Behind the Times (29 page)

A week later, Rosenthal met with Pomfret to discuss the business side’s idea of adding a weekly column on personal computers to Science Times. The column ought “to cover the whole explosion of home and small business information,” Rosenthal subsequently told Arthur Gelb. “The advertising people think they can get a lot of advertising for this. As far as I am concerned, it is a good, solid venture because it is an interesting, expanding, and useful field which we do not now cover.” Rosenthal also relaxed his vigilance against the advertising department’s ideas for promotional tie-ins. When a major Richard Avedon exhibit was due to open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Times Magazine
ran a lavish selection of Avedon’s work. Avedon was one of the great fashion photographers, and the
Times
sales force solicited advertising from the department stores that sold high fashion. The feature turned into a trifecta: Punch Sulzberger at the time was on the board of the Met. Later, as economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s, tie-ins appeared regularly in the
Times.
In the Arts and Leisure section of February 2, 1992, there was, for example, an appreciation of the new upper Madison Avenue retail space opened by the clothier—and major advertiser—Ralph Lauren. (Lauren was reported to be unhappy because his store didn’t get an even grander spread in the
Times Magazine
; instead he had to be satisfied with carefully calibrated treatment that began on page one of the section and ran to over nineteen hundred words.)

There was indeed a “new”
New York Times.
Sulzberger had named Mattson president of the Times Company in 1979; Mattson was also appointed to the board of directors. Science Times began paying for itself, thanks to home-computer advertising. The editors learned to stop worrying and begin to love the fashion business. The
Times’
balance sheets were now reasons for joy. Mattson encountered less trouble in his drive to develop more new “editorial products” around which advertising could be sold—inserts and magazine supplements such as the Sophisticated Traveler, Good Health, and Business World. All of them became money-makers though none did quite as well financially as the special magazine section called “Fashions of the Times,” or FOTs.

FOTs were ingenious tie-ins. Adolph Ochs’s
Times
long ago understood the importance of the clothing manufacturers and the big stores to the economic health of the paper. Ochs courted Seventh Avenue. Retail ads for the “rag trade” ran throughout the daily paper and the
Times Magazine
on Sunday. But the FOTs offered a pure “dedicated” format: The news department supplied the fashion-editorial matter and the advertising department sold the fashion ads around the copy. The Fashions of the Times supplement which appeared on March 3, 1985, for example, totaled 158 pages; 68 percent of those pages represented paid advertising, including a gatefold ad for the cover. The total advertising revenue for that single section on that one Sunday totaled $2,322,100. This revenue was in addition to revenues from the ad lineage scattered through the regular edition of the
Times Magazine
and the rest of the Sunday paper. The direct expenses to produce that Sunday’s Fashions of the
Times
totaled $1,618,500, mainly for printing and paper (the editorial staff costs, to prepare the copy, were listed as $150,000). The “gross contribution margin” was $703,000, a 33 percent return on revenue. The Fashions of the Times supplement of the year before had done even better; the FOT section of March 4, 1984, totaled 224 pages; its contribution to profits was $1,533,000, a 44 percent return. Later FOTs were developed for men’s fashion and for children’s clothes, in addition to the women’s FOTs. Supplements also appeared seasonally for the spring and fall fashions.

By 1990, the
Times
was publishing eight special magazine supplements on fashion and related feature subjects each year. All of these were edited by Carrie Donovan, who first joined the paper in 1955, left in the mid-1960s, and came back in the 1970s. In addition, Donovan edited the weekly features of the
Times Magazine
covering fashion, style, beauty, design, and food—in effect, more pages offering desirable “advertising adjacencies” to the fashion industry. In the fall of 1990, in a long profile of Donovan,
Vogue
magazine described her as “the most powerful and influential newspaper fashion editor in America, perhaps in the world.”

