Behind the Times (26 page)

Three
Times
senior editors, returning from lunch at Orso, one of the executives’ favored “company canteens” along restaurant row on West 46th Street, made a detour around the quiet, listless crowd in front of St. Luke’s Church. The church soup kitchen began serving at 3:00
P.M.
By 2:30, more than eighty men and women were waiting to be fed. The editors observed firsthand the editorial-page abstraction, “the homeless.”

In the sports department, the dayside desk was quiet, the pace noticeably slower after the full schedule of weekend games. The football season was over; the baseball teams were in spring training, with opening day still more than a month away. Among local professional basketball teams, the Knicks and Nets were idle; so were the Rangers of the National Hockey league. Only the Islanders and Devils were on the NHL schedule Tuesday night. For the past two days, the big sports story hadn’t involved a line-score at all. The three New York tabloids—the
News
, the
Post
and
Newsday
—featured stories about excessive drinking aboard the charter planes carrying the New York Yankees to games during the past season. The Westchester-Rockland Newspapers, the small suburban chain, had been on the story before the
Times
as well. The
Post
quoted Rickey Henderson, the Yankees’ star centerfielder, who suggested that the carousing was one reason the Yankees didn’t win their division pennant. For the approaching season, Yankees management had banned hard liquor on the team’s charter flights. Michael Martinez, the
Times
reporter assigned to the Yankees, was in Fort Lauderdale with the team for spring training. Trying to get the
Times
back in the game, Martinez spent Tuesday morning looking for Lou Piniella, the former Yankees’ manager, to get his comments or corroboration. Martinez had not yet found him. The dayside desk urged Martinez on.

“Victory has a hundred parents,” John F. Kennedy is credited with saying, “defeat is an orphan.” So too with the success of the modern
Times
, and the great “rescue” of the paper in the 1970s and 1980s, when the whole enterprise appeared to be sinking, along with the municipal fortunes of New York City. Between 1970 and 1975, for example, the
Times
suffered severe circulation and advertising losses. In one six-month period alone in 1971, daily circulation dropped by some 31,000 to 814,000. The
Times
had increased its newsstand price from 10 to 15 cents per copy, and the message seemed clear: Some people didn’t think the
Times
was worth a nickel more. “
I used to have a nightmare when I was editor,” Abe Rosenthal recalled two decades later. “It’s a Wednesday morning and there’s no
New York Times.
” In Rosenthal’s recollection, “If no one did anything, and if we kept losing money, then the
Times
could have gone out of business. I’m not saying that it would have happened, but that it
could
have.”

By the mid-1980s, however, all the trend lines had been reversed. Not only did the
Times
regain the daily circulation it lost in the early 1970s; it added another 100,000 readers between 1976 and 1982, then another 50,000 by 1984, and then another 50,000 more, to go over the one million mark in 1986. The city had come back, and so had its leading newspaper. The
Times’
shift to special interest coverage—its
sectional revolution—became a model of the industry, and the faltering paper of the 1970s metamorphosed into the money machine of the late 1980s, throwing off operating profits of $200 million a year. The architects of its success were, in the commonly accepted accounting of events: Abraham Michael Rosenthal from the news department, and his opposite on the business side, Walter E. Mattson. Overseeing their work, leading the two leaders, was the third member of this pantheon of achievement, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. They were, to be sure, a disparate team: Abe Rosenthal, son of immigrants, abrasive, driven, emotional; Walt Mattson, plain-spoken, curt, direct, a production specialist from western Pennsylvania, never wholly comfortable in New York; Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the scion of privilege who had been treated rather dismissively by his family and associates in his earlier years. But, together, the odd trio remade the
Times.
They turned it into a contemporary guide to good living while maintaining comprehensive news coverage; they insured its continued preeminence in the new media landscape.

“Mattson and I worked together, but Punch had to make the critical decisions,” Rosenthal remembered, rehearsing the company history. “That is, whether to change the
Times
by cost cutting or by adding more resources.” Then Rosenthal, the word man, offered what has become known among
Times
executives as the “
soup speech.” Sulzberger, Rosenthal said, could have cut back on the
Times’
national and international coverage, diluting the daily news report—putting more water in the soup. Or he could maintain the
Times’
hard-news commitments while adding the new special sections—putting more tomatoes in the soup. Thus, as the
Times
presented itself, there was no conflict between the daily news report and the new feature sections. The
Times
did both hard and soft news, and did them superbly. “We never cut back on our news coverage,” Rosenthal recalled. “The publisher never said to me, ‘Since we’re adding news about food, cut elsewhere.’ Other places did cut back. It would have been easy at the
Times
to do so, too. We’ve got fifty foreign correspondents? Okay, we’ll use twenty. We have seven music critics? Hey, keep two and we’ll still have one more than the others. The same with the four daily book critics, and the seventeen national news bureaus for just five columns a day. That’s 150 columns a month. Who’ll notice if we do 130 columns?” The
Times
, Rosenthal emphasized, had to grow or atrophy. And so his metaphor of news-as-food. “Do we change by cost cutting,
which was the solution of others? Or do we put more tomatoes in the soup, which was our solution? I wanted more tomatoes. So did Mattson. Punch had to say, ‘Yes, I agree. Do it.’ He did, and he became the best publisher the
Times
ever had.”

So the official story goes. History, as usual, has been written by the winners.

