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When the New York Times made the controversial decision to eliminate its public-editor position, in 2017, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., then the paper’s publisher, noted that online platforms such as Twitter had democratized the role and its functions. “Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be,” Sulzberger wrote. Spiritual successors to the public editor include Alexandra Bell, a conceptual artist who produces replicas of Times stories edited to illuminate racist stereotypes, and Editing the Gray Lady, an algorithm-powered Twitter account that documents changes made to stories on NYTimes.com. These days, the best-known successor may be the New York Times Pitchbot—which is not a bot at all, but a satirical Twitter account run by an anonymous math professor (himself an avowed Times devotee) based in Rochester, New York.
In a profile for CJR, Caleb Pershan traces NYT Pitchbot’s ascent from political-blog provocateur—a kind of “unmalicious” troll working the comments sections of mid-aughts favorites like Balloon Juice—to his current status as a prolifically wry pitch machine beloved by media-watchers. “With his account, NYT Pitchbot imagines the Times formula for stories as a kind of wheezing algorithm, a bot churning out contrarian headlines and half-baked hot takes,” Pershan writes. Those takes are peppered with tongue-in-cheek refrains (“Dems in disarray!”) and unaltered Times headlines that, to the man behind the Pitchbot, tip over into self-parody on their own, no additional commentary required. One journalism professor told Pershan that the Pitchbot “is the best media criticism I’m seeing of the New York Times.” —Brendan Fitzgerald, senior editor
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