Behind the Times (64 page)

One year after the publication of Blum’s throwaway
advice on how to tip the
Times’
weighting scales, the
Washington Post
published a page-one investigative report about precisely one such apparently successful tipping.
Allen H. Neuharth, the high-profile former chairman of the Gannett newspaper chain, wrote his autobiography,
Confessions
of an S.O.B.
(many of the “confessions” described how smart Neuharth was). The book made the
Times
Best Sellers list for seven weeks. According to the
Post
, the Gannett Foundation, a nonprofit education fund headed by Neuharth since his retirement, spent $40,000 to purchase two thousand copies of the book when it was published in the fall of 1989. Rather than make the purchase from the publisher in bulk, as large organizations usually do, foundation officials approached the editors at some of Gannett’s eighty-one daily newspapers throughout the country and asked them to buy copies of the book in the editors’ cities. After the
Post
story appeared, a publishing source told reporter Clare McHugh of the
New York Observer
that, considering it costs $19,000 to buy a full-page ad in the
Book Review
—which may or may not help sales—“sending employees out with $19,000 to buy copies of the books makes sense.”

Times
editors could appreciate such a straight cost-benefit analysis, if not welcome it. The
Book Review
licenses the
Times
Best Sellers logo and reproductions and blowups of its lists throughout the country as part of the paper’s advertising, display, and promotional efforts. “Such activities,” Blatty declared in a sworn statement, “are undertaken to enhance the
Times
, to encourage advertising and subscriptions, and to otherwise increase the profits for the New York Times Company.” So much for the
Book Review
as a “tweedy backwater.”

10:00
P.M.

Times
reporter Michael Martinez, assigned to the Yankees in Florida, reached former Yankees manager Lou Piniella by phone at Piniella’s restaurant in Woodbridge, New Jersey, a few miles across the Hudson from the
Times
offices. Piniella confirmed the story of players’ drinking on airplane flights, but denied it had cost his old team the pennant: “I can give you ten reasons why we lost, and drinking wasn’t one of them,” he told Martinez. The reporter phoned in the quote and other details to the sports desk. Winfield deleted the fudge-phrase “a Yankee official” in Martinez’s first edition story, and substituted Piniella’s name as the source of confirmation. Winfield was pleased that readers of the second edition would get a more
Times
-like account of the Yankee’s troubles, one complete with attribution.

Winfield encountered, in his words, “the first glitch of the night.” The
Times
photographer that sports thought was assigned to the Devils game at the Meadowlands in New Jersey had instead been sent by the photo department to cover a tribute to the actor Sidney Poitier at the Waldorf-Astoria. The department failed to tell the sports desk of the switch. The Associated Press promised Winfield it would cover for the
Times.

10:20
P.M.

No Devils picture arrived from the AP, so Winfield instead picked an AP photo from the Islanders game. Because the two stories were both planned for the upper half of the second sports page, the Islanders photo fitted with no difficulty.

The National edition closed, unfortunately, before David Jones had the Chicago Democratic primary results in hand. Richard M. Daley, son of Richard J. “Boss” Daley, won over the black incumbent, Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer. The account, by Chicago bureau correspondent Dirk Johnson, arrived in time for the late city edition sold in New York. It also made the National editions printed via satellite on the West Coast, thanks to the three-hour time difference. Perversely, the news came too late to make the satellite edition printed in Chicago. As a result,
Times
subscribers in Los Angeles and San Francisco read of Daley’s victory in their editions while Chicago readers did not.

11:20
P.M.

The Sports Department neared deadline for the second edition. Final copy for the Islanders game was not yet in. Robin Finn, the
Times
sportswriter assigned to the team, completed her running story—the chronological account of the game filed in takes to the sports desk. She began to write a compete sub: a fresh story.

The desk processed wire-service results of the night’s basketball games for the agate page—the page with all the sports scores. The agate page closed at 11:31, one minute after the nominal deadline. Two pages of the four-page section were left to close. The Sports Department would miss its deadline for the second edition, Winfield acknowledged, “by a regrettable but acceptable four minutes.”

11:34
P.M.

The real deadline. The second edition closed, with the turnaround desk’s changes, including Chicago primary results and some sports scores.

12:00 midnight

The nightly “postscript” for the National edition. Postscript was
Times
talk for a brief interruption of the press run—rather than stopping the presses to plate a fresh edition—in order to make corrections, or insert late sports news, or update page-one stories.

1:28
A.M.

All sports copy set, including the complete sub from Islanders’ reporter Finn. The final, or Late City edition, sports pages closed, with seventeen minutes to spare. Winfield gave a “good night” in sports.

1:30
A.M.

Hold it. Winfield spotted the wrong score for the Devils game in the final page proofs. The sports desk killed the page, and placed the proper score in the proper place by 1:40
A.M.
, still with five minutes to spare.

1:45
A.M.

Deadline. The third, or Late City, edition closed, on time. Now, a real Good Night for the desk editors. The printers began the final press run, signaled by the alternating green- and red-flashing lights and clanging bells in the pressroom.

2:00
A.M.

The New York Area edition of the
Times
of March 1, 1989, began streaming off the presses.

6:00
A.M.

Early Wednesday morning, before catching the 10:00
A.M.
flight from Boston to Washington, Anthony Lewis redid his column. He dropped the reference to the Suciu case, promising himself to take it up at some later date. On the flight down to National Airport, Lewis wrote in longhand, on a yellow legal pad. Later in the morning, he turned in his finished column at the Washington bureau.

