Copy editors at The New York Times are speaking out after the paper announced plans to cut their staff in half in order to hire more reporters.
The Times' copy desk sent a letter to the paper's executive editor Dean Baquet and its managing editor Joseph Kahn this week in protest.
The lengthy letter, to which Baquet and Kahn responded, claimed the 109 copy editors have been "living more than a year and a half under a cloud of uncertainty about our jobs, a cruelly drawn-out period in which we suspended major financial arrangements and life decisions, and carried an ever-growing kernel of fear."
The letter, which Poynter reports was reviewed by roughly two dozen editors at a New York NewsGuild meeting this week before it was sent out, is frank in its assessment of how the copy desk feels about the upcoming buyouts and layoffs.
"We were compared to dogs urinating on fire hydrants when we edited stories," the letter continues, noting that an internal Times report called one layer of the copy desk "low-value editing."
"We are, as one senior reporter put it, the immune system of this newspaper, the group that protects the institution from profoundly embarrassing errors, not to mention potentially actionable ones," the letter reads.
Baquet and Kahn wrote a brief response that said the plan to do away with part of the copy desk is already in motion.
"There will be reductions among editors and some other departures from around the newsroom in coming weeks and months. That is a difficult process for us all," they wrote.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.