Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  Raines’s faintly comical self-aggrandizement might have been tolerable—if distracting—at another company, but the success of The New York Times has always depended on a culture in which a majority of employees feel some sense of ownership and responsibility for the company and its mission. “When he was here,” says Glenn Kramon, “the staff felt it was always all about Howell.” Arguably, for the Times to be the Times, its employees—at every level—need to be willing to sublimate their own egos to serve a larger, quasi-public good. “My staff is worth a lot more on the open market than I can pay them,” Kramon says, and, in the days after the May 14, 2003, town hall meeting, he says, “I needed to find a way to keep them here, to make this something they believed in.”

  Unfortunately, Raines did more than just temporarily alienate many of the paper’s reporters and editors. In his effort to force the Times to revolve around him, Raines sought to permanently transform the way in which the newspaper was run. In doing this, he came to personify a shift that had been occurring in America for decades, as daily newspapers started modeling themselves after glossy magazines in a response to increased competition and the ubiquity of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The Times had been aggressively adopting editorial innovations from the magazine world since the 1970s, when it added “service” and “soft news” sections in an effort to compete for readers with outlets like the advertising-rich New York magazine, which had itself begun as a weekly supplement to the now defunct New York Herald Tribune. By the 1980s, that competitive impulse had transformed the “hard news” pages as well, as CNN put pressure on daily papers to add insight and analysis and, especially, drama to their coverage of breaking news. Even though these innovations were viewed with wariness by journalism traditionalists, they were considered necessary to newspapers’ collective survival in an ever more entertainment- and information-saturated culture.

  “We are not the first, on any important story, to bring you the news,” Max Frankel said more than a decade ago. “What does that mean? Why do you read? . . . The kind of thing that we used to wait a week for the newsweeklies to give us, ideally, we’re giving you tomorrow morning. We’re going to explain this event and combine in a very artful way a report on what happened and why it happened and who says what happened.”

  Raines took this evolution to arguably perilous ends. If the country’s dailies were adopting more and more of the characteristics of magazines—with the additions of lyrical dispatches, tension-filled narratives, and portentous analyses—then why not go all the way and run the Times in a manner similar to how New York’s celebrity magazine editors, such as Tina Brown or Vogue’s Anna Wintour, ran their titles? Not content with merely helping to advance the Times’s brand, Raines decided to brand himself. Every page of the Times would reflect his unique sensibility, his personal news judgments, his passions and predilections. He’d force out writers and editors he didn’t get along with and ignore those he couldn’t rid himself of. He’d seek buzz and place more importance on getting the big story than on getting the right story, or even on getting the story right.

  Naturally, Raines gravitated toward writers who were willing to help him realize his vision. “In the newspaper world,” media columnist Simon Dumenco wrote in discussing Raines’s and Blair’s careers, “if you think like a magazine editor, if you think like a magazine writer—drama! glamour! style! narrative!—you get ahead.” Jayson Blair intuitively recognized this, just as he intuitively realized that the path to success under Howell Raines was one that often seemed to prize style over substance. So what if the details of Blair’s sniper coverage weren’t quite right? His stories were gripping. Who cared if Blair hadn’t actually interviewed the characters in his pieces? He’d shown a willingness to produce whatever it was that Raines’s team ordered up—unlike some writers, who griped about impossible-to-meet deadlines and ridiculous travel demands.

  Not surprisingly, Raines found upon taking over the Times that the mechanisms that had been put in place over many decades didn’t work for him. When he came to power, he did so preaching the virtues of an empowered masthead, of including more people in the daily decision-making process. After discovering that those people had concerns about his way of doing business, he cut them out of the equation rather than negotiate or compromise. But unlike a typical national magazine, with, say, fifty or a hundred staffers, the Times has more than a thousand journalists working for it, and the type of autocratic management that might work at the average glossy is destined to fail miserably at a large, unruly news organization where only a small percentage of the staff can ever hope to get meaningful face time with the boss.

