Hard News

by Seth Mnookin

  SULZBERGER’S CHALLENGES

  Today, eleven floors above the newsroom, Arthur Sulzberger is moving forward with his plans for the New York Times Company, insisting 2003’s turmoil has changed neither his nor his paper’s long-term goals. “It’s postponed things,” he says, “because we were caught up in our own underwear, so to speak, for a while. . . . But the plans have not changed.”

  Still, questions about Sulzberger himself persist. “The Times couldn’t exist without the Sulzbergers,” says James Goodale, a former Times executive vice president. “But at some point you have to wonder if the bloodline thins.” “It’s the question many people on the staff have been asking,” says Jack Rosenthal. “Was [Raines] a bet that went wrong, or was it a reflection [of] Arthur’s lack of skill in picking people or in recognizing faults in people he picked?”

  Shortly after he forced out Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, Sulzberger—who had initially refused to accept any responsibility in the Times’s May 11 account of the Blair affair, saying, “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives—either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher”—finally shouldered some of the blame for the meltdown at his family’s newspaper. He told the Siegal committee that he “should have been listening harder to what was happening in the newsroom. I blame myself for that.” While Sulzberger apparently never lost the support of the company’s board of directors, family members made it clear they were none too happy with the way in which their newspaper’s reputation was being sullied. Ultimately, it was the very business executives Raines had so deliberately courted who told Sulzberger the time had come to cut Raines loose.

  When Arthur Sulzberger selected Howell Raines to be the sixth executive editor of The New York Times, his decision was, to be sure, based partially upon Raines’s perceived journalistic and leadership skills. Perhaps even more important was Raines’s desire to update significantly the content and operations of the Times and his adherence to Sulzberger’s fervent belief that the Times needed to transform itself from being solely a newspaper to being a multimedia content provider. There were certainly aspects of Raines’s sales pitch that made good business sense, such as his promised revamping of the paper’s culture section, which was a huge—and editorially neglected—source of advertising revenue.

  But Raines—who had spent years flattering Sulzberger*50—ultimately had an appeal beyond his promised impact on the bottom line. Both Raines and Sulzberger have said that Raines was hired to serve as a “change agent.” In this way, Raines can be seen as a defining appointment for Sulzberger, especially coming on the heels of his occasionally frustrating relationship with Joe Lelyveld, the man Sulzberger felt he had little choice but to appoint in the early 1990s. Unlike Lelyveld, who had at times found the manner in which Sulzberger wanted to achieve his goals—concerning diversity or the Times’s foray into the Internet or the company’s flirtations with television—either simplistic or headstrong, Raines had for years been an enthusiastic and vocal supporter of Sulzberger’s plans. In choosing Raines to be his executive editor, Sulzberger found himself an employee who shared not only his vision but also some of Sulzberger’s complicated reactions to the paper itself. For his part, Raines needed to see the future of the Times as distinctly different from its past in order to create a self-fulfilling narrative in which he played the part of an almost mythical hero, riding in to save a fading institution from obsolescence.

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  SULZBERGER HAS LONG BEEN dismissive of those who try to ascribe Oedipal motivations to his leadership of the Times, but his selection of Howell Raines, coupled with his almost religious devotion to having a plan of attack for confronting the future, can be seen at least partially as a reaction against his father.*51 But if Punch Sulzberger wasn’t always aggressive about the company’s strategic development, he did viscerally recognize that the source of the Times’s strength and power stemmed from the fact that its employees—and he counted himself as one—viewed the institution as working toward a greater good, a higher purpose, that outstripped the worldly aspirations of any one person. Sulzberger Jr., in contrast, seems more intent on trying to prove the Times can reinvent itself as the dominant media company in a new era.

  Today, Bill Keller is moving forward with some of the innovations Sulzberger and Raines had talked about three long years ago, most notably the much-discussed revamping of the paper’s culture coverage. But the outlook for Sulzberger’s business plans is more mixed.

  One of Arthur Sulzberger’s favorite sayings is attributed to Dwight Eisenhower: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything.” It’s the planning of the Times’s executive team—Sulzberger; Russ Lewis, the company’s CEO; and Janet Robinson, the chief operating officer and executive vice president—that has positioned the Times as the country’s leading national paper. This was done in large part in the mid-1990s, as the Times worked its jujitsu on the paper’s ad and circulation strategies, moves that enabled the paper to sell itself as a truly national product. Previously, the emphasis of ad salespeople at the Times had been the New York metro edition; the national edition was an add-on. “That was backwards,” says Robinson. “What we should have been saying was, ‘Buy the entire distribution of The New York Times, and if indeed you would like to advertise just in the New York region, you can choose to appear in the metro section [which is distributed only in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut].” So Robinson instructed the Times’s ad sales staff to do just that. By 2004, nearly 90 percent of the paper’s advertising ran in all editions of the paper.

  “We’ve moved to the point where now we are the national newspaper for a whole stratum of the American population,” says Russ Lewis, who will step down as the Times Company’s CEO in late 2004, to be replaced by Robinson. “It could have been The Washington Post. It could have been the Los Angeles Times. But it isn’t. It’s us.”

