Veteran journalist, Adam Nagourney, (a New York Times’ staff writer since 1996), undertook a mighty tall order; chronicling The New York Times during some of its most tumultuous years of its 172-year history, roughly from 1977, through the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
The finished product was titled “The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism.”
It was published in September.
The book is an independent work, the Times did not authorize it.
During his meticulous and scrupulous research and countless person to person interviews, I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the well-respected Nagourney to open up old wounds, recount bitter feelings, bruised egos, spilled blood, and describe careless journalistic practices at a newspaper he works at.
Fortunately for him, most of the journalists Nagourney writes about have long left the building.
A. M. Rosenthal was executive editor of The New York Times from 1977 through 1986.
Photo Credit: Associated Press
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Fittingly, Nagourney begins his history of the Times recounting the reign (or to some, the “reign of terror”) of A.M. (aka “Abe”) Rosenthal and his appointment as executive editor in 1977.
By the time he retired in 1999, Rosenthal completed a 55-year career with the Times as reporter, foreign correspondent, metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor, associated managing editor, managing editor, executive editor, and finally columnist, His final op-ed column appeared on November 5, 1999, along with a biographical sketch of his career written by Clyde Haberman.
As the reader quickly discovers, so much of how the Times changed and progressed over the decades was in reaction to how things were run during the Abe Rosenthal era. Not many can deny that Abe Rosenthal, despite his and volcanic personality and tyrannical rule, made the Times a better paper, he scoured the country for the some of the most talented journalists and expected they live up to their top billing and his high expectations.
As Nagourney wrote: “Rosenthal believed that the Times was different from every other newspaper and that it was obliged to stand apart from, and to rise above, the world it was chronicling.”
Abe Rosenthal’s court, however, appeared limited to the well-established conventional writers and editors, those considered outside the box had limited opportunities to advance.
This was certainly true for any journalists who happened to be gay. Nagourney writes how Rosenthal questioned the standards editor, Allan M. Siegal, whether he was hiring a cluster of gays on the metropolitan and national desks? Siegel responded he wasn’t intentionally hiring gays, but he wasn’t excluding them either.
Rosenthal held strong convictions (beliefs apparently shared by publisher at the time, Punch Sulzberger) that gays represented a seditious force in the newsroom, which, if left unchecked, will affect the content of the paper subversively.
It wouldn’t be until Max Frankel (1986-1994) took the reins from Rosenthal as executive editor would gay issues and the AIDS epidemic be given the coverage it deserved. Frankel promoted deputy national editor Jeffrey Schmalz to give readers a more comprehensive overview of HIV/AIDS and its impact on the LGBT community.
Schmalz, who was gay, was diagnosed with AIDS himself, writing about it in 1992 and ultimately dying from complications of the disease in 1993. He was 39.
Frankel was additionally the editor who relaxed some of the more austere editorial policies under Rosenthal by letting reporters, for example, have more than one byline in the same day’s paper, along with allowing multiple bylines to a story, something reporters vigorously pushed for.
Women, too, were given short shrift before and during Abe Rosenthal’s reign.
A Women’s Caucus in 1972 was formed, which found there were 385 men on the Times’ staff compared with only 40 women, 11 of the women were in the family and style pages. There were no women executives listed on the masthead, the 11-member editorial board didn’t include a woman, and there were no women photographers, and no women columnists.
While working on the metro desk, Anna Quindlen (later an op-ed columnist) was seven months pregnant when editor, Arthur Gelb, approached her station to ask “So, this is the last one, right? “
Appointing women and minorities to senior positions became a high priority for Max Frankel, along with Arthur Sulzberger Jr. when he succeeded his father as publisher.
Soma Golden Behr was the first female national editor; Gerald Boyd was promoted to managing editor in 2001, becoming the first African-American on the Times’ masthead. Prior to that, Bob Herbert was named a Times’ op-ed columnist in 1993, while Margot Jefferson earned a Pulitzer in 1995 as a Black critic on cultural criticism.
The New York Times’ website went live at 11: 59 p.m. on Friday, January 19, 1996.
As the Times slowly made the migration from print to the Internet, Nagourney’s book takes on a decidedly more dramatic tone and the stories and characters he writes about become all the more juicier.
Howell Raines, executive editor, arm raised at center, celebrated a record number of Pulitzers in 2002, at the desk of Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor.
Photo Credit: Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
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Nagourney writes that soon after Howell Raines was promoted to executive editor in 2001 and led the Times to a record 7 Pulitzer Prizes for its 9/11 coverage, the House that Adolph Ochs built began to crumble, one brick at a time, igniting a nationwide scandal when the Times internal editorial flaws were exposed.
The first major scandal involved a young Black reporter, Jayson Blair, who after serving his internship was promoted to a full-time reporter in January, 2001.
He turned into a prolific reporter with his byline appearing in over 750 stories in just under five years. Eventually, more and more of the details in his stories began to be questioned by editors.
An internal investigation found problems with at least 36 of the 73 articles Blair wrote for the Times. He fabricated some quotes, wasn’t even in cities he claimed to have been in; and most damning of all-he lifted passages from a San Antonio Express-News article.
On May 2, 2003, the Times published an article announcing Blair’s resignation and chronicling his acts of “journalistic fraud.”
The next major scandal involved the Times’ national security correspondent, Judith Miller, who after 9/11 began quoting from some purported reputable sources of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; many of the stories were splashed on page one of the Times.
As history proved, there were no WMD’s in Iraq, triggering complaints from Times’ staffers and media critics why her Iraq articles weren’t scrutinized more closely.
