Behind the Times (11 page)

The
Times
did start a limited national edition three years later, after Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s illness and the appointment of his son-in-law, Orvil Dryfoos, as publisher. It was not a well-thought-out venture. Instead of facsimile, the
Times
used the old linotype technology; type was set in New York and transmitted to presses in Los Angeles for printing and distribution. The project, called “Westward Ho” within the paper, soon faltered. Some Westerners may have wanted a pocket version of the New York paper, but the
Times’
choice of a centralized printing plant meant that the company was dependent on small aircraft—and the vagaries of weather—to get the paper delivered to areas beyond Los Angeles.

Punch Sulzberger killed “Westward Ho” within a year of succeeding Dryfoos. The
Times
didn’t revive the idea of a nationally distributed edition until the late 1970s, well after the
Wall Street Journal
had demonstrated how to reach a national market with the technologies of facsimile and space satellite. Following the
Journal
model, the
Times
used a satellite to link a network of printing plants (some owned by the
Times
, some under contract) through facsimile technology. In the Chicago area, the Southtown Economist, Inc., Bruce Sagan’s company, won the contract to become the
Times’
printer. On April 24, 1980, after the
Times
signed its facsimile-transmission agreement with Community Newspapers, Sagan sent Punch Sulzberger a bantering note, attaching photocopies of the letters Sagan had exchanged two decades before with Arthur Sulzberger. Punch Sulzberger replied as his father had, by return mail. He thanked Sagan for the “wonderful” correspondence, and made a little joke about the
Times’
deliberate
ways: “Dad put a committee together 21 years ago, and they just reported out.”

That was Dad, and that was Punch: the father uninterested in seizing opportunities to take the
Times
beyond its “one product” and indeed beyond its base in New York, the son willing to expand and diversify. While AHS spurned a column on New York by Gay Talese because it was too soft, the son started the daily magazine sections (and rode out the sneering remarks about the
Times’
pasta desk, and its hard-hitting investigations of the best marinara in town). If AHS tolerated the separate fiefdoms of strong-willed editors, the son didn’t exactly crack heads; but he got everyone’s attention, consolidating the daily and Sunday papers and ending the autonomy of the Washington bureau.

Above all, the son was credited with transforming the
Times
into a public corporation. The “historic”
Times
had been content to earn a modest profit for the family; the modern
Times
made no apologies about wanting returns of 18 to 20 percent earnings on revenues (the media industry “standard” for well-run corporations). The needs of
Times
readers had to be served, but so did the needs of the newer Wall Street audience of stockholders and security analysts. The
Times’
first
obligation, Punch Sulzberger told
Times
economics writer Leonard Silk in 1980, “is to be profitable.” Sulzberger quickly added, as if in deference to Dad, “Isn’t that a terrible way to put it? But if we’re not profitable, we can’t have any other mission.” (The second mission was “to cover the news—to call the shots as we see them.”)

The too-neat contrast between then and now, father and son, requires scrutiny, and qualification. AHS’s
Times
held facsimile technology in its hands, and let it get away, but Punch Sulzberger’s
Times
was a leader in data-base publishing, and in its turn walked away from that lucrative field. Sulzberger’s
Times
also abandoned its interests in cable television and made no significant investments in the new technologies that began to change the media business in the 1980s. Instead it opted for small Sunbelt newspapers and special-interest magazines—with marginal success.