The
Times
had discovered in the FOTs a new way to print money. Through the flush years of the 1980s, however, some of the old tensions festered; prosperity, perversely, didn’t produce total peace between the advertising and news departments. The
Times
advertising-sales staff complained that Donovan featured fashions that were “elitist,” “fantasy, “impractical for ordinary people.” Worse, from the
sales staff’s perspective, the FOTs concentrated on the same select upper-end designers, principally Yves St. Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Calvin Klein, Chanel, and Norma Kamali. In the advertising department’s view, the editors were “ignoring major societal changes such as the professional working woman.” As an example, the sales staff cited an article urging women to rush out in June to the department stores because the racks would be empty when they returned in September; it was “unrealistic,” a business-staff memo declared, for the
Times
to assume that the typical woman reader “took a three months’ vacation in the Hamptons.”

The most vocal protests came from Herbert Shapiro and Brenda Racoosin, two salespeople responsible for selling to the mass-market manufacturers—rag trade companies as opposed to couturier houses. The
Times
needed “broader, more practical fashion coverage,” Shapiro told Rosenthal. Shapiro refrained from attacking Donovan directly. But he alluded to her high-fashion tastes, reminding Rosenthal that “only 8 percent of our weekday readers and 7 percent Sunday have household incomes of over $100,000.” Further, there were many working women in the
Times
audience for whom the couturier prices were out of reach: “Probably more than 95 percent of our readers can appreciate our fashion news only vicariously.” Racoosin, for her part, did a tally of the women’s Fashions of the Times for the spring of 1983, and reported: “YSL was mentioned 67 times, Calvin Klein 22x, Lagerfeld for Chloe and Chanel 44x …” Similarly, Racoosin analyzed the children’s FOT for the summer of 1984. “Why are we directing our editorial credits to less than 10% of our readership?” she asked. Racoosin calculated the average cost of the children’s clothes in FOT’s twenty-three photo spreads. The outfits featured, she complained, cost on average $125.25; there was only one “mass market” outfit—“a lonely jumpsuit from Health Tex for $16.”

No one could mistake Shapiro and Racoosin for objective analysts; they both made their livelihood selling the “mass market” accounts. Shapiro was particularly sensitive to what he judged Donovan’s “editorial swipes” at his accounts. The men’s and the women’s FOTs in the spring of 1985, he declared, were “the two worst editorial sections I can remember.” Shapiro listed the offending features: “ ‘City Styles’ is so damaging I can only hope that because it is also so boring and uninformative it goes unread. In one sentence we’re told the Palm Beach suit was banished ‘into mothballed oblivion’ and a Dacron shirt
‘is looked upon with the same disdain.…’ Both Palm Beach and Dupont, among our very biggest advertisers, will love it.” Another advertising department report summed up the “perceptions of the trade” about the
Times’
fashion staff: “Does not return phone calls, does not acknowledge letters and invitations, does not explore merits of product lines, sign up for shows and never show up and don’t even call to say sorry; doesn’t have enough people to get out and really dig into and explore the trade.”

Still, the fashion trade gritted its teeth and continued to advertise in the
Times.
Eli Dyan complained that the
Times
was “just not tuned in”—and bought a twelve-page schedule. Another major advertiser, Paul Marciano of Guess Jeans, increased his company’s schedule, after expressing his “disbelief” at the
Times’
“devotion to the same select few.” The advertisers had few other places to go: The
Times
so dominated the upper end of the newspaper audience in the Northeast that space buyers could only turn to
Vogue, GQ
, and the glossy magazines for alternative print options. As the decade of the 1990s approached, the fashion-sales troublemakers, Shapiro and Racoosin, were both shown the door by the
Times.
Offered early retirement, both accepted. Donovan carried on. The
Times’
“quintessential Fashion Person”—as
Vogue
called her—worked well into her seventh decade (she was born in 1928). The FOTs rolled forward, as did Science Times. There was something for everybody in the new
New York Times.

The same
Vogue
article that praised Donovan as fashion’s most powerful newspaper editor also sketched the contrasts in the life of a
Times
department editor. In her public persona, Donovan represented the
Times.
As
Vogue
described the official Donovan: “In a white-sequined Bill Blass jacket and Karl Lagerfeld dress, she took a limo to a benefit at Carnegie Hall and sat in a box with Oscar de la Renta, Nancy Kissinger, and some foreign aristocrat.”
The private Donovan, however, appeared in
Vogue
as a lone, unmarried woman who had recently been through a sad “relationship”: “In for the night, [Donovan] curled up in the bed of her small one-bedroom rental on Sixty-fifth Street with Chinese takeout, a glass of wine, and MTV.” Wrapped in the rich mantle of the
Times
,
Vogue
suggested, ordinary, otherwise unremarkable people come to wield extraordinary authority among the moneyed and the celebrated. Power came with the
Times
job, of whatever kind: theater critic, architecture writer, executive editor, publisher.