It turned out to be another major embarrassment for the Times.
In an attempt to defend her journalistic integrity, Miller wrote: “The experts and the journalists who covered them we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong. I did the best job that I could."
But as Nagourney points out, other newspapers didn’t botch the WMD story as badly as the Times did.
Judith Miller resigned from the Times on November 9, 2005.
The Times first public editor, Daniel Okrent (appointed by executive editor Bill Keller), attempted to untangle the lapse of sound editorial judgement in an article (Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?) published on May 30, 2004.
Interestingly, both the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller debacles, may be attributable to Howell Raines, who pressured subordinates extremely hard to promote more minorities; and for the national desk to press harder on Iraq and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In their quest to meet Raines violent demands, they overlooked important tenets of journalism: truth and accuracy.
Former executive editors of The New York Times, from left to right: Dan Baquet (2014-2022), Jill Abramson (2011-2014), Bill Keller (2003-2011)
Photo Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux
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After the resignation of Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd on June 5, 2003, the baton was passed to the well-seasoned and Pulitzer Prize winning Bill Keller, who did a remarkable job of restoring credibility to the Times. First, by hiring a public editor and then on May 9, 2005, appointing an internal committee to examine how the Times could regain reader’s trust.
Their findings would be made available on the Times' company website at www.nytco.com.
Nagourney devotes the final chapters of his book examining how the Times navigated a new reality to the newspaper industry--for better or worse--how readers rely more and more on the Internet, podcasts, blogs, etc., for their news.
Seeing the writing on the wall and in a fight for its own survival, as readers spent more time online than reading the print edition, the Times unveiled a metered model on January 20, 2010 (that would begin in 2011), charging readers for access to the Times, which would empower NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business.
The pay model has been a rousing success. As of Q2 2023, The New York Times Company registered 9.2 million digital only subscribers.
When Jill Abramson (the first female executive editor in the Times’s history) succeeded Bill Keller as executive editor in 2011, reporters were now expected (at the urging of new CEO Mark Thompson) to tweet more often, spend time on podcasts, videos, web articles, mobile apps, and engage with their online audience in addition to their responsibilities to the print edition of the paper.
It was a tall order; and it was a facet of the new journalism that executive editor Jill Abramson took a rather dim view of.
It was Abramson’s contention that the extra online responsibilities would be putting too much of a burden on reporters to such an extent that it would compromise the quality of a completed story or project.
Nagourney wrote: “Abramson didn’t want the Times to become a news organization measured by traffic and clicks or where reporters and editors were expected to come up with revenue-producing ideas.” “She believed,” Nagourney explained, “in guarding the sanctity of the newsroom because that had been her life and career in newspapers.”
It would take Abramson’s successor (after her dismissal in 2014), Dean Baquet, to act as a bridge between the editorial and business side of the paper, and embrace the new technologies in order to increase revenue in the midst of declining print circulation. Unlike Abramson, Baquet never saw the digital side of the Times as a threat to the quality of the product.
On May 5, 2015, for the first time since 1946, Baquet eliminated the page one print edition meeting among editors of different desks in order to devote more time and energy to the digital product. He did this for a good reason. Weekday print circulation was 603, 700 in 2015, down from 648,900 the year before. Paid digital circulation, by comparison, leaped from 1,094 in 2015, up from 910,000 the year before.
Nagourney ends his book with the election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th U.S. President, winning the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to 227 votes for Hillary Clinton.
It was a red wave stunner, to be sure, so much so that the Times had a headline all ready to go on the anticipated election of Hillary Clinton: “MADAME PRESIDENT!”
As soon as it was clear Trump captured the presidency, Times’ staffers were caught back on their heels, scrambling, and trying to piece together a biographical profile of the controversial real estate mogul to post on the Times’ website.
With the election of Trump, politics was becoming more divisive and polarized.
Readers, and even Times’ employees, were pushing for the paper to step away from “detachment,” and embrace a more “adversarial” brand of journalism, which would better reflect the polarized times the country was living in.
Such thinking was utterly at odds with what Abe Rosenthal believed in.
Nagourney recalls that in 1968, Rosenthal was bothered at the stories being filed at the 1968 Democratic National Convention by the Times’ staff writers. He felt the reporting was too slanted, the tone of the reporting appeared overwhelmingly to side with the peace demonstrators, while condemning the brutality of the police amidst the mayhem and chaos on the streets of Chicago.
“Do we become part of this movement, or do we report this movement?” Rosenthal asked.
Maybe such a critical question posed by Abe Rosenthal over 50 years ago is something the Times in 2023 should ponder more often in an age of extremism, divisiveness, and as more and more news organizations push an agenda.
--Bill Lucey
November 4, 2023
NOTE: When researching and compiling a New York Times chronology, back in 2001, on the paper’s 150-year anniversary, I consulted the following resources.
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Recommended References
Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Johnson, Gerald W. An Honorable Titan: A Biographical Study of Adolph S. Ochs. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946.
Ostrander, Stephen J. "All the News That's Fit to Print: Adolph Ochs and The New York Times." Timeline (a publication of the Ohio Historical Society), 10, no 1 (Jan./Feb.1993).
"150th Anniversary 1851-2001: From The Newspaper To The Information Age" (A special section published November 14, 2001). The New York Times.
Gelb, Arthur. City Room. G.P Putnam's Sons, 2003.
Frankel, Max. The Times of My Life and My Life With The Times. Dell Publishing, 1999.
The One That Got Away: A Memoir by Howell Raines. A Lisa Drew Book, 2006.
