reader of The Morning, and that he enjoyed it, but that he also had noticed when we made what we thought was a tiny change.
What is the most important thing you want do in your new role?
Help develop the editorial board voice of The New York Times. There are a lot of aspects of that voice that we want to continue as they have been. But there are also things we want to change, because the world has changed.
We want to think about the most effective ways for The Times to express its enduring values and help our readers make sense of this really complicated world.
What is the value of an editorial board today?
There’s such a cacophony of voices out there. There are hundreds and hundreds of writers whom our readers can read on Substack, in our own report, in our competitors’ reports, and I love reading all those voices. I still think there can be a role for an institution to say, “This is how we think about it,” and to help individuals sort through the noise.
If we can persuade readers to trust us — and that doesn’t mean that they always agree with us — but to come away convinced that we’ve thought deeply about the issues, we can get readers to pay attention to what we do in editorials in a close way.
