Behind the Times (53 page)

The journalistic value of the shift from lifetime tenure to short-term contracts could be endlessly debated: On one side, there was the loss of the writer’s independence, at least in the abstract, to be balanced, on the other side, against the editors’ desire for “liveliness” and going with the market flow. Would Quindlen or Gelb, say, find themselves rotated off the page to make room for a hotter, younger writing talent?

As it turned out, Gelb never started his “second term.” In the spring of 1993, he left the
Times
to become head of the Council of Foreign Relations, publishers of
Foreign Affairs
magazine. His departure coincided with the arrival of Bob Herbert, then forty-eight, as an Op-Ed columnist. The product of area parochial schools and the Manhattan borough unit of the State University of New York, Herbert spent
seventeen years at the
New York Daily News
, rising to columnist and editorial board member. In many ways, he was the ideal Op-Ed hire: Arthur Sulzberger at last had a writer with a strong background in city affairs to fill the long-vacant Schanberg chair. The new columnist was, in the bargain, a black American, who met the new publisher’s standard of greater “diversity” … up to a point, of course: for Herbert, despite his raffish tabloid background, was as middle-class and mainstream as any of his new colleagues. His moderate views insured that Arthur Sulzberger was making the best possible P.C.—politically centrist—appointment.

While Herbert wasn’t exactly a one-for-one replacement of the pale male Gelb, the presence (finally) of a black man on the Op-Ed page nevertheless cleared the way, diversity-wise, for another white woman columnist. In the
Times
Washington bureau, reporter Maureen Dowd had attracted attention with her sharp-eyed coverage of politics. A few traditionalists thought Dowd was already writing opinion pieces and belonged somewhere other than the news pages. Dowd herself had none of the old Paper of Record drive. A newsroom colleague remembered her reaction when, finishing her tour in the New York office, her ticket punched, she learned she was going back to Washington. She would write big-time features, and eventually cover the Reagan-Bush White House, Dowd told her coworker, in that way she had of leaning intimately into the conversation. “I know one thing,” she said. “I’m not going to be covering any of those dreary regulatory agencies.” Post-White House, Dowd was plainly destined for Bigger Things. Her “news analysis” pieces during the 1992 presidential campaign offered un-
Times
ian generational attitudes and pop culture references. Rather than write “traditionally” about politics and “the issues,” she would typically spin out the conceit of the candidates as people we knew in high school—class president Clinton, greaser Jerry Brown, etc. Covering a U.S.-Russian summit in misty Vancouver, Dowd wrote of the “bad hair day” threatening the presidential coiffeurs of Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.

A case could be made in favor of such flexibility at the modern
Times.
Perhaps the old column form had outlived its usefulness. The era when the generalists—a Reston in the
Times
, or a Walter Lippmann in the
Herald Tribune
, the other “thoughtful” morning paper—addressed the full sweep of national and international politics had long passed. The world was a more complicated place; the contemporary columnist had to be a specialist of a sort, less magisterial, more personal.

Some things, in truth, did not change. The
Times
was still “The
Times
” in one important sense. Throughout the paper, on the editorial page and Op-Ed page, in the Sports section and in Styles of the Times, the opinions were predictable. Readers knew what Anna Quindlen would say on Clarence Thomas, where A. M. Rosenthal would come out on foreign aid, and who the editorial board would endorse. Thus, the
Times
’ 1992 presidential endorsements wrote themselves. The editorial as expected judiciously added up the pluses and minuses for right-moderate George Bush and left-moderate Bill Clinton, and mystery-moderate H. Ross Perot—as it did in 1988 when Bush faced Michael Dukakis. The
Times
then decided for Clinton, as it did for Dukakis. Readers grew to expect such (slightly) off-center positions every four years. But genuinely
new
news events produced expected responses as well. When the pro basketball superstar Ervin “Magic” Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive at a news conference in November 1991, the
Times
’ initial editorial praised Johnson’s courage in coming forward. Johnson’s willingness to be a role model in the cause of AIDS research and prevention was another matter, and the
Times
had Second Thoughts. Over the next few days,
Times
sports columnists Dave Anderson and Robert Lipsyte both questioned Johnson’s status as a spokesman for safe sex because of his own
“irresponsible” behavior. Johnson had slept with scores of women in National Basketball Association cities around the country, Lipsyte scolded. What’s more, he was a college dropout who was paying child support for a son born to a former girlfriend back in his home state of Michigan. “He has been hailed by many as a ‘hero,’ when hedonist might be a better word,” Anderson wrote. “Magic Johnson is hardly a model or ideal to anyone with a sense of sexual morality.” Five months later, the same
Times
sports columns were full of
praise for Arthur Ashe, another HIV-positive athlete. Ashe contracted the virus asexually, from a blood transfusion. He was, moreover, well-spoken and well-mannered; he lived temperately (one wife, one legitimate child). There was no replay of the coverage this time. “The role model most on our minds these days is Arthur Ashe, quiet gentlemanly Arthur Ashe,” wrote Heywood Hale Broun, a guest columnist on the
Times
sports pages. A few weeks later, Barry Lorge, another guest columnist, called Ashe “the gentleman who has been the conscience of tennis.…” The
Times
could well imagine the gentlemanly Ashe as a regular reader, as it could not the hedonistic Johnson.

