The New York Times on the Precipice | vanityfair.com
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Bookmark History
Saved by 10 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-03-30
- Stubeth2 on 2009-05-27 - Tags no_tag
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- Trexbean on 2009-04-05 - Tags bowden , vanityfair , article , nyt , sulzberger , newspapers
Public Sticky notes
“111-111-1111,” the peculiar signature of an incoming call from The New York Times.
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Speaking of Arthur, the fifth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty to preside over the paper, Talese had said, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”
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small army of reporters—1,300 of them—into the field every day asking questions.
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“The Internet has taken away far more advertising than it has given.”
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Arthur recently borrowed $250 million from Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, who owns the fourth-largest stake in the Times Company. Controlling interest is held closely by the Sulzberger family, which owns 89 percent of the company’s Class B shares. These shares, not traded publicly, are held by a family trust designed to prevent individual heirs from selling out, and ultimately to shelter editorial matters from strict concern for the bottom line.
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The family owns about 20 percent of the Class A shares, which is about the same percentage owned by the hedge funds Harbinger and Firebrand. The third-largest Class A shareholder is T. Rowe Price, with 10 percent. Slim comes next, with 7 percent.
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It is now very thinkable. Among the other prospective buyers whose names have surfaced in the press are Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York; Google; and even, perish the thought, the press baron Rupert Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal has emerged as journalistic competition for the Times in a way it never was before
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He has separated from his wife of more than three decades, Gail Gregg, a painter, and embarrassing speculation about his sleeping partners has surfaced in the tabloid columns. His son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, is now working as a reporter at the pape
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Sulzbergers have long treated the Times less as a business than as a public trust, and Arthur is steeped in that tradition, rooted in it, trained by it, captive to it. Ever the dutiful son, he has made it his life’s mission to maintain the excellence he inherited—to duplicate his father’s achievement.
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The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: Journalism sells.
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it simply isn’t true. Rather: Advertising sells, journalism costs.
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The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: Journalism sells. Arthur says as much at every opportunity, and clearly believes this to his core. It encapsulates his understanding of his inheritance and of himself. But as a general principle, it simply isn’t true. Rather: Advertising sells, journalism costs.
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For this story, Arthur stuck by his decision to get out of the business of being interviewed, and he also declined to permit his employees to talk to me. Nevertheless, many did. I interviewed dozens of current and former Times reporters, editors, and business managers, as well as industry analysts, academics, and editors and publishers at rival newspapers. Nearly every one of them hopes that Arthur will succeed. Few expect that he can.
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two years ago the New York Times Company moved into a new skyscraper on Eighth Avenue designed by Renzo Piano.
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the erection of a new headquarters often seems to spell trouble for corporations
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depicted as weak, pampered, flawed, a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock
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when he grins he is slightly buck-toothed, which adds to an impression, unfortunate for a man in his position, of puerility. He is a lifelong New Yorker, but there is no trace whatsoever of region or ethnicity in his speech.
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e is long-winded and, in keeping with a tendency toward affectation, is fussily articulate, like a bright freshman eager to impress, speaking in complex, carefully enunciated sentences sprinkled with expressions ordinarily found only on the page, such as “that is” and “i.e.” and “in large measure,” or archaisms like “to a fare-thee-well.” He exaggerates. He works hard, endearingly, to put others at ease, even with those who in his presence are not even slightly intimidated or uncomfortable.
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Arthur has the clever adolescent’s habit of hiding behind a barb, a stinging comment hastily disavowed as a joke. Some find him genuinely funny. Others, particularly those outside his immediate circle, read arrogance—t
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He will adopt, for instance, a pet expression that becomes an in-joke, which he will then deploy repeatedly. One of these is “W.S.L.,” which stands for “We Suck Less,”
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His mind wanders, particularly when pressed to concentrate on complicated business matters.
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he is a Star Trek fan
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the personality of “a twenty-four-year-old geek.”
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His 30-year marriage has reportedly foundered over a relationship Arthur had with a woman named Helen Ward, from Aspen, Colorado, whom he met on a group excursion to Peru.
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For what it’s worth, he is a Star Trek fan.
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Arthur is provincial. Asked once if he had seen a story on the front page of that day’s Post, he looked confused until it was explained that the item had appeared in The Washington Post. He said, “I only read the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.”
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personality of “a twenty-four-year-old geek
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for many years jogged in Central Park. Recently his knees have started to bother him, so he now prefers exercising on an elliptical trainer
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He also takes Pilates classes and can be evangelical about them, telling friends the practice wards off arthritis,
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enjoys unwinding with a cigar and a martini. He still goes on motorcycle treks with his cousin Dan Cohen and other friends. He is drawn to feats of personal daring, and is an avid rock climber, a vestige of his enthusiasm for Outward Bound.
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Arthur is theatrical. It shows in his public speeches, which can be impressive. He has a nice sense of comic timing, and enjoys attention and applause.