  Turner Catledge, the Times’s first executive editor (and one of Raines’s acknowledged heroes), wrote about the need to delegate authority in his 1971 memoir, My Life and The Times. “The Times was too big to be bossed by the traditional shirt-sleeved managing editor. Our news staff numbered some eight hundred reporters and editors, in New York and elsewhere, and I could deal with them only through a chain of command. . . . The kind of men I wanted in the top positions at the Times were independent, creative men, thoroughbreds, and they were not the sort who could be bossed or browbeaten.” Catledge went on to say that he needed subordinates who knew things he didn’t: “I considered myself an expert in one subject, national politics, and in other areas I expected initiative and imagination from responsible editors.”

  In an August 2002 interview with Charlie Rose, Howell Raines paid lip service to this type of approach. “You cannot perform quality journalism without quality management and quality leadership,” he told Rose. “No one person can have enough ideas in a day to feed the intellectual engine of The New York Times or even a single department in The New York Times. . . . Whatever greatness adheres to us, it’s from the collective brainpower. So my philosophy of management is to try to get more people being shareholders in that process.”

  The reality, of course, was much different. Raines ensured that only the select few felt they truly had any influence on shaping the Times. In the process, not only had he created a culture in which a sociopath like Jayson Blair was allowed to thrive, he had enabled a series of embarrassing miscues that sullied the most valued brand in journalism. He effectively negated the power of the Times’s greatest resource—the pooled intelligence and experience of its many employees. Instead of working for a larger good, employees at the paper were forced to focus on protecting their own hides.

  “Everybody felt under siege [under Raines],” says Roger Wilkins, the former Times editorialist and columnist who served on the Siegal committee. “The instinct to cooperate and watch your buddy’s back is diminished. When Thor is up there throwing thunderbolts, your happiest moments come when those thunderbolts hit someone else.” The result was a paper that, at its worst, was considerably less than the sum of its parts.

  What’s more, Raines seemed intent on twisting the role newspapers have played in contemporary American culture. When he became obsessed with Augusta National’s refusal to allow women as members, to cite but one example, he “flooded the zone” in a way that very obviously didn’t reflect the reality of the rest of the world’s concerns. Instead, it reflected Raines’s own preoccupations to an extent that gave the lie to the newspaper’s historic mission: to inform the world of each day’s top stories “without fear or favor,” as Adolph Ochs famously stated in 1896.

  For decades, the Times has maintained its dominance by being a New York newspaper that also serves the country’s media, intellectual, and political elites. Howell Raines, though, tried to make the Times wholly his—not his employees’, not his readers’. It was a costly mistake.

  In doing so, Raines unintentionally highlighted what will be an ongoing challenge for the Times as it continues its national expansion during a period when the intense variegation of the media has given rise to more and more outlets (witness Fox News and the recent circulation gains of its corporate sibling, the right-wing tabloid the New York Post) that find an un
derrepresented audience niche and work to fill it. Over the next decades, will the Times, and the country’s other leading newspapers, be forced to niche-ify themselves in order to target readers in hyperspecific socioeconomic groups or with ever more blatant political affiliations? Will the American press move closer toward the British (and Western European) media industry, in which each daily speaks very particularly to political partisans?

  A NEW TEAM IN PLACE

  More than a year after the resignation of Howell Raines, it is clear that the Times has already come some distance toward recovering from his administration. After all, a century’s worth of accumulated prestige and loyalty could not be washed away in a bad year or two.

  Some of the credit for this can be attributed to the deep eagerness of Times employees to return to their normal rhythms. Credit also needs to be given to Bill Keller, who became the Times’s new executive editor on July 30, 2003. “What I expected was a place that had suffered a blow to its morale and self-confidence,” says Keller. “There was that, although it cleared up pretty quickly. What I didn’t foresee was the extent to which the operations of the place had broken down to the point where some were dysfunctional.”

