This is a fair @gabrielsnyder piece about our Very Bad Headline — knowledgeable about the subject, plainly written, deliberate — and I’m rethinking my views on Public Editors.

DEAN BAQUET, THE EXECUTIVE EDITOR of The New York Times, was at home on Monday night—as was the rest of the paper’s senior leadership (referred to internally as “the masthead”)—when the next day’s front page was being composed. Soon, it would turn into a public disaster.

At 9:13pm, Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, the statistical news site once published by the Times, sparked a social media furor with a tweet of the front page. A banner headline appeared over a pair of stories on President Trump’s White House speech addressing the weekend’s two mass shootings; Silver commented, “Not sure ‘TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM’ is how I would have framed the story.” Not long after, Joan Walsh, of The Nation and CNN, tweeted that she had canceled her Times subscription and urged others to do the same. “I know a lot of folks will tell me I’m wrong. I will miss it. But I can’t keep rewarding such awful news judgment,” she wrote. “‘Trump Urges Unity Against Racism’ is almost as bad as their full-page Comey letter coverage just before 2016 election. Nobody learns.” (A spokesperson for the Times declined to say how many cancellations the newspaper has seen, but acknowledges, “We have seen a higher volume of cancellations today than is typical.”)