During the first week of November, a public statement published by a coalition called Writers Against the War on Gaza was circulating. “Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people,” the petition stated, calling Israel “an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians.” The petition, signed by hundreds of people, criticized media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, including a New York Times editorial that offered support for Israel’s right to defend itself militarily while urging it to protect civilians.

In the New York Times Guild Slack, one journalist raised the question of whether the guild should discourage people from signing the petition, as doing so would appear to violate Times policy; staff members may not “sign ads taking a position on public issues, or lend their name to campaigns…if doing so might reasonably raise doubts about their ability or the Times’s ability to function as neutral observers in covering the news.”

“It was immediately apparent to a lot of folks that this was a hangover from what happened last time,” one Times staffer tells me, referring to the newsroom blowup earlier this year over journalistic independence and activism, ignited by a public letter criticizing the paper’s transgender coverage. “So we were like, Oh, fuck, here we go again.” The general consensus among a handful of people who chimed into the Slack, though, was that it wasn’t the guild’s position to tell people whether or not to sign something, and it was the company’s role to remind people of Times policy. The issue seemed settled.

But New York Times Magazine writer Jazmine Hughes had already signed the petition. And by week’s end, she would resign over it.

The October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and monthlong war in Gaza has led to heated clashes across college campuses and social media. It has also renewed debates inside media companies over staffers expressing personal views in a public setting, a point of tension that has flared before around issues of racial justice and abortion. Some news organizations, including Vanity Fair parent Condé Nast, have recently sent emails reminding staff of their social media policies. Publishing giant Hearst Magazines went a step further last week with a new social media policy that “warns staffers that even ‘liking’ controversial content could result in their termination, and encourages telling on colleagues who post content that could violate the rules,” according to The Washington Post.

And there have been open letters, like the one Hughes signed, along with another written by a group of US-based reporters, signed by more than 1,000 journalists, that called on “Western newsroom leaders to be clear-eyed in coverage of Israel’s repeated atrocities against Palestinians” and “use precise terms that are well-defined by international human rights organizations, including ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘genocide.’” The petition, as Semafor pointed out, also has a note stating that a journalist asked to have their signature removed “at the request of their employer, the Associated Press.” An open letter published by Artforum—and signed by thousands in the arts community—recently led to the firing of the magazine’s editor, David Velasco.

Hughes’s exit from the Times magazine follows a distinguished eight-year run, in which she was honored with an ASME Next Award, in 2020, and this year took home a National Magazine Award for profiles on Viola Davis and Whoopi Goldberg. But amid the journalistic accolades, Hughes also ran afoul of Times policy.

Earlier this year, Hughes signed a letter criticizing the paper’s transgender coverage. She and other staffers who signed that letter were given the equivalent of a warning, as I previously reported. Hughes was told that a letter would be going in her file and there would be consequences if this were to happen again. So it didn’t come entirely as a surprise when Times media reporter Katie Robertson reported on November 3 that Hughes had resigned after signing the Israel-Gaza letter. 

However, a somewhat vague email from the Times guild a few days later raised a new set of questions. On November 8, the guild told members that it would be filing a grievance on its own behalf against Times management following statements that Jake Silverstein, the editor in chief of the Times magazine, had made in an email to magazine staff and were quoted in Robertson’s piece. “While I respect that she has strong convictions, this was a clear violation of the Times’s policy on public protest,” Silverstein wrote. “She and I discussed that her desire to stake out this kind of public position and join in public protests isn’t compatible with being a journalist at the Times, and we both came to the conclusion that she should resign.”

Silverstein’s statement implied “that signing a petition, or even signing two petitions, means you will immediately lose your job,” the guild wrote. “It does not.” The guild’s memo did not take a position on whether or not Hughes should have signed the letter, but rather suggested that her resignation process was handled improperly, and reiterated members’ right to due process and just cause protections. The guild’s email contained a statement from Hughes, who said her “resignation process from The New York Times was under pressure” and she was “largely denied guild representation.” (Hughes’s colleague at the Times magazine, Jamie Lauren Keiles, also signed the Writers Against the War on Gaza letter, and resigned from their contributing writer position at the magazine the same day as Hughes; Keiles, as a contributing writer, is not covered by the guild’s contract.)

In conversations with sources, I’ve learned more about what went down behind the scenes.

On November 1, a few days after Hughes signed the Writers Against the War on Gaza letter, Hughes was confronted by her manager, Silverstein, and she offered to resign, as it was becoming clear that her values were increasingly incompatible with the Times’, according to a source familiar. The next day, Silverstein told Hughes he had met with the paper's top leaders and they had decided she should resign, and that she should send a resignation letter by the following day. Hughes verbally agreed to resign. A few hours later, she informed a guild representative of her situation. They told her she did not need to send a resignation letter by the following day, and to tell Silverstein that she was in conversation with her guild representative and would get back to him.

