In Real Time, Calling for Anthony Weiner to Step Out of the Mayor’s Race

We’ve all heard of fast-breaking stories but something relatively new in the newspaper world is the fast-breaking editorial.

The Times is doing more of that these days - posting editorials expressing the paper’s institutional opinion in real time rather than waiting until the next day’s paper.

Few instances have been as notable as one on Tuesday, when about three hours after Anthony D. Weiner’s news conference, The Times had written and published an editorial calling for him to remove himself from New York City’s mayoral race.

The editorial began: “At some point, the full story of Anthony Weiner and his sexual relationships and texting habits will finally be told. In the meantime, the serially evasive Mr. Weiner should take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City.”

I asked Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor, about this practice, which runs counter to the stereotype of tweedy and bespectacled editorial writers deliberating and arguing for long hours over the news in the morning paper for comment (at earliest) the next day.

He said the editorial board had started, during the 2012 campaign, to put editorials online as soon as they were ready rather than wait for an 11 p.m. deadline as the print edition went to bed.

“We started speeding up,” he said. “We began to put them up when we had them ready.”

The recent, major Supreme Court decisions on the Voting Rights Act and the Defense of Marriage Act were among those news stories to get this kind of immediate comment.

“We just feel like when people are focused on a big story, that’s the time to weigh in,” he said. Editorials, at that moment, “get more attention and have more impact.”

With Tuesday’s development on Mr. Weiner, he said, “we started talking about it earlier in the day” when news sites started to forecast a major development. At that point, writing something for possible use later seemed premature, he said.

But given the news conference and what Mr. Rosenthal saw as Mr. Weiner’s “contemptuous attitude,” he felt that “this had gotten to the point of craziness.”

Making a strong statement “seemed legitimate at that moment.”

This practice requires fast decision-making followed by fast writing, fact-checking and editing. “We compress and speed up the process.” In the case of the Weiner editorial, that also involved checking with the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., to make sure he was on board. He was.

Once the editorial is posted, the inexorable world of Internet commenting begins, and sometimes outside  reaction means the editorial will be adjusted before going into its final, print form. Last month, the Twitter world was critical of a change in an editorial about President Obama’s credibility on the government’s phone data collection, making much of The Times’s apparent softening of its position.

“That was an instance in which it became clear that people were misreading what we intended to say so we clarified it,” he said. I wrote about that in this blog, suggesting that - given the strength of the original statement and the strong reaction to it - the change should have been explained very briefly to the reader. Mr. Rosenthal disagreed, saying the change was only meant for clarity and didn’t need an explanation.

The real-time posting of editorials is a good development and one that, so far, has served Times readers well.

But what’s next? Will editorials soon be sent out on Twitter in 140-character increments?

“That’s not my intention,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “You have to think about the best way to say something. This is already pretty fast.”