Hard News (7 page)

Raines has written about how he had prepared for years for these job interviews. “I thought the paper was becoming duller, slower, and more uneven in quality with every passing day,” he wrote in a May 2004
Atlantic
cover article. In fact, the
Times
was coming off an overwhelming and fast-changing story—the 2000 presidential election and Florida recount—for which it had provided excellent coverage, an inspiring combination of daily reporting, and in-depth investigations and analyses. Late on Tuesday, November 7, as soon as it had become clear that Florida would decide the election, Lelyveld had dispatched the
Times
’s enormous resources into the state. On Thursday, the
Times
ran more than twenty stories about the recount, twice the number
The Washington Post
ran that day. The
Times
blanketed the story so completely that a special rubric—“Counting the Vote”—was adopted to guide readers through its coverage. Throughout November and into December, the paper’s combination of breaking news and investigative reportage led the pack. On November 17, for instance, Raymond Bonner and Josh Barbanel broke a story about the disproportionately high number of ballots cast by African American voters in Duval County that had been invalidated. Several weeks later, on December 8, a front-page story by David Barstow and Somini Sengupta broke news about the controversial history of a judge in Leon County whose ruling crippled Al Gore’s chances. Even
Washington Post
ombudsman Michael Getler noted how completely the
Times
dominated the story. In an internally circulated memo, Getler wrote how “our rivals up the road” had won the ground war. “It seems to me that what must have been a big and well-organized commitment of resources to Florida by the NYT paid off in some important and enterprising stories and in raising the profile of the paper’s on the ground reporting,” he wrote. During his tenure, Lelyveld had also reinvigorated the paper’s metro and business staffs and created a top-notch investigative team.

Another of Lelyveld’s lasting contributions to the
Times
was to break with a tradition in which those who hadn’t spent their entire careers at the paper were looked on with distrust. Lelyveld, like Frankel and Rosenthal before him, was a
Times
lifer, but he fought to bring outsiders into the fold. To this end, he recruited John Geddes and Jill Abramson from
The Wall Street Journal
to help run the business and Washington desks, respectively, and snared Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Dean Baquet from the
Chicago Tribune.
He actively promoted longtime Washington reporter Gerald Boyd, who had begun his career at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
He tapped Adam Moss, a pop culture–savvy editor who had cut his teeth on New York’s magazine scene, to lead
The New York Times Magazine,
which Moss transformed into one of the best weekly publications in the country. “The period in which it became normal to have a paper run by people who knew how other folks did things, who had seen a competitive landscape from a variety of perspectives,” says Bill Keller, “was the Joe regime.”

But to make a plausible argument for his ascension, Raines had constructed a narrative in which he was needed to rescue the paper from editorial and financial ruin. For a decade, Raines had been quietly preparing a file of the paper’s problems, so when he and Sulzberger sat down for the first of their dinner-cum-interviews, he was well prepared. Raines told Sulzberger that the paper was slow out of the gate, that the cultural coverage was in shambles, that the
Times
had ceded its traditional dominance by becoming lazy and moribund. He talked of wanting to dismantle the paper’s “old-boy network.” “The ingrained management habit of favoring seniority and networking skills over talent had its roots in a kind of Skull and Bones system in which people who came to the
Times
at an early age and advanced to high positions made sure that the guys with whom they had been clerks and cub reporters were taken care of,” Raines would write in 2004.

This critique dovetailed nicely with what Raines knew was Sulzberger’s strategic belief that for the
Times
not only to survive but to continue to serve as the country’s, and the world’s, dominant news-gathering organization, it had to undergo a major overhaul. For the past several years, Sulzberger and Janet Robinson, the paper’s president and general manager,
^*18
and Russ Lewis, the Times Company’s chief executive officer, had sought to focus the paper’s growth on its national expansion. “We had to create a new newspaper for the next generation of readers and advertisers,” says Sulzberger.

And Raines was prepared to argue that the
Times
was failing in exactly this endeavor. “Whether we liked it or not,
USA Today
and
The Wall Street Journal
were better than the
Times
at editing for a national audience that was, for example, interested in both foreign policy and the Super Bowl, both Medicare funding and the constantly shifting American youth culture,” he wrote, describing the
Times
at the turn of the century. It’s difficult to determine which newspapers Raines was reading. Under Lelyveld, the
Times
certainly dominated on all these topics, especially when compared with
USA Today
and the
Journal.
Even the
Journal
’s traditional domination of business stories had grown less secure. If there was an area in which
USA Today
beat the
Times,
it was in college and national sports—but amping up the
Times
’s sports coverage to make it truly a national page would be a hugely costly proposition. The
Times
did well with the resources it had. There was, of course, room for improvement, especially in the paper’s often stodgy culture coverage, and there were entire departments that could have been made more efficient. But any major overhaul would require a similarly major investment, and the advertising downturn of the early twenty-first century precluded that.

Keller, on the other hand, refused to articulate a vision for the paper that included a denigration of Joe Lelyveld’s work, despite the fact that he sensed Sulzberger was looking for just such a critique. And while Lelyveld was vocal in his praise of Keller, he refused to knock Raines. As the quiet, closed-door selection process progressed, it was becoming increasingly clear that Howell Raines had the upper hand. Significantly, Raines’s personality seemed more suited both to Arthur Sulzberger’s outgoing nature and to leading a large institution. Raines loved people. He loved socializing and was skilled at circulating through a room, glad-handing and making small talk. Keller, by con-

trast, gravitated to the corners of parties. Raines always seemed to say just the right thing in large gatherings; Keller was the opposite, famous for cracking jokes that made people feel awkward. “My wife sometimes refers to me as socially autistic,” he would say later.