*        *        *

In the mid-1970s, when the
Times
was being treated as a faltering enterprise,
Business Week
magazine had criticized the paper’s “leftist” bent and Punch Sulzberger’s apparent disdain for profits. In the magazine’s issue of April 26, 1986,
Business Week
couldn’t find enough compliments to pay Sulzberger and the
Times.
According to
Business Week
, the
Times
was “flush with record profits.” The company had spent some $400 million on acquisitions in 1985, and was still a “hugely profitable engine for growth.” With the “flagship paper throwing off cash,”
Business Week
concluded, Sulzberger now presided over a company with “an embarrassment of riches.”

Punch Sulzberger’s elliptical managerial style seemed vindicated. The tensions at the
Times
were papered over (a winner’s habit, too). Indeed, while the odd trio of Sulzberger, Mattson, and Rosenthal remade the institutional
Times
, they also reinvented themselves. Abe Rosenthal engineered perhaps the greatest make-over.

Allan M. Siegal, one of the
Times’
assistant managing editors, normally juggled the column allotments among the news desks. Siegal had the authority to swing space toward or away from national, or foreign, or business, or metro, depending on how the news developed on any given day. February 28 was shaping up as a moderately quiet news day, and so no extra demands were placed on the news hole—the daily budget of sixty-six pages that the editors controlled. The news department worked within an annual allotment; each time the editors determined that breaking events required an increase in the size of the news hole, that decision took them over budget, and they had to draw from the “bank,” subject to the publisher’s approval. In any given week, Siegal knew just how much the news department owed the bank, and how much it could still borrow. (Eighteen months later, during the extraordinary run of news beginning with the Persian Gulf crisis, the news department received permission to increase its news hole to sixty-eight pages per day. In all, it went seventy-two pages over budget for 1990, an expense that added several million dollars to the year’s costs.)

Siegal was a
Times
lifer; he joined the paper as a copy boy in 1960 after his graduation from NYU, and never left. Smoothfaced, intelligent, intense, he lost a battle against weight early in his
Times
career. He sometimes ballooned to 240 pounds, then contracted to a relatively svelte two hundred. By newsroom legend, Siegal’s poundage was a measure of executive-office turmoil: the greater the bureaucratic tumult among the top editors, the larger Siegal’s girth.

He was the
Times’
arbiter of taste as well as of its space allotments. If there was one editor who made the
New York Times
the
Times
, it was Al Siegal. Readers might not recognize his name, but the journalistic brotherhood knew him; most of the day of February 28, Siegal was at Columbia University, helping judge the Pulitzer Prize competition.

The day-side editors in the newsroom were joined by the night shift of backfield editors. Each of the sections in the news department—national, business, foreign, sports, culture, life-styles, media, and so forth—was run by three desks. The first, or day, desk consisted of the section head, the section deputy, and their assistants. These editors determined what stories should be covered and made the reporting assignments. In the Frankel years, they had been instructed to look for a mix of stories, trends as well as spot news. A second desk, known as the backfield, came in after lunch and stayed through the lockup of the first edition later in the evening. Backfield editors monitored copy flow, determined story lengths, and edited leads and opening paragraphs—actually, reedited them, since the day desk already had made its input on stories. Backfield work followed a predictable pattern. In the words of editor Carolyn Lee, “the reporters call in and mutter, ‘What do you mean you want more information?’ Or, ‘What do you mean I’ve got to cut ten inches from my story?’ ” A third desk, made up of the copy editors, was the
Times’
“experts in style, grammar, and arcana,” to quote the
Times’
handbook for new employees. The copy editors were charged with searching out errors and inconsistencies in the reporters’ copy—another layer of editing.