Meanwhile, on January 9, the editorial leadership instituted a new newsroom policy aimed at ending the leaking of Slack messages that have driven so much negative coverage of the Gray Lady. “What once was occasional criticism is a constant flow that often veers into harassment and abuse aimed at intimidating our reporters and editors into changing their coverage,” Sulzberger, Kahn, and Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of the New York Times Company, wrote.

Companywide Slack channels were essentially public spaces, the letter said. “Public criticism by Times employees of our colleagues for their work product outside of designated feedback forums, as described below, is not permitted,” the new policy says. Now when a Times staffer posts a personal attack on Twitter, they are given a warning to remove it. If they do not, the paper’s “Slack community manager” will delete the message.

Already, though, activists in the Times newsroom have figured out ways around the new policy. One Times journalist told The Free Press, “They will do silly junior high things to get around it.”