Hard News (32 page)

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.

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.”

—————

I
N 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.

The three reports, totaling almost one hundred pages, were released to the public in July 2003. They received only a sliver of the attention the
Times
’s May 11 Blair report had, but together these three documents may do more to permanently alter the newsroom culture of
The New York Times
—and in time will likely have a similar effect on the journalistic world at large—than anything else that had happened in the previous two years.

One of the main goals of the committee reports was, not surprisingly, to codify the manner in which newsroom leaders were trained. Journalism tends to reward people who do well while operating as lone wolves. Historically, the farther afield the assignment, the more prestigious it is considered: Working out of far-flung domestic bureaus is a step up from toiling for the metro desk, and landing a foreign posting is more glamorous than writing for the national desk. Finally, when another foreign posting seems redundant, the best correspondents are asked to come back to the home office and serve as editors. The skills that make someone a valuable foreign correspondent include being self-motivated and possessing a healthy ego. A good editor, on the other hand, is someone who gets pleasure out of helping other people do well.

“The most important character quality [to be a good editor] is you have to have reached the point in your life where you are willing to realize yourself through the work of others,” Max Frankel said soon after retiring. “If you’re still a star, if you still need to be center stage, if you’re still a performer, God bless you, go perform. If you want to be an editor, you’ve got to get your kicks the way a parent does out of children . . . and you’ve got to nourish them and support them in that task.”

Before 2003, remarkably, there was no training program in place at the
Times
to teach enormously successful solo stars how to make the transition to being editors. “When I became foreign editor,” says Bill Keller, “nobody ever taught me how to evaluate a writer, how to deal with a budget. When we become foreign correspondents, at least we get basic instructions on benefits and how to rent a car and how to get money wired and all that.” In promoting editors from the ranks of foreign bureaus, Keller says, “we were taking people whose job it is one day to go out to a barricade and the next day they’re managing people.”

While the recommendations that emerged from the committee reports were in many cases vague—one of the stated goals of improved management training was to “create a newsroom culture that values civility, diversity, openness, teamwork, trust and career development”—Arthur Sulzberger agreed to fund several new senior-level positions that were designed to shore up the
Times
’s standards and improve its training. They included an ombudsman—which the
Times
termed a “public editor”—whose full-time job would be to investigate and answer outsiders’ concerns about the
Times
’s coverage; a standards editor, to codify the
Times
’s practices on everything from the crediting of stringers to the use of anonymous sources; and a career-development editor. Both the standards editor and the career-development editor would be masthead-level positions.

All three positions had been filled by the end of 2003. Daniel Okrent, a former top editor at Time Inc. (and the inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball), was named the paper’s public editor; he signed a nonrenewable, eighteen-month contract. Al Siegal was officially named standards editor, the post he had essentially been filling for years. And Glenn Kramon became the paper’s career-development editor.