Photo: Frankie Alduino for New York Magazine/The New York Times Opinion Section
In the summer of 2020, as James Bennet, the head of the New York Times’ “Opinion” section, was being forced to resign, his deputy, Kathleen Kingsbury, locked herself in a bedroom at her parents’ house in Wisconsin. Bennet had ignited a newsroom uprising over a now-notorious column by Senator Tom Cotton, the headline of which called for the military to “Send in the Troops” in response to the violence sparked by the George Floyd protests, and Kingsbury “immediately knew there was going to be an issue,” she told me. “Primarily because of the headline. But, you know, the first three years that I was here were marked with a lot of controversy in the department. And I guess I worried that, in that volatile moment, there would be a reaction.” As Bennet was pushed out in a bloodbath that one staffer later described as “Caesar on the floor of the Roman Senate,” Kingsbury stayed sequestered for more than a week, managing a fallout that divided the entire organization and reverberated throughout the media industry and beyond.
When Kingsbury took charge of “Opinion,” she was not seen as a long-term solution. She was 41, young for the Times, and it wasn’t clear that she was up for the job. Bennet, who was credited with breathing life into The Atlantic before he was brought to “Opinion” in 2016, was known as a creative risk-taker who often enraged liberal members of the staff with the provocative essays he commissioned and the conservative staffers he hired — the man most responsible for unleashing Bari Weiss onto the world. Kingsbury, who goes by Katie, was in some ways the anti-Bennet. She was an outsider, brought in by Bennet a few years earlier from the Boston Globe for her skill in writing editorials, those dusty, earnest tracts full of policy proposals and civic virtue. Publisher A. G. Sulzberger said she would remain in charge through the November election, commencing a very public tryout period. In the first few months, she lost ten pounds.
After the 2020 blowup, Sulzberger could very well have downsized “Opinion.” It is both looked down upon by reporters as a factory that churns out bland 800-word “takes” and feared by executives for the outsize controversy it can occasionally create — which is why the publishers of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have scrambled to diminish their respective opinion sections since the reelection of Donald Trump. It would have been easy to imagine Sulzberger concluding that there wasn’t a ton of upside to investing in an operation that was at the very center of the culture war ripping apart the Times. Instead, five years later, the department has doubled in size with nearly 200 people on staff — bigger than many American newsrooms and magazines.
Kingsbury not only steadied the ship but built a fleet around it, with audio, video, graphics, design, and special-projects teams that operate independently of the main newsroom, as well as an expanded roster of columnists. The size and scope of the department make it feel like its own separate publication rather than just a corner of the Times, which is technically true in the sense that none of the journalism published by “Opinion” is overseen by executive editor Joe Kahn. Kingsbury, who reports directly to Sulzberger, has encroached on newsroom departments like the magazine and the culture sections by frequently publishing longform narratives, access profiles, photography portfolios, and literary memoir. Some of the notable stories of Kingsbury’s tenure include a viral essay on the Asian American women named after legendary broadcaster Connie Chung, a stirring coming-out story by the son of a pastor, and, recently, a hard-to-get sit-down with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — none of which could be classified as a traditional work of opinion. “The line between news and opinion has simply been an organizational one for ten years,” said a former senior “Opinion” editor. In an interview in late April at the paper’s headquarters in Times Square, I asked Kingsbury what she considered to be her biggest achievement in the past five years. She made a sweeping motion with her hands, gesturing all around her. “Just look at it,” she said.
Despite having one of the biggest jobs in journalism, Kingsbury remains a relative unknown to the outside world and to many at the paper. “She’s not even New York Times famous,” as one staffer put it. She is perhaps best known for being “ambitious,” which in the argot of the Times tends to be an insult. “Inside the Times, it’s like 19th-century politics: You have to hide your ambition,” said one person in the newsroom. “Yet you have to make the moves, get the jobs, to get yourself into consideration.” And as Kingsbury herself rightly noted during our interview, “Who at the New York Times is not ambitious?”
If Kingsbury is less of a hard-charging visionary than Bennet, she seems to have a better set of antennae for what the people around her are thinking and feeling, which also makes her a better operator. She is a “very interesting combination of cautious and bold,” as one staffer put it. She gets along well with Sulzberger, and unlike Bennet, whose clashes with the newsroom partly led to his downfall, she has maintained a respectful distance from her colleagues on the other floors of 620 Eighth Avenue. Kahn is 60, five years away from the traditional age when people at the top are expected to step down, and some think Kingsbury, now 46, is eyeing the job (which she denied) and could even have a chance of getting it.
