For a while, the conventional wisdom surrounding the next editor of the New York Times settled on three names: Joe Kahn, James Bennet, and Cliff Levy, a trio of long-serving Times soldiers seen as the most seasoned and carefully groomed journalists in line for the throne. But at a gossipy and ambition-filled institution like the Times, even a pandemic and protests haven’t tamped down the scuttlebutt over who might next steer the ship. And as just about everything in America feels less certain than six months ago, the long-running newsroom speculation over who’ll succeed Dean Baquet, too, has been upended.

For one thing, Bennet has been knocked out of the running. His stunning ouster as editorial page editor in June was precipitated by a staff rebellion over the publication of a now infamous Tom Cotton op-ed calling for the use of federal troops to contain the less peaceful elements of Black Lives Matter protests. But the backdrop to Bennet’s defenestration—in addition to a string of Twitter–fueled controversies that clouded Bennet’s four years atop the Opinion section—was a larger conversation about race and diversity inside newsrooms, where much of the power and management mojo has historically resided with white people (and white men in particular).

That’s started to change in recent years, as some newsrooms have become more proactive and deliberate about recruiting, cultivating, and promoting journalists of color. The shift has only accelerated over the past few months, with the nationwide reckoning over racial justice, and it is factoring into how people view the succession question at the Times. Baquet, after all, made history in becoming the first Black journalist—the first nonwhite one, for that matter—to lead the Times’ newsroom when he was named executive editor in 2014.

“After Bennet, everything’s now up in the air,” a Times source told me. “The thing that happened with the Cotton op-ed is, it really cemented a feeling in the newsroom around the importance of this conversation. The running joke [about the front-runners] was, Great diversity pool, you’ve got one from Harvard, one from Yale, and one from Princeton. After the Cotton op-ed, in the George Floyd era, and with the Times now being a much younger newsroom with a lot more people of color, if you still pick another middle-aged white guy who went to an Ivy League school, what have you really done?”

Someone hinted at this notion during a recent internal town hall, conducted via Zoom, where staff were given an opportunity to submit questions directly to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. The gist of one question, according to multiple people who attended virtually, was about whether Sulzberger felt like he could appoint a white executive editor to follow Baquet. Sulzberger, according to each of these people, seemed to interpret the query as a suggestion that Baquet was a token Black newsroom leader, which he vigorously pushed back on, even if that wasn’t the question’s intent. “I find that question very offensive,” he replied, according to one of the people who was listening.

It’s no secret that Sulzberger finds all of the palace intrigue and candidate handicapping to be premature. He believes he has an array of highly qualified journalists to choose from, and any decision is far from imminent. Times executives traditionally step down by the end of their 65th year (although it’s not some indelible edict, and Sulzberger could always decide to forego that tradition). Baquet is about to turn 64, and there’s a growing sense in the newsroom that he will, and should, stay in charge for as long as possible. Sulzberger declined to chat with me about all of this, but said, “All speculation is likely to be inaccurate, because I am in no hurry for the best editor in the business to leave anytime soon.”

Nevertheless, the speculation had begun to tick up even before Bennet’s departure, the Black Lives Matter resurgence, and all of the other upheaval that 2020 has brought. Toward the beginning of the year, I began hearing chatter about a small handful of top Times editors who had gotten comprehensive 360 performance reviews, which some insiders perceived as a sign that the wheels were in motion.

In addition to Bennet (moot point), Kahn (the managing editor), and Levy (who is about to come off his stint running Metro and return to the masthead in a role overseeing enterprise projects alongside Matt Purdy, sources told me), the other participants included Marc Lacey (national editor), Rebecca Blumenstein (deputy managing editor focused on business coverage), Carolyn Ryan (assistant managing editor overseeing recruitment), and Steve Duenes (deputy managing editor in charge of multimedia and visual journalism).

Those who got the reviews, which were overseen by an outside career-consulting firm, were told it was an honor because it meant they were seen as future leaders of the Times (in some significant capacity, if not necessarily as the next executive editor). As part of the exercise, everyone met with Baquet individually, and feedback about the editors was provided by several-dozen colleagues around the organization, most of it anonymously. Then each person went over the results with the career consultant inside a glass office on the third floor of 620 Eighth Avenue, sitting at the former desk of Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., a historic hunk of wood where the Pentagon Papers once lay.

“For some, the comments were just brutal,” said a source familiar with the process. “People were incredibly frank. Those in the know were peering through the glass trying to get a sense of how shell-shocked the person was at the results.” (I’m told that at least some of the 360-ers have continued to meet with career coaches to work on issues that came out in their reviews.)

Among the crop of participants, Lacey’s name is now being kicked around in a way that it definitely wasn’t just a few months ago, when the whole thing still looked like a face-off primarily between Kahn and Bennet, with Levy rising up in the wings. “There’s been a real effort to elevate Marc Lacey,” one insider told me. “Marc Lacey’s stock has risen really high,” said another. “He was never slotted in, and now all of a sudden he is.”

Yes, Lacey is Black, but he also happens to be a highly respected newsroom figure who has been running one of the Times’ most important news reports of the moment, the national section, now home to coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 electorate, and America’s smoldering season of unrest. Sources noted that Lacey was chosen to co-moderate one of the Democratic primary debates last fall, as well as being asked to moderate a company-wide Zoom meeting in the wake of the Cotton fiasco (before he cut out due to technical difficulties). “Marc has really emerged as a leader,” another one of his colleagues said.

This same source emphasized a point that came up in several of my conversations for this piece. In the past, there has often been a single most obvious heir apparent. Baquet was that person in 2014, just as Jill Abramson was in 2011. Baquet wants the next go-round to be different, and he feels it’s incredibly important to give Sulzberger a true slate of heirs, any one of whom would be fully qualified to take over the newsroom. In a sense, that could end up being one of Baquet’s most enduring legacies. “Dean is a mentor figure, and he definitely feels like there should be a bunch of candidates for that job,” the source said. “Running a newsroom as big and vast as the Times has become, from print to audio to an entire digital-product organization, I think he believes there’s no lone genius who can do that. It’s really gotta be a team.”

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