Hardly a day goes by without a reminder that personnel decisions at the Times happen very very very slowly.
Item: Mark Bittman, in a farewell piece for the Times Insider, reports: "In 1994, Trish Hall, then the Living section's editor, asked me if I wanted to write a column for the new Dining section. Duh — who would say no to that? Three years later (The Times doesn't often move quickly) The Minimalist was born."
Item: On November 13, the Times reported, "David Leonhardt, the founding editor of The New York Times's digitally focused The Upshot, will join the Op-Ed page in the new year as a staff columnist." Here we are in "the new year," two months later, and Mr. Leonhardt is still cranking out copy for the Upshot rather than the op-ed page. That's doubtless a huge frustration to the thousands of readers waiting eagerly for Mr. Leonhardt's copy to begin appearing on a different page, a transition so momentous that the Times considered its readers deserved at least two months worth of public notice to prepare themselves adequately.
Item: On January 12, the Times announced that Jim Rutenberg will become the paper's media columnist. Even the Times announcement acknowledged that "Jim takes over the media column almost a year after the passing of David Carr." [emphasis added. Carr died February 12, 2015.] Do Times readers get a partial refund of their subscription money for having to endure almost a year without a regular media column? If the column is so dispensable that readers could muddle along without it for almost a year, why bother reviving it?
Item: The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports that Politico editor Susan Glasser is in talks with the New York Times in part because "Glasser's husband, Peter Baker, a longtime Washington-based reporter for the New York Times, has been in talks with editors about replacing Jodi Rudoren at the paper's Jerusalem bureau." Ms. Rudoren was gone as of January 1, which means the Times has been without a bureau chief at Jerusalem. Back in the day the paper would have sent a veteran like Ethan Bronner over to fill in, but Mr. Bronner has since left the Times for Bloomberg.
The paper can maybe save some money by leaving some positions temporary unfilled. Even a less than fully staffed Times has more reporters and editors than many other news organizations do. But when even decades-long veterans of the Times such as Mr. Bittman openly acknowledge that "The Times doesn't often move quickly," it only tends to reinforce doubts on Wall Street about whether the Times management is moving quickly enough to keep up with the publishing industry's digital transformation.