Behind the Times (65 page)

At the beginning of the long process of preparation to succeed his father, Arthur Sulzberger took his service as heir apparent seriously. There were no make-work assignments, or time spent inspecting building steam pipes. His first job was as a reporter for the
Times
 … of Raleigh, North Carolina. From there, he went to the Associated Press in London and then to the
New York Times
Washington bureau. In the early 1980s, he went to New York to join the metro desk as a reporter. He got a ground-level view of the city. One of his more memorable pieces was an on-scene report of an abandoned brownstone in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The floorboards were ripped out and a bathtub pillaged and its cast-iron pipes broken “so the lead joints”—worth pennies each—“could be taken.” As publisher, Arthur sometimes acted as if he were still in the newsroom. He had a core of reporter-pals from his days in the Washington bureau and on the metro desk. While he was still deputy publisher, he arranged a series of social dinners with small groups of
Times
people, typically, the younger reporters who were his contemporaries, men and women in
their thirties and early forties. He impressed an acquaintance at the time as “a take-charge command guy; if possible, he wanted to get to know all one thousand people in the news department.” Obviously, the acquaintance added, “as a Sulzberger and as the publisher, he can no longer be just one of the boys and girls.”

When friends and associates described Arthur Sulzberger, certain adjectives kept coming up. He was called caring and ruthless, by the same former metro reporter in the same sentence. In private conversation, he could be very funny and fast on his feet. If his self-confident manner sometimes shaded into arrogance, there was a good reason: He was extraordinarily well prepared for the publisher’s job, which he sensed was due him before late middle age. After his tours as a reporter, he crossed over to the business side in New York, working in advertising—making sales calls to corporate customers—and then in the circulation and production departments. People who claim to know say he is smarter than his father, or any of the Sulzberger cousins who, in theory, had a claim on the succession. Most of all, Arthur Sulzberger was a man of his generation. He wore his hair long as an undergraduate at Tufts, and owned a black leather jacket and a motorcycle. Like so many other children of the era, he trimmed the hair, married, and settled down. He and his wife, Gail Gregg, now live in an apartment building on Central Park West. Arthur helps out in the raising of their two young children, and was supportive of Gregg’s decision to undertake a new career as an artist and painter. Anna Quindlen, who counted both Gregg and Arthur Sulzberger as friends, describes him as
“a feminist.” As she explained it, “He comes to feminism by virtue of his age. He belongs to that generation of men, like my husband, who willingly pitch in at home.”

The responsibilities of running a newspaper with annual revenues of over $1 billion inhibited
Arthur Sulzberger from being too openly New Age. Still, though he operated within the institutional imperatives of the
Times
, he showed that he could be sensitive to his surroundings, and to other people. “The Oldthink at this place tends not to worry about morale, or about how the staff feels,” Quindlen explained. “Miserable was best.” When Quindlen was thinking about leaving the
Times
after the birth of her third child, Arthur Sulzberger worked out the arrangements for the Op-Ed column. According to Quindlen, “His attitude was, ‘Let’s find arrangements that are mutually beneficial for the individual and the company.’ ” At the same time, however,
Arthur Sulzberger showed his reverence for the tools of market research—also a generational characteristic—and the other currently fashionable mechanistic approaches to modern journalism. His absorption with profit margins demonstrated that he could count beans as well as any MBA. “Arthur wanted those earnings-to-revenues margins of 17 and 18 percent annually for the
Times
,” says Albert Scardino, who left the
Times
in late 1989 to become press secretary to New York City mayor David Dinkins.

During Arthur Sulzberger’s tenure as deputy publisher, the newsroom—and careful readers of the paper—were alert for clues to how he would run the
Times
of the twenty-first century. His public alliance with Quindlen carried the unmistakable message that he intended to be an activist publisher. Granted, the Palm Beach rape story was a monumentally obvious lapse in editorial judgment; it created a huge outcry, outside and inside the
Times.
It didn’t require extraordinary courage to take a high-profile stand against such smarmy journalism. Upper management couldn’t ignore the angry, closed-door conferences among some of the
Times’
top women editors, or the staff petitions of protest (which culminated in a tumultuous lunchtime meeting that filled the tenth-floor auditorium). The senior editors, principally Max Frankel, apologized for the rape story twice, once to the staff and then to the readers in an “Editors’ Note.”