But as Kingsbury solidifies her perch, major changes are underway at the section. Earlier this year, David Leonhardt, the lead writer of the popular The Morning newsletter and one of Sulzberger’s favorites, was brought in to lead the editorial board, making him a natural successor to Kingsbury were she to be replaced. The board also stepped back from making local endorsements in New York races, depriving Kingsbury of the kingmaking political power the head of “Opinion” once possessed. And as “Opinion” bulks up its reporting and continues to seize territory that used to be the preserve of newsroom departments, resentment has started to bubble up and questions are being asked — the foremost of which is whether Kingsbury, the accidental editor of “Opinion,” is what Sulzberger has in mind for a department that he is personally invested in but whose identity still feels wildly in flux.
Photo: Frankie Alduino for New York Magazine
Kingsbury is a corporate creature, usually spending at least a few hours at the office on the weekend. “I’m often turning on the lights, literally,” she said. On the day we met, she wore black trousers, a black blouse, a black belt, and python-print kitten heels that exposed the flower tattoo she has on the top of her foot, a souvenir from the time she lived in New Zealand in college. “I would be lying if I didn’t tell you it is the result of a long evening of drinking, and I’m quite certain that my parents would still have something to say about this,” she said. I asked her if she considered the tattoo off-brand: Kingsbury is an Upper West Side mother of two who regularly goes to church. “I don’t know — I made the decision when I was 20,” she said. But you’ve kept it, I noted. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “I’m also just afraid of getting it removed.”
Kingsbury is buttoned-up and often described as “tough.” She is quite literally tight-lipped, sometimes talking out the side of her mouth and putting peculiar emphasis on certain consonants. She can also be pleasantly casual — the kind of person to walk up to you at a company event and complain about her shoes hurting — one of the ways she does not quite fit the Times mold. “Her humor comes from the fact that you don’t expect it,” one of Kingsbury’s friends told me. “Someone will come up and she’ll be like, ‘That person is a fucking moron.’”
Another way she doesn’t fit the mold, at least among the paper’s seniormost editorial staff, is that she’s a woman. “The close reading of her personality does feel incredibly gendered to me,” said one columnist. “It’s not like Joe Kahn is some warm, fuzzy ball of love.” Also like Kahn, who is an heir to the Staples fortune, Kingsbury comes from big-box-company money: Her father was the CEO of Kohl’s and before that Burlington Coat Factory.
She went to Georgetown, where she studied Mandarin, then got her master’s from Columbia Journalism School. She spent time in China on a Pulitzer fellowship, an experience she later recounted in an essay called “How Kissinger’s Prophecy Pointed the Way.” She then worked at Time magazine, splitting time between Hong Kong and New York, before going to the Globe, where she won a Pulitzer for editorial writing for a series about the hardships faced by restaurant workers. “When I won my Pulitzer in 2015, one of the things that was really interesting to me was how much praise I got for the fact that it was deeply reported,” she said. “I’ve constantly been thinking about that form and how it can evolve.”
That was the mandate in 2017, when Bennet hired her to help reorganize and update the Times editorial board, which writes the paper’s unsigned editorials. She brought on writers like Mara Gay, Binyamin Appelbaum, Michelle Cottle, and Jeneen Interlandi and, for the first time, televised the board’s interviews of the candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary, a process that drew criticism and groans of embarrassment when it ended with the board endorsing two candidates. She still sees it as an accomplishment. “We were doing a lot of playing with form,” Kingsbury said, “and a lot of the changes we’ve made over the years started then.”
The head of “Opinion” has always reported directly to the publisher, and Sulzberger, the sixth member of his family to serve in the role, has been intimately involved in the section. There’s a hard line when it comes to ownership influencing major newsroom decisions, but “Opinion” has historically been a place for the Sulzbergers to dabble (and even publish their own essays). When the Times hired Bennet from The Atlantic, he brought the spirit of magazine work to “Opinion,” restructuring the department — which was then only about 60 people — to produce longer articles with more reporting, such as a series on privacy that newsroom staffers still gripe about because it intruded so closely on their work. Sulzberger encouraged the shift: He wanted big projects, more investigations, more volume. At one town hall, the publisher told staffers “he was much less worried about reporting in the Opinion coverage than by opinion in the news report,” as Bennet wrote in the 16,000-word cri de coeur he published three years after his departure.
