Behind the Times (27 page)

In typical
New York Times
fashion, nothing was done “hastily.” Fifty years before the introduction of the new sections, a member of the
Times
business department, Julius Ochs
Adler, anticipated most of the “groundbreaking” ideas of the 1970s and ’80s. Julie Adler was the nephew of Adolph Ochs and, as it happened, a rival of Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Ochs placed the two young men in separate departments at the
Times
and let them compete for his approval). In a five-page proposal headed “memo for Mr. Ochs” and dated December 31, 1924, the young executive recommended “supplemental additions to the daily
Times.
” As Adler described them to his uncle:

“Monday—Financial, Economic and Commercial Review. Tuesday—Technical and Scientific Review. Wednesday—Mid-Week Pictorial Section. Thursday—N.Y.T. Shop Window (Women’s Section). Friday—Review of the Professions (Law, Medicine, etc.) or Review of Sports (articles by golf and tennis stars etc. etc.). Saturday—Book Review.”

A half century later, the architects of the modern
Times
used different rubrics on different schedules—though not all that different. The Business Day section of the 1980s appeared every weekday, the Science Times section on Tuesdays, Living and Home on Wednesdays and Thursdays, etc. Rosenthal referred to these sections as “daily magazines.” Adler wanted true stand-alone magazines: sixteen-page, tabloid-size sections inserted into the daily paper.

The parallels between Adler’s proposals and the ideas of his successors were the result of independent invention: There is a finite number of ways to slice the steak of a daily news report and market its sizzle. Consequently, Adler’s arguments for the new section sounded very much like the arguments offered in support of the 1970s changes. They resembled as well the continuing efforts to remake the
Times
in the 1990s. Among his justifications, for example, Adler cited the changing “economic and intellectual” character of the 1920s audience. “People are more interested in a greater variety of matters and in turn these matters play a larger part in their lives,” he wrote, making the “demographic argument” for change several decades before the first MBA specialists arrived at the
Times.
Adler also stressed that his proposed new features were “not of the cheap variety but are in keeping with the high intellectual plane which the
Times
has always striven to attain and maintain.” Finally, Adler promised an added bonus: Some of the features of the daily would be shifted from the
Sunday Times
, “to relieve somewhat the size of [that] huge paper”—and help make the
Sunday Times
a faster read (another highly desired goal of his successors at the
Times
).

None of Adler’s daily magazines materialized in his lifetime. Other
Times
people in subsequent years came forward with plans for changing the
Times.
One editor, E. Clifton Daniel, was more fortunate than Adler; he lived to see the realization of his ideas, though long after his departure from the paper. Clifton Daniel was the
Times’
managing editor from 1963 to 1969, a period that in retrospect served to mark off the “traditional”
Times
from the “modern”
Times.
The son of a drug-store
owner in Zebulon, North Carolina, Daniel grew up during the Great Depression. He went to the University of North Carolina, and worked as a reporter at the
Raleigh News and Observer
and the Associated Press before joining the
Times.
He served as a foreign correspondent in wartime London and later married Margaret Truman, the only child of Harry S Truman, the thirty-third president of the United States. Daniel proved to be an ideal middleman during the period of transition at the
Times
in the 1960s. He was a man of modest background but well connected; Southern born and bred yet schooled in the ways of the wider world; reserved in manner though the possessor of a lively, inquisitive intellect. Daniel excelled as well at
Times
office politics; when he lost his managing editor’s job, to Rosenthal, Daniel maintained his air of elegance (Rosenthal found a gift bottle of Scotch whisky waiting for him when he moved into Daniel’s old office). Whatever pain Daniel felt during those years, he managed to put behind him, and he became an expert witness of the transition from the old regime of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Turner Catledge to the energetic new team of Punch Sulzberger, Rosenthal, and Mattson.

