Behind the Times (68 page)

Through the 1980s, the
Times
used four delivery services to distribute newspapers in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region. In early 1992, Arthur bought out the owners of two of the services. The remaining two services were purchased by a wealthy, tough New Jersey trucking magnate named Arthur Imperatore, who received a loan, with good terms, from the
Times
, in order to complete the deal. By federal law, existing labor contracts do not survive the sale of a property. Imperatore immediately imposed all the new work rules that the
Times
—if it was starting anew—would have most assuredly wanted. When three hundred drivers went out in protest, Imperatore hired replacement workers to do the union men’s job, again a management “right” established by federal law (during the 1993–94 congressional session, Liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives tried again to amend the law, which dated from the 1930s). There was sporadic violence, but Imperatore more or less succeeded in making his trucks run on time. The NMDU had the choice: half a loaf (settle and get guaranteed lifetime jobs for some drivers) or nothing at all (stay out and be permanently replaced). The drivers capitulated to Imperatore, and then to the
Times
, giving the paper the money-saving “efficiencies” it sought on its routes. Arthur’s liberal image stayed intact. He could claim, narrowly, that the
Times
did not engage in the union-busting tactic of using replacement workers. The other guy, Imperatore, did. The
Times
confidently proclaimed that it had achieved “labor peace through the year 2000.”

*        *        *

Something more was on management’s mind than a desire for new work contracts, important as they were. In the
early 1990s, Arthur’s
Times
faced its first real cross-town competition since the best days of the old
Herald Tribune
after World War II. The new competitor was
Newsday
, a daily in the process of transforming itself into a plausible alternative to the
Times.

The newspaper heiress Alicia Patterson, with financial support from her husband, Captain Harry Guggenheim, started
Newsday
in a garage on Long Island in 1940. Her timing proved exquisite;
Newsday
was in place after World War II when the potato farms of Nassau County were plowed under to make room for the houses of suburbia. As the Levittowns grew, so did
Newsday.
The three million people who live in Nassau-Suffolk counties today make up one of the nation’s top ten markets. Her idea of a handy tabloid-size newspaper executed tastefully suited a wide readership: big-city brass muted for the increasingly conservative mood of tract Long Island. Later, two brilliant editors, Bill Moyers and David Laventhol, perfected the form, creating a magazine-style daily journalism that the
Times
belatedly began to imitate. By then, both Guggenheim and Patterson were dead, and their heirs had sold the paper to the Times Mirror Company, publishers of the
Los Angeles Times.
As the 1980s began,
Newsday
was so firmly entrenched on Long Island that Times Mirror decided to expand to the west—it couldn’t go any farther east for readers (the next doorstep after Montauk was in Portugal). Laventhol started
New York Newsday
in 1983. Twenty years after the
New York Times
had launched project Westward Ho, its National edition, in the
Los Angeles Times’
backyard, Times Mirror returned the thrust, sending
Newsday
westward into Queens and Brooklyn. The single-family-home owners on either side of the City-Nassau County line were more likely to be
News
readers, and when the
News’
fortunes sagged,
New York Newsday
benefited. The combined circulation for the New York and Long Island
Newsday
editions averaged 825,000 during the
News’
strike of 1990–91. Within a year, Maxwell was a suicide, and the
News
in bankruptcy court, fighting for its existence, until Mortimer Zuckerman, the real estate developer, breathed new life into it. By the summer of 1993, the
News
was holding on to a circulation of 780,000, while
Newsday
was selling 455,000 papers on Long Island and 270,000 in New York. Arthur naturally became solicitous about the fate of the
News.
Should the
News
shut down for good,
Newsday
might gain enough circulation to achieve market parity with the
Times.
Readers might not notice, but advertisers would.