On the day Bennet resigned, Kingsbury sent the “Opinion” staff a note saying that anyone who sees “any piece of Opinion journalism — including headlines or social posts or photos or you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately.” That message may have given the impression that her tenure would be an ultracautious one. But she was determined to prove that she was committed to publishing countervailing views that might offend people in the newsroom. “That first week, we published several columnists who disagreed with the decision for James to step down,” she said, including one by Bennet’s friend Ross Douthat. “Some of those columnists I’d only had a cursory relationship with before that.”
Many staffers left the department in this early period, including Weiss, who in her resignation letter to Sulzberger bemoaned “the new McCarthyism” that had taken hold of the paper. But Kingsbury played her cards right with those who stayed. In October, she supported Bret Stephens’s essay about the factual errors and historical flaws of The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project.” Going after one of the paper’s own stories might not have earned her points with newsroom staff, but it did with other columnists. Sulzberger told me that Kingsbury is “brave”: “She’s been willing to make tough and important decisions.”
Kingsbury has overseen a significant expansion of the roster of columnists, transforming a section that used to be populated by a small group of stalwarts like Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman. She recruited Ezra Klein, a Democratic Party whisperer who is now the department’s most influential figure, in 2020 before she had even secured the official job. In the years since, she has added Zeynep Tufekci, Carlos Lozada, Lydia Polgreen, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Pamela Paul, M. Gessen, and David French. (She also welcomed back longtime columnist Nicholas Kristof after his near-comical run for governor of Oregon.) “The way that an editor puts an imprint on a section or on a publication is with staffing,” said Lozada. “Those are also the most difficult and complex decisions to make.”
For a time, it seemed as though Pamela Paul was Kingsbury’s very own Bari Weiss, each of Paul’s woke-baiting columns on transgender issues and campus politics causing howls of derision to emanate from the New York Times Building. But Kingsbury has also made it clear that these positions are no longer lifelong sinecures, announcing in January that Paul and Charles M. Blow would be leaving. While there has been speculation that Paul was fired for her controversial views, she was let go for performance issues after undergoing a job review and a switch in editors that didn’t result in the improvement management was hoping for. (Paul denied she was let go for poor performance, saying, “I was hired as a columnist to report and opine on challenging issues, which became politically uncomfortable for the Times. The truth is hard, but these are the facts.”) The moves came as Paul Krugman, who retired from his position at the Times in December after two and a half decades, said in a Substack post that his relationship with the paper had “degenerated” to the point that he had to leave, claiming that the editing of his columns “went from light touch to extremely intrusive” with “substantial rewrites before it went to copy.”
It turns out the age-old complaint about the “Opinion” columns — Is no one editing these things? — was correct. Krugman was among the long-standing columnists who for many years didn’t have a dedicated editor, receiving a mere copyedit before publication. That changed under Kingsbury, who told Sulzberger every columnist had to have an editor. “She recognized immediately, stepping into the role, that we just don’t live in a world in which anything that the New York Times publishes should be unedited,” Sulzberger said.
In many ways, the section remains haunted by the Cotton fiasco. Essays over a certain length now need to be read by someone in senior leadership. Some editors who once had power to green-light stories no longer do. To some, it can feel like overkill, especially for op-eds (which Kingsbury renamed “Guest Essays” to further distinguish the Times from its contributors), with multiple emails from multiple editors every day announcing that X writer will be writing on Y topic. Last year, Kingsbury hired Matthew Rose, a Wall Street Journal veteran, as an editorial director. “There are so many departments within the department,” said Rose. “They all need someone just to kind of take care of them.” Some see him as one more layer in an already top-heavy section — “like a hawkish babysitter,” as one staffer put it.
The 2024 campaign was a reminder of just how explosive decisions at an opinion desk can be. When the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post killed planned endorsements of Kamala Harris weeks before Election Day out of apparent deference to Trump, readers were outraged. The Post lost 250,000 subscribers virtually overnight. Some confused readers appeared to think it was the New York Times, not the Los Angeles Times, that had spiked its endorsement, and there was an urgent need for the paper, which had endorsed Harris a month earlier, to correct the record — and, perhaps, ride the wave.
