The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  “So we played this game,” says Jones, “and when it was all over, I talked to the guy who worked there, who ran the game, and I said, What was your impression of us from the way we played? How do we compare with other groups? And he said—and they have business groups that come—he said, ‘This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.’”

  Arthur himself, despite his leftist politics and social liberalism, despite the lip service he pays to the need for change, is deeply conservative where the family business is concerned. This is not to say that he resists change. His nytimes.com is the most successful newspaper website in the country. It can claim an ever-rising number of hits and, until the general economic slump of 2008–2009, recorded steady growth in ad revenue. But none of this will save him, because at the core Arthur and the Times remain wedded to an archaic model of journalism.

  For ten years or more, Arthur’s signature phrase about this seismic change in the news business, the one he repeats to show that he gets it, has been platform agnostic. “I am platform agnostic,” he proclaims proudly, meaning that it matters nothing to him where his customers go for New York Times content: the newspaper’s print version, television, radio, computer, cell phone, Kindle—whatever. The phrase itself reveals limited understanding. When the motion-picture camera was invented, many early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its audience. To be sure, this alone was a significant change. But the true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater. Audiences could be transported anywhere. To tell stories with pictures, and then with sound, directors developed a whole new language, using lighting and camera angles, close-ups and panoramas, to heighten drama and suspense. A director could make audiences laugh by speeding up the action, or make them cry or quake by slowing it down. In short, the motion-picture camera was an entirely new tool for storytelling. To be platform agnostic is the equivalent of recording stage plays.

  “When I first heard Arthur talk about being platform agnostic, I knew he was trying to suggest that he was not stuck in a newspaper mind-set,” says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “But I thought there were two problems with that language. One is, agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure what they believe in. That’s the first problem. And the second problem is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You actually have to choose which platform you work on first, which one comes first. At the time that he was talking about this, what he really meant was, Everything we put in the newspaper, we’ll put online. If you really want to move to the Internet in a serious way, you need to change the culture of a news organization and decide that the Internet is the primary new thing. Platform agnostic means that all the online companies are going to zoom past you, because they’re going to exploit that technology while you’re sitting there thinking: Well, we don’t care which platform we put it on. You need to exploit the technology of each platform. You need to be, in fact, not platform agnostic but platform orthodox. So that expression, platform agnostic, always struck me as something he heard someplace, rather than something that he really grasps and understands.”

  Arthur’s idea is to continue producing the New York Times the way it has always been produced, and then to offer a digital edition of the product, with video, images, interactive graphics, blogs, and so on. That’s what nytimes.com does superbly. According to Nielsen, it attracts more than twenty million unique visitors a month. Imagine a newspaper that was picked up by twenty million readers every month! If only a tiny fraction of that number came back and became subscribers, circulation would explode. But those users are not “picking up” the newspaper; many of them are just picking up individual stories. Nearly half of those who access nytimes.com to read a story come in, as it were, through a side door. They begin by plugging search terms into an engine such as Google, which spits out a long list of links to related sites. And in any case, they’re not spending a lot of time with the newspaper: the average amount, says Nielsen, is thirty-five minutes per month. (The figure is worse for other sites—only about sixteen minutes per month for washingtonpost.com.) One of Arthur’s hopes is that, once on the site, readers will linger, sampling the Times’ other superb offerings, but usage patterns suggest that this isn’t happening.

  Those who grew up using the Internet—they now include a full generation of Americans—are expert browsers. It’s not that they have a short attention span. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly by professional journalists, they search out only the information they want; and they are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news. It eliminates the middleman—that is, it eliminates editors. At a newspaper, top editors meet several times a day to review the stories and photographs gathered from their own staff and wire services. These editors decide which are the most important or compelling, and then prioritize and package them. When you buy a newspaper you are buying a carefully prepared meal. Inevitably stories and artwork are left off the plate for a great variety of reasons, all of them subjective—they are deemed less significant, less credible, less tasteful, less useful. Or maybe there just isn’t enough room. The Internet replaces editors with an algorithm. Google is a search engine. It makes no value judgment about information unless you instruct it to make one. All of the stories and photos in the world are there, including billions of items that the reader never imagined wanting to see. It is unmediated. There is no adult supervision. And the kicker is, it’s free.