At the time, even some of Lelyveld’s deputies felt that Raines might be the right choice to lead the paper. Raines is a dynamic and forceful presence—he can “fill a room,” as Dean Baquet, a
Times
national editor under Lelyveld, says. When Baquet left New York in 2000 to become managing editor of the
Los Angeles Times,
Sulzberger asked him who he thought should be the next editor of the paper. “Raines,” said Baquet, and after Sulzberger told some of the paper’s executives what Baquet’s answer had been, it was repeated, sotto voce, around the newsroom. Raines’s leadership of the paper’s editorial page, Baquet thought, proved he could be an energetic steward. Besides, Baquet said, Raines would need to retire in 2009, before he turned sixty-six. Keller would be only sixty and would still have almost six years to lead the paper on his own. What’s more, Raines had made it a point, while editorial-page editor, to invite to lunch members of the
Times
’s increasingly frustrated masthead. If he was in power, he assured them implicitly, things would be different. “Under Joe, I felt really marginalized,” says Al Siegal, a
Times
assistant managing editor. “Howell at the time was the editor of the editorial page. We would have lunch twice a year or so, and he was very understanding about how I felt in my working life. He was empathetic.”

“There was a feeling on the masthead that Howell was a good idea,” says Soma Golden Behr. “Bill was fine, but he seemed kind of quiet and subdued. Howell seemed exciting and daring. He took risks. I thought we could use a little of that.”

Sulzberger agreed, and on Monday, May 21, 2001, he announced that Howell Raines would be
The New York Times
’s next executive editor. “Howell will continue to improve the news report of the
Times
and build on Joe’s outstanding accomplishments,” Sulzberger said in a public announcement, praising Lelyveld for “shepherd[ing] The Times through one of the most momentous periods in its 150-year history.”

Raines, for his part, publicly disavowed much of what he had been saying privately in his conversations with Sulzberger. “My first and foremost responsibility will be to protect and build upon The Times’s tradition of quality journalism,” he said after being appointed. “I also feel great joy at the prospect of working again with my talented colleagues in the newsroom and our bureaus.” The newsroom greeted the announcement with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Keller was known and respected, but he was not considered a particularly warm leader. Raines, on the other hand, was a mystery. There was concern about Raines’s reputation as an autocrat and a tyrant: Written in an open comment book in the
Times
’s newsroom on the day of Raines’s appointment were two telling entries. Under the heading of “I would like to see in the new building” (into which the
Times
was planning to move later that decade) were scrawled two anonymous comments: “No tyrannical executive editors,” someone had jotted down. “No Howell Raines,” wrote another. But for the most part,
Times
staffers were ready to be optimistic—maybe Raines would be a pleasant surprise.

Over the next several months (Raines wouldn’t take over the newsroom until September), Raines went on a listening tour, getting acquainted with a 1,200-person news operation he had been removed from for almost a decade. Some staffers appreciated the gesture—Raines spent a shift with each section’s copy desk, sometimes sitting with them until midnight, when the pages closed. Other times, Raines seemed to be doing more shouting than listening. He was vocal in expressing the low regard in which he held the business report and publicly criticized Glenn Kramon, the section’s editor. He was outspoken in his criticism of the paper’s culture department. And he was dismissive of the paper’s sports coverage, which he deemed parochial.

“The first lesson of management should always be, it’s a mistake for the new administration to come in trashing the old administration,” says Baquet, who arrived at the
Los Angeles Times
in 2000, at the tail end of a period in which the paper had been rocked by scandal and then sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Company. “The reality of a newsroom is that it’s the same population from editor to editor, especially at a place like
The New York Times.
The new administration shouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on what the predecessors did, because eventually the reporters and editors will start thinking you’re talking about them.”

Raines, though, was in too much of a hurry for such niceties, and he began to lay out a vaguely defined vision: The paper would have a “higher competitive metabolism”; business would push harder on breaking stories; sports coverage would trend more national. Meanwhile, Joe Lelyveld was still running the newsroom. The tension between the two men grew. In August, when invitations were sent out for a gala fete celebrating Lelyveld’s career, the gatefold invite featured dozens of datelines that Lelyveld had filed from, including Kashmir, South Africa, London, Nairobi, Geneva, and Burma. Some thought the design was intended as a barb to Raines, who, with the possible exception of Scotty Reston, was the least-traveled executive editor in the history of
The New York Times.

T
HE
D
EPUTY

On July 26, 2001, Raines made his first, and most significant, appointment, naming as his managing editor the fifty-one-year-old Gerald Boyd, the paper’s deputy managing editor for news. Boyd’s elevation to the newsroom’s second in command was not a surprise: Raines had made Boyd’s ascension, which would make him the highest-ranking African American in the history of the paper, part of his campaign to win the executive editorship. But it did little to soothe those looking for a counterbalance to Raines’s imperious ways. Boyd had a reputation for being cold and caustic—“No more Mr. Gruff,” he told the newsroom after his appointment was announced. Boyd had worked with Raines in Washington and had been at the
Times
since 1983, when he was hired from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
as a political reporter. After a period spent covering the White House, Boyd had been an editor in Washington and had served time on the national and metro desks as well. He also did a stint as metro editor in the early 1990s.