The Times, an important book on the most recent history of the most prestigious journalism company in the world, has just been published. Written by Adam Nagourney, a veteran reporter for The New York Times who, in some way, wants to be the second part of The Kingdom and the Power (1969) by Gay Talese.
The style and intention are similar: to tell the interiors of the “Gray Lady” with “immersive storytelling” techniques. The difference is that Talese already wrote from outside the newspaper and Nagourney still works in its political section. But neither of them are an unofficial story, and that is why, rather than praising or criticizing, attacking or defending, they describe without modesty and in detail what readers never see.
It is an exercise in journalistic “voyeurism” that allows us to know how information is cooked, what role the owners, directors, journalists and managers of the newspaper play, and how “tutti quanti” pressures and criticizes them.
The hero of Talese’s book was Abe Rosenthal who years later would be a vitriolic, demanding and creative director; and the villain, Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger, an old-school editor.
In this book, the misunderstood and underappreciated hero is Arthur Ochs (Pinch) Sulzberger, an editor who, despite his lack of charisma, saved the newspaper and kept it from sinking in the face of the “digital tsunami,” and the villains, the old guard of journalists who made changes difficult, made life miserable for Howell Raines, the most valuable director of all time who was blown up; the same bodyguard that opposed Jill Abramson, the first woman to run the newspaper, and Dean Baquet, the first journalist of color who succeeded her.
When Russell Baker, the Times’ most beloved and read columnist, retired, he wrote a letter to Pinch telling him that the coverage of the attack on the Twin Towers (“U.S. Attacked”) had been the most “astonishing, extraordinary, incredible and elegant ” story never told in the history of the newspaper that the eruptive Raines ran.
Nagourney pays another well-deserved tribute to Martin Nisenholtz, thanks to whom at 11:59 p.m. on Friday, January 19, 1996, the newspaper’s first website was published. Historic event that was celebrated in the digital newsroom with a box of Veuve Clicquot champagne bottles, a gift from Pinch.
Although the book ends with Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, the author does not hide his admiration for the new editor, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the calm and innovative force that today governs a Times that is still hybrid (print and digital), but profitable just surpassed 10 million subscribers. And with a newsroom of 900 journalists in New York (800 for the digital version and 100 for the print version) in a newspaper where 53% of its journalists today are women.
The Times covers the years of seven editors of the newspaper: Rosenthal (genial and abrasive), Frankel (conservative and eternal rival of Rosenthal: “I have no other plan than to be like Abe”), Lelyveld (“intimidating intelligence”), Keller ( loved and admired), Raines (volcanic and mercurial), Abramson (lonely and unempathetic) and Baquet (skillful and peacemaker). All of them experienced the “phone that no longer rang syndrome” when they stopped running the newspaper. Brutal cure of humility reserved for those who for a few years were “the kings of mambo.”
The Times is a book written after 10 years of research, some 300 interviews, supported by thousands of documents coming mostly from the newspaper’s corporate archive (to which it had unrestricted access) and from funds deposited at Columbia University and the New York Public Library. The author points out that until the mid-1980s, when the newspaper’s editors retired, they were obliged to hand over all their papers to the Times archive. A practice that today would be almost impossible because the “digital and audiovisual footprint” of any professional goes beyond the manuscripts and typewritten documents of the past.
It all started, says Adam Nagourney, when he interviewed Pinch and asked him to explain the type of book he wanted to write. Could he count on his collaboration? -Let me think about it, was his response. And a few days later he told her: yes, count on me for whatever you need, but don’t force me to ask other employees for that same access.
If some conclusions are drawn from the book, two are the most important: professional talent and family ownership. The New York Times has been, and continues to be, a newspaper of great quality thanks to the extraordinary talent of its editorial staff and management, where resources were never spared. And that was always the priority of the five generations of the family that owned the newspaper since 1896 when the great-great-grandfather of the current editor, Adolf Simon Ochs, bought a bankrupt newspaper founded in 1851. They all made mistakes, but they all preserved the hallmarks of a reliable and independent newspaper, in times of prosperity and in times of crisis.
The Times is now the only major family-owned newspaper published in the United States. Until the 1980s, almost all of the 2,000 North American newspapers were family businesses, known by the last names of their editors (Hearst, Pulitzer, Bancroft, Chandler, McCormick, Knight, Ridder or Graham).
This book is also a “manual” on how to manage a “daily institution” led by a family that came to stay. A newspaper so profitable that Pinch received a generous compensation of $5.5 million as editor in 2017. A newspaper that was local, then became national and today is the first global newspaper in the world.