“
Some of us had ideas for ‘modernizing’ the
Times
long before it became an economic imperative to regain lost readers or attract younger readers,” Daniel remembered, taking care to make the point that he wanted change for reasons of journalism rather than for reasons of marketing. Daniel’s superiors resisted “modernizing.” All through the Ochs and AHS decades, the
Times
was printed in two sections only. This effectively limited the prime display space to page one and to the second front page (known at the
Times
in the 1960s as the split page, and more recently, in the multisection
Times
, as one of the dress pages). When Daniel proposed dividing the paper into several sections to achieve broadened news coverage and better play of stories and photographs, he was told it couldn’t be done. According to the production department, the physical limitations of the
Times’
presses prevented any such reconfiguration: the paper had to be in two sections of equal size. Daniel later concluded that “this attitude of it-can’t-be-done” was a result of two factors typical of the
Times’
traditionalist thinking. “First, we had two sections and had gotten along all right. That is, the readers seemed to like them. Second, it would cost a lot of money to refigure the presses, and the
Times
thought it was a little short of money at the time.”

Daniel nevertheless was able to make some major changes in the
physical appearance of the
Times.
The second front page of the two-section paper was, by tradition, a miscellany: stories left over from page one, local and regional news, and inconsequential features, “usually about children or dogs.” In order to open the second front for big photographs and major enterprise stories, Daniel decreed “no more kids or dogs.” This caused objections from the editors who made up the page. The opposition was so fierce that the task had to be taken away from the Bull pen, as the imperious chief layout editors were known at the time, and given to Abe Rosenthal’s lieutenants on the metropolitan desk. The new page, Daniel was happy to see, was an immediate success: “We got only one letter of complaint; it came from a cousin of one of the former editors of the page.”

Daniel was eased out of the newsroom in 1969; Punch Sulzberger wanted his own man, Rosenthal, in charge of the daily news report, and not a holdover from his father’s regime. Two years before Daniel’s removal, the
Times
became a public company, its stock traded on the American exchange. Daniel knew that there were new pressures to change the traditional can’t-do attitudes. A good case might have been made that the
Times
, of all newspapers, could ride out the shifts in the New York market. Would its well-educated readers really be lured away to suburban papers or to the intruder television? For years, the old management felt confident it knew the answer: There would always be a need for the authoritative voice of the
Times.
No other paper, over the years, attempted as much journalistically as the
Times
did, and no other paper succeeded the way the
Times
did (more often than not). But if the
Times’
typical readers were not likely to be lost to more trivial pursuits, they were inevitably going to be claimed by the actuarial tables. Older readers had to be replaced with new readers, specifically, those younger, affluent consumers desired by the advertisers. A company whose shares were publicly traded could not afford to be too smug, or appear to be too passive.

And so the new dynamic took over. Decision making focused on improving stock price-earnings ratios. The production departments solved the challenges of a four-section paper. The editors filled the newly opened space with fresh features designed to attract the right audience. Between 1976 and 1978, the
Times
introduced its daily, consumer-oriented C sections (Sports Monday, Science Times on Tuesday, Living, Wednesday; Home, Thursday; Weekend, Friday) and the Monday-through-Saturday Business Day, a stand-alone section
offering expanded coverage of business and finance. The new features became testimony to the endurance of the
Times
—and to the team of Rosenthal, Mattson, and Punch Sulzberger. In a 1983 interview, Mattson described these years of change as “
the highlight of the careers of a lot of people. Abe and Artie [Rosenthal’s deputy, Arthur Gelb] were so involved that they’d just bubble over.”

At the time, many of the participants didn’t appreciate just how much they were supposed to be bubbling along, enjoying themselves. This victory had one hundred parents, many of them constantly fighting with each other. Mattson and Rosenthal were the chief antagonists, although with the passage of the years, the more jagged edges of their bureaucratic and personal disagreements became smoothed over: Collective Memory, like corporate history, dwells on success.

A protracted great struggle between Science and Fashion, for example, occupied the energies of the news and advertising departments for the better part of two years, beginning in the fall of 1977. At that point, the C-section format was four-fifths complete: Only a theme for the Tuesday paper needed to be selected. Sulzberger and his lieutenants, Rosenthal and Mattson, couldn’t agree on what that theme should be. Narrowly considered, the fight pitted the editors against the sales staff in an argument about news content. The editors wanted the fifth and final C section to cover science and technology; the business side wanted a section of fashion news.