  Much more is at work here than a change of platform. Whether you think more is lost or gained depends upon which side of this evolutionary divide you fall on. For me—someone who spent most of his adult life working in a newsroom; someone who reads three newspapers every day, including the Times—the loss will be far greater. Newspapers enable serious journalism. They provide for the care and feeding of career reporters and editors. They strive to be fair, accurate, and objective. They are independent sources of credible, well-researched information. They are watchdogs for the public interest, an important part of the communal mind and memory of the nation. When an editor is replaced by an algorithm, all information is equal. Propaganda shares the platform with honest reporting, and the slickest, most attractive websites and blogs will be those sponsored by corporations, the government, or special interests, which can afford to pay for professional work.

  Arthur’s argument, or his hope, is that the quality of the Times’ brand will prevail, that high-quality independent journalism is so obviously valuable that serious readers will continue to seek it out. He has been offering the Times content free because experience has shown that subscriber-only stories leak—they are copied and e-mailed and rapidly proliferate free anyway—and because Internet users, accustomed to getting information free, are loath to pay for it. Do you remove yourself from the global conversation if you wall yourself off? Can you make enough money on subscriptions to survive? The Wall Street Journal has gone in this direction online, while offering some free content. The jury is still out. Arthur has continued to provide Times content free, but is considering reversing direction. His brand remains the best in the business, but that hasn’t solved his revenue problems. Journalism costs. The revenue from Internet advertising is still only about a tenth of total revenue. Even if those millions of brief hits on nytimes.com continue to swell, the Times itself may be in bankruptcy court long before the website generates enough revenue to replace what Arthur has lost.

  In fairness, no one has the answer for newspapers. Some—such as former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson; Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaperman and Silicon Valley CEO; a
nd Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs, all of whom have experience as executives—are pushing some form of micropayment. If the Times, in partnership with the big search engine companies, got paid a few pennies for every person who clicked on a link to its content, it might replace the old business model for advertising. The price of accessing a single item would be so small that it would hardly be worth the trouble to hunt up a pirated version. Some have suggested that all of the major news providers should band together and withhold their content from the Internet until such a pricing agreement can be put in place. It seems clear that drastic action is required. One top editor at another newspaper put it this way: “Ask yourself this—if the Internet existed and newspapers didn’t, would there be any reason to invent newspapers? No. That tells you all you need to know.”

  Some at the Times anticipated this tectonic shift years ago, but Arthur wasn’t listening. Despite lip service about change, he presides over a slow-moving beast. Diane Baker, who was regarded as an energetic and forceful outsider, ran up against this in her years as CFO. When she took the job, in 1995, she was shocked to discover that the company was still doing all its accounting by hand. “They literally did not have the ability to produce spreadsheets,” she says. “They had not invested in the software you need to analyze data. It is a company run by journalists. The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not businessmen.”

  Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in its own prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales; it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?” Baker recalls. “They said, ‘We can’t do it, because Barnes and Noble is a big advertiser.’”

  Toward the end of his tenure as executive editor, Max Frankel was asked to think about the impact of computers on the news business. This was back in the mid-1990s, when the Times’ national edition was taking off and most Americans were embarking on their first hesitant drives on the “information superhighway.” For the Times there was money to maneuver with, and to invest, and a chance to adapt to the new age. Frankel wrote two memos, which he no longer has, but whose content he remembers clearly. In the first memo he argued that, because computers were so good at generating and cross-referencing lists, classified ads in newspapers were doomed. He suggested that the Times set up a computer system to allow buyers and sellers to deal with each other directly online—“It was essentially Craigslist,” Frankel jokes. “I should have started it up!” Craigslist was created in 1995 and today averages billions of page hits per month, with reported annual revenues in excess of $80 million. It is a major factor in the decline of newspaper ad revenue.