But there were other clear signals that Arthur Sulzberger intended to put his own, activist mark on the
Times’
news pages and its business operations. He publicly announced his commitment to “diversity in the newsroom,” and instructed his editors to follow a policy of affirmative action, hiring women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians whenever possible. Quietly, he extended his idea of diversity to include homosexual men and women, a minority that in the past felt the need to remain closeted at the
Times.
“We can no longer offer our readers a predominantly white, straight, male vision of events and say we’re doing our job,” he declared in the early summer of 1992. He also put his money quite literally where his mouth was, promising that he would provide
Times
health insurance and other benefits to employees living in “gay partnerships.” In the first months after Arthur became publisher, several
Times
people, among them the reporter David Dunlap, the photographer Sara Krulwich, and the advertising columnist Stuart Elliott, identified themselves with the newly formed organization, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. The gay-oriented
magazine
QW
devoted a two-part series to what it called “The Lavender Revolution” at the
Times.

Arthur Sulzberger’s affirmative-action policies were sometimes mocked by the
Times’
more traditional hires, whether the old CCNY crowd or the newer Ivy League recruits. The most common complaint was that women and minorities were being promoted to midlevel and senior editing positions while they were a few years away from such leadership roles. One reporter lowered his voice and said of a Style section editor: “By talent, she’s still just at the copy editor level.” Each promotion contributed to the epidemic of title-itis throughout the paper. Arthur Sulzberger and his editor Frankel created two dozen sections, subsections, desks, subject “clusters” (media, fashion, law, education, etc.), and new administrative functions—each with an editor and deputy editor and, sometimes, an assistant to the editor
and
an assistant to the deputy editor. One of the cluster editors, Martin Arnold of the media desk, was credited for telling a joke on himself: the
Times
was creating so many new managerial positions that the newsroom would eventually resemble an inverse pyramid—one lone reporter working for 999 editors.

Arthur Sulzberger showed no inclination of retreating from his social agenda.
“The old guard kept saying, ‘It’s a passing thing. He’s young. He’ll get over all this diversity talk the longer he’s publisher,’ ” said Lena Williams, a black reporter on the metro desk. “But he’s serious and committed about affirmative action. He’s not ‘getting over it.’ ” In July 1991, less than three months after Arthur Sulzberger praised the Quindlen column, he sent another strong public signal to the staff. In Kansas City, at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Arthur Sulzberger was the host at an elegant luncheon for two thousand NABJ delegates and their guests. He spoke of the current hard climate for racial change, and of the economic and political roadblocks to “our cause” of creating more jobs for minorities in the newsroom. “Keep pushing,” he told the NABJ, “keep pushing to turn your vision of diversity into our reality.” Racist practices in journalism did not normally occupy the attention of members of the 99.44 percent white-male American Newspaper Publishers Association. Newspaper publishers’ energies, in the best of circumstances, tended to go into gentrified campaigns such as new convention centers, local airport expansion, and similar good works of the business classes. When Arthur made “our cause” of diversity his principal
ANPA activity, his out-front activism was a break with the ANPA’s past as well as the
Times’.
The principal beneficiary of Punch Sulzberger’s civic service was the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Despite the newsroom sniping, the
Times’
overall record for hiring and promoting minorities improved. Women in particular were moved forward. Some of the
Times’
life-style departments had been for a long time run by women editors, a tradition dating from the days when there was a segregated Women’s Page in American newspapers. The putatively more serious international and national news pages were considered male preserves (a “
news gender gap” still dates from these practices: market surveys conducted in 1991 showed that men were more likely to be daily newspaper readers than women, by about four percentage points). A dozen women moved into previously male-dominated senior positions in the news department. In 1988 Rebecca Sinkler, then fifty-four, became the first woman to edit the
Book Review.
Two years later, Carolyn Lee, forty-four, was named an assistant managing editor, sexually integrating the news department names carried in “the box,” the list of
Times
senior editors that appeared daily on the editorial-page masthead. Both Lee and Sinkler came to the
Times
in mid-career, after experience at other newspapers—the institutional
Times
itself had no coherent policy of preparing women for senior editing posts. Under Arthur Sulzberger that began to change, too. In the past,
assignments that generated page-one bylines were a fast track upward for ambitious male reporters; a run of good stories inevitably raised one’s visibility. At the start of the 1992 presidential campaign, the
Times
named twelve people to high-profile assignments covering the candidates and politics. Six were women; three were African-Americans.

