Gray Lady Down Read online

  During Sulzberger Jr.’s apprenticeship, Mattson and Sulzberger Sr. coined a new corporate title just for him, that of “assistant publisher,” although it was said that Mattson himself somewhat teasingly referred to Arthur Jr. as “Deputy Dawg.” In 1988, Arthur Jr. was named “deputy publisher,” at which point he began acting as a kind of “publisher-in-waiting,” sharing in major decisions. In fact, he made the final call on many of those decisions, except for those involved with the editorial page, although he is said to have sat frequently in on meetings there. He was still young, just thirty-five, and even younger looking. His own secretary referred to him as “the Kid.”

  Almost from day one, Arthur Jr. demonstrated a management style drastically different from his father’s. While Punch had embraced the “hidden hand” approach and went to considerable lengths to avoid direct confrontation, young Arthur very visibly got involved in almost every facet of the paper and relished being in the middle of battle. His father had allowed strong news executives like Rosenthal virtually as much autonomy as they wanted. By contrast, Arthur Jr., a former reporter—although of mediocre accomplishment—was set on running both sides of the paper, business and editorial, in every respect, no matter how far down the management ladder the decisions had been made in the past. A micromanager, he injected himself into decisions about budgets and finances and also got deeply involved in various labor disputes, which Punch had always let others handle. His friend Anna Quindlen, a former Times columnist, chalked it up to self-doubt: “Arthur is going through his whole life with something to prove,” she told Tifft and Jones. “Every day he wakes up and thinks, ‘How can I show them today that I am the man I want to be?’”

  By all accounts, those working around Sulzberger Jr. found the experience an exasperating one. He tended to view the world in black-and-white terms, unaware of, or at least unbothered by, shades of gray. People at the Times talked about a lack of sachel—Yiddish for common sense, tact and diplomacy. Max Frankel, who was made editor when Rosenthal retired in 1986, tried to play mentor and run interference for Arthur, often imperceptibly grimacing inside when Arthur Jr. made glib, inappropriate comments or went off in a mistaken direction. He played behind the scenes to rectify the damage and soothe ruffled feathers. (“I’ll say this about Arthur,” Frankel was said to have quipped privately. “He never makes the same mistake three times.”)

  Despite the extensive grooming, as the time drew near for “Punch” Sulzberger to hand over the reins, questions about Arthur Jr.’s management style and personality were mounting. According to Tifft and Jones, at the board of directors meeting after Punch announced his intention to step aside and have Arthur Jr. step into his shoes, the hesitation in the boardroom was “palpable.” The single presentation that Arthur had made to the board left them unimpressed. Many of them didn’t know him at all except for his reputation; his lack of maturity and his questionable leadership skills had left them worried. “We heard a lot of stories,” one board member told Tifft and Jones. “People would say: I was talking to so and so and he tells me that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the most impossible SOB.”

  The board responded by delaying the succession proposal. They were not rejecting Arthur Jr., board members wanted to ensure Punch; they just wanted to get to know him better. The board also wanted reassurance that naming Arthur Jr. publisher would not automatically mean that he would become chairman and CEO, out of concern for Wall Street’s dim view of “irresponsible nepotism.” Punch Sulzberger could have overruled the board. Instead, he chose to lobby them for a few months to set a better stage for Arthur’s debut. When the board assembled again in January, they ratified Punch’s choice.

  According to Tifft and Jones, a pair of eerie omens cast shadows on the occasion. The day that Arthur was made publisher, the bulbs blew out on the large clock hanging outside the Times building on 43rd Street, with its Gothic letters spelling TIMES. Upstairs in the mahogany-paneled boardroom, just as Punch Sulzberger introduced Arthur as the man who was going to be named publisher, one of the heavy bottom windows in the august room flew up and a cold rush of wind caused a framed photograph of the Shah of Iran to crash onto the floor. One board member joked that it was the spirit of Adolph Ochs. Another jested, “No, it’s the winds of change.” Mike Ryan, the Times’ attorney, told Tifft and Jones that the experience was “frightening.” In thirty-five years he had never seen anything like it in the boardroom.

