I retired in July 2024 after 27 years as an editor at The New York Times. Here is the draft of the remarks I gave at a newsroom toast in my honor.

Everyone leaves The Times sooner or later. No exceptions. The only question is whether you get to choose when and how. I’m choosing to leave at the top of my game.

People have asked what I’m going to do. The short answer is: whatever I want.

The long answer: I want to travel and do some writing. I might do a little editing on the side. I’m involved in a local center that teaches Zen meditation. Our apartment is full of more unread books than I’ll ever finish. I became an Irish citizen a few years ago through my grandparents, and I am learning to speak Irish. I want to ride my bike everywhere, work out, do some sailing with my friends.

And I really want to finish Baldur’s Gate 3.

So, confession time.

I did not grow up dreaming to work at The New York Times. I knew people who did. The Times didn't seem like my kind of paper. A little scary, a little stuffy. The Philadelphia Inquirer or The Boston Globe seemed more my speed. Maybe one of the New York tabloids. But I couldn’t get an interview at any of those places.

I was a night city editor at a small daily in Pennsylvania at the time. I was seeing a woman who was a grad student in Amherst, Mass., and we were driving back and forth, six hours at a time. I wanted to find a place in the middle.

I spotted an online ad for copy editors and applied as a lark, figuring it was a long shot. The New York Times, come on. I took the home editing test, some of the worst copy I had ever seen in my life. I spent weeks on that and qualified for a five-night tryout. I passed. Charlotte Evans and Merrill Perlman hired me. And it changed my life.

The grad student got her degree, moved to the city, that’s Jane right there, we’ve been married 26 years.

Our daughter, Eva, was born a few years later. She grew up a city kid in Manhattan, and now she’s in Chicago, working for the EPA. She’s 24. She’s up on the screen. Hi Eva.

I was told I must also mention the other members of our family, Audrey and Max, two Siberian cats we adopted as adults in 2020, a month before we all got sent home to work. Great timing.

I started on the metro copy desk in the old building on 43rd Street in 1997. You could still hear the presses rumble under your desk at the end of the night.

When the clerks dropped the first edition off at your desk, it was still warm. The ink smeared your hands. At 34, I was briefly the youngest person on the rim. I was full of bravado, but I felt like an imposter. My old boss John Geddes used to say everyone here feels that way when they first get here. My informal survey over 27 years suggests he is right.

I spent the first decade of my Times career on Metro. Five different metro editors -- Mike Oreskes for a month. Joyce Purnick, Jon Landman, Susan Edgerley and Joe Sexton. I am grateful to them all, and to my many other mentors and colleagues from those days.

In the night backfield, I learned at the elbows of Phil Corbett, Gerry Mullany, Jim Roberts, Peter Applebome, Bill Goss, and the late Christine Kay. I worked with some great reporters. Chivers, McFadden, Kleinfeld, Barry, Slackman, Bumiller, Cave, Adam Nagourney, Clyde Haberman, the great Jim Dwyer. I miss that guy. Forgive me. I can’t name everyone or we’d be here all night. We all went through fire together on Metro. Without a doubt, the biggest story was 9/11 and the aftermath.

Most of our focus was on print. I had grown up a computer geek. My father worked for the Defense Department in the 70s and used to let me play games on the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. He thought I should become a programmer. He thought computers were going to put newspapers out of business. But I wasn’t a good programmer and I wanted to be a journalist. At my last paper I had launched the paper’s website and updated it on my own time after deadline. The publisher said he wasn’t going to pay me for that. Quote: “Nobody wants to go home and stare at a computer after sitting in front of one all day at the office.”

I had been excited to join a newsroom viewed as a pioneer in online news. But nobody in the main newsroom seemed to know how the website came together. Some other building somewhere, in the middle of the night. That slowly started to change.

Sexton and Landman put me and Sewell Chan in charge of figuring out how to start publishing Metro news to the web as it happened. After some political blogging experiments, that project morphed into the late great City Room. Before long the newsroom had something like 50 blogs. Social media was also exploding, and several of us joined Twitter, sharing headlines from other papers and bits and bobs of news. The rest of the newsroom was confused. Was this even allowed? But you know the old saying, retweets are not endorsements.

Around this time, Geddes asked me to write a memo suggesting ways The Times should restructure for the internet future. The memo turned into a job. Bill Keller put me in charge of the copy desks, the heart of the newsroom, as he called it, with the goal of merging the print and web editing operations.

These were tough years. Advertising was in meltdown. Print circulation was in decline. We had a financial crisis and the great recession. The Times sold off assets and went into debt. We had waves of layoffs and buyouts, budget cuts and hiring freezes. The two newsrooms were eventually merged under Jill, the paywall came along and saved the business, and the innovation report forced even more changes. Many of my friends and mentors left the newsroom. Then Jill herself was gone. Old timers know I’m glossing over a lot. There’s no reason to rehash it. Adam Nagourney covers most of it in his book.

Some things not in the book. I set up a SWAT editing team to improve the quality of headlines and web copy. We started training copy editors in production and training web producers to edit. And we hired people who could do both. They’re working all over the newsroom now. We kept pushing deadlines earlier to get news up sooner for the online audience. I helped Jennifer Preston, our first social media editor, to teach the newsroom how to use Twitter for breaking news, and that gave The Times an edge on some big stories, including the Sandy Hook massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing. I was the newsroom liaison to the developers on a long project to create a web-first CMS, which evolved into Oak. And a group of us helped Phil Corbett revise the outdated stylebook to allow a more casual style suitable for online journalism.

