#Speculation swirls over Choire Sicha replacement at NY Times Styles

A month after Choire Sicha’s puzzling departure from the top of the New York Times Styles section for an ill-defined role in a newsletter unit, speculation continues to swirl on who will get the plum job and exactly what prompted his departure.

The inside candidate who would ordinarily be considered the next in line is Alexandra Jacobs, one of three deputy editors who handled much of the fashion and lifestyle section’s day-to-day operations.

The two other deputy editors in the section are not believed to have put their hands up so far. But the search is still in its early stages, said several sources.

“I would imagine they feel pressure to pick a person of color,” said one insider. “That said, maybe picking a woman would at least satisfy the woke contingent.”

The Daily Beast has reported that Dodai Stewart, NYT’s deputy editor for narration and a former editor of the snarky website Splinter, is in the hunt. Sources also floated as a potential candidate Lindsey Underwood, who is currently in Los Angeles as a senior staff editor at Styles. Both Stewart and Underwood are persons of color.

Stella Bugbee, an editor at large at New York Media since October and previously editor-in-chief of New York magazine’s fashion vertical The Cut, was also said to be in the running, as Media Ink previously reported. 

The Daily Beast on Thursday reported that Sicha’s departure followed concerns about his hands-off management style, which was viewed as problematic when it came to writers such as Taylor Lorenz, the tech writer he personally recruited from The Atlantic who’s taken a lot of heat for her social media activity.

Sicha originally reported up the masthead to Carolyn Ryan, a deputy managing editor, but was later reassigned to his pal Sam Sifton, an assistant managing editor. One source said the newsroom read this as a sign that Sicha rankled the masthead with his freewheeling management style even as he pushed creative boundaries and shook up the coverage in the paper’s biggest feature section.

“Choire has a lot of fans inside the Times,” said one source. “But it is true that Carolyn Ryan was not one of them.” Sicha and Ryan did not return emails seeking comment.

The Times said in response to the Daily’s Beast’s reporting, “You’ve heard a lot of false and misleading rumors. Choire is a superb journalist and a treasured colleague who has mentored journalists on the Styles desk and across the newsroom. We realized that newsletters offer us big opportunities and key to those ambitions is having expert newsroom leadership.”

Sicha contributed to speculation surrounding his departure with a surprise April 16 memo to staff announcing he would be exiting the Styles job immediately and working on a still undefined newsletter job “at least through the summer.”

The Times spokeswoman said, “As our most senior leaders have made clear, there is no one better suited than Choire, an innovative thinker and a naturally entrepreneurial editor, to help build on our newsletter portfolio and showcase new voices in ways that meaningfully expand and evolve Times journalism.”