New York Times reporters have long dreamed of seeing their stories on A1 of the print edition, preferably above the fold, and, more recently, atop the website. Sure, these goals still exist, but there are now two more coveted “front pages” of the Times, as top executives will tell you: the flagship podcast, The Daily, and the flagship newsletter, “The Morning.” “That’s how you get seen,” said one reporter. “It’s not a necessary evil, so much as something you have to care about now.”
“The Morning,” with over five million readers daily, has become a key vehicle for Times reporters to blast their stories out to the widest possible audience, especially as traffic from search engines and social media is increasingly disrupted. “The most valuable thing we do for other parts of the newsroom is putting their journalism in front of our audience in people’s inboxes,” said David Leonhardt, a Times veteran whose past gigs include Opinion columnist and Washington bureau chief. Leonhardt, 51, serves as a Virgil-like guide through the day’s news, often writing a lead essay explaining everything from the hunger crisis in Gaza to Democrats’ shifting immigration policy views. “I think there is a huge audience of people who want journalism that is smart and makes them feel smart,” he told me.
The perspective of “The Morning,” unsurprisingly, tends to align with Leonhardt’s, which can be a source of tension in the newsroom. “It’s like putting him on the top of A1 every day,” said a second Times staffer, noting that “the idea of this conversational newsletter is a great idea, but the concept of it being the flagship” has been hard for some people to square. Through the flagship newsletter, Leonhardt has effectively served as the voice of the institution.
But Leonhardt is increasingly asking others to put their stamp on it, as “The Morning” recruits beat reporters across the newsroom—from the Times real estate desk to the congressional team—to write the lead column, an initiative that recently hired deputy Adam Kushner will spearhead and that Leonhardt described as the newsletter’s top priority for 2024. “If in the first incarnation, 1.0, of ‘The Morning,’ we would kind of go interview those experts and then almost translate their expertise into this new explanatory language, this next turn is really sharing the microphone,” said deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick. “There is just something about that newsletter platform which can build out a showcase of expertise,” executive editor Joe Kahn told me.
It’s a different tone than reporters typically use in the news pages—more conversational and straightforward and perspective-driven—that Dolnick and Kahn hope will filter back through the traditional paper. “It feels as though a lot of the analytical or explanatory writing that we’re doing, or even some of the breaking news reporting, can harvest some of that tonal difference from that direct addressing of readers and their needs,” said Kahn. “We haven’t seen any downside to featuring that more as a bigger part of the offering.” The gulf between how writers sound in “The Morning” and the paper is “going to start shrinking,” Dolnick suspects, “and we’re going to find something closer to the middle that is more like a new voice for the Times.”
In January 2020, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger thought Leonhardt had made a mistake. The paper was rebranding their flagship newsletter, then called “The Morning Briefing,” and Dolnick and Adam Pasick, who’d been hired a few months earlier to be the paper’s new editorial director of newsletters, had asked Leonhardt to be its host. He initially declined, content with his current gig in Opinion, where he was writing the department’s daily newsletter. Then the publisher urged him to reconsider. “This is a huge opportunity given the size of the audience,” Leonhardt recalled Sulzberger telling him, “and I think you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to speak in both an approachable and institutional voice.” Leonhardt said he “spent that evening stewing over it” and then threw his hat back in the ring.
It was a moment when high-profile writers were flocking to Substack and news organizations were leaning into more personality-driven material. The Times saw potential in their flagship, which had quietly amassed the largest audience of any Times product, and “partnered with the product side to figure out how we could meaningfully build this email list at the same time as we were going to meaningfully sharpen its editorial,” says Dolnick. The newsletter relaunched in the spring of 2020 with more than 17 million subscribers and at least three million daily opens. This was the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and readers were looking for an authoritative voice to explain what was going on. COVID helped shape the function of the newsletter’s lead, which is “to help people understand the very biggest stories in the world,” Leonhardt said. The most successful “Morning” leads pass the “one-sentence test,” as Leonhardt calls it, meaning they can be summarized in a single sentence that makes a clear, intriguing point. “Basic facts are relatively widely available relative to the pre-internet world,” he notes. “What people want is a more personal, conversational form of writing,” and “a more honest form.”
The Times, said Pasick, “created a different style guide for newsletters,” which, being a relatively new medium, have fewer stylistic rules. “We’ve tried to use that to our advantage,” said Pasick, and “have newsletters be a kind of test bed for different ideas.” He added: “In a strange way, I know that a lot of my bosses are interested in bringing some of those lessons back to the newsroom.”
On a recent Tuesday morning, I found myself in a conference room at the Times Manhattan headquarters, where the handful of staffers who work on “The Morning”—three in person, and seven, including the Washington-based Leonhardt, remote—were performing an autopsy on the newsletter sent out hours earlier. They do this every day, a postmortem on notable changes and potential lessons to glean from them. On the day I visited, this included seemingly minor edits made to eliminate “news speak” and a debate that photo editors had over the lead photo. After the postmortem, they look toward the rest of the week.
This meticulous, at times tedious, analysis of the daily digest suggests how seriously Leonhardt takes his role. Throughout the meeting he chimed in to connect a decision or finding to their broader mission, such as when an editor noted that of the 20 most-clicked links in last week’s newsletters, only three were from the news section. “I love that finding, right?” Leonhardt commented, “because we are deliberately writing our news bullets in ways to make them as information-full and clear as possible.”
“Sometimes picking up the newspaper can feel like you’re entering two-thirds of the way through a conversation,” Dolnick told me after the meeting. “The Morning” is able to “slow that down a bit without dumbing it down,” he said, a distillation that provides a “really useful service.” So much so that the Times has decided to launch an international version of “The Morning”—and is now looking for the writer to lead it. “International subscribers are a huge priority for us,” said Pasick.