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after spending a few months living in London in his youth, returned home wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a cane.
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will pounce on colleagues as they happen by his 16th-floor office, urging them to step in and visit, saying conspiratorially, “Let me show you something cool.”
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He is drawn to feats of personal daring, and is an avid rock climber, a vestige of his enthusiasm for Outward Bound.
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To a degree some of his top staff consider unwise, he tends to promote people based not on a cold-eyed assessment of their talent but on how comfortable he feels around them—on how much fun they are. As Arthur was deciding between Howell Raines and Bill Keller for the executive-editorship of the newspaper, in 2001, the reserved Keller kept a professional distance. The gregarious Raines sought to sweep Arthur off his feet.
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“To hell with nepotism!” said Arthur, smiling. “I’m a believer in primogeniture!”
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he also staked his claim to the crown deliberately and dramatically, when he was only 14 years old
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His mother, Barbara Grant, and Punch Sulzberger divorced when Arthur was just five. He lived throughout his early childhood on the Upper East Side with his mother and her new husband, David Christy, a warm and supportive stepfather. Punch is nominally Jewish, although not at all religious, while his son was raised Episcopalian.
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Yet, understanding what his famous name meant, and who his distant father actually was in the world, he packed up his things and moved himself the half-mile to his father’s home on Fifth Avenue, to live with Punch and his stepmother and their daughters. He was not pulled by any strong emotional connection. It seemed more like a career move. His biological father and his stepmother were wealthy, socially connected, and powerful; his biological mother and his stepfather were not. Arthur opted for privilege and opportunity.
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stepmother, Carol Sulzberger, despised Arthur—she would stick out her tongue at pictures of him—did not seem to matter. He was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and showing up on his father’s doorstep was a way of asserting, consciously or not, that when Punch changed wives he had not washed his hands of an obligation to his son. While the inheritance was his by birth, it was also very much Arthur’s choice.
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Arthur, too, would grow his bushy hair long, try drugs, demonstrate against the Vietnam War, and embrace the style and rhetoric of the 60s. He has said that he worked on his high-school newspaper but not his college paper, at Tufts, because “we had a war to stop.
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He began as a reporter for The Raleigh Times, then moved on to the London bureau of the Associated Press. He was a hard worker and a cheerful colleague, and he produced competent if unspectacular work
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They both started working at the newspaper at about the same time, Punch having gone to college only after serving in the Marines
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he would never become a top reporter, lacking qualities that are essential and rarely cultivated by such men as himself, the properly reared sons of the rich. Prying into other people’s affairs, chasing after information, waiting outside the doors of private meetings for official statements is no life for the scion of a newspaper-owning family. It is undignified, too alien to a refined upbringing. The son of a newspaper owner may indulge in reporting for a while, regarding it as part of his management training, a brief fling with romanticism, but he is not naturally drawn to it.
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Yet, understanding what his famous name meant, and who his distant father actually was in the world, he packed up his things and moved himself the half-mile to his father’s home on Fifth Avenue,
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He went from the Washington bureau, where he was close friends with Steve Rattner, Judith Miller,
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Newspapers do not attract top-tier business and financial talent, because it would be unseemly to pay those on the business side disproportionately more than the most senior editors, and the salary scale for even the highest-paid editors is a fraction of that for high-level C.E.O.’s and bankers.
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what is supposedly wrong with Arthur: “He has no rays”—rays, as in the lines cartoonists draw around a character to suggest radiance, or power.
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People liked Arthur everywhere he went, and he worked at being liked.
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The Washington Post, which is being buoyed through this industry-wide depression by the highly profitable Kaplan Inc., an education-services company that provides test-preparation classes and online instruction.
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Except for his admirable Web site, Arthur has failed to expand the Times effectively into other media. Back in 2000 he announced that television was “our next great frontier,” but his one timid step in that direction, a partnership with the Discovery Channel to produce news-related documentaries, was halfhearted (and abbreviated).
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The Times still lacks a presence in television. Arthur has not missed the boat entirely with digital start-ups—his decision to buy the online information site About.com, which provides assisted Internet searching, has paid dividends
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His choice for executive editor, Howell Raines, played favorites in the newsroom, overlooked shoddy journalism, and so alienated his reporters and editors that they forced Arthur to dump him.
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Arthur tried to break the ice before a large audience of restive reporters and editors by pulling a toy stuffed moose out of a bag, a favorite device of his meant to facilitate candid discussion—the moose was supposed to represent the core issues that no one dared address. Newsmen, it should be noted, are rarely shy about expressing their opinions, and on this occasion the crowd was about as reserved as a lynch mob. The moose was so silly and so unnecessary, and reflected something so tone-deaf, that Arthur has yet to live it down.