*        *        *

For all the talk of diversity, the outpouring of opinion at the modern
Times
was actually well controlled. It stayed within the banks of the mainstream: the received wisdom, thoughtful, midbrow, safe. In the 1870s, a tumultuous time for America and for journalism, Wilbur Story, editor of the
Chicago Times
, announced that his paper intended “to print the news and raise hell.” The traditional
New York Times
printed the news and occasionally raised … heck. The modern
Times
moved further away from the record and from heck raising. When the
Times
’ opinion-page editors, columnists, and editorialists looked at the world, they saw their own mannerly reflection. The readers returned the compliment: They found their views of the world reinforced by the
Times.
And why not? The modern
Times
was designed to be friendly to a well-defined class of readers.

The leftist critique of American journalism usually looks at that friendliness and conspiratorily concludes that “the media” are the captives of the advertisers, toadies of Corporate America. The left misses the more intriguing story: Newspapers like the
Times
have captured a demographic segment of the population highly desired by the advertisers; Corporate America then pays the
Times
—and CBS,
Newsweek
, et al.—for the privilege of talking to that audience. In the decade of the 1990s, a million-plus people around the U.S. were willing to pay whatever the
Times
asked for a copy of the paper; while the newsstand sale price kept rising, the demand remained elastic. The user was happy. Consumer satisfaction helped explain the rise of opinion at the modern
Times
and equally significant, the content of that opinion.

The modern
Times
’ audience and the
Times
had both changed. Jack Rosenthal concluded that the media were “de-aggregating into a range of special-interest services.” The opinion columns and the downtown Styles pages were just the beginning. Secondary markets were opening up; beginning in 1991, fans of the
Times
crossword could call a 900 number and get three clues to that day’s puzzle, 75 cents for the first minute, 50 cents for each additional minute. Within a few months, the pay service was bringing in revenues of $20,000 a week. Puzzle addicts were a strange breed but they weren’t unique. In similar fashion, the
Times
turned its inability to distribute a paper with the final sports results into a money-making opportunity. Sports fans who received their copies of the paper without an account of their favorite team’s night game were advised in a box on the sports page that they could dial another 900 number, and pay 50 cents per minute to get the late scores the
Times
didn’t have.

The deaggregated, electronically wired paper of the future, it seems, won’t actually have to carry news.

6:00
P.M.

Al Scardino made notes on a story idea that, he thought, would create some media chatter—the demise of the “Joe Friday” reporter. No longer were journalists willing to say, “Just the facts, ma’am.” Instead, Scardino explained, the new breed of opinionated reporters informed their interviewees, “I have my own opinions but I’ll try to suppress them a little to hear you out for a moment or two.” (The story never appeared; Scardino left the
Times
later in the year, to become press secretary for the mayor-elect of New York, David Dinkins.)

7:00
P.M.

Edited pages began to flow to the composing room in five-minute intervals.

7:05
P.M.

Paul Winfield, late-night desk man in the Sports section, held a quick meeting with his staff to go over expected changes in their four pages. Sports’ dress front was set with features on the Yankees and Dallas Cowboys, plus one of the
Times
’ columnists. Everything else was happening inside the section: the pro hockey scores, and the college basketball results, for both men’s and women’s teams. Winfield selected the Sports section’s postage-stamp-size cartoon at the top of the fronting page—a ritual sweetened by the fact that no other
Times
cartoon of any size appeared in the news pages. An umpire had been voted into the baseball Hall of Fame, and the cartoon showed the busts of a catcher and an umpire, arguing with each other. The caption read: “You’re in!” (“Our fans will get it,” Winfield reassured his staff).

Bryan Miller ate out at least eight times a week as the
Times
’ chief restaurant critic for almost ten years. He started in the job in October 1984, at the age of thirty-two, and served until July 1993, when he moved on to do
Times Magazine
features. He treated his assignments as “a consumer beat.” He had, he once explained, “the vital function of tipping off readers where they should spend their precious dining dollars.” Like the other
Times
reviewers who covered America’s cultural and leisure-time life, Miller’s words often had a strong influence on the economic fate of the restaurants he wrote about. Or more precisely, the fact that Miller’s words appeared in the
Times
could be critical to the fortunes of the restaurant he was reviewing. That power resided more in the
Times
itself than in the talent of any of its individual critics. Miller’s immediate predecessors, Mimi Sheraton and Craig Claiborne, for example, wielded similar influence during their time at the paper. And Miller’s successor, a former
Los Angeles Times
food writer named Ruth Reichl, whose work began appearing in the late summer of 1993, is sure to exert a powerful influence as well.

Ruth Reichl’s roots were urban and middle class, again, much like most of the other
Times
critics. In one respect, though, Bryan Miller had been unusual; unlike most of his other colleagues who wrote about theater, music, sculpture, architecture, television, and the rest of the
topics covered on the
Times
’ arts and leisure pages, Miller had some direct, hands-on experience in the field he was assigned to review.

Miller was born in New York City, graduated from Columbia University, and worked for newspapers in the Northeast and for the Associated Press before joining the
Times.
Along the way, too, he took cooking classes and wine courses. In his words, “It was just as a diversion at first,” but then he started thinking seriously about being a chef. In 1981 he quit his job as an editor at
Connecticut
magazine, and worked for twenty-three months in the kitchen of Restaurant du Village, a bistro in Chester, Connecticut. (Reichl also had experience as a chef, in Berkeley, California.) He also volunteered briefly for waiter service during his stay, an experience that “instilled in me respect for a professional waiter.” Miller’s combination of youth, magazine training, and kitchen experience made him attractive when the
Times
was looking for the right person to hire as chief restaurant reviewer—a high-profile job and something of a symbol of the paper’s new interests. After Restaurant du Village, too, Miller was ready to put aside his ladle and whisks.