The idea came together quickly as Kingsbury was leaving Pilates class on a Saturday morning. She wrote a script on her walk home, showered, grabbed her son from ballet class, and dragged him to 620, bribing him along the way with a Wendy’s Frosty. A member of the “Opinion” video team came in from New Jersey to shoot and edit. The video, in which Kingsbury sits in a red leather armchair explaining that the Times had, in fact, already heartily endorsed Harris for president, was up on TikTok and other social platforms by that night.
People may not read the editorials, but it turns out they do want them. “Readers want their worldview affirmed; they want outrage about Donald Trump,” said one newsroom staffer. “ ‘Opinion’ can give readers what they want. So getting this right, and not pissing those readers off, is incredibly important.” Which makes it a tad awkward that Kingsbury has all but gutted the editorial board in recent months, offering Mara Gay, Jesse Wegman, Brent Staples, and Farah Stockman buyouts or roles elsewhere in “Opinion” or the newsroom. In March, the newsroom announced that Jyoti Thottam, who had led the day-to-day operations of the board since 2022, would be joining as an editor on the international desk. This group includes some of the most prominent people of color at “Opinion.”
Unsigned Times editorials used to have real power. They were written less for the average reader than for people who set policy in the State Department. But the people who set policy in the State Department today do not heed the Times. Over the past decade, the editorial board has reduced its output from three articles a day to one a day to, now, roughly one a week. “We all have a friend who offers you just the right piece of advice at just the right moment, and we also all have a friend who offers you three pieces of advice every day,” Sulzberger explained. “We both know which of those two friends you listen to more.”
Sulzberger, Kingsbury acknowledged, has “gotten more involved” in the past few years. “I think that’s because he’s pushing us to rethink and update the editorial voice,” she said. If the knock against Kingsbury is that she lacks an easily identifiable vision, the same cannot be said of Leonhardt, whose task of reinventing the board was announced in February. As the principal author of The Morning, Leonhardt provided analysis of the news in a bloodless tone that belied a consistent ideology on issues ranging from pandemic response to immigration to abortion — a center-left agenda that many people believe Sulzberger shares. The board’s recent editorial “The Democrats Are in Denial About 2024” showcases many of Leonhardt’s beliefs: that Democrats went too far left after Trump’s initial victory in 2016, that they must prioritize persuading moderate voters rather than drumming up their base, and that they are too focused on issues of identity.
Leonhardt naturally rejected the idea that unsigned editorials don’t have the same influence as they used to. “If that was the acknowledgment, we could stop doing it,” said Leonhardt. “I think that the country actually is really hungry for leadership right now, and an institution like the New York Times, when it puts its heft upon an argument, can break through,” said Kingsbury.
This makes it all the more curious that the Times has cut back on local endorsements in recent years — an area where its heft is proven. “There just aren’t that many things that have the potential to change races,” said political strategist Chris Coffey, who is informally advising Andrew Cuomo this mayoral cycle and ran Andrew Yang’s 2021 bid. “The fact is they endorsed Kathryn Garcia in 2021 when she was at 6 percent in mid-May, and she came 7,000 votes away from winning. Garcia would have been a better mayor than Eric Adams. So why would you want to give up this power to do some good?” Coffey added, “Katie Kingsbury, by nature of her job, is one of the most powerful folks in New York City and State politics.”
The Times insists it is just stopping the practice of automatically endorsing for every local office, from mayor to comptroller. “We reserve the right to endorse,” said Leonhardt. Kingsbury would not say whether the board would endorse in the upcoming mayoral race — “I don’t want to spoil it for you” — though on the day I visited the Times, Patrick Healy, Kingsbury’s deputy, was neck-deep in planning how it would weigh in on the primary. The whiteboard wall in his office was covered with names of prominent New Yorkers — former government officials, nonprofit leaders, titans of industry, celebrities — whom they were thinking of interviewing.