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Times veterans remember with pained expressions the “bonding games” Arthur forced them to play at company retreats in the late 1990s, and the time and effort he demanded they lavish on crafting “mission statements” for the newspaper and the company. “We have it written down and we carry it with us,” Arthur told Charlie Rose in 2001.
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e blundered into a losing and ultimately embarrassing fight over his old friend Judith Miller, who went to jail to protect a source, former Cheney chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, before striking a deal with prosecutors. The fight was widely regarded as a poor one to make into a First Amendment test case, but that didn’t stop Arthur from charging to Miller’s defense. The “Free Judy” buttons he distributed made for a ludicrous contrast to his father’s storied battle over the Pentagon Papers. An explanatory mea culpa about the Miller case, written by the executive editor, Bill Keller, suggested that Miller had had an “entanglement” with Libby, which some read as a suggestion that she was sleeping with him.
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He has no rays”—rays, as in the lines cartoonists draw around a character to suggest radiance, or power. In the comics trade these lines are called “emanata.” The emanata deficit is a standard insider lament about Arthur, although most Times people need a few more words to make the point.
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Arthur’s fixation on newsprint evidences a devotion to quality journalism amid the growing din of propaganda and digital frivolity; after all, most of the real reporting done in America is still done by newspapers. His eagerness to defend reporters’ freedoms stems from noble instincts, and demonstrates that, for Arthur, the paper’s mission takes priority over its profits. His enthusiastic defense of Judith Miller may have backfired, but the same impulse led Arthur to defy a strongly worded request from the Bush administration—delivered in person at the White House—not to print stories that revealed legally dubious domestic spying, stories that would win a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.
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He comes off as a lightweight, as someone slightly out of his depth, whose dogged sincerity elicits not admiration so much as pity
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ing more than a billion dollars to buy The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune. These purchases appear to have been historically mis-timed, rather like sinking your life savings into hot-air balloons long after the first excited reports from Kitty Hawk
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might his willingness to back down and fire Raines be seen as a sign not of pusillanimity but of humility and flexibility?
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The Times still lacks a presence in television
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he passed up (along with a lot of other people) early opportunities to invest in the great search engines, such as Google, which today is sucking ad revenue from the paper while at the same time giving away its content
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As an old football coach once told me, “Write whatever you want: if I win, you can’t hurt me, and if I lose, you can’t help me.”
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He is, or was, big on managerial gimmickry
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On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”
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Times veterans remember with pained expressions the “bonding games” Arthur forced them to play at company retreats in the late 1990s, and the time and effort he demanded they lavish on crafting “mission statements” for the newspaper and the company. “
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rthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value.
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Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars.
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Where Arthur senior had been seen as stolid and serious, Arthur junior appeared callow. One of those involved in the Miller episode describes Arthur’s behavior throughout as “childish.” Another word you hear is “goofy
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“One of the enduring myths about The New York Times is that it nobly sacrificed profits from revenue-generating ads during World War II in order to print more news,” wrote Tifft and Jones. “But the truth is somewhat more complicated.” It seems that the Times actually slashed its news hole in this period “far more severely than it cut the space devoted to ads.” With newsprint rationed, and with more ads and news than he could fit, Sulzberger increased space for ads and decreased space for news
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Arthur was talking about the impact of the Internet on newspapers earlier than anyone else in our industry, and the records show that. So you have this strange kind of thing where you have the vision and you have insight, but you don’t get the business side of it right—but literally, without exception, no one has.
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While the rival Herald Tribune sat on its swollen profits during the war, Sulzberger used his profits to print not more news but more newspapers, greatly expanding the Times’s reach. That strategy left the Times with a larger circulation than the Herald Tribune after the war.
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The invention of the Internet has caused a fundamental shift not just in the platform for information—screen as opposed to paper—but in the way people seek information. In evolutionary terms, it’s a sudden drastic change of climate.
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“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.’”
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“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.
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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. T
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He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: Journalism sells.
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To be platform agnostic is the equivalent of recording stage plays.
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Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It’s not that they have short attention spans. 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 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.
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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.
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Propaganda shares the platform with honest reporting, and the slickest, most attractive Web sites and blogs will be those sponsored by corporations, the government, or special interests, which can afford to pay for professional work.
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When Arthur became chairman of the Times Company, in 1997, he dragged his top people to retreats in leafy locations, there to learn better cooperation and to think big thoughts. He was less worried about adapting the Times to a new era than about making his company and newsroom a happier place to work. The underlying assumption was that there was nothing ahead but smooth seas. Many of the newsroom’s hard-bitten veterans found these events revealing.
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because at the core Arthur and the Times remain wedded to an archaic model of journalism.
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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.”
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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 the paper’s 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.
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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.
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But the true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater
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“They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”
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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.
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agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure what they believe in
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there is no such thing as being platform agnostic
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“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 pre-eminent. 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.”
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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.
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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.
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In speaking with many who know him well, I discovered a near-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.
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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.” T
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The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not businessmen.”
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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.
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