Behind the Times (48 page)

Barbara Gamarekian circled the room at the reception celebrating the Wilderness Society’s twenty-fifth anniversary year, hoping perhaps to pick up an item for the
Times
“Washington Briefing” feature.

In recent years the news coverage of the modern
Times
has told a story of subtraction. A. M. Rosenthal and later Max Frankel, together with Joseph Lelyveld, cut back on the complete texts of governmental reports, presidential news conferences, and other official transcripts that, in the past, gave the
Times
its reputation as the Paper of Record. Years before, too, their predecessors discontinued the shipping-news column, the listings of garment-center buyers in town, and the other now-quaint ledgers of an earlier era, in the life of the city and the
Times.
The routines of congressional legislation no longer wended their way day after day through the
Times
’ news columns as they had as recently as twenty-five years before. According to Lelyveld, the “
official”
Times
of the 1960s had several excellent writers—he singled out Russell Baker for his coverage of the U.S. Senate and Claude Sitton’s dispatches from the South during the civil rights marches. Still, said Lelyveld, “By the standards of today, that
Times
would be unreadable. Then we’d do eight page-one stories on a Senate crime bill, and chart its legislative snail’s-progress from hearings to committee votes to passage in each house to White House. Today, by contrast, we would do two or three page-one stories at most: when the bill clears committee, and when it’s passed and/or vetoed.” The same held true for the international-news report. Early in his career, Lelyveld was the
Times
bureau chief in New Delhi; good foreign correspondent that he was, he understood that the foreign desk wanted to hear from him regularly. As late as the 1970s, Lelyveld remembered, when there was a shake-up of the Indian cabinet, that used to be front-page news. Today, Lelyveld says, “a cabinet shake-up would scarcely rate a short. That was the ‘official’
Times.
Now it’s a different
Times.
” He adds: “That’s not a downgrading of news from India. It’s a redefinition. We want more significant themes.”

In place of the Record, as we’ve seen, the modern
Times
expanded its coverage of “softer” specialized news, life-style features, and trend stories. By far the most unremarked increase, however, was in the space the
Times
devoted to opinion. Through all the years until the late 1950s, there were never any more than four or five columnists in the
Times
—two or three Big Thinkers appeared alongside the editorials on the editorial page; another, usually less reverent, graybeard ruminated on “Sports of the Times” in the sports section, and, on the metro pages, the revered Meyer Berger wrote the “About New York” column. By the 1990s, however, almost four dozen columnists were being published throughout the pages of the modern
Times
, from the critics’ contributions in the arts and culture section to the columns devoted to society and fashions. The editorial page itself was opened up, with the chin-tugging columnists given their own new page and the old space turned over for “Letters to the Editor,” and for “Editorial Notebook,” a series of short, informal signed opinion pieces by the previously anonymous members of the editorial board.

The subjects of these columns, editorials, and “Notebooks” changed as well, just as the hard-news coverage had changed, to reflect the new interests of the
Times.
To describe the new content as “trivial” was too harsh; but it was nevertheless true that many of the columns and commentaries concentrated on “light” subjects. They were certainly a soufflé in contrast to the old, “serious”
Times.
The 1990s sports section alone, for example, offered more commentary than had appeared in the entire 1950s-era paper; the
Times
of April 17, 1992, carried four sports columns, including one devoted solely to commentary about sports events on television. In the paper run by Arthur Sulzberger and edited by Frankel and Lelyveld there was, in fact, a column for just about every reader’s taste; hints for “The Practical Traveler” in the Travel section, “Peripherals” (for owners of computers), “Economics of Health” (in the Business Day pages), “Personal Health,” “Pop
View,” “Keeping Fit,” “Parent and Child,” “Coping,” “At the Bar” (about lawyers), “Runways” (on fashion). The final enshrinement of consumerist journalism—or for nostalgists of the old
Times
, its reductio ad absurdum—came in May 1992, when Arthur Sulzberger and Frankel et al. introduced a new Sunday section called
“Styles of the Times.” Styles consisted almost wholly of columns about people, fashions, nightclubs, eating, drinking, and other consummatory pleasures. Styles had attitude … spread out over almost two dozen pages. There were features on bondage trousers and children as a fashion accessory. “The Night” reported on the club scene of the moment, mainly Downtown. A typical column began: “Monday. Mambo Monday. Again the pink flamingos are out in front of SOB’s in Tribeca …” The standing column-heads cried out for attention: “The Sexes” (about men and women), “Egos & Ids” (celebrity gossip), “Things” (how various new consumer products work, such as caller ID).

The advent of Styles marked the resolution of the editorial infighting that had been waged for almost two decades over the contents of Sunday Main Part 2, the second news section with its mix of society news, wedding announcements, late radio-TV listings, and arts reviews. In the new Styles some of these old Part 2 staples were repackaged with trendy graphics and self-consciously “spritely” writing. “On the Street” and “The Evening Hours” featured big photographs of the fashionable at play. The formulaic wedding pictures were also given a postmodernist make-over; in the late 1980s the
Times
began encouraging the groom as well as the bride to pose for their marriage announcement pictures (and make the point that wedding news was no longer about “lucky” young women who had caught their man). Styles took the new wedding pages another step away from the old sexism with “Vows.” The story of one couple from the forty or so wedding notices carried on average in the
Sunday Times
, “Vows” recounted details of the couple’s initial meeting, courtship, and marriage.

