For regular New York Times readers, Sunday mornings haven't been the same the past couple of weeks now that its longtime columnist in the Week in Review section, Frank Rich, has departed from the paper of record after 30 years to begin working at New York magazine.
Now the twice-weekly columns of Bob Herbert in the Times will also be a thing of the past.
On Friday, Herbert announced his resignation from the paper.
I have been writing a column for 25 years, nearly 18 at The New York Times. The deadlines and demands were a useful discipline but for some time now I have grown eager to move beyond the constriction of the column format, with its rigid 800-word limit, in favor of broader and more versatile efforts. So I am leaving The New York Times and the rewards and rigors of daily journalism with the intent of writing more expansively and more aggressively about the injustices visited on working people, the poor and the many others in our society who find themselves on the wrong side of power.
I am writing a book called “Wounded Colossus” about some of the great challenges facing the United States and will be part of a new, soon-to-be-announced effort to help bolster progressive journalism in the cause of a more generous and just America.
My years at The Times have been wonderful and I will miss working for the greatest newspaper in the world. But sometimes a mission presents itself, and I could not look in the mirror if I did not respond.
Herbert's last column for the paper ran on Saturday. In it, he wrote about the theme that he has been unrelentingly focused on over the past few years, especially since Barack Obama took office: that our economy is in much worse shape than the official government statistics indicate, and it's not getting better for a lot of people who have been hurt by the Great Recession.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2011.