During this sequence of events, on November 2, managing editor Carolyn Ryan and Standards editor Susan Wessling emailed the newsroom to reinforce the paper’s “commitment to independent journalism,” reminding them that, in keeping with Times policy, they should not sign petitions related to the Israel-Gaza conflict. “When Times journalists, however well-meaning, join public pronouncements about the war, it risks creating the perception that we are joining a side or putting ourselves in the middle of the story,” they wrote.

On November 3, there was a virtual meeting between Hughes, her guild representative, and Silverstein, but Silverstein left that meeting, saying he was not qualified to discuss the matter, according to two sources familiar with the matter. (Another source familiar with the matter says that Silverstein expected the call to be about logistical off-boarding questions that Hughes had, but instead found it to be a different, more investigatory, line of questioning, and that it would not have been appropriate for him to be on that call without someone from the labor relations team.)

After leaving the meeting, Silverstein texted Hughes to discourage her from bringing the guild into these conversations and encouraged her to deal just with him and HR. In the hours that followed, Hughes went back and forth between fielding calls and texts from Silverstein and trying to verify information with her guild representative. According to two sources familiar with the matter, Hughes asked Silverstein multiple times whether she could get the guild representative on the phone with them, to which Silverstein strongly pushed back. Hughes asked Silverstein whether she could take the weekend to confer with the guild, as her guild representative told her she could, and he said no. He told her that if she did not resign by the end of the day, she would be terminated. He attributed the urgency to internal and external inquiries that the Times had started to receive about the situation.

Asked for comment on the guild’s suggestion that Hughes’s resignation process was improper and Hughes’s contention that her resignation process was “under pressure,” New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told Vanity Fair, “Ms. Hughes chose to resign and her editors accepted her resignation.” Asked for comment on the nature and details of Hughes’s resignation, Rhoades Ha pointed Vanity Fair to Silverstein’s email to magazine staff, while adding, “At no time was Ms. Hughes discouraged from talking to her guild representatives, which we understand she did throughout this period.” Hughes declined to comment.

At one point, according to two sources familiar with the conversation, Hughes asked Silverstein about severance, citing the union contract provision that says there is a severance package if it is a mutual resignation. Silverstein said this did not apply to her, according to a source familiar. Hughes learned she would not receive any severance, and only walked away with her paid time off and health care extended through the end of the month. Hughes emailed a letter of resignation a few minutes after 5 p.m. on Friday. Within the hour, she received a call from a Times media reporter, who was writing an article about her resignation.

Hughes wasn’t an opinion writer, in which case, according to the Times’s own editorial standards, she would have “more leeway than others in speaking publicly because their business is expressing opinions,” though opinion writers are still expected “to consider carefully the forums in which they appear and to protect the standards and impartiality of the newspaper as a whole.” But she was a magazine writer who, as opposed to a straight news reporter, could be expected to inject a point-of-view or first-person perspective into her work. Hughes, who is Black and gay, has tackled race and identity in her work; she won an award from the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists for a Times magazine story revisiting her experience coming out.

While there is no such stated provision for Times magazine writers, Times staffers I spoke to noted that writing in the magazine has by nature been more open to commentary than the news pages. “But it’s still part of the Times paper and ultimately still answers to Joe Kahn,” as one puts it. The executive editor and his deputies have made it clear to staff that it is not acceptable to publicly align with an advocacy group or criticize colleagues’ work. “Under this current masthead,” another Times staffer notes, “there has never been less tolerance for this.” Especially at this moment, when the Times has been under a microscope for anything related to the Israel-Hamas war. “The context here is huge,” a third staffer says, “and that letter took a direct swipe at the Editorial Board.”

The Times was among the news organizations scrutinized for their initial framing of last month’s Gaza hospital bombing, later issuing a rare editors’ note regarding its coverage. Last Thursday, protesters calling for a cease-fire occupied the lobby of the Times building and distributed mock newspapers that accused the Times of “complicity in laundering genocide.” The same day, photographer Nan Goldin said she had “canceled a big job” with the Times magazine “because of the NYT’s reporting on the war on Gaza, which shows complicity with Israel,” she wrote in her Instagram Stories. “For what they report and don’t report, and how they question the veracity of anything Palestinians say.”

Also last week, the Israeli media watchdog organization HonestReporting insinuated, without evidence, that a Gaza-based freelance photographer who has done work for the Times may have had prior knowledge of the October 7 attack by Hamas; Senator Tom Cotton then wrote a letter to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, warning that the newspaper’s leadership could face legal action, b​​ased on “reports,” obliquely referencing the HonestReporting piece.

“You are merely parroting disinformation harvested from the internet based on a website that has conceded it has no evidence for its claims,” Times deputy general counsel David McCraw wrote in response to Cotton. “No employee of the Times was embedded with Hamas, or had advance knowledge of the attack, or played any role in the savage massacre of that day…the only connection The New York Times has to Hamas is that we report on the organization fearlessly and at times at great risk, bringing essential information to the public about the terrorist attacks in Israel and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.”