Other Main Part 2 news offerings, such as “Campus Life,” were dropped entirely from the new section. A series of stringer reports from colleges around the country, “Campus Life” touched on unusual courses and curriculum changes, manifestations of political correctness (and, on the other side, yahooism), and social tensions among students (clashes between blacks and whites, for example, or feminists and fraternities). “Campus Life” carried actual news. Now, in the space where “Campus Life” formerly appeared, Styles featured a two-page
account of “The Arm Fetish,” writer Molly O’Neill’s speculation of the effects of fitness routines on body image (“the sculptured body is now the foundation of fashion,” she announced). Styles writers cultivated their individual voices; the presentation fairly cried out, “Pick me up, caress me (with your shapely arms), read me. I’m so fabulously adorable.”

Styles was introduced shortly after Arthur Sulzberger succeeded his father in early 1992. When the new publisher was asked about these changes by a university teacher—who said that he missed “Campus Life,” and the sense it gave him of what was going on at other colleges—Sulzberger replied, pleasantly, “Styles isn’t intended for you. You’re too old. It’s for different readers, for those between thirty and forty years old.” He paused and laughed, “Maybe I’m getting too old for it, too” (Arthur Sulzberger was forty-one at the time). More seriously, he half-apologized for some of the unbearable lightness of Styles, explaining that the new section was a departure from the usual news-gathering work of the
Times.
It would take a period of adjustment before the form was mastered by the “hard news” people. “We’re not there yet. It hasn’t been our franchise. We’re not used to this kind of thing at the
Times
,” he said. After the first few Styles appeared, Enid Nemy, a
Times
fashion reporter since the early 1970s seemed unusually quiet when asked about the new section. “
Downtown isn’t going to read Styles. Those children just don’t read the
Times
,” she said, echoing what the Polish Tea Room crowd had said when it discussed the culture pages’ romance with rock, rap, and “the pop life.”

Arthur Sulzberger and his lieutenants Frankel and Lelyveld did not abandon the traditional franchise. The same Sunday the first Styles appeared, a new Sunday Metro section was also introduced. It brought together in one place coverage of the city and its suburbs; the new section was the first step toward zoned editions, a publishing plan that would segregate still further metropolitan-area news: Connecticut news for Connecticut subscribers only, for example. But the main marketing energy of Arthur Sulzberger’s
Times
was channeled into softer features with “voice” and into commentaries of all kinds.

The emphasis on opinion began well before Arthur. As far back as the early 1970s, the
Times
’
Op-Ed page, with its daily chorus of public-policy voices, proved to be a crowd pleaser. Readership surveys indicated that the Op-Ed page was the best-read part of the paper, after page one, just as the same surveys reflected the popularity of “Critic’s
Notebook,” the variant of the column idea of the culture pages. On any given day, the Op-Ed page offered two contributions from the
Times
’ own columnists, including Anthony Lewis, Russell Baker, William Safire, and, in more recent years, Anna Quindlen and A. M. Rosenthal. In addition, two or three outside contributors usually appeared each day, so that on average about sixteen to twenty nonstaff pieces were published each week. A four person Op-Ed-page staff commissioned about half of these contributions, after the approval of the page editor (the editor and an art director increased the size of the staff to six). The same person who suggested topics to selected writers then worked with the writer to get the article in shape. By far the most time-consuming part of the staff’s work, however, involved digging out from under the avalanche of unsolicited manuscripts—known as the “slush pile,” a phrase borrowed from book publishing. Hundreds of opinion articles arrived from people eager to be published in the
Times
, for reasons of ego, ideology, or an interest in contributing to “the public dialogue.” It certainly wasn’t the money that made outsiders want to be in the
Times
: Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the Op-Ed page paid an inflation-proof $150 for the standard 750-word article (double-length contributors earned $300).

The Op-Ed page was a popular hit with these would-be contributors. At first a trickle and then a rush of manuscripts came in by mail, by messenger, and more recently, by fax. When the page observed its twentieth anniversary in September 1990, as many as sixty unsolicited manuscripts were arriving each workday. In the early years of the 1990s, the slush pile passed one hundred daily. “
It was as if the Gray Lady had hit the dance floor,” Robert B. Semple, Jr., dryly noted on the occasion of the anniversary. Semple was the editor in charge of Op-Ed from 1982 until mid-1988, when he moved across the page to join the editorial board. The Op-Ed page attracted so much attention, Semple said, “
I developed a fantasy about all the would-be contributors. There were all these Op-Ed assembly lines across the land at the think tanks and the universities. Rooms full of professors and experts writing Op-Ed pieces for submission. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, the Carnegie Endowment, the Brookings Institute, the Heritage Foundation. They had a paragraph in their employment contract, stipulating, ‘You will write X number of Op-Eds a year.’ ” Considering that no more than two unsolicited pieces are normally published in the
Times
on any given day, Semple added, “There must be a lot of
unfulfilled agreements out there.” Mitchel Levitas, who took over the page in late 1990, said he noted a fallback pattern among the rejects: “They showed up later in the
Washington Post
and the
Wall Street Journal.
”

Many of the Op-Ed assembly line writers moonlighted by writing to “Letters to the Editor.” In the 1980s, according to R. A. Barzilay, the editor in charge of selecting the letters that appeared on the
Times
’ editorial page, some seventy thousand letters came in annually; by 1992, the figure had risen above 100,000. Typically, three hundred letters a day were arriving, without any sign of a dropoff, a remarkable volume considering that seven or eight letters on average were published daily on the editorial page. (The editors of other sections of the
Times
, such as the
Times Magazine
, the
Book Review
, the Sports section, and Arts & Leisure, received their own heavy volume of mail as well; they accommodated a few of these in their pages.) According to Barzilay, there were some souls—eager? lost? pathetic?—who corresponded with the
Times
daily and many more who wrote “excellent and informative letters at least weekly.” But the
Times
was firm: As a rule no outsider could appear on the Op-Ed page or the letters columns more than two or three times a year. For a time, Henry Kissinger was an exception; eventually, the rules were applied to him as well.