  Indeed, while convincing advertisers to buy national runs, the Times has been continuing to aggressively increase the number of markets in which home delivery is available on a day-of-publication basis. By doing this, the Times has managed to buck current business trends: Virtually every paper in the country is facing shrinking circulation.

  Then, too, there’s the International Herald Tribune—what has basically become the foreign edition of the Times, following the Times Company’s 2002 buyout of the Washington Post’s interest in the paper—as an engine of overseas growth. The IHT, Sulzberger says, will be a major focus of the Times Company, as will aggressive expansion into television and the Internet. “We can now go to an advertiser and say, ‘Okay, we became national, now we’re becoming global,’ ” says Sulzberger. “And most of these companies are global. We can offer them thought leaders in Europe and Asia [through the IHT], and we can offer them thought leaders in the U.S. with a single buy. That’s one of the great opportunities now that we have one hundred percent control [of the International Herald Tribune].”

  But the Times’s takeover of the International Herald Tribune can also be seen in a less rosy light. Peter Goldmark, who had been the chairman and CEO of the IHT since 1998, had for years been telling executives at both the Times and The Washington Post that they needed to explore different ownership options. By keeping the IHT as a quasi-independent entity, he argued, the papers were ignoring what could be the IHT’s greatest strength: its ability to sell global ad buys to businesses looking to pitch their products to an elite audience on both sides of the Atlantic. But when Sulzberger told Post executives they needed to either sell the IHT to the Times outright or have the Times drop out of the joint agreement and start an international paper of its own, he not only angered the Graham family, owners of The Washington Post, but shut the door on the possibility of maintaining a joint editorial operation while giving the Times control of the IHT’s management—and ad sales. “That was no one’s finest hour,” says Goldmark.

  What’s more, the Times appeared not to have a plan for what to do with the IHT once it ga
ined control of the paper. It was unclear the extent to which operations were going to be run out of New York or who, exactly, would lead the Paris-based broadsheet. Even the name of the paper was undecided, as the company debated whether to rename the property as the international edition of The New York Times or keep its current moniker. Sulzberger says all that uncertainty is an example of being willing to remain flexible under changing circumstances and cites readership studies that showed a preference for keeping the paper’s current name. But outside observers say it seemed more as though the Times Company suddenly had a new toy it had no idea what to do with. “It was amateur hour,” says a Wall Street analyst who covers the Times and the newspaper industry. “Regardless of whether it ends up being a good long-term strategic decision, the way that thing was handled didn’t inspire a lot of confidence in anyone.”

  “These are our bets,” says Sulzberger. “They’re well-placed bets. But you know what? If the worst were to happen and they didn’t work out, it wouldn’t kill us. We’d move on. Because we have the resources to do that. So we pick the bets that, in our heart of hearts, we think are going to work. And we go with it.” Russ Lewis is similarly confident. “When people look at the IHT, or at Discovery Times [television] and say, ‘What the hell are they doing that for?’—well, those same people were saying that about our national edition. There’ve always been naysayers,” he says.

  Sulzberger, of course, deserves credit for helping to steer the Times through its last decade of growth and dominance. He also deserves credit for swallowing his personal pride in June 2003 and forcing Howell Raines to step down. But if, as he says, planning is everything, then his track record is clearly mixed. Considering Raines’s well-documented managerial problems, Sulzberger could have and should have found some way to institute checks on Raines’s autocratic tendencies; indeed, for a person who began his tenure as a publisher preaching a need to eliminate overly hierarchical management systems, his blind faith in Raines now seems outright bizarre. When, throughout 2002, there were innumerable signs that the newsroom and newspaper were spinning out of control—when, indeed, people inside and outside the Times came to him to tell him about the dangerous level of dysfunction gripping the paper—Sulzberger should have moved decisively.

  In the end, this is what makes the Times’s recent saga so sad. What might have happened, what might have been avoided, had Sulzberger not chosen Raines?

  POSTSCRIPT

  The two men whose names became synonymous with the tumult at The New York Times were, not surprisingly, the men whose lives were most affected by the events in 2003. And while they appeared to be as different as two men can be—Howell Raines was a white, successful writer and editor fast approaching the end of his career; Jayson Blair was a black, mildly talented reporter just starting his—both shared a need to create overly ambitious narratives from the raw material of their lives.

  We all do this to some extent—the human mind seeks a narrative everywhere—but when the stories these men told about themselves turned out to be greater and grander than anything they were capable of, they fell. The disconnect between Raines’s and Blair’s self-conceptions and their realities gave them permission, in a sense, to smooth the path to distortion and fabrication in the outside world as well. Jayson Blair saw himself as terminally unique. It was okay, then, if he chose to make up stories about the world he was ostensibly covering. Raines, meanwhile, had imagined himself as a desperately needed savior. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap for him to imagine similarly mythic struggles taking place both within the Times’s newsroom and in the actual news itself.