At the same time, Arthur Sulzberger sent other, more ambiguous, signals about the direction he wanted to take the
Times.
In the mid-1980s, his father and Walter Mattson raised the
Times’
profits-to-revenues ratio to the newspaper industry’s desired 15 to 20 percent annual figure. By 1991, with Arthur in day-to-day charge of the
Times
, the ratio had fallen back to around 5 percent. While annual revenues held fairly steady, operating expenses kept rising, and the Times
Company’s net income declined from $167,680,000 in 1988 to $44,709,000 in 1992. Arthur Sulzberger could not be held responsible for the national recession and the
Times’
consequent loss of advertising; the demise of important retailers like Alexander’s and B. Altman’s was
not his fault. The
Times’
internal business affairs did come under his control. He let it be known that he wouldn’t shrink from the management “efficiencies”—that is, staff cuts, salary caps, tougher work rules—the
Times
said it needed to hold down costs. “All around us we see once prosperous businesses failing or coming close to failing,” he told the
Times
staff on April 7, 1992. “This newspaper will not be among them.” He cast around for further efficiencies in the
Times’
business affairs, aided by the marketing theorist W. Edwards Deming. Deming, “the nation’s preeminent quality pioneer.”

The retreats of 1992 and 1993 were only the visible tip of the Deming iceberg at the
Times.
Arthur organized no fewer than seven employee-management committees to spread the teachings of Deming throughout the paper.
Times
people mastered a Demingistic vocabulary (“process-oriented management,” “holistic vision”) and learned the value of “the three virtues” of self-esteem, intrinsic motivation, and the curiosity to learn. They also picked up the rather unsettling news that when companies were Demingized they became “leaner and flatter.” That is, they got along with fewer employees. Most important of all,
Demingism meshed neatly with the strategy of a reader-friendly
Times.
Beneath the blather was a doctrine attuned to the marketplace, “a single holistic victim of anticipating and meeting the desires of the customer.” When the in-house company newsletter,
Times Talk
, carried a report of the meetings, it used the Dylanesque heading “The Times, They Are A-changin’.” The Deming lectures were not totally hot-air exercises; staff attendees at one all-day session received a catered lunch, and a briefing on the new Edison, New Jersey, printing plant. “
The food was terrible,” the cultural reporter Grace Glueck noted tartly, “but it was nice to hear of our future plans from the company rather than reading about them in the
Village Voice
.”

Arthur’s faith in managerial bromides, like his father’s before him, seemed harmless enough (except perhaps for employees like Glueck who were given retirement packages in the interests of a “leaner, flatter”
Times
). More unsettling were the long-range plans for the editorial content of the
Times.
The search for reader-friendly formulas at times sounded hostile to the physical existence of the newspaper itself. The fault was not entirely the
Times’.
Try as Arthur Sulzberger and his editors did to reach out and engage the reader, there were people who didn’t return the compliment. The
Times’
market research kept coming upon the infamous aliterate American, twentysomething
men and women who could read but didn’t. Yes, the times were a-changin’. How much would the
Times
have to change as well?