After all the worries about the challenges of television, the new technologies, aliteracy, and deaggregation, Arthur had to think about the old threat of newspaper competition. The
Times’
rediscovery of local news, sports, and Downtown styles was a direct response to the upstart
Newsday.
Senior
Times
men denied that they were chairbound intellectuals: Frankel played tennis, Joe Lelyveld and Arthur were runners. But they and their predecessors managed to shuffle off sports for decades, allowing the sports pages to wander around in the paper like a team forever on the road. When the
Times’
market surveyors discovered that young, affluent, male New Yorkers actually bought
Newsday
, or the
News
or the
Post
principally for their sports sections, Arthur resolved that if this desirable profile liked fun and games, the
Times
would supply them. He anchored sports in the same place in section B on Tuesday through Saturday so it could be more easily found. He intended to make the
Times
a one-stop paper: Readers could get all the sports coverage they wanted, including opinionated columnists and the agate fields of statistics that dedicated fans loved to graze on, without the need to pick up one of the tabloids.

The Metro section was also expanded with more than a glance at
Newsday.
Arthur implicitly acknowledged the
Times’
past disinterest in local news when he had to find “outsiders” to run the Metro pages. Gerald Boyd, a Midwesterner and a member of the
Times’
Washington bureau, became Metro editor; Michael Oreskes, a former
Daily News
political reporter, was named Boyd’s chief deputy. Martin Gottlieb, an investigative reporter and former editor of the
Village Voice
, was another key addition. The
Times
also recruited Adam Moss, thirty-four, the founding editor of
7 Days
, a self-consciously hip weekly aimed at young adults living on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan (Moss was the closing editor as well, when the weekly was shut down after two years of losses in 1988). Moss informally joined the
Times
staff serving as “consultant to the managing editor,” an unusual arrangement in the unbending hierarchy of the newsroom, and a measure of Arthur’s commitment to shake up the
Times.
The experts around the office water coolers quickly passed word that Arthur brought Moss in to create a new “
7 Days
-type” section. The gossip was half-right. Moss, and Tom Botkin, the chief designer of the
Times
,
transformed Sunday Main Part 2 into Styles of the Times. But Moss was not appointed the first editor of Styles. The title went to Stephen Drucker, another thirtysomething outsider who had previously worked at
Vogue.
Within a year, Drucker left and Moss went to the
Times Magazine
, while Styles of the
Times
continued to search for its “voice” under the editorship of Claudia Payne.

The expanded coverage of sports, metro, and Downtown represented the most visible alterations in the everyday façade of the institutional
Times.
Another fundamental restructuring took place in the subbasement where the paper was printed. In the mid-1980s, in those fat, happy boom years, Punch Sulzberger and Walter Mattson authorized the building of a new state-of-the-printing-arts plant across the Hudson River in Edison, New Jersey. Their long-range goal was to get all the
Times’
printing out of the antiquated facilities at West 43rd Street, and the marginally better presses at the Carlstadt plant, also in New Jersey. Edison had the capacity to handle more pages per edition, as well as color presses to match or surpass what
USA Today
and the newsmagazines could offer advertisers. Edison was completed in December 1990, at a cost of $450 to $500 million; it stood unused for over two years while the
Times
and its unions tried to come to accommodation on manning levels. The visitor to Edison doesn’t require an engineering degree to realize that the number of employees needed is a tenth or twentieth the size of the work force at West 43rd Street: People were in the way of the robots at Edison. It hurt Arthur to see a half-billion-dollar plant lie idle. But the pain was unexpectedly eased by, of all things, the Bush-era recession: With the
Times’
advertising lineage down, the paper didn’t need new press capacity to accommodate clamoring retailers.

Arthur Sulzberger has made clear what he wants his contribution to be in the succession of family publishers who have run the
Times
in this century. He plans to lead the return to New York,
“our base and the energy that drives the
Times
machine.” He hopes to hire a staff on both the business and news sides that reflects the city’s diversity. He will try to engage new audiences with a relevant, reader-friendly
Times
of broad appeal. “We are a New York City paper,” he emphasized the day he became publisher, his father at his side, the oil painting of Adolph Ochs on the wall behind him. “We have a role in the nation. But a majority of our advertisers are here. New York is the point from
which we speak. I’m bullish on New York.” He says that he will accomplish these new goals while honoring the old standards of the
Times
, “the values that make the place what it is.” He will also nourish the international reporting “franchise.” The Soviet Union may have collapsed and, with it, five decades of cold war journalism, but the new publisher says that these changes will not affect the
Times’
international commitments: “Foreign coverage is fundamental to what we are.” And for the record, the
Times
National edition will continue to receive his support, to serve upper-end professional and business readers. “It’s true no ads are out there right now,” he said, “but there’s still no limit to its potential for growth.” Did the
Times
, then, aspire to be a national newspaper, a local New York newspaper, or a hybrid national and local paper? His answer is: “We are a little of all of the above.”

