Behind the Times (44 page)

Like Levine and Jefferson, the prospective new hire has typically
accumulated several years of experience at other newspapers, or in related work, before the
Times
will consider an application. When James Reston was chief of the
Times
’ Washington bureau, he instituted a system of news clerkships; Reston hired bright young men from the Ivy schools to serve as his assistant, sorting mail, clipping newspapers, keeping files—and observing Reston close up. After a year, Reston’s news clerks graduated to reporting jobs. A number of
Times
stars came up in this manner, including Robert Darnton’s brother, John Darnton. In the mid-1970s, a Yale graduate named James Brooke served as Reston’s clerk and achieved a dubious first: The
Times
did not make him a reporter after his Reston clerkship. The competition for
Times
reporting slots was so keen, Brooke was told, it would be better if he went out and “got a reputation” if he wanted to work at the
Times.
And so Brooke, tall, slim, dark-haired, well-groomed, fluent in French and Spanish, left Washington for Rio de Janeiro, where he had talked himself on to an English-language paper, the
Brazil Herald.
In Rio, he also served as a stringer for the
Miami Herald
and the
Washington Post
and worked himself onto the
Herald
staff. Finally, in 1984, he was hired by the
Times.
In 1986, at the age of thirty-one, he became the
Times
’ West African bureau chief, and three years later, the
Times
’ man in Rio, covering all of the South American continent.

A good
Times
man also must be prepared for a lengthy—sometimes ludicrous—mating dance once the
Times
shows interest in hiring him. The courtship of Margo Jefferson sputtered on and off over a period of four years, and it was not all that exceptional. John Crudele joined the
Times
in 1985 as a financial-news writer. Crudele worked for Reuters, making his reputation as an astute reporter of Wall Street during the 1980s boom years. The
Times
sought him out: “
They wanted me, I wanted them,” he says, “and it still took six months.” Crudele sat through four separate interviews, each one higher up the
Times
chain of command. Two editors told him they were unsure why they were interviewing him: “It’s the editor of your section who really cares. He’s the one trying to hire you. The rest of this is bullshit.” The interviewing process culminated in a session with the executive editor, in Crudele’s day, Rosenthal. As Crudele remembers the interview, “Rosenthal was sitting at a desk with these toys … I think, plastic guns … on his desk. He doesn’t look me in the eye. He says, ‘I’d like to hire you.’ Then he calls in my section editor, and says to him, ‘You’ve made a good choice.’ And then to me, ‘Glad to have you aboard.’ There’s
more chitchit about my specialty, the financial markets. Then he says, ‘We would like to have you do more interviews, but we’ve streamlined the process.’ ” Crudele later told his wife, “Streamlined, hell! It was crazy.” Rosenthal explained why the process was so extensive. “It’s because we’re giving people tenure here.… This is for life.” Crudele found himself thinking, Nothing’s for life.

Later Rosenthal invited several recent hires, including Crudele, to the executive dining room to celebrate their induction into the
Times.
To reach the reception, the new
Times
men and -women walked down a winding corridor; on the walls on either side were framed pictures of the
Times
’ winners of the Pulitzer Prize, a display connecting the
Times
’ past to the present (history looks out on
Times
workers wherever they are; the walls of the Tokyo offices are decorated with photographs of Adolph Ochs and past chiefs of the bureau). At the reception, Crudele recalled, “we new boys and girls had cheese and wine and tried not to get drunk in front of the boss. In Rosenthal’s speech, he said he would like to welcome us all to the
Times
, but since the
Times
was now our home, ‘it seemed inappropriate to welcome someone to one’s own house.’ A group of us in back snickered. It sounded so presumptuous that we should consider the place as dear to us as it was to him and the older editors. We were there to feed our families, not to join a priesthood.” (Crudele left the
Times
two years later).