  Insiders were right to worry about the transition. Sulzberger Jr. was about to face a financial and journalistic crisis even worse than the one his father and Abe Rosenthal calmed in the 1970s. As Edwin Diamond observed in Behind the Times, among these challenges was the need to create new news products for an emerging multimedia world while still maintaining the most important aspect of the organization’s franchise: the role of defining the nation’s news agenda and reporting news with fairness, accuracy and context. The paper also had to find a way to balance the interests of its older, elite audience with those of a younger readership—a readership increasingly foreign born. “The Times could once at a minimum count on an intellectual audience that not only wanted to read the Times but felt that it had to. The paper’s authority was unchallenged,” wrote Diamond, but “These certitudes no longer exist[ed].”

  At the time of his ascension, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. had been running the paper on a day-to-day basis since 1988, casting critical votes in various company decisions, if not having explicit veto power. But with the new title, he began to act with more force, revamping both the management culture of the paper and its news product to fit his vision for the needs of the future. It was a vision reflecting his own values, beliefs, temperament and experience, defined by a combination of New Age management theory, aging liberal pieties, sixties-style countercultural advocacy and affectations, as well as the identity politics of the 1980s and early 1990s. It was a vision preoccupied with the pursuit of youth demographics, one that encouraged the Times to be self-consciously hip and its reporters to write with flair, or at least make the attempt. And it was a vision that promoted opportunities for “opinion” to an unprecedented degree.

  A New Age management theory that Sulzberger found intriguing was William Edward Deming’s notion of “management by obligation.” Demingism asked managers to embrace three virtues: “self-esteem, intrinsic motivation and the curiosity to learn.” Sulzberger Jr. had been much impressed by his teenage experience in Outward Bound; and Demingism, with its emphasis on self-discovery, bonding and team play, has been likened to “Outward Bound in a business suit.” Deming’s ideas also provided Sulzberger with a way of adding gravitas to his leadership abilities.

  But the management revolution that Sulzberger wanted to encourage stumbled badly from the outset, further damaging morale as egos were bruised and tempers flared in seminars that were supposed to help close fissures. Sulzberger was undeterred, however. When the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta told him some of the old-timers at the paper were complaining that he was trying to establish his legacy too quickly, Sulzberger quipped: “I’ll outlive the bastards.”

  Meanwhile, Sulzberger took the concern over trends and age cohorts to a level beyond what drove the Sectional Revolution of the 1970s. The old thinking about the Times was that it “should not be too popular and should not try to be,” as Edwin Diamond phrased it. But as Diamond also explained, market research and focus groups indicated a disturbing trend toward “aliteracy,” with otherwise educated young professionals saying “they had no interest in picking up a copy of the Times.” And it wasn’t just a local problem. In 1967, roughly two-thirds of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine read a newspaper; in 1988 the figure was 29 percent.

  The research commissioned by the Times showed that the paper was defining itself too narrowly to appeal to an elite that no longer existed in its traditional form. It needed to adjust its journalistic offerings, and its pool of talent, to appeal to an evolving elite that included the educated classes from the city’s booming
immigrant populations.

  One manifestation of demographic anxiety was the crusade for “diversity” that Arthur Jr. mounted in his newsroom and led in the newspaper industry at large. Diversity, he argued, was not just a moral issue, a vehicle for taking the civil rights movement to another level; it was also an economic necessity if newspapers were to survive in an America whose demographic reality was rapidly changing. Enthusiastically mouthing the slogan “diversity makes good business sense; makes moral sense too,” Sulzberger blithely ignored warnings that the ideological and political dimension of diversity risked fragmenting newsrooms along racial, ethnic and gender lines, and could make the Times more partisan as he forged ahead to make it “look like America,” in Bill Clinton’s words.