The actual sequence of events was at once less dramatic and more ambiguous: The soup was a mixed brew. First of all, the changes were not revolutionary; nor were radical fixes even contemplated. The “new”
New York Times
was, above all, reactive—derivative of other journalistic models. Second, the
Times
never came close to shutting its doors, Rosenthal’s nightmare to the contrary. Year after year in the previous decades, the newspaper demonstrated that it was possible to maintain journalistic standards despite minimal profit margins. That was, of course, before the
Times
became a public company, and well before its managers began worrying about whether the security analysts were recommending the stock. Third, the old
Times
—the hard-news Paper of Record—did suffer in the transition to the new, both absolutely and in comparison to others. Newspapers such as the
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal
improved their own soups in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. The
Post
produced a stronger national-news report, the
Journal
a better business-financial report. Not surprisingly, during all the soup stirring, the
Times
lost some of its most talented men and women, who were attracted to other news organizations with the promise of higher salaries and greater visibility (other talents turned down the chance to work for the
Times
in the first instance). “
Once, the best people wanted to come to the
Times
to be a foreign correspondent or to write about American society,” says Albert Scardino, who joined the
Times
in 1985 and left five years later. “They found they could do that elsewhere, and perhaps more effectively.”

But neither did the
Times
devolve into a bland, suburbanized feature package, as some of its hard-line critics claimed. These revisionists presented the Rosenthal
Times
as an unfeeling Nero of New York, fiddling for the rich while the city burned. “To believe that the
Times
accurately reflects the world and then go out into the streets of New York is to be struck by a sense of the absurd,” contributing editor Earl Shorris wrote in
Harper’s
magazine in October 1977. And, in a reference
to a notorious $4,000 dinner described by the
Times’
food writer, Craig Claiborne, Shorris asked plaintively, “Will the
New York Times
never stop eating?” (Rosenthal and his critics alike couldn’t get away from thoughts of food.)

The revisionist critics had to suppress a large part of the past to make their case. The Sulzberger-Rosenthal-Mattson team did not suddenly turn its back on the blight of the Bronx and Brooklyn in favor of a cosmeticized view of New York as a wondrous place to live and work (and read a paper). The unbeautiful city of the poor and the dispossessed had not been within the
Times’
traditional ambit to begin with. In their times, Adolph Ochs and Arthur Hays Sulzberger passed quickly over the city—after giving close daily attention to its affairs of business and merchandising—to attend to the wider world of national and international news. The
Times
typically maintained more reporters in London or Paris than in the outer boroughs.

Both the official historians and the critics glossed over the essential point about the new, celebratory
Times.
It had not only come late to the consumers’ party in the first place; once there, it looked around nervously to mimic what the others were doing. The
Times
was among the last major American newspapers to adjust their graphics and writing styles to a television-saturated society. In the late 1970s, an assertive young reporter named Anna Quindlen came to the
Times
from the
New York Post.
Fifteen years later Quindlen still remembered every detail of what happened when she turned in her first story to the metro desk. “Hot town. Summer in the city,” she had written.
The copy editor returned the story to her. “These are sentence fragments,” he remonstrated, and proposed to insert before each “fragment” the phrase “It was a.” The editor also wanted semicolons and other punctuation marks. “Look,” Quindlen said, “you can’t do that. These are the first words of a song.” “What kind of a song?” the editor asked. “A rock ’n’ roll song,” Quindlen replied, challengingly. The editor, she remembered, was equally defiant. “His expression said, ‘
You
look. You’re never going to get rock ’n’ roll and sentence fragments into this paper.’ ”

The
Times
adapted itself—somewhat—to fresh styles, and memories like Quindlen’s are intended to produce tolerant smiles now. The Sulzberger-Mattson-Rosenthal era changes actually were modest. Success came in part as a result of the failures of others: for example, the even more hesitant responses of the rival
Herald Tribune
to changes in
the New York marketplace in the 1960s, and the self-destructive labor policies of another potential competitor, the
News
, in the 1970s and 1980s. Opportunism too played a part in the successes of the Sulzberger years, though few people normally associated that word with the
Times.
In the early 1970s, a group of former
Herald Tribune
journalists led by the editor Clay Felker developed so-called service journalism in
New York
magazine, with such features as “The Underground Gourmet,” “Best Bets,” and “The Passionate Shopper.” Rosenthal lifted these ideas for the
Times
; to execute them, he also hired away from
New York
a cadre of editors and writers, including Nancy Newhouse, Mimi Sheraton, Suzanne Slesin, and Joan Kron, among others who had worked with Felker. (
New York
magazine, Rosenthal told the writer Stephanie Harrington, “used to drive me out of my mind”: It was covering subjects around the city that the
Times
ignored.) The
Times’
roving eyes also fixed on the visual presentations and themed sections developed in regional newspapers such as the
Miami Herald.
When these features were adapted for the
Times
, they appeared fresh to readers and advertisers within the northeast corridor.

It was not an indictable offense for the
Times
to follow the lead of the more enterprising newspapers and magazines among the competition, especially when the
Times
subsequently produced many of these borrowed features in style, with sufficient financial and journalistic resources. “The
New York Times
hired real science writers, real music critics, and real architectural specialists, and they produced the best newspaper feature sections in the country,” in the recollection of a friendly outside critic, Tom Rosensteil of the
Los Angeles Times.
His own paper, he added, experimented with rotating themed sections in the late 1970s, and eventually decided that it couldn’t find enough talent to execute all the sections properly.