Behind the Times (67 page)

Arthur’s resolve to reposition the
Times
on a New York base broke with the past: The readers he sought were not members of the dinner-party set. The new populist strategy put one Sulzberger at odds with the other Sulzberger. Punch Sulzberger had argued that the
Times
couldn’t be local, or too ethnic: “
We’re not New York’s hometown paper. We’re read on Park Avenue but not in Chinatown or the east Bronx. We have to approach journalism differently than, say, the
Sarasota Herald Tribune
, where you try to blanket the community.” Punch Sulzberger believed that the
Times
should cover the city, but in its own way and from the perspective of a class-based readership: “We should deal with the overall important urban stories that are of interest to
Times
readers wherever they live, Palo Alto or 82nd and Fifth.” Arthur’s populist
Times
sounded like a violation of the tested form that
made the
Times
“the
Times.
” There was an understanding inside the paper of his father that the
Times
was edited by elites for elites; the quality of the metro coverage or the space devoted to sports and the Downtown scene never seemed to matter much. Glory came through the international and national reporting; being read by the people who belonged to the Council of Foreign Relations—or who lived, as Punch Sulzberger did, at 82nd and Fifth—counted more than being read in Bay Ridge. “Our identity has not been primarily geographic, it has been demographic,” Max Frankel acknowledged. A reconstituted geographic
Times
was undoubtedly a more attractive alternative for the traditionalists than the deaggregated, 900-number
Times.
Nevertheless, it represents a departure from the elitist past.

The traditional
Times
was a newspaper with a grand mission. In the
postwar years of the late 1940s through the 1960s particularly, superpower America had global interests, and the
Times
saw itself as the paper of responsibility, covering the American era. The
Times’
self-importance would have been insufferable if it hadn’t been accompanied by a certain sense of redeeming idealism. The lawyer James Goodale remembered that he joined the
Times
in the early 1960s just as the paper was preparing to remake itself. The older vision had not yet faded. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Punch’s father and Arthur’s grandfather, wanted the
Times
to help shape American public policy. Arthur Hayes Sulzberger reasoned that no single newspaper, magazine, or radio broadcast between the two World Wars reached a significant number of the opinion elite. And so, in the absence of a nationally formed opinion, the Hitlers and Stalins of the world could rise to power, their manipulative propaganda unchallenged. Similarly, absent a consensus, isolationism and the America First movement thrived in the United States. “Arthur Hays Sulzberger wanted the
Times
to play the role of a great national forum,” Goodale said. “Some of us saw that as the
Times’
unique contribution to the world.”

By and large, the postwar
Times
delivered: In the earnest pages of the
Times’
Sunday Week in Review section and in the
Times Magazine
, public policy matters were explored for an audience of worldly readers. The
Magazine
’s big-picture articles always seemed to be written by Dame Barbara Ward, the British economist; they always seemed to ponder the same grave “challenges” and “issues.” But that was part of the point. By the 1990s, in Arthur’s day, the big-picture article became … big color pictures with modest accompanying text. Warren Hoge,
the
Magazines
editor in the first years of Arthur’s tenure, sped the decline of the Dame Barbara form; the front of the
Magazine
(the letters columns, the ruminative introspection of “About Men”) and the back (the outré high-fashion spreads) steadily encroached on the middle well of public policy. Even there, in the center space devoted to the longer articles, the
Magazine
regularly offered one soft feature, usually a personality profile, to provide “balance” for the substantive public-affairs analysis. And even then, the space for think pieces was given over to articles by
Times
staff writers; the number of contributions by policy makers declined.

The old wisdom held that the
Times’
news coverage couldn’t be too “popular,” and should not try to be. “
We’re not an easy paper to fall into—you’ve got to work at it,” Punch Sulzberger declared without apologies, toward the end of his term as publisher. When it was suggested to him that one lesson of the uproar caused by “the Florida woman” story might be that
Times
senior editors were too high-minded and “intellectual” to do good tabloid journalism, he replied without missing a beat: “I certainly hope so.”