True, in the summer of 1993, in his sixty-seventh year and nearing the end of his formal career, Punch Sulzberger made a climactic Big Picture acquisition, presiding over the agreement to bring the
Boston Globe
under the control of the Times Company. The agreement was described as a $1.1 billion deal; actually, little cash was involved: the
Times
offered to pay by issuing millions of new shares of its common stock, thereby diluting their earnings per share (the deal carefully left untouched the class of stocks held by the Sulzberger family). A
Times
news story in the editions of June 13, 1993, gave a—predictably—upbeat analysis of the agreement linking “two newspaper giants.” Outsiders, however, were puzzled by the acquisition. While the
Globe
was the dominant paper in its corner of the Northeast, Boston, like New York, had been slow to recover from the early 1990s recession. In 1992 the net income of the
Globe
’s parent company, Affiliated Publications, totaled a respectable $14.1 million. Of course, the
Globe
was not a glamorous business acquisition when measured against all the brave new tomorrowland talk about 500-channel cable TV systems and interactive media services. But it fit the Sulzberger temperament: an economically centrist move, progressive but not radical, with grand ego satisfactions to be derived from his fellow newspaper publishers. Some Wall Street analysts reacted sourly; they had no appreciation of how the
Globe
purchase played among the peers of the Sulzbergers.

For the rest, Punch Sulzberger’s custodial record when he passed control of the
Times
on to his son was mixed, particularly as it affected the content of the paper. The consolidation of editorial power in one man, the volcanic Abe Rosenthal, created the predictable Actonian corruption, while the celebration of consumption in the new upscale sections inevitably weakened coverage of the unbeautiful city. The strategy of moving the
Times
out of the New York market also produced equivocal results. Punch Sulzberger’s 1990s version of a national-satellite edition of the
Times
may not work any better than the
Times’
effort in the early 1960s. By the time the national
Times
reached the markets beyond the Hudson, the
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
were there, in place. The
Journal
had become a “second read” of a business-minded audience (its first read was the hometown paper, the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, or the
Chicago Tribune
, for local news and sports). In smaller cities, for less demanding readers, the folksy
USA Today
, with its short stories and TV-like color graphics, became a second read.

In one managerial area, though, Punch Sulzberger achieved absolute success. With tenacity, and the help of good lawyers, he guaranteed his family’s control of the
Times
well into the middle of the twenty-first century.

Half the world away from 43rd Street in the other direction, Bill Keller, the
Times’
bureau chief in Moscow, had a clock that worked to his advantage. Keller could put in a full day of reporting in Moscow, organize his notes, and write his story—and it was still early in the day in New York. He also had an easy commute to work: His apartment at one end of the fortress-like building at 12/24 Sadova Samotechnaya was fifty feet from the second-floor flat that had been converted into the
Times’
offices. Sadova Samotechnaya is one of the ring roads in Moscow, and number 12/24 is part of the foreign journalists’ ghetto in the capital. Several other American newspeople, as well as Japanese and British journalists, lived in the same building. Five minutes away was the U.S. Embassy. Keller, compact and clear-eyed, was born in California in 1949. At Pomona College, he edited the student paper and spent weekends as a backpacker. When a big earthquake cut off Moscow’s communications with Soviet Armenia, Keller alternately hitchhiked and walked along the 160-mile perimeter of the earthquake zone, from the Armenian capital of Yerevan to the hardest-hit towns of Leninakan and Spitak. The morning of Tuesday, February 28, he strolled to his office knowing that the
Times
had just nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize for his earthquake coverage (one month later, on March 30, Keller won his Pulitzer in the international reporting category).

On 43rd Street in front of the
Times
building, two twenty-wheel trucks, numbers 49 and 08, pulled up to the pressroom bays just east of the lobby entrance, toward Broadway. The two trucks, both thirty-three-foot-long trailers pulled by ten-foot cabs, were from the Baldwin Transportation Company, 108 Leggitt Avenue in the Bronx near the Hunts Point railhead, where the trucks offloaded the newsprint rolls the night before. The shipment had come by rail over the weekend from the Spruce Falls Power and Paper Company Limited, Spruce Falls, Canada. The driver of the first truck, Mike Casanova of the Teamsters Union, was delivering order number 73; it consisted of ten newsprint rolls, each weighing one ton and as big around as a kitchen table. The
Times’
two printing plants, one at 43rd Street, the other in Carlstadt,
New Jersey, received over eight thousand such rolls that week; in all, some 400,000 tons of newsprint was budgeted to publish the
Times
of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In Boston, his pile of newspapers read, Tony Lewis had his idea for his column for the edition of March 2. The Congressional opponents of the John Tower nomination, Lewis thought, were using dangerous tactics in relying on untested charges from an FBI report.