  Arthur Jr. had clearly telegraphed his fixation on diversity before he assumed the throne at the Times. Shortly after he was named deputy publisher in 1988, he started assembling certain middle and senior managers and giving what came to be dubbed “The Speech.” At its intellectual center was one demographic fact that he believed had more resonance for the future of the Times than any other: by the end of the 1990s, 80 percent of all new American employees would be women, minorities or first-generation immigrants. This rapidly shifting demographic mix of future employees—and future readers—did not give the Times very long “to get its white male house in order,” Sulzberger told a management seminar in 1989, again stressing that diversity was “the single most important issue” the Times faced. At the 1991 convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Kansas City, Sulzberger spoke of the difficult climate for racial change and the roadblocks standing in the way of “our cause.” To considerable applause, he told the audience: “Keep pushing. Keep pushing to turn your vision of Diversity into our reality.”

  Once he became publisher in 1991, he banged the drum even harder, amplifying, refining and implementing “The Speech.” As one of the principal figures in the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Sulzberger pushed diversity as an industry obligation. At the Times itself, he encouraged a variety of corporate and newsroom initiatives to get the paper into the Promised Land. He aimed to replace the Times’ pledge to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor,” with the more amorphous promise to “enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.” The new motto never got any traction in or out of the newsroom.

  On a more practical level, Sulzberger put all managers, especially newsroom managers, on notice that they must reject what he called the “comfort factor” of hiring and promoting only white men. He set up committees to examine diversity in all its permutations at the Times, on both the editorial and the business side, scrutinizing everything from salaries to career paths. Training was key, he believed. In a strong endorsement of cultural relativism, Sulzberger declared, “We are all going to have to understand [differences]. Be aware of them, know what they mean, understand that we don’t all see the world or a moment in time in the same way.”

  This fixation translated into a number of high-profile hiring, promotion and assignment decisions that reverberated across every news desk in the newsroom. To enhance minority hiring at lower levels, Max Frankel, functioning as Sulzberger’s de facto diversity officer, instituted what he would refer to as his “own little quota plan,” based on “one-for-one” hiring—one minority for one white male—“until the numbers get better,” as Frankel put it in 1991.

  In short order, blacks and Latinos were appointed bureau chiefs, national reporters and foreign correspondents; the number of racial-minority desk editors increased as well. Eventually the Times would institute a minorities-only internship program. Sulzberger cleared the way for Gerald Boyd to be named the paper’s first Metro editor, and later for him to become one of the paper’s assistant managing editors, which made him the first black ever on the Times masthead and put him on track to be considered for the paper’s executive editorship.

  Under Sulzberger’s leadership, the Times developed new beats to reflect multicultural change and boosted the importance of certain beats already in existence, allowing some to become vehicles for ethnic and racial advocacy. Sulzberger was adroit at telegraphing his diversity priority through his monthly “Publisher’s Award.” The recipients of the cash award were well balanced by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, while the subject matter of the stories was in keeping with the new multicultural orthodoxy.

  Arthur Jr.’s vision of diversity encompassed a more expanded role for women. In some early speeches he made the highly symbolic gesture of using “she” as a general pronoun. He also made no secret of his close association with Anna Quindlen, the op-ed columnist who became an unofficial part of his brain trust and was, many thought, on track to become a top editor.

  Sulzberger also encouraged more open attitudes toward gays, a sharp break from what were increasingly portrayed in newsroom culture as the bad old days of Abe Rosenthal, who felt it best for gays to stay in the closet. In a videotaped speech he sent to the 1992 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Convention, Sulzberger affirmed newsroom identity politics when he said, “We can no longer offer our readers a white, straight male vision of events and say we are doing our job.” In that same speech, he declared he wanted the Times to extend company benefits to same-sex couples. Afterward, he let it be known that those who discriminated against gays would risk losing their jobs. Even before he became publisher, Sulzberger, in league with Max Frankel, also got his father to drop his opposition to the use of the term “gay” in news reports. Sulzberger Jr. met with openly gay staff members and assured them times had changed. He committed considerable company resources to underwrite panel discussions and job fairs sponsored by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and made sure the Times sent sizable delegations to NLGJA conventions and other events.