  “The second idea was much more important, and came a little later,” Frankel says. “I wrote that one big coming threat posed by the computer was disaggregation: the Internet disaggregates the hunt for information. The need for information would survive the advent of the digital era, but the package offered by the New York Times might not. So how do you protect the package? What was so great about the New York Times was not that we offered the best coverage in any particular field but that we were very good in so many. It was the totality of the newspaper that was a marvel, not any of its particulars. The Web threatened to break that up. One way to weather this, which I suggested, was that we needed to pick the fields in which to be preeminent. If you want to have the best sports package, then start hiring the staff and make yourself the best go-to place for sports information. If it is business, or politics—whatever—pick one and make yourself the best, or make a strategic alliance.” This is the approach taken by ESPN.com, Bloomberg.com, IMDB.com, Weather.com, and a multitude of others. Any one of dozens of sites specializing in, say, politics or the arts could have been taken over and built up around the Times’ expert staff. It could still happen. The Washington Post is increasingly staking out the national government as its field, but an even more immediate threat to the Times is coming from downtown. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal already has a larger national circulation than the Times, and its rapacious new owner is vigorously competing on new fronts. Both newspapers are losing revenue in the current downturn, but the Journal may be in a better position for the long term. It has a smaller staff, and a clearly specialized arena with deep importance and broad appeal—business and finance. It has clearly dominated coverage of the ongoing economic crisis, with perceptive stories that are more knowingly reported, more analytical, and consistently better written. Online, the Journal’s editorial matter is largely password-protected, which means its readers are already paying for content, and it has been steadily improving its coverage of culture, sports, and lifestyle, and in its weekend edition featuring original essays by acclaimed writers and thinkers. And while the Times is busy throwing assets overboard to stay afloat, the Journal is attached to Murdoch’s international empire, News Corp. Arthur aspires to be the patron saint of journalism, but the smart money may be on the pirate. The kind of specialization Frankel forecast is also driving most smaller newspapers, which are aggressively focusing coverage on their own communities, where they have exclusive content. Many see this as the only strategy that will enable them to survive. The retired executive editor says that he sent both of his memos up the chain of command—as he puts it, “off into the ether.” He did not hear a word from Arthur or anyone else about them.

  6. “Never Give In”

  Arthur Sulzberger can be a loyal and thoughtful friend, someone who will surprise a distant or old acquaintance with a small note of congratulation or commiseration, a gesture out of the blue that is felt and remembered. He is sincere and determined. He is, by all accounts, a doting and involved father. He did not have to work at all, yet he has always worked hard. “He is kind, decent, and good,” says his longtime friend Steve Rattner. “In everything he does, he means well.” His convictions about journalism are above reproach, and he cultivates his journalistic values in the ever-expanding Sulzberger clan. In speaking with many who know him well, I discovered a nearly universal desire to protect Arthur. “It’s funny. There’s something about him that makes you want to—it’s almost like this maternal instinct kicks in,” says Vivian Schiller, who was an executive at the Times before becoming president of NPR. Part of the desire to protect Arthur stems from his role at the head of a great newspaper in hard times. Part of it is loyalty to the Sulzberger family. But beyond all of this is fear—not just that Arthur will be hurt but that he will fail.

  It is sometimes true that a man’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. Soon after Robert J. Rosenthal was named managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, in 2002, he ran into Arthur at a conference on the West Coast. Arthur congratulated Rosenthal, who had started his career as a copyboy at the Times, and when they shared a car ride Arthur talked about how different their challenges were. “Yours is to turn the ship around,” he said. “Mine is to keep the Times on course.”

  He still might—though in fact staying on course means turning the ship around. If he makes the right moves in the next few years, he may yet be able to ride his inheritance into the digital age. If he pulls that off, the achievement will outstrip those of his revered ancestors. It would be something more akin to the feats attributed to the original Arthur, the one who pulled Excalibur from the stone. But precisely because he is who he is, Arthur may be the last person in the world with the answers. The more likely outcome is that he w
ill lose the Times to someone with deep enough pockets to carry the enterprise at a loss until circumstances sort themselves out—a rich individual, or a rich corporation, or a rich philanthropic institution. In recent years there have been persistent reports of Rupert Murdoch’s interest in the Times, if only because he has historically lusted after prestige broadsheets. Michael Wolff, who wrote a biography of the Australian billionaire, reported in these pages last year that Murdoch had entertained the idea of a merger with his Wall Street Journal’s backroom operations and “fantasize[d] about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple.” (Given the recent layoffs at the Journal, and reports of the newspaper unit’s drag on News Corp’s bottom line, the acquisition of another sagging national newspaper might seem to be an irrational act—but that may be beside the point.) A business model to sustain a professional staff of reporters and editors could yet emerge in this new era, most likely a model devised by entrepreneurs with everything to gain and little to lose. This is a course that would save the institution, but would mean the end of the Sulzberger dynasty.

  Arthur keeps a framed quotation by Winston Churchill in his office, a passage from a speech Churchill delivered during Britain’s darkest hours: “Never never never give up.” What Churchill actually said was “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in,” and he added an important qualifier: “except to convictions of honour and good sense.” The bulldog approach worked for Churchill. But for Arthur, as the prospect of success dims, good sense may dictate the very terms he resists. Serving the institution at some point may require selling it. Many of the newspaper’s superb journalists have already left. Many others are actively eyeing second careers. It is hard to imagine what a second career would be for Arthur.