Raines really cut his throat with that Rose interview.
'Let's Move On'
Seth Mnookin
Newsweek Web Exclusive
"We've been turning the page for some time now. This is more like an entire new chapter." Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the chairman and publisher of The New York Times, was speaking on Tuesday, the day after he watched Bill Keller give an impassioned speech to the weary staff he inherited as the Times' newly appointed executive editor.
IT'S BEEN a painful and trying two months for Sulzberger. On May 1, a once-promising young reporter named Jayson Blair had resigned when faced with evidence he had plagiarized an article from The San Antonio Express-News. Ten days later, the Times published an extraordinary 14,000-word report on the pathological deceit Blair had managed to print in the Times, the country's most revered newspaper. At that time, Sulzberger had called the Blair fiasco a low-point in the Times' long history.
Amazingly, that report was only the beginning of this spring's turmoil at the Times. By the end of the month, Rick Bragg, at one time one of the paper's brightest stars, had resigned as well, but not before publicly belittling his colleagues. In early June, Howell Raines, Sulzberger's hand-picked executive editor, was forced out, a casualty of his own imperious management style and the unprecedented resentment and anger it inspired on the part of the paper's staff. Raines did not go quietly. Last Thursday, Times staffers say, after Raines got word that Sulzberger was about to appoint a new executive editor, Raines requested an appearance on Charlie Rose's PBS show for Friday night. That hourlong interview was stunning. Raines blamed his ouster on the fact that the Times is rife with staffers who were unwilling or unable to produce the quality and intensity of work Raines aspired to. He all but called his one-time boss a liar--after Raines's resignation, Sulzberger had said the decision that Raines and his deputy, managing editor Gerald Boyd, leave the paper was mutual. Raines told Rose he had been fired.
On Tuesday, Sulzberger didn't sound angry. He seemed calmer and more assured than he had been during the previous months, and he said he was confident that Keller would successfully lead the paper out of its current troubles.
Sulzberger also said he hadn't seen Raines's interview. "I read the transcript Sunday night," he told NEWSWEEK. "I'm not surprised that Howell felt he needed to talk about this experience. It's been a powerful experience. He'll feel a need or desire to talk about things, and I understand that." Sulzberger was being more gracious than many other Times employees (and many media obsessives). Immediately after Raines's seemingly forced resignation, there was one school of thought that Raines's punishment hadn't fit his crime. His interview with Charlie Rose seemed to erase any residual sympathy for this hard-charging editor whose stated-commitment during his 21-month tenure was to quicken the Times' competitive metabolism.
"Every editor goes into a job with a commitment to changing or growing things," Sulzberger said. "Howell went in with that same commitment. In his eyes, that included this competitive metabolism thing. You hire an editor knowing they're going to come in not accepting the status quo. Bill's not going to accept the status quo, he's going to make the news report reflect the concern of his areas, and that's right, that's what he should do."
Keller comes to the newsroom with years of experience working with Times editors and reporters, and those relationships will, according to people inside the paper, serve him well. Keller made his name at the paper as a foreign correspondent. He also served as foreign editor and, under Raines's predecessor Joe Lelyveld, as the managing editor. (Lelyveld has been leading the paper on an interim basis since Raines's resignation.) For the past two years, Keller has split his time between the Times Magazine and the paper's op-ed page, where he wrote a semimonthly column.
Keller says there will be no radical changes, at least for now. He says he's wary of laying out too "grandiose" a blueprint for his tenure, which begins July 30. "I have Bush Sr.'s aversion to talking about the vision thing," he told NEWSWEEK. But Keller, who said he didn't want to cast stones at his predecessor, did draw some implicit, and stark, distinctions. "My basic approach is, you have to run the newspaper in a way that you get full advantage of the people at the bottom--the reporters. They're the ones who are your senses.
"I don't want to pick a fight with the guy I replaced," Keller continued. "He did some great stuff. He did some not so great stuff. Now he's gone. Let's move on."
But Keller couldn't avoid talking about the Charlie Rose interview. "The one thing that kind of made me a little sick watching [the Rose interview] was the collateral damage. And I don't mean me and Joe [Lelyveld] and the publisher, or even Gerald [Boyd], who was kind sideswiped in the course of that. I mean the whole staff of this place. All these people who worked their hearts out for him. And he was saying, 'Until I came on the scene you were a bunch of slackers and all the people who covered a couple of Balkan wars and the presidential election and the recount and impeachment were all part of a culture of complacency and lethargy.' I thought that was insulting. And wrong."
Keller said he realizes the glowing coverage he's getting these days is likely to be the best press he ever receives. Sometime in the next several weeks, he'll appoint a management team, including a managing editor. (Sulzberger said the future staffing decisions would be left up to Keller.) The second-guessing will begin. "I'm considering every possible permutation," Keller says, including installing more than one M.E. "There's a group of people [internally] looking both at how other newspapers do it and how we've done it. We need to decide what we really want the masthead to be. How do we define those jobs so they have real authority and clear responsibilities but don't undermine the department heads and the reporters, whom you want to be the main engines of the report." (Quick terminology lesson: the masthead consists of editors above the level of department heads such as the business editor or the metro editor. The Times' masthead has traditionally been comprised of the executive editor, the managing editor, the deputy managing editor and the assistant managing editors. The report is newspaperspeak for the content of each day's paper.)
The Times, at least for the immediate future, will continue to draw more intense scrutiny than ever before. One of the things Raines was criticized for was creating an activist news hole--overplaying stories, like the Augusta National Golf Club's refusal to admit women as members, which Raines seemed to feel were important. The paper under Keller's leadership will be scoured for these types of biases. The paper's trustworthiness will also continue to come under scrutiny, as will its record in hiring and promoting deserving minorities. (Just this week, the Times ran an unusual "corrective article" after a story by Lynette Holloway had errors that undermined the entire premise of her piece.)
But Times staffers seem, for the first time in months, confident that they can and will soldier on. Unlike Raines, Keller doesn't seem in a rush to shake things up. At 54, he could potentially serve as executive editor for 11 years, under the paper's mandatory retirement age for the paper's top editor at 65. Both Keller and Sulzberger said they agreed there was no need for Keller to serve for that entire time. "We didn't set a term limit, or settle on a particular time table," Keller said. "It's just something we laid on the table and down the road we'll talk about it again."
Then he chuckled. "Obviously this isn't the time to begin talking about my exit strategy."
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