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.

Readers’ relationship with Leonhardt has contributed to a “healthy conversion rate” from the newsletter to overall subscribers, according to the Times, particularly following the occasional appeals he’s made to explain why the Times is worth paying for. (The Times recently hit 10 million total subscribers.) The newsletter gives “people a sense of the full New York Times,” says chief product officer Alex Hardiman, which is “news first, but we do have all of these lifestyle value propositions.”

Below the lead column, you’ll find lists of bullet points, organized by subject, summarizing (and linking to) other notable news stories and features across various sections of the paper. There’s also a “Morning Recommends” section (“Use a cast-iron skillet to make these thick, golden brown sourdough pancakes,” or “Clean your humidifier”), as well as a “Games” section, which includes a graphic of that day’s Spelling Bee grid and the answer to the previous day’s pangram. “The Morning” is “a gateway,” said Kahn, particularly for the “very fertile middle ground of people who are engaging with us regularly, often daily, but not yet thinking of themselves as subscribers.”

Inside the paper, reporters have complicated feelings about Leonhardt’s operation. On one hand, it can be a powerful amplifier for Times journalism. The newsletter has become “one of the biggest ways to launch a big project now,” says Dolnick, from investigations to new games or wellness challenges. Section editors can pitch “The Morning” on forthcoming stories to feature in the lead, as well as those that may have been overlooked. “Occasionally, ‘The Morning’ is responsible for more than half of an article’s online audience,” Leonhardt told me, with recent examples including Wirecutter advice on black tights and a politics story on how the cold weather was affecting the Iowa campaigns.

But Leonhardt’s approach has raised questions about how the paper distinguishes between analysis and opinion—and whether Leonhardt, an institutional star, has more latitude than others to toe that line. “He has an enormous amount of power, and it’s kind of stealth,” said a third staffer. The column is imbued with his positions, some of which have come under scrutiny by experts outside the Times (as well as within it). His pandemic coverage made progressive readers particularly uncomfortable, as Leonhardt, bucking what he called journalism’s “bad news bias,” often broke with public health messaging in his push for normalcy. Leonhardt has “a little bit of that New Republic 1990s vibe of being skeptical of liberal conventional wisdom,” a fourth staffer said. COVID was “the thing he had the strongest position on that was a little bit out of step with the bulk of the paper,” they said, “but also time has kind of proven him a bit more right than wrong on that.”

Leonhardt agrees. “My coverage reflected what were, to me, the reading of the facts. And it doesn’t bother me that not everybody read the facts that way, and that people who didn’t criticized the newsletter,” he said. “I think that increased time and increasing evidence have suggested that our take on the pandemic looks a lot better in retrospect than some of the maximalist claims that people made in 2021 and 2022.”

What distinguishes that “take” from opinion, according to Dolnick, is that in opinion journalism, “‘you should’ is kind of the active verb: ‘Here’s what you should do.’ And I think here what we’re trying to do is, ‘Here’s how to understand,’” he told me. But how to understand can also be subjective. During the pandemic, for example, Politico reported “notable doctors and scientists have written to the Times, individually or in groups,” to say that Leonhardt “cherry-picks sources and data, giving too much weight to people who may have medical expertise but not on infectious disease.” More recently, Leonhardt has received pushback on how he’s tackled the debate over standardized test scores—first in an article, then in the newsletter and on The Daily—by citing data suggesting the test scores are a better predictor of academic success than high school grades and arguing that the move away from the SAT disadvantages lower-income applicants. Some experts challenged his analysis of the data. A few weeks later, Leonhardt again devoted “The Morning”’s lead to SAT scores, this time to explain why Dartmouth had reinstated the test requirement and “why other schools may follow Dartmouth’s lead.”

“David has become a great generalist, but his background was largely econ-focused,” one Times editor said. “So if you’re the person who is covering the Ukraine war and he’s weighing in on it one day, there might be some tension where people feel like this is my beat, and you’re taking it more on the opinion side.” Kahn doesn’t seem too worried. “I don’t think that David’s views add up to an ideology,” he said, but rather “a belief that the role of a leading journalist—and the leading newsletter of The New York Times—is partly just to challenge people to continuously look at the issues around them, the facts connected with the leading storylines, and reach an intelligent judgment that isn’t overly dictated by conventional wisdom or assumptions.”

Leonhardt says he views his role at “The Morning” as “querying the ideas of both political tribes in our country,” while acknowledging “that the things we write that ask liberals to confront evidence that doesn’t always align with their priors sometimes gets more attention.” He continued: “But I think the fact that we do that on both sides is, to me, a sign of what it means to be an independent news reporter in the current day and age…we are analytical journalism. I embrace that. It takes judgment, but that is different from opinion journalism.”

The tension is particularly relevant at a time when Sulzberger is writing 12,000-word essays making the case for journalistic independence, and Times journalists have taken internal stands appealing to the same principle. “The newsletter is working: having a little perspective is drawing the readership,” the fourth staffer said. “I think it can be aligned with independent journalism, but you just have to be careful.”