Many younger journalists were prepared to suspend some of this generational skepticism in order to become good
Times
men. Anna Quindlen eventually rose through the ranks to achieve in 1990 one of the best prizes the
Times
can bestow—a twice-weekly column on the Op-Ed page. Quindlen joined the
Times
in 1977 after working as a general assignment reporter for the
New York Post.
Her column reflected a feminist sensibility on such contemporary “women’s issues” as abortion, sexual harassment, and the limits of equality in the workplace. In her own ascent at the
Times
, however, Quindlen chose accommodation rather than trying to smash through the “glass ceiling” that thwarts women’s ambitions. “Fifteen years ago at the
Times
, our tendency was to try to
blend in, to be ‘another one of the boys,’ ” she recalled for a group of university students (80 percent of them female) in the fall of 1991. Good
Times
men and -women were aware of the importance of behaving responsibly. When Quindlen worked at the
Post
, she said, “The feeling was, ‘If we get it wrong today, there’s always tomorrow.’ At the
Times
, you feel that if you make any mistake,
a bolt from above will strike you. You know what they say about journalism being a first rough draft of history? That’s the
Times.
” Some of Quindlen’s audience were skeptical. Go to the public library, she said, and look around the reading room. “When I see some fifteen-year-old reading the
Times—my
words—on microfiche, I feel that weight of history.”

The
Post
had the sporty, big-mouthed style associated with New York City tabloids; but it also had, in Quindlen’s day, a newsroom where the majority of reporters were women (52 percent by Quindlen’s count). At the
Times
, by contrast, women made up no more than 15 percent of the newsroom during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The
Times
actively sought more women, propelled along by a sex discrimination suit brought in 1974 on behalf of a group of
Times
women employees. The newly recruited women, like the new male hires, were encouraged to regard the
Times
as an institution above and apart from all others. “The editors acted like the
Times
was a ‘calling’ and a form of higher service,” says Alex S. Jones, who regarded the editors’ arrogance with a certain sly compliance. Jones joined the
Times
in 1983. He came from a publishing family in East Tennessee, where newspapering for him was a real calling. He had been the editor of the
Greenville Sun
, the paper his family had owned since the early 1900s. He became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1981, and in his first week in Cambridge met Susan Tifft, a Duke graduate who was studying at the Kennedy School of Government. When the couple decided to marry at the end of the Harvard academic year, Jones knew he would not be going back to Tennessee, to the family business. Tifft wanted to write about national politics, and so they concentrated on job hunting in Washington and New York. Jones had attended the annual meetings of the newspaper owners’ and editors’ professional associations and met
Times
executives socially. The
Times
was looking for a reporter to cover the press; Jones, with his newspaper-business background and his Harvard training, seemed like an ideal candidate. Nevertheless, he, too, went through the elaborate interviewing process, culminating in a meeting with executive editor Rosenthal, who insisted on making the formal offer to all new hires. Jones met Rosenthal in the editor’s sitting room, next to his office just off the newsroom. The sitting room was done in Japanese-style, homage to Rosenthal’s Tokyo bureau days. There was a shoji screen and scrolls on the wall. They talked twenty to twenty-five minutes and then Rosenthal leaned forward. He put his
hand lightly on Jones’s knee, and asked, “Would you join us?” Jones answered yes; Rosenthal leaned forward again toward the new
Times
man, and with a broad smile asked: “Who’s the first person you’re going to tell?”

Jones, Quindlen, and Crudele were among the prospective new hires who managed to avoid the series of test assignments that the
Times
uses to winnow out people who don’t meet the editors’ standards for good
Times
men. Not long ago, a white, male Ivy League graduate—who does not want his name used—sent a letter of application for a reporter’s job, along with clips of his articles, to the editor of one of the
Times
’ major sections. Later the applicant spoke on the phone with a deputy editor, who sounded only moderately encouraging. The
Times
, he was told, had been looking for minorities (“Max Frankel says that we’ve got to have some blacks”). The applicant persisted; he was given a test assignment, to write a feature story. He did well on the test, according to the detailed commentary sent to him by one of the editors. He then was asked to write a critique of the section’s pages. He gave the assignment considerable attention; in his words, “I didn’t pull any punches.” He wrote that he found many stories predictable, and the writing stilted. The editor liked his comments and moved the applicant on to the next assignment, a list of story ideas for the section. He submitted twelve proposals, which were judged good enough to take him past this third hurdle. He was told that while no reporting positions were available for him, an editing job might open in a few months. Four months had passed and he still had not managed to arrange a face-to-face interview. Finally, eight months after he first applied, the man was invited to New York to meet the editors; six weeks later they offered him an editing assignment on the section desk.