  Without preaching about a need for wholesale change, Keller moved quickly to set the newsroom’s operations back on track. On July 31, he appointed Jill Abramson and John Geddes the paper’s new managing editors. Geddes had served as the Times’s deputy managing editor since 1997 and had joined the paper as a business editor in 1994; Abramson had been at the Times since 1997. It was the first time the paper would have two managing editors, and both Abramson and Geddes were coming to the job with far less experience at the Times than any previous person who had held the position. Geddes, who had essentially run the paper while Raines and Boyd were consumed with the Blair scandal, would be in charge of newsroom operations, while Abramson would perform the traditional managing editor’s role: organizing and supervising the daily news report.

  Over the next year, Keller would oversee the turnover of many of the paper’s desk editors and department heads. He promoted Jon Landman to a masthead-level position and named Susan Edgerley, one of Landman’s deputies, to be the new metro editor (In the spring of 2004, Landman was put in charge of overseeing the culture department.) Glenn Kramon was appointed to a newly created masthead-level position that would oversee training and career development, and Keller lured Larry Ingrassia away from The Wall Street Journal to take over as business editor. Roger Cohen stepped down as foreign editor and was replaced by Susan Chira, who had formerly been in charge of the Times’s book projects. Times Magazine editor Adam Moss agreed to take the lead on a redevelopment of the paper’s culture pages and was succeeded at the magazine by his deputy, Gerald Marzorati. Chip McGrath stepped down as editor of the Book Review and was replaced by Vanity Fair’s Sam Tanenhaus. Keller persuaded Fortune’s Michele McNally to become the Times’s new director of photography (Jim Wilson, the paper’s previous photo director, had stepped down for personal reasons) and promoted Philip Taubman, the deputy editor of the editorial page, to take over Abramson’s old job as Washington bureau chief. Patrick Tyler, meanwhile, was reassigned to London. Keller lured Rick Flaste, an old Times editor who had gone to work at the Los Angeles Times, back to work as the paper’s acting science editor*47; Cornelia Dean, who had been editing the paper’s science coverage, returned to writing and reporting. While Raines, the self-described “change agent,” had struggled mightily to pry a league of recalcitrant editors out of their jobs, Keller was able to almost entirely recast the paper’s desk editors in a matter of months with only a minimum of fuss.

  In fact, many of the changes Raines had hoped to make finally began to happen once the newsroom stopped being preoccupied with intramural politics. Within months of taking over, Tanenhaus had reinvigorated the Book Review, adding more topical essays and reported features. Michele McNally’s impact on the paper’s photo selection was felt immediately. Perhaps most important, the much-discussed reworking of the paper’s culture pages that had been initiated under Raines finally began to be implemented in the summer of 2004. “We knew the culture report had to be much more news oriented, and we knew we had to make sure we had the best critics in the country,” says Frank Rich, who was persuaded by Raines to help with the section’s revamping. It’s a role he’s stayed in under Keller. “We have to be much faster in reporting news about both high and low culture. We really have to be more aggressive in every area.”

  The Times quickly became more aggressive, pushing daily deadlines back for the arts desk so it could feature breaking news. Arthur Sulzberger moved to show that, like his father, he was willing to pour money back into the editorial side of the newspaper even during tough economic times. In the wake of its 2004 Pulitzer haul, the Los Angeles Times was faced with forced layoffs imposed by its corporate parent, the Tribune Company. The New York Times, meanwhile, went on a hiring spree. While Raines had lost a number of excellent reporters and editors, including Doug Frantz and Kevin Sack, to the Los Angeles Times, Bill Keller—with approval from Sulzberger—began to reverse the flow. In late June, Keller made four prominent hires from the Los Angeles Times, poaching film editor Michael Cieply, film critic Manohla Dargis, music industry writer Jeff Leeds, and architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. “I do think Arthur has inherited his father’s penchant for demonstrating strength when rivals are tempted to retreat,” says Keller. “Hiring in hard times is a way of showing confidence in our fundamental conviction—that quality journalism is good business.”