The Newthink wisdom holds that the
Times
should be accessible to those who weren’t falling into the paper. Every few months, the
Times
carried lengthy analyses detailing the decline of reading (a variant of the aliterate American form). On successive Sundays in June 1992, two such death-of-print stories appeared. The first, in the
Book Review
, was entitled “The End of Books.” Its author, the novelist Robert Coover, said print was
“doomed and outdated” and about to be replaced by hypertext, the humming, digitalized language of the new technology, written and read on a computer screen. If Coover intended to be ironic about the glories of hypertext, his irony was so arch that many readers missed it; he sounded serious, and approving. The second article, by the
Times
computer-news specialist John Markoff, appeared in the Business section. Markoff described technologist Roger Fidler’s dream of a powerful, portable personal computer that would provide news and interactive information. According to Markoff, “Fidler envisions a row of commuters reaching into their briefcases on their ride to work. Instead of pulling out the morning paper, each grabs a thin tablet-sized computer.” Fidler assured
Times
readers that the portable electronic newspaper was just five years away.

When the
Times
wasn’t carrying the obituary for the written word, the American Newspaper Publishers Association was pointing its finger
at those who killed reading. According to the ANPA, the perpetrators were members of the boomer gang, the generation of 77 million Americans born after World War II. These younger adults were in their peak spending years, raising families and buying homes, the kind of people an advertiser prizes. But they were intent on a life of aliteracy. They regarded reading a newspaper as a “complex and unrewarding activity.” Worse, it was a single-dimensional activity; as the media consultant Christine Urban succinctly explained, “You have to sit down to read a newspaper.” Busy, pressured boomer people considered it “more efficient” to be engaged in
multi
dimensional activities, simultaneously driving to work and listening to all-news radio, or doing aerobics while watching CNN. Thus, while media expenditures per family increased by 42 percent between 1982 and 1987, most of the money went for purchases of VCRs, cable services, fax machines, and personal computers. Newspaper readership was not keeping up with population growth: The same number of people read a daily paper in the 1990s as in the 1960s, when there were thirty million fewer Americans. Putting the figures another way, in 1967, three quarters of American adults said that they read a newspaper every day; by 1990, the figure had plummeted toward 50 percent. For young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine—the growing ranks of
aliterate Americans— the numbers were even more sobering; roughly two thirds read a paper on a typical day in 1967 compared to 29 percent by 1988.

Younger
Times
reporters and midlevel editors serving on the publishers’ planning committees didn’t need any more studies to grasp the significance of these generational changes. They looked through the one-way windows at members of focus groups assembled by the
Times.
They listened with growing horror as one after another of the group—people who were their contemporaries, college graduates and professionals—said they had no interest in picking up a copy of the
Times.
Arthur was among the
Times
people who peered through the windows at the focus groups. He knew the survey data. If hypertext concerned him, it was still in the computer hackers’ twilight zone. More immediately, he faced the everyday reality that the
Times
was going unattended in its home base, and that the
Times’
New York penetration—the percentage of metropolitan households that bought the paper regularly—was among the lowest of any big-city daily. The
Washington Post
had a penetration of 60 percent; the
Dallas Morning News
, 33 percent; the
Boston Globe
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and the
Chicago
Tribune
, around 23 to 25 percent. In the New York metro area, the
Times’
penetration was 10 percent: just one in ten households took the
Times.
These were upper-end households, and Arthur was glad to have them. But when he looked at New York in the 1990s, he saw a society “where the elites were redefining themselves,” and where new elites, including younger New Yorkers and nonwhite arrivals to the city, were developing new interests. Or so the market research said. He feared that if the
Times
stood still, stayed “narrow,” or talked only to an aging—and shrinking—elite, then it would no longer be relevant. “We would be serious and unread, like
The New Yorker.
” He resolved to change the
Times’
mix of news and features.