While Arthur attempted this feat of balancing, he also tried to make the
Times
cost effective with profits once again equal to, or surpassing, the industry norm of 15 to 20 percent. Newsroom-staff cuts and union peace were supposed to contribute to a more efficient
Times.
Readers, too, were expected to do their part, and pay more for the paper. Quietly, without provoking any dinner-party conversation, Arthur’s
Times
began shifting its revenue stream away from the usual formula of an 80–20 split—80 cents of each dollar coming from advertising and 20 cents from circulation—toward something closer to a 50–50 split. In the summer of 1992, the newsstand price of the
Sunday Times
sold around the country reached $3, and still the readers paid. Without sufficient national advertising, however, even robust national circulation could be harmful. Larger press runs meant more newsprint expenditures and delivery cost. The fate of
USA Today
was instructive: With over 1.8 million readers, it still lost an estimated $20 million in 1991 (
USA Today
’s total losses reached a staggering $800 million, from the paper’s introduction in 1982 through January 1, 1992).

USA Today
represented one print solution to aliteracy and the worries about readers’ discretionary time. It was a TV-like newspaper: colorful, quick, high on human interest. Not too long ago, Arthur and a dinner guest were discussing the future of newspapers. The guest mourned the retreat from hard news. Arthur responded lightly, calling the guest “a child of the 1950s.” The days when newspapers were riding high and didn’t worry about readership or do audience surveys—those days were finished. Print was on a new wavelength now: shorter stories, enticing writing, gossip, sex, and service journalism (fitness, health, careers, and getting ahead). Arthur didn’t mention it that
night, but some newspapers were experimenting with features that a child of the 1990s might not recognize as news. In the name of reader-friendliness, papers were opening their pages to direct reader participation. Letters to the editors columns expanded; in California, the
Orange County Register
was inviting readers to send in their letters and postcards from vacation trips for publication; in Florida, the
West Palm Beach Post
covered shopping
malls the way traditional newspapers used to cover the courts and City Hall.

The conventional wisdom, the assumption that drove Punch Sulzberger and his editors toward the new sections, held that television’s ability to deliver hard-news headlines twelve to fourteen hours before the
Times
appeared on doorsteps had altered the role of newspapers. Print had to go toward consumer-oriented features. Arthur and his editors took the “news you can use” idea a step farther. Just as the definition of “news” was broadened, so too was the definition of “you” expanded to encompass potential new audiences. Possibly, though, both generations of
Times
managers misunderstood the new media landscape. When Tina Brown, the thirty-eight-year-old editor in chief of
Vanity Fair
, was invited to address the ANPA in May 1991, the assembled publishing executives expected some practical advice on how to be more popular and “with it.” After all,
Vanity Fair
was an upscale
People
magazine. Brown had made it, the
Times
reported, “the hot book of the 1980s.” Her magazine specialized in five thousand- to fifteen thousand-word personality pieces that matched first-rate writers with superstar subjects from movies and TV. Instead of offering her audience instructions in trendiness, Brown told the publishers that they were responding in the wrong way to the age of television. Their newspapers were too quiet, too bland, too user friendly, “too safe, safe, safe.” She urged them to stop trying to be soft to attract readers. They should be shriller, harder edged: “Once in a while you have to bite the hand that reads you.” (In June 1992, S. I. Newhouse, whose family owned both
Vanity Fair
and
The New Yorker
, decided that Brown was the editor needed to bring edge to
The New Yorker.
)