  It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, to be sure. Shortly after Moss accepted his new assistant managing editor post, he left the Times to edit New York magazine, a painful defection that had Arthur Sulzberger scrambling to find some way to keep Moss at the Times. Roger Cohen’s departure as foreign editor was not harmonious—he was pushed out of his job—and late 2003 saw the paper’s Baghdad bureau in turmoil as it was beaten on the ground by The Washington Post and roiled by a series of petty internal disputes. And in January 2004, before finally settling on Sam Tanenhaus to replace Chip McGrath, Keller gave an interview to Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel, the authors of the “Book Babes” column for the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Florida–based journalism think tank, in which he discussed the Book Review’s future. Keller gave the impression the Times would seriously cut back on reviewing new literary fiction. “We’ll do the new Updike, the new Roth, the new Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith,” he said. “But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me.” Naturally, Keller’s remarks provoked no small amount of hand-wringing among the literary intelligentsia, forcing him to publicly clarify his comments a few days later.

  Sure enough, the ambient level of discontent that is a daily presence in any newsroom soon became evident. Keller, staffers grumbled, didn’t circulate in the newsroom. Abramson, some said sarcastically, had the listening skills of Howell Raines. Reporters complained about how the paper was getting beaten on big stories; some even said Raines would have dominated the devolving situation in Iraq in a way the current team seemed unable to. But the complaints were, for the most part, halfhearted, another sign that things at 229 West Forty-third Street were settling into their old, pre-Rainesian rhythms.

  For the reporters and editors who produced the Times’s Blair report, things returned to normal as well. Kramon, of course, began his new post. Lorne Manly was named the Times’s chief media writer in June 2004, a job that would have him covering trends “across the range of media,” according to the memo announcing the new post. Jonathan Glater says he can’t comment on any future assignments, but according to several newsroom sources, he was tapped to work as part of a team preparing a multipart series on class in America, a project reminiscent of the 2000 series on race that Gerald Boyd had helped organize and which had won the Times a Pulitzer Prize. Adam Liptak and Jacques Steinberg continued to report on legal affairs and the newspaper industry, respectively, and both writers saw their profiles rise.
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br />   Dan Barry and David Barstow, meanwhile, saw their black-humor quips about how their work on the Blair project would affect their careers proven delightfully wrong: In April 2004, Barstow won his first Pulitzer Prize for his project on workplace safety. In 2003, Barry began writing the biweekly “About New York” column, which was created more than half a century ago for the legendary reporter and columnist Meyer Berger. And in the spring of 2004, W. W. Norton published Barry’s stirring memoir, Pull Me Up, to laudatory reviews.

  On May 11, 2004, one year after the publication of their report, the seven men who produced the Blair report met at Blue Smoke, an upscale barbecue joint on Manhattan’s East Side run by celebrity chef Danny Meyer (Al Siegal didn’t attend). The locale was a nod to the dinners they had scarfed down in the page-one conference room a year earlier; as often as not, their takeout feasts were from Virgil’s, a Times Square barbecue restaurant with all the charm of a T.G.I. Friday’s. Those meals had been grim and came at the end of exhausting days. This one was much more celebratory. The next day, the Times would run a glowing review of Barry’s book by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who called it “an extraordinarily lyrical look at a mid-20th-century working-class Irish-American family. . . . Mr. Barry has managed to find the richness of heart of a now oddly distant America.” Everyone was happy in his job and generally upbeat about the future.

  “One of the great things about journalism is that when you’re thrown into really difficult stories under tight deadlines, you forge these amazing friendships,” says Barstow. “This experience will bond me to these guys forever. We were in a foxhole, and we’ll always remember that.”

  —————

  IN THE WEEKS following Jayson Blair’s resignation, Raines and Arthur Sulzberger appointed three internal committees charged with investigating how Jayson Blair was allowed to thrive and how to safeguard against similar fraudulent employees in the future. The largest of those groups, the Siegal committee, focused on the specifics of the Blair case and came up with recommendations on how to improve the internal workings of the Times. A working group on training and performance management proposed a series of recommendations for making sure newsroom leaders and new hires alike were given extensive training and reviews. And a working group on communications tackled the problem of interdepartmental and hierarchical information sharing.