Sat, Apr 03, 2004 page9

• The 'New York Times' laid bare

  Former editor Howell Raines' devastating critique of The Gray Lady paints a picture of "the world's greatest newspaper" as sagging under the formidable weight of its own complacency

  • By David Teather / THE GUARDIAN
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  Howell Raines, the former editor of the New York Times, whose career was brought to an abrupt end by the actions of the plagiarist reporter Jayson Blair, gave one eviscerating interview shortly after he was deposed. Then there was silence.

  The venerable newspaper hired a new editor, whose immediate aim was to calm the roiling waters of the newsroom. The revolt and anger that led to Raines' departure dissipated. Normal order appeared to have been resumed at what Americans regard as more of an institution than a newspaper. That is until now.

  Raines, who had often said he had wanted to raise the New York Times' "competitive metabolism," is back, and it turns out he still has plenty to say. In a searing 20,000-word article that will be published in Atlantic Monthly on April 13, Raines warns that the paper is set on a path toward irrelevance.

  

  YUSHA

  The article gives an unsparing insight into the workings of a newspaper that bears the hallmarks of another era. He describes an organization with 1,200 journalists and a newsroom budget of US$180 million, where editors sit in dark-panelled rooms with gothic mouldings and where any urgency to report the news and compete with rivals is stifled by complacency and arrogance.

  "I felt on the day I became executive editor and on the day I drove away from West 43rd Street for the last time that the Times badly needs to raise the level of its journalism to survive," he writes.

  "Our casual pose of being above the fray and too self-assured to care had become a Victorian affectation we could no longer afford. And yet our pulse seemed to be getting slower as the country's got faster."

  spineless

  Raines paints a picture of an operation riven by conflict between two cultures: that of achievement

  and that of stultifying complaint, cheerled by the Newspaper Guild union. He attacks the spinelessness of his "friend," the newspaper's publisher Arthur Sulzberger, for failing to stand by him against his enemies in the newsroom in the teeth of the Blair scandal. He also suggests that Sulzberger's position is now so weakened from the Blair episode that he will be unable to work necessary reforms.

  Sept. 11, 2001, and the Blair brouhaha stand like bookends on either side of Raines's tenure as executive editor. At one end, a story of devastating consequence. At the other, a pathetic tale of a troubled junior reporter.

  Raines, though, suggests the two are inextricably linked in

  his downfall. He had pressed the newsroom too hard in the months after the terrorist attacks and used up his "reservoir of goodwill" by the time the Blair episode broke.

  It seems less an admission that

  he made a mistake than another thinly-disguised attack on those reporters who turned on him.

  "In retrospect, I underestimated the difficulties of inculcating in others my passion for breaking stories that other news organizations had to follow," he writes.

  Raines offers a devastating critique of the paper. He was picked as executive editor as a "change agent," he says, to jolt the Times out of complacency.

  "I thought the paper was becoming duller, slower and more uneven in quality with every passing day," he says.

  "One of our dirty little in-house secrets was that even we, who were paid to read it, often couldn't hack the Sunday paper."

  no urgency

  He immediately ran into a culture "that requires mass allegiance to the idea that any change, no matter how beneficial on the surface, is to be treated as a potential danger."

  He makes repeated references to pervasive "lethargy and complacency." He refers to "ma?ana journalism," the idea that there is no urgency in reporting the news, something that strikes newcomers to American journalism as a bizarre eccentricity.

  Some departments, he writes, "hastily and explicitly school impressionable reporters in shrugging off scoops by other news organizations, with the reassuring but dangerously outmoded Times maxim, `It's not news until we say it's news.' The debilitating corollary to this idea is that it's all right for the Times to get beaten on big stories, because when it gets around to doing them, it'll do them better."

  After a probationary period of 14 weeks, workers get tenure for life. Raines tells the story of one worker who the company tried to fire but his supervising editor narrowly missed the cut-off point.

  The supervisor argued that the worker surely did not want to stay where he was not wanted because of a technicality. The worker disagreed and is still there 25 years later.

  "For people who have worked at other newspapers, the biggest shock upon coming to the Times is that the level of talent is not higher than it is. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the level of applied talent. Very few unintelligent people get hired at the Times. So what's shocking to the newcomer is the amount of coasting," he says. "At the Times, as at Harvard, it is hard to get in and almost impossible to flunk out."

  brick wall

  His comments will rattle the paper. The New York Times is pushing to build itself into a national and international powerhouse. The paper now sells more copies outside of the New York area than it does in the city but overall circulation has hit a brick wall at just 1.1 million, in a nation of 290 million.

  Advertising is also faltering, leading the company to issue a profit warning for the first quarter while rivals are enjoying strong growth.

  It was the custom in the newsroom Raines says, to blame the business executives for the failure to keep pushing circulation growth. But he suspects that the paper simply had to improve the quality

  of its journalism. He praises the departing chief executive Russell Lewis and Janet Robinson, a former advertising boss who will take the top job at the end of the year.

  A spokeswoman for the New York Times preferred to overlook the criticisms and pointed to the positive elements in Raines's report.

  She said, "In his article in Atlantic Monthly, Mr Raines calls the Times `indispensable' and irreplaceable.' We agree. And this is due to the inspired work of Times men and women over the decades."

  Raines's passion for the paper is tangible. He heaps praise on the depth and quality of the award-winning reporting during and after the terrorist attacks. He also says he worked with the most talented staff in the business. "My greatest frustration was that the Times was seldom as good as it could have been, given its advantages in money and prestige over other papers."

  arcane

  He also talks of the achievements made during his tenure; of vast improvements in business and arts coverage. The arts editor, he says, had previously been a fan of the "arcane corners" of classical music and the paper had lost touch with readers' interests.

  "Serious journalism did not have to be restricted to traditional somber subjects," he says.

  "We had to be as good on popular culture as we were on high

  culture." He cites the death of the singer Aaliyah, a huge event in minority communities which was virtually ignored by the Times "because one of our music critics had declared her a minor musician."

  There was more than a hint of schadenfreude a few weeks ago when the Times ran a front-page story on USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, whose own fabrications made Blair's look quite mild by comparison. Kelly had allegedly invented accounts including a face-to-face encounter with a suicide bomber in Jerusalem and his participation in a hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2003. The suggestion seemed to be that a Jayson Blair could happen anywhere. Viewed through Raines' eyes, it was perhaps another example of the complacency that has again taken root.

  Raines describes the emotional meeting on June 4 last year when the failure to quell unrest sparked by the Blair episode led to his being fired. "`You've given your

  life to this paper,' Arthur said. He reached out and grasped my arm, and seemed almost overcome for a moment. I knew him well enough to see that his agony was genuine but his mind was made up. The language was all familiar Times-speak, some of it debatable, much of it true. Arthur believed that if I stayed there would be `too much blood on the floor.'"

  Raines now says that he thinks of Blair as "an accident that ended my newspaper career in the same unpredictable way that a heart attack or a plane crash might have."

  That doesn't diminish its impact. He recalls a dinner with Sulzberger in early 2001 when they were discussing plans to revamp the paper. "Neither of us could have imagined that in a little more than two years a young, relatively unknown reporter named Jayson Blair would figure prominently in the derailment of the managerial reformation for which we were laying the tracks."
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