Rosenthal was then executive editor; Mattson, executive vice president: two strong-willed men leading the two factions. Science and technology ranked in the editors’ minds as an “intellectual” subject, befitting their image of the
Times
, and of themselves. On the other side, the sales staff argued that a section devoted to fashion was just as newsworthy—and also effectively lent itself to the selling of ads. With his habit of florid self-dramatization, Rosenthal kept telling Sulzberger and Mattson that the “character of the paper” would be defined by their fifth choice. He left unspoken the other issue: which side would prevail over the other, a matter of some importance to men of great ego.

Mattson, however, now says, blandly, that “
there was no real debate.” According to Mattson, “Abe said he was going ahead with science, and we should sell advertising for the section.” In memory, the business side’s magnanimity transcended egos, as well as its responsibilities to the bottom line. “We tried to sell ads and couldn’t at
first,” Mattson said mildly, the practiced executive used to defusing aggressive questions from stockholders and investment analysts. “But we went ahead anyway. We felt we owed Abe one.” Rosenthal’s “merry henchmen”—Mattson’s quietly mocking term—joyously threw themselves into the job, Mattson remembered.

Rosenthal’s recollections were more pointed: Boy, did they ever owe me one! In his memory, he and his “henchmen” had reluctantly but uncomplainingly soldiered on through the new Weekend section and Sports Monday, both with the stress on leisure-time news. Then they produced the Home and Living sections focused on upscale “life-styles.” Taken together, the “character” of the first four sections was unabashedly light and consumer-oriented. “That was not my world,” Rosenthal remembered.

But he and his editors were nothing if not realists. Sulzberger expected the new sections to pay their own way, not only by bringing in readers but by concentrating on subjects that would appeal to the advertisers as well. “
Our first major effort,” Sulzberger told Rosenthal, “must be to answer the following: What is it that we can add to the news content of
The New York Times
that will make the newspaper, in addition to being the best in the world, more marketable and a better advertising medium. That, after all, is the pressure under which we are working.” A few months later, in a memorandum about the proposed Living section to Rosenthal and Mattson, Sulzberger became more specific: “
If we continue to grow, we are just going to have to adapt the added material in
The New York Times
to the desires of our advertisers. If we want to get the business, we just can’t give them circulation which they do not find useful, and we, in turn, cannot afford the luxury of carrying that material free.”

The “material”—news, reviews, features, columns, guides, and similar service articles—shouldn’t be too grim or downbeat. Content had to be aimed at gaining “useful circulation”—read, the affluent and the suburban readers. When the
Times’
research department conducted a poll to find out what readers wanted in a Weekend section, interviewers were instructed to go to “upscale areas” for their sample. The poll results indicated these upper-end readers wanted listings of movies and entertainment; they were so eager for this service that they said they would turn to such a section on Thursdays for “early planning purposes.” The C sections were supposed to be about fun, and advertising. The morning after the debut of Weekend on April 30, 1976,
Rosenthal
told his staff how much he liked the pace, writing, and design of the pages—the tone was “sophisticated but not nasty.” Weekend was an “up.” It was “light.”

Rosenthal was less certain about Home, with its food and entertaining tips threading through large display ads for D’Agostino’s, Sloan’s, and other supermarkets. He believed that “recipes lowered the quality of the paper”—though, he says, he recognized Sulzberger’s argument that the
Times
needed the advertising. Rosenthal remembered that he became reconciled to the publishing side’s economic arguments by convincing himself, like a good
Times
man, that if the
Times
was going to do soft journalism, it should do
superior
soft journalism: “We would cover food the way we did foreign affairs, with the best writers and reporters.” True, the subject was “only” food—and later, “only” design—and not topics with the resonance of Mideast politics or Soviet military affairs. And so he had a second nightmare: “
I was terrified at the idea that people would pick up Home or Living, decide they were soft, and throw away the whole section.” Consequently, he insisted that the
Times’
reviews of theater, music, dance, and motion pictures and its arts coverage be carried in the interior pages of each C section. “With our culture material in the back C pages,” he reasoned, “no one could throw the section away.”