The editors and reporters who worked on the twenty-odd departmental desks responsible for the
Times’
daily news report arrived in the New York newsroom and offices: the main dayshift of 450 men and women. In Washington, Michael Oreskes was among the first of the thirty-five men and women who worked in the bureau to appear at the
Times’
offices on I Street. The offices, located in the former Army-Navy Building, were elegantly appointed, with modern work stations, economically designed—as the more sardonic
Times
bureau people told it—to maximize the computer-human interface. Only the rolltop desk of James Reston, the longtime bureau chief and columnist, broke with the cool modern design. But Reston’s old-fashioned “country editor’s desk” was an artful replica; upon closer inspection, a visitor saw that Reston’s desk had a built-in LED display clock and other electronic features.

The bureau was in a prestige location, with two floors connected by an interior staircase, the Washington mark of high-powered law firms, well-connected public relations counselors, and other Capital rainmakers. Oreskes, an emerging star of the
Times
for his work during the past presidential campaign, had returned that morning from New York, where he participated in a conference on “the Sound Bite Election.” One of his fellow panelists was Roger Ailes, George Bush’s media adviser and the creator of some of the Bush “attack” commercials (Dukakis riding in a tank, polluted Boston Harbor). Back in Washington, Oreskes prepared, in his words, “to wade through the mud of the Tower story.” The appointment was being held up while the Senate debated Tower’s “fitness” to be secretary of defense. There were reports of drinking, womanizing, and too-cozy relationships with military contractors. It was trial by leak, Senator William Cohen, Republican of Maine, had complained in a brief conversation with Oreskes. The reporter considered Cohen a smart, decent senator; Oreskes arranged a longer interview.

In the office pantry, Barbara Gamarekian, a member of the
bureau for three decades, poured a cup of coffee, checked the message center for calls, and sat down to read an office copy of the
Times.
She had already read the
Washington Post
at home, turning to its Style section for a story she expected to be there. All day Monday, the bureau had heard rumors about the possible defection of Steven Roberts to
U.S. News & World Report.
Roberts, forty-six years old and a twenty-five-year
Times
veteran, was considered by his colleagues “the classic
Times
career reporter”: productive, ambitious, and with a network of excellent Washington sources willing to help, and be helped by, the
Times.
“His work was never less than a 8.7 on a journalistic scale of 10,” in one
Times
man’s assessment. Roberts was married to Cokie Roberts of National Public Radio; he often appeared on public television’s “Washington Week in Review.” The editors of the
Post
judged Roberts’ departure from the
Times
newsworthy enough to be put on the first page of Style Tuesday morning.

The
Post
described Roberts’s desire to write “on a broader canvas than the
Times
was offering” and said that he wished to “get away from the grind of the daily beat.” The
Post
hinted also that Roberts was unhappy about the
Times
rule limiting the amount of outside work, including regular TV appearances, that staff members were permitted. Post writer Eleanor Randolph quoted Max Frankel, who explained that the
Times
didn’t want “our people to be regulars on TV shows.” In Frankel’s view, a TV producer who wanted to build up an on-air staff “shouldn’t do so on the back of the
New York Times.
”

The
Post
had managed to needle its rival—the references to the
Times’
clampdown on free-lance work, to the fact that other places were now offering competitive salaries. But the article stopped short of the rest of the story, the part
Times
bureau people were talking about. Roberts had begun his career at the
Times
in elite company, as one in the series of news clerks that James Reston hired, usually right after graduation from Harvard. Roberts began much like all of Reston’s clerks, opening mail for the columnist, arranging appointments, tracking down information. It was the gentleman’s way for
Times
mentorship: Reston’s news clerks were, almost without exception, young, white, Ivy league males. A clerkship typically insured smooth passage to permanent staff assignment. With Reston’s approaching retirement the news clerk’s job had been abolished, along with some of the older gentlemanly agreements.