On the morning of Sept. 8, 2020, Meredith Kopit Levien’s first day as CEO of the New York Times, she opened her laptop in the living room of her pandemic rental in Calabasas, Calif., as her 9-year-old son remotely attended fourth grade nearby. She stared into a world on fire.
Much of the publication’s 4,700-person staff was working from cramped apartments, taking meetings on Zoom, or reporting from the streets—some in harm’s way. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a few months earlier had ignited a summer of rallies and a national reckoning on race and power. Inside the Times, an incendiary op-ed calling for military force to subdue Black Lives Matter protests had led to the abrupt ouster of the opinion editor.