My deputy back then was Susan Wessling. What she failed to mention in her kind remarks is she was by far the most qualified candidate to run the copy desks. But I got the job. So I asked her to be my deputy. She graciously agreed. And I am glad that she did. She is an ingenious problem solver, a sharp judge of talent and saved me from making a fool of myself on countless occasions. Now, as standards editor, she is doing the same for the newsroom at large. You should do whatever she tells you.

I am also indebted to the many slot editors and leaders from that time, especially Charles Knittle, Pete Blair, Eric Dyer, Rogene Jacquette, Sarah Graham, Karron Skog, Mike Abrams, Lew Serviss, Jill Taylor and Gina Lamb. And many others.

Fast forward to 2015. I missed breaking news. And I wanted to work with reporters again. Cliff Levy came along at the right time with the idea of creating a central team of digital reporters to chase stories, including weird internet stuff, that the traditional desks were not covering. I jumped at the chance.

We cobbled together a small team of editors and reporters: Mike McPhate, Daniel Victor, Christine Hauser, Katie Rogers, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Liam Stack, Ashley Southall, and, later, Yonette Joseph. We published fast-breaking news that The Times used to ignore, and tackled some of the weird water-cooler stories that were building audience for places like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post. We did this without sacrificing quality or standards or descending into deceptive clickbait.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t make the bosses nervous from time to time. Katie Rogers wrote about a woman who made videos of herself rolling her face in freshly baked bread. The headline: “This Is Her Face. This Is Her Face in Bread. Any Questions?”

Dean called me into a meeting about that one.

No regrets.

If readers were fascinated by something goofy, we were on it. Was the dress blue or gold? Is the recording saying Yanny or Laurel? Do you shower in the morning or at night?

And you may remember Dan Victor’s legendary one-word story. The headline: “When I’m Mistakenly Put on an Email Chain, Should I Hit ‘Reply All’ Asking to be removed?” The one word answer: No. (I was on vacation for that one!)

This weirdness was all practice for the biggest internet story to come, the tweeting president and a global pandemic that drove much of the world indoors and online. After that, our work grew more serious, more focused on hard news, especially breaking news, and live reporting, but we’ve tried to keep it fun.

Express is now a global round-the-clock team of more than 35 editors and reporters, with hubs in New York, Seoul and London, and reporters scattered across the U.S. The team has been responsible for bringing millions of readers to the report, and many of them have stuck around as subscribers.

I want to give credit to Erin McCann, my strategic deputy for many years. She launched our London hub in the middle of the pandemic, and it has been a tremendous success, zigging when the rest of The Times is zagging, and playing an essential role in major story lines.

I also want to thank Andres Martinez, who in the past year was instrumental in launching our new hub in Seoul, a collaboration with the Live team. And while I’m at it, best of luck to Melissa Hoppert, a great partner on Live and an excellent choice to lead Express into the future.

Thanks also to the Sulzberger family. Their dedication to this institution is remarkable, and the world is richer for it. There are much easier ways to make money. I’d especially like to thank A.G., whose first job as a Times reporter was working for me on City Room. This was no accident. The top editors at the time wanted to immerse him in digital journalism from the first day. I think the plan paid off.

[A funny story about that. We called him Arthur back then, or Arthur Gregg to distinguish him from his father, but when he got his first front-page story the tech team came to me on deadline in a panic. No matter what they did, they could not squeeze the byline “Arthur Gregg Sulzberger” into a single A1 column. He says I gave him about 20 minutes to come up with a new byline. He went with “A.G.” and that stuck.]

Thanks also to the many masthead editors over the years who put their trust in me – in particular Allan M. Siegel, who terrified many people but who was always kind to me. Also Bill Keller, John Geddes, Bill Schmidt, the late Janet Elder, Dean Baquet, Matt Purdy, Joe Kahn, Carolyn Ryan, and Sam Dolnick. And my last three bosses, Cliff Levy, Rebecca Blumenstein and Marc Lacey. Thank you all for having my back and putting up with me when I was annoying.

Trust me, I was annoying.

I’d also like to thank all my fellow department heads, especially Julie Bloom, Anna Dubenko and Nestor Ramos.

I don’t have time to thank everyone on Express by name, let alone all the Express alumni and friends out on the desks, or all the many former copy editors and web producers who have risen through the ranks, but I am grateful for all the warm wishes you have sent my way in the past few weeks. I’ll always be rooting for you from afar.

I do have to thank Pete Khoury, Mr. Breaking News. When all hell is unleashed, you want Pete in the foxhole with you.

And thanks to Maggie Adams, my operations deputy, who worked hard to master the job in a few short months, only to find out that her boss was quitting. She organized all this. Thank you, Maggie, and I’m sorry.

A few other names. Melina Delkic, our highly creative day editor. Will Lamb, a wordsmith who is calm under pressure. Chris Mele, the weekend dynamo. Ron DePasquale, our steady late editor. The rest of the crew in Seoul, especially Mike Ives, who used to do what six people do now. Joel Petterson and the rest of the London hub, especially Derrick Bryson Taylor and Jenny Gross, who were present at the creation. Not to mention Johanna Barr, Matt Stevens, Niraj Chokshi, Sarah Mervosh, Eduardo Medina, Maria Cramer, Ashley Calloway-Blatch, Michael Gold, Louis Lucero, Dagny Salas and all the other alumni. You’re all still Express to me.

All right. Last words.

It has been the privilege of a lifetime to work at The Times alongside so many brilliant, talented and dedicated journalists.

I have never taken it for granted. You shouldn’t either.

This newsroom has seen some rough times. The ship always rights itself.

Look around. These are good times. The staff has never been bigger. The resources are vast. The leadership is stable.

The Times is not perfect. What is? But it is great. It is great because it is full of great people who pull together to rise above our imperfections. I am proud to have been part of that.

Now it’s up to you.

Thanks.