  In the spring of 2004, both Raines and Blair, unwilling to let the drama they had set in motion move on while they were offstage, tried to muscle their way back into the spotlight. On March 6, Jayson Blair published Burning Down My Masters’ House, a book that was advertised as a memoir. A month later, Howell Raines made an epic return to print with a twenty-one-thousand-word cover story in The Atlantic titled “My Times.”*52

  Blair’s book was published by the obscure California-based New Millennium Audio—best known for its quickie books about the O. J. Simpson trial—which is run by an unctuous character named Michael Viner. After New York publishing houses passed on Blair’s proposal, Viner agreed in September 2003 (in the same week his company filed for bankruptcy) to publish it.*53 Blair, Viner said, had an important story to share. What’s more, he stressed that the book would be scrupulously fact-checked.

  For several weeks before its publication, Blair’s manuscript was the subject of intense speculation within the Times’s newsroom. Outside media interest was high as well; everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk to the man who had shaken the Times to its core and necessitated its very public regime change. Katie Couric arranged to interview Blair for an hour-long special on Dateline NBC. Blair would also be featured on the Today show; Hardball, Chris Matthews’s CNBC shout-fest; The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show; and CNN’s Larry King Live. Times reporters braced themselves for the second Blair media frenzy in less than a year.

  But the book’s actual release was a massive letdown. Blair, who was a skilled enough liar to fool his editors at the Times for months on end, had difficulty sustaining even the semblance of a cohesive narrative, either in his book or on the air. Burning Down My Masters’ House, rather than being an honest and nuanced discussion of the Times’s culture or his own deceit (or even race, despite the inflammatory title), was notable mainly for its sloppiness and continued fabrications. A supposedly verbatim conversation with his girlfriend changes from the book’s first pages to its last pages, as does the day of the week the conversation supposedly took place. At one point in the book, Blair talks about how he wanted nothing more than to get off of the sniper case; later, he claims his only goal was to stay on the case.

  Other times, he seems to make things up entirely. He wrote that Gerald Boyd’s mother had died “after a long struggle with drugs.” “It shaped much of who he was,” Blair wrote, “and I was well aware from my interactions with him . . . of his emotional detachment.” Odessa Thomas Boyd actually died at age twenty-nine of sickle-cell anemia. “It is unconscionable that a journalist would write something so hurtful,” Boyd wrote in a newspaper column shortly after Blair’s book was published. “The truth is that my mother did not drink or smoke, and she certainly never used drugs.”

  Blair also wrote about how he avoided reading the Times for much of Sunday, May 11, the day the paper’s report about his deceptions ran on the front page. That night, Blair writes, he went out for a dinner of “barbeque chicken sandwiches with sweet plantains on the side.” In the middle of the meal, he headed outside for a smoke. “I walked over to a nearby deli and looked at the front page of the Sunday Times,” he wrote. “I looked at the top of the story and noticed the names on the byline. . . . I did not have to look past the bylines to know that very few stones had been left unturned, but I took a deep breath and started reading the story.” There were, of course, no bylines on the front page of the Times’s story about Blair; the authors’ names, along with the names of two researchers, were buried deep inside the paper. Less than a year after being drummed out of journalism for making up facts about other people’s lives, Blair had resorted to fabricating the circumstances of his own emotional responses.

  By the time the book was published, Blair seemed unable to keep track of his own deceptions. In Katie Couric’s Dateline interview, she stumped him with a question about his own memoir. Couric asked Blair about a conversation with an army staff sergeant he admits in the book to fabricating. “The—I—I’m not sure—actually—one second. I am not sure about that one,” Blair answered. Couric paused to allow Blair to page through the book he had just finished writing. “Yeah,” Blair said finally.

  “Yeah?” Couric asked.

  “I remember it,” Blair replied.

  The book, despite an overwhelming amount of press, sold miserably. As of May 19, BookScan, a company that t
racks book sales, reported that Blair’s book had sold only 3,300 copies. (This figure does not include book club sales or copies sold at Wal-Mart.) To earn back his reported $150,000 advance, Blair would have had to sell over 40,000 copies of his book. By April, Blair’s book tour had been canceled. On April 28, a one-line announcement on his eponymous website read, “Jayson Blair is on hiatus from speaking until this fall. A schedule will be posted shortly.”

  In mid-March, word leaked out that The Atlantic was publishing a lengthy cover story by Raines. The piece, released to the press on March 24, was a seemingly unending excoriation of the Times. “My intention here is to perform a final service for the newspaper that I worked for and loved for twenty-five years, by revealing the real struggle that was going on behind the scenes at the Times as the Blair scandal played out,” Raines wrote early on in the piece. Instead, he sprayed blame like machine-gun fire. Lelyveld, the man who bookended Raines’s tenure, came in for the harshest criticism: His paper was dull, Raines wrote, and his leadership uninspired. Raines compared Arthur Sulzberger to Wile E. Coyote and portrayed him as weak, immature, and dishonest. Raines went on a lengthy rant about Arthur Gelb, the paper’s former managing editor and one of Raines’s onetime mentors at the paper; Raines’s bile was occasioned by some moderate criticism he had received in the pages of Gelb’s recently published memoir, City Room. (Raines wrote in his piece that Gelb called him up, sputtering with criticism over Raines’s decision to run the May 11 report on Blair. Gelb says he doesn’t remember any such incident.)