Triumph and Troubles at The New York Times

Being the Best is Hard

The New York Times’s most recent public account of performance reports ten million subscribers and robust financial results. For a news organization founded in 1851, let’s agree that this is amazing.

As an entity, the Times is a subject of fascination and mostly high regard from the rest of the media. Everyone seems to have an opinion about it – and if you are a consumer, in print, on line, or increasingly in audio and video, probably a complaint. The Times is immersive and personal.

Adam Nagourney’s book The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism is the latest effort to describe the enterprise. Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World, published in 1969, is still the most famous.

Nagourney’’s book was not authorized in any official sense, but it must have been sanctioned – he has been at the paper for decades – because of the interviews with scores of Times notables, past and present. If there was a glitch, a mistake, or an embarrassment, Nagourney has the scoop in detail. Even as engaged a reader as I was finally started skimming the peccadillos.

I never worked at the Times myself – As a former employee of The Washington Post, I am still associated with what at the Times is considered the lesser half of the “Times-Post” shorthand for elite journalism. But my relationships at the Times are many and in some cases deep and surprising. Here’s one example:

As publisher of the Times Books imprint, owned then by Random House, I spent a memorable day with Abe Rosenthal, after his years as editor and while he was writing a column for the editorial page. He had a contract with us to write a memoir.

Considering that I was a stranger and worked in the past at the Post, Rosenthal’s candor, pain, and insecurity about who he was and what he had achieved from humble origins was astounding. I came away understanding his devotion to the paper and, for all he had done there, a sense of unrequited love.

He never wrote the memoir.

People who work at the Times for the most part know that they have reached a pinnacle of sorts in the field they have chosen to master. My sense of what happens resembles what legend has it new Harvard students were told: “Welcome. In a few months, half of you will be in the bottom half of the class.”

That realization tends to sting. When you put that many talented and ambitious people into the same organization, there is bound to be friction. I get it.

Nagourney’s book falls short (I could go further) on two major counts. He acknowledges the Sulzberger family’s commitment to the institution through thick and thin, but he misses how formidable the reinvention of the institution has been, when so many other newspaper-owning families gave up or shut down.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is my friend. When the merde hit the fan as print advertising collapsed and print subscriptions plunged, he and his executive and editorial team made the decisions – expanding the national and international reach and establishing a paywall – that saved the day, the year, and the decade.

Nagourney’s acknowledgment of this achievement is tepid, especially compared to the sniping he portrays.

And then with all the focus on turmoil, mostly at the senior levels of editorial management, the book very largely misses what makes the newspaper so great: its journalism. Yes, there is a moving chapter about the coverage of 9/11, followed thereafter by the Jayson Blair fiasco and later by Judy Miller’s stint in jail (sort of), standing on principle.

But the work of Times reporters and editors that has made the newspaper what it is gets short shrift. I asked three of my closest New York Times friends for permission to write about them.

Craig Whitney spent his entire professional career at the Times. He was an assistant managing editor, foreign editor, and bureau chief or correspondent in Saigon, London, Paris, Germany twice, and Washington, which did not go well. Nagourney’s only real mention of Craig is about his time in Washington, and essentially misses the explanation, a mismatch of personalities and assignments.

I asked Arthur Sulzberger Jr. about Craig. He said, “His legacy is that he was a wise and steady hand in a newsroom that absolutely needed that.”

John Darnton won a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent in another decades-long career at the paper and edited several major sections. (His father was killed in World War II while on assignment for the Times.) Nagourney mentions John only in connection with his asking Abe Rosenthal for story ideas.

Elisabeth Bumiller started as a reporter in the Style section of the Washington Post. Over time she was, as I recall, the Times’s City Hall bureau chief, Pentagon and White House correspondent, and since 2015 the Washington bureau chief, where she has set a leadership standard recognized by all and sundry as outstanding. The only reference to her in Nagourney’s book is that she slightly exaggerated Henry Kissinger’s opposition in a story about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Imagine, slightly misrepresenting Henry Kissinger!

How have the Times people reacted to the book? A great many of them attended as I did a book party for Nagourney at Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn restaurant in October. I do know of a case in which Nagourney wrote someone to apologize for how he had been treated.

One of the best assessments of “Journalism’s Essential Value” was published last year in the Columbia Journalism Review by A. G. Sulzberger, said to be the fifth generation in his family to head the institution, which no longer can be called just a newspaper, with Cooking, Wirecutter, and Games flourishing. His thoughtful representation of the manifold challenges of this era – from a publisher no less (!) – is an important indication of insight and also foresight.

So, two books have now appeared, one about the Post and the other about the Times. The trajectory in both places can be bumpy. But my overriding sense as a reader, journalist, observer, and citizen is abundant gratitude at their continuing mission and success.