7:30
A.M.

The digital electric clock above the entrance of the Times Building flashed the hour and minute. From a row of four metal poles
flew the flags of the United States, New York State, New York City, and the
New York Times.
The
Times
flag was a crisp white banner with the blue letters
NYT
emblazoned on it. Spotlights were trained on all four flags. A security guard at the entrance explained the etiquette; if the flag of the United States is kept lighted, it can remain flying through the night. Albin Krebs, finishing his career at the
Times
, listened to the explanation and looked at the four flags a long moment. How appropriate, he said, as much to himself as to his companion, that the
Times
has a flag, and that it is treated like Old Glory, “because the
Times
is a country itself.”

In April 1991, Anna Quindlen did something that
New York Times
columnists never do. She used her “Public & Private” column on the Op-Ed page to attack directly the editors of the
Times.
Specifically, she criticized the editors’ treatment of Patricia Bowman, the woman who had accused William Smith of sexual assault in the “Palm Beach rape case.” Quindlen wrote that the
Times’
news coverage of the woman’s story—which used Bowman’s name and recounted her bad-driver’s record and sexual history (“she had a little wild streak,” the story noted)—was “beneath the traditions” of the paper. Quindlen also accused the editors, in their own paper, of sexism and snobbery and of being voyeurs in the bargain. The editors were not named; but everyone in the
Times
newsroom knew that Max Frankel had initiated the story and that Al Siegal had supervised the editing as the copy moved toward deadline. Quindlen’s column appeared in the Sunday editions of April 21; as is the custom of the Op-Ed page, Quindlen wrote the headline over the column herself. “A Mistake,” it read.

The next morning, Quindlen arrived at work to find the
Times
staff divided and hesitant about how to respond to “A Mistake.”
Half the newsroom, seemingly, agreed with her criticisms. “The other half,” Quindlen recalls, “thought I made a big mistake to air the
Times’
business.” Then Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., visited the newsroom
and sent everyone a strong signal. He passed Quindlen in an aisleway and, in a voice loud enough for a dozen witnesses to hear, complimented her on the column. It was important that she had spoken out the way she did, he told her.

Arthur Sulzberger’s message to the staff went beyond the specifics of the column, and the broader feminist issues that Quindlen said she wanted to raise. At the time the column appeared, Arthur was listed as deputy publisher on the
Times’
masthead. His father, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Sr., held the title of publisher. In fact, Arthur had been running the
Times
day to day since late 1988, and eight months after the Palm Beach rape story roiled the newsroom, Arthur was formally designated publisher by the
Times’
board of directors, which included his father and his three aunts. Punch Sulzberger kept the title of chairman and CEO of the Times Company. To emphasize the
Times’
continuity along with the passing of authority, father and son invited a small group of reporters from other publications (and one official
Times
photographer), to the boardroom for a brief news conference on January 16, 1992. The Sulzbergers posed together under the oil portrait of Adolph Ochs, Arthur’s great-grandfather. The son stood four inches taller than the father, his attractive, unlined face and full head of dark, curly hair contrasting with the pale, balding older man.

Whether Arthur Sulzberger’s
Times
will be better or worse than the one his father supervised over the last quarter of a century is unclear. Certainly, it will be a different
Times.
The personalities and generational attitudes of the two men were different, as was the marketplace in which each found himself operating. The father left the affairs of the paper in order; the Adolph Ochs family, owners of the
Times
since the last years of the nineteenth century, would continue in control well into the twenty-first century. But the father’s prudence could extend only so far. For all the forward planning, no one foresaw the severe economic downturn in the
Times’
business fortunes and the major internal effort to restructure the institutional
Times
in response to changes in the media landscape.

Punch Sulzberger began as the accidental publisher, elevated only because of the illness of his father and the death of his brother-in-law. Punch Sulzberger learned the business on the job, and exercised his authority ad hoc. “I read stories like any other
Times
subscriber, when the paper came out,” he said. “Then if I wanted to, I’d pick up the phone and discuss the directions we’re going in with the editor.” He
believed in the
Times
hierarchy, and dealt mostly with his executive editors—successively, Turner Catledge, A. M. Rosenthal, and Max Frankel. There are
Times
writers who in twenty-five years never heard from Punch Sulzberger, pre- or post-publication. By contrast, young Arthur Sulzberger quickly demonstrated, through highly visible episodes such as the one involving Quindlen, that he intended to be a hands-on, involved proprietor.

Unlike his father’s, Arthur’s ambitions became focused at a truly tender age. His succession was never considered inevitable, even though he was the sole Sulzberger son. For one, after his parents’ divorce in 1956, when he was five years old, he lived with his mother, Barbara Grant Sulzberger. He was brought up as an Episcopalian, the religion of his mother, and was confirmed at that Upper East Side redoubt of proper churchmanship, St. James. At the age of fourteen, in an act of adult resolve, the boy decided to leave his mother’s house and move in with his father. He left his religion as well as part of his past behind. In a conversation with Ari L. Goldman, the religion correspondent for the
Times
, Arthur Sulzberger explained his “betwixt and between state”—that is, a member of a Jewish family raised as an Episcoplian, who now, as an adult, observes neither religion. Arthur told Goldman, “ninety-nine out of one hundred people consider me Jewish.
How could a Sulzberger not be Jewish?”