At this point, new hires may still be required to go through an extended trial, or probation period. Both the
Times
and the tryout look each other over, although the arrangement favors the institution. The outcome may be uncertain until the end, as probationer Michael Gross discovered. A 1974 graduate of Vassar College, Gross built a solid free-lance career in the years between his twenty-first and thirty-first birthdays. He wrote books on rock and folk musicians (including a life of Bob Dylan), and also tried his hand as a mystery novel writer, an advertising copywriter, a contributor to
Manhattan Inc.
and
Vanity Fair
magazines, and a reporter for the
East Side Express
, a short-lived Manhattan weekly. He began writing about the fashion business (“to
meet models,” he says now). One afternoon in early 1985, in his thirty-third year, he bolted upright in his Manhattan apartment. “
I read in Liz Smith’s gossip column that John Duka, the fashion/style columnist for the
Times
, had quit what I considered a dream job.” Gross’s older sister, Jane, was a valued
Times
reporter. She urged him to send his clippings to James Greenfield, at the time an assistant managing editor. Greenfield, Michael Gross remembers, “was very charming. I suppose it was because he had once worked for the State Department.” Next Gross met Nancy Newhouse, the editor of the Home and Living sections. “She made it clear that this was going to be a long process.” Four months passed. “My life goes on,” Gross says. “Then I’m told I am a finalist, but that there is no reason to cheer yet. Two more months pass and I get a call to come in to see Abe Rosenthal. We spent at least an hour together. It’s clear from his questioning that there was a ‘Duka problem.’ ” The
Times
was unhappy with Duka: He was considered to have behaved in an un-
Times
-like manner, apparently abusing his
Times
privileges by, among other things, bringing his girlfriend to fashion shows and passing her off as a
Times
staff person (a “crime” probably every reporter has perpetrated in one context or another). Nevertheless, Rosenthal did not commit himself to Gross during their interview. Later Duka resigned from the paper. Two more months went by. In late 1985, Gross got an offer, but not of a job. Rather, the
Times gave
him the chance to work as a free-lance “contract writer” for six months at a salary twice what the
East Side Express
paid him. Gross was told the arrangement was a way around the Newspaper Guild rules, which required the
Times
to make its decision to hire and confer job security after a fourteen-week trial. The good pay also came with a trip to Paris to cover the showings (the assignment “would clarify questions about his ability to cover fashion,” noted his editor, Newhouse). Two days shy of the six-month mark, the
Times
formally notified Gross he had made the staff. He was assigned to the Style pages, to write a column called “Notes on Fashion.” The end of his tryout came with another bonus. While Rosenthal and Greenfield were careful about who they admitted to the ranks of the
Times
, Gross discovered, the editors had little interest in what a fashion writer actually wrote once at the
Times
, short of embarrassing them as Duka apparently had. “They thought fashion was squishy soft. The pages were about personalities and parties and fun, and not ‘real news.’ And so they didn’t pay much attention to us.”

Still, Gross says, “the self-importance of the place” nagged at him. He was not adapting: He wasn’t becoming a genuinely good
Times
man. Gross developed a “thirty-month plan.” At the end of two and a half years at the
Times
, he would consider his options again. As Gross’s private deadline approached, he found himself sitting on the balcony of the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles, on assignment from the
Times.
“I was doing my column. I could pick up the phone, and get anyone—they would respond to The
Times.
’ I had my expense account. It was intoxicating. I rethought my plan. Maybe I’m wrong about the
Times.
This is a great life. I’m in love with the world.” Three days later, Gross was told that the new editor, Max Frankel, had much firmer ideas about fashion coverage than his predecessor. The Style page, where Gross’s “Notes on Fashion” appeared, was being changed. Frankel wanted a new column focusing on the business of fashion—sales figures, marketing strategies, tie-ins of the couturiers with department-store chains, hirings and firings. Frankel also wanted the column to be “more national”—to work in references to fashion-business news from Dallas and Beverly Hills—in keeping with the
Times
’ new plan to make its pages attractive to an audience outside New York.