James Bennet: “My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: ‘Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.’ It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.”