Punch Sulzberger’s response had been different. “They are scary,” he replied, when asked about the aliterates. But he thought that the solution lay with a public and policymakers who “paid more attention to the kind of
education young people received.” He said nothing about a softer, featurized, friendlier
Times.
Some of the contrasting responses of the old
Times
and the new, the father and the son, were the consequence of generational emphasis; a young publisher’s energetic resolve to do something about penetration in a changing market measured against an older man’s practiced acceptance of the fact that New York isn’t Sarasota, or even Washington. Sulzberger family members always tried to speak with one voice about their
Times
property, but the inevitable strains involved in any passing of institutional authority were intensified by the early 1990s business recession. In 1991 and again in 1992,
Times
advertising lineage continued to drop off in the key categories of retail (the department stores), help wanted, and real estate. The paper’s profits fell by a third. The
Times
had hidden annual costs, computer-system upgrades, and replacement of delivery-truck fleets, among other recurring outlays. For a paper the size of the
Times
, these costs ran as high as $50 million a year. They had to be paid for out of earnings. The forecasters told the Sulzbergers that the city was coming out of the recession, “but so
slowly that nobody knows it.”

Arthur did what executives of most large corporations try to do in tough times. He looked for ways to reduce fixed operating costs. To cut the size of the staff, the
Times
in the summer of 1991 offered buyouts to employees age fifty-five or older and with more than fifteen years’ service at the paper.

The buyouts were a civilized preview of the
Times’
bare-knuckle
negotiations with its blue-collar unions the following year. Arthur and his chief associate, Lance Primus, concentrated on the three unions representing the pressmen, the mailers (the men who bundle and sort the papers), and the drivers. For years
Times
management sought to change work rules that encouraged featherbedding, routine overtime pay, and “lost” deliveries—bundles of papers that rogue drivers sold to dealers-accomplices and split the cash proceeds from, all at the expense of the
Times.
As usual, the dollar losses from what was “legal” far exceeded what was stolen under the table. For example, in the old days, work crews of ten or more were typically assigned to each printing-press unit at the New York newspapers. In the 1970s and 1980s, advances in technology drastically changed the need for such manning levels for the pressmen (there were no women, or for that matter, no nonwhites, in the union crews). In other cities, where papers operated in non-union shops, without the work rules built up over the years in New York, four- or five-person crews ran a press unit. The same disparities between New York and the rest of the country held for the mailers and drivers. To induce unions to surrender such prerogatives, the
Times
set aside a $30 million fund to buy out the contracts of hundreds of its workers and grant lifetime job security to those who remained.

The
Times’
negotiations with the Newspaper Mail and Deliverers’ Union of New York and Vicinity (NMDU)—the truck-drivers union—were from the start complicated by one basic fact: The drivers had the only leverage remaining for the newspaper craft unions in the city. Union conflict was unpleasant and to be avoided by a prudent management. But it was no longer impossible for a strikebound daily to publish: A determined management could use its non-unionized staff and white-collar supervisors to collect some semblance of a news report, physically print the papers, and get them to plant delivery bays. It was something else entirely to truck the papers from the plant to subdistributors for home delivery or for drop-off at some 10,000 newsstands, convenience stores and street boxes in a three state area. The police authorities could not assure the safety of a “strike breaker” in a delivery truck on deserted roads between 3
A.M.
and 6
A.M.
—even if City Hall was of a mind to confront the unions.

If Arthur did not fully grasp this fact of New York street life, the lesson was brought home during the
Daily News
strike of 1990–91. Then, the
News
hired replacement workers—known, in an earlier day,
as scabs—to drive its trucks. People were beaten up and trucks fire-bombed, and the replacement drivers were able to deliver no more than 400,000 copies of the
News
around New York (compared to the prestrike press run of just over one million). As the strike wore on, the police and City Hall felt pressure to maintain some law and order, and the
News’
delivery record improved. But the Tribune company of Chicago, the
News’
absentee owners, basically wanted to walk away from the paper; at the first plausible opportunity, Tribune gave the British press lord (and scoundrel) Robert Maxwell $60 million to take the paper off its hands. The
Times
observed the whole sorry mess and extracted a moral from the story: Someone with a strong enough stomach for conflict could defeat the drivers, eventually. Arthur Sulzberger was not that someone: He was a social progressive. The
Times’
solution, a model of simplicity, consisted of finding a stand-in unconcerned about public image.