Some wonder if Leonhardt’s presence signals the beginning of the end of Kingsbury’s reign. Kingsbury said it was “a dream to be able to have him as part of my leadership,” but as a proven “innovator” and favored son in the organization, he also presents some kind of threat to it. With the recent announcement that Healy is heading back to the newsroom to take a masthead role, Leonhardt’s path to the top looks even clearer. Working against him is the fact that the last time he oversaw a large operation, the Washington bureau, he lasted only two years, and he subsequently was put in charge of a smaller staff.
Most staffers said “Opinion” is a nice place to work with fewer sharp elbows than the newsroom. But some said Kingsbury can be cliquey, and multiple former “Opinion” staffers described a culture of anxiety stemming from her tendency to pick favorites and then sour on them. “Katie can be extremely hot on people and then go very, very cold,” as one put it. “She just has a thing where she falls out with people or freezes them out. It’s very high school to me.” Still, critics and supporters alike said she has been a capable steward. “This was a really wounded department,” said Leonhardt. “I just think that if you looked at where it was in the fall of 2020 and asked, ‘Five years from now, will it feel like a happy department that’s publishing a wide array of journalism, including a lot of non-liberal arguments and some outright conservative arguments?’ I don’t think at all that the answer to that question was obviously ‘yes.’”
“Opinion” also remains important for retaining and attracting new readership. Its top stories regularly bring in 750,000 to 1.2 million page views. The median number of page views for “Opinion” in 2024 was just below 200,000 per story, and that figure rose in early 2025. Still, a source familiar with the paper’s overall traffic said that “Opinion” is a solid, but not outsize, contributor to it.
Sulzberger rejects the idea that “Opinion” has become a parallel newsroom since Kingsbury took over. But for all of the Times’ efforts to distinguish between the two, for all the different labels and typefaces that attempt to explain to the reader that news pieces do not contain opinions and “Opinion” pieces are not news, the truth is the average reader often can’t tell the difference. “Opinion” resembles a magazine in the diversity of its offerings, even if it doesn’t have the coherent sensibility of a typical magazine, while the magazine that lives within the newsroom has become less a citadel unto itself, with several of its editors outsourced to other parts of the operation to bolster the feature writing and narrative reporting being done elsewhere. All of these changes have made the distinctions between the Times’ different kinds of journalism blurrier. Notably, “Opinion” was nominated for multiple National Magazine Awards this year.
Kingsbury described herself as “a reporter at heart.” The department’s projects stand out less for their intellectual firepower than for the significant resources put into them, such as this year’s three-part series on parents using IVF to optimize their children’s genes or last year’s 16-part series on the threat of nuclear weapons, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer. “We’re not going to put out pieces that go viral or change or evoke conversation — they’re very afraid of something bold like that,” said one “Opinion” staffer. “It’s a very blatant before-and-after moment, in terms of what kinds of swings we’re willing to take.” Recently, “Opinion” published a photo portfolio of Trump’s entire Cabinet, a series of 22 portraits that, aside from an introduction written by David French, seemed to have little opinion in it. I’m told even people in the department are at times confused about what makes something an “Opinion” story or not and often find that the answer is arbitrary.
The all-encompassing nature of “Opinion” can draw the ire of the newsroom proper. “In a world where the Times doesn’t have a ton of legacy-media competition, competition from within the house is what we’ve got, and people are just as annoyed if it’s coming from upstairs than if it’s from Washington or Los Angeles,” one senior newsroom staffer said. “We want a vibrant media ecosystem, but we want to win, and we don’t want to get beat by our own people.” Kahn, unusually for an executive editor, doesn’t seem bothered by the department’s mission creep.
Whether potential successors to Kahn see Kingsbury as a threat is another question. Max Frankel and Howell Raines both became executive editor immediately after heading the “Opinion” section, and Bennet was seen as a contender, but all three had something Kingsbury doesn’t, which is prior experience in the Times newsroom. (Before going to The Atlantic, Bennet was the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief.) Virtually everyone agreed she would need to run a newsroom desk to be in contention, and Kingsbury seems to know this, having spoken with various people about various newsroom jobs over the years. Kingsbury denied this, insisting that other than her current job, she has “never applied for, raised my hand for, interviewed for, or been rejected for (at least to my knowledge) any other role since coming to the Times in 2017.”
In her favor, she already has a lot of experience running a newsroom, even if she denied that, too. “The New York Times has only one newsroom, and it’s run by Joe Kahn,” said Kingsbury. “And he does an excellent job at that.”
