In a memo to the newsroom, Dean Baquet, the executive editor,<br />and Joseph Kahn, the managing editor, said the current system of copy editors and “backfielders” who assign and shape articles would be replaced with a single group of editors who would be responsible for all aspects of an article.<br />New York Times Will Offer Employee Buyouts and Eliminate Public Editor Role -<br />By DANIEL VICTORMAY 31, 2017<br />offered buyouts to its newsroom employees on Wednesday, aiming to reduce layers of editing and requiring more of the editors who remain.<br />Another editor would be “looking over their shoulders before publication.”<br />“Our goal is to significantly shift the balance of editors to reporters at The Times, giving us more<br />on-the-ground journalists developing original work than ever before,” they said in the memo.<br />In a separate memo, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, said the company would be eliminating the position of public editor, which was established to receive reader complaints<br />and question Times journalists on how they make decisions.<br />Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a school for journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla., said<br />that copy editors — who, in addition to editing for grammar, spelling and style, check facts, correct faulty logic and make sense of garbled prose — have frequently been targeted in cost-cutting efforts in newsrooms across the country.