  Accelerated minority hiring and promotions rankled some of the old guard, who complained that some of the blacks, Latinos and women were being moved into senior leadership positions years before they were ready. Others bristled at a generally antagonistic atmosphere, which Peter Boyer, a former Timesman, described in a 1991 Esquire article as “moderate white men should die.” Boyer left the Times to become a staff writer at the New Yorker. Other accomplished midcareer Timesmen left too, taking with them vital experience, institutional memory and a special old-fashioned Times sensibility and culture. Rubbing salt into some of the old guard’s wounds, Frankel, backed by Sulzberger, virtually admitted that the commitment to diversity made double standards acceptable. At a forum at Columbia University, Frankel conceded that it would be difficult to fire a black woman, even if she were less good than another candidate.

  The 1991 piece on the Times by Robert Sam Anson in Esquire described a newspaper increasingly dominated by ideology. N. R. Kleinfield, a veteran business and Metro reporter, told Anson that Frankel wanted “a subtle point of view” in stories—code for a more politicized take. Anonymously, one “senior Metro reporter” said “The Times is basically guided by the principles of political correctness. It is terrified to offend any of the victimized groups.” Anson described reporters complaining of being told they couldn’t work on certain stories because they were white, and others admitting that they tailored some articles to liberal political tastes. “Don’t make it too nice” is what one reporter told Anson he was instructed when assigned a profile about a conservative. Anson also cited veteran media insiders, like Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who said the Times now was “not as trusted. . . . People are saying it’s got a line.”

  Yet unlike his father, who was bothered by complaints of ideological bias and relayed that annoyance to his top editors, Sulzberger Jr. had little patience with what he regarded as quibblers and naysayers. As legitimate questions were raised about diversity as a force in news coverage, he would hear none of it. Instead, he displayed a righteous, even sanctimonious insistence that he was “setting a moral standard.”

 
; Not surprisingly, the diversity dissidents in the newsroom—and there were quite a few—became skittish. As John Leo of U.S. News and World Report put it, the paper’s “hardening line on racial issues, built around affirmative action, group representation and government intervention,” was difficult for staffers to buck. “Reporters do not thrive by resisting the deeply held views of their publisher.... When opinionated publishers are heavily committed to any cause, the staff usually responds by avoiding coverage that casts that cause in a bad light.” Or as one veteran Timesman told me when I was writing Coloring the News, no one was going to tell Arthur “We’ve gone too far. We’re losing our credibility.” William Stockton, a former senior editor, described the chilling effect of Sulzberger’s agenda: “With Arthur Jr. saying all those things about diversity in public speeches, clearly it was not good for your career to ask tough questions,” he told me.

  In his bid to boost readership among a less news-literate generation, Sulzberger Jr. increased the amount of attention given to soft news and lifestyle. “Junior’s paper,” as the Times was now being sarcastically called by some on the staff, also encouraged some reporters to write with more “voice,” which further loosened the definition of news. Soon, features in People magazine style were making their way to the front page, sometimes little different from tabloid gossip aside from quality of writing.

  In 1991, the Times hired Adam Moss, a former editor at Esquire, as a consultant to help revamp its coverage of lifestyle and popular culture. The result was Styles of the Times, a bid to appeal to the ad-rich world of downtown chic. Styles of the Times was Arthur Jr.’s first visible move as publisher, and he seemed to sense that it was a high-profile gamble. “Younger readers had better like it,” he joked to some reporters in the Washington bureau, “because all the older ones will drop dead when they see it.” Moss ran edgy, “transgressive” stories on gay rodeos, dominatrix wear, cyberpunk novels and outré celebrities.