I have read that many journalists were inspired in part to join the profession after reading Gay Talese’s, The Kingdom and the Power, a book published in 1969 about the New York Times, and the Watergate book, All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. No young person, though, will read Adam Nagourney’s book, The Times, and come away convinced that The New York Times has been a great place to work, whatever they may think about journalism as a career.
The book dwells on the challenges and the missteps of The New York Times from 1977 to 2016. During this period, there was the challenge to newspapers’ business model relying on advertising by the rise of the internet, and The New York Times committed serious journalistic errors, such as publishing Judith Miller’s articles on Iraq and Jayson Blair’s made-up stories, among others, which damaged the paper’s reputation.
The story Nagourney tells, though, has a happy ending. While the paper was slow to embrace the internet, it finally bowed to the inevitable and has regained its financial footing. It did not have to do this the way The Washington Post found its financial salvation by selling itself to a billionaire savior, Jeff Bezos. The New York Times has in recent years become more a digital news outlet, with more of its revenue coming from digital rather than print subscriptions. However, missing in Nagourney’s telling is the role of Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire, who is barely mentioned. Mr. Slim provided loans and investments which enabled the New York Times to survive difficult financial times.
The book’s focus is on how the two publishers and seven executive editors during the period covered coped with the challenges. Other employees of the paper appear when they become important to the top people. There is much detail concerning personal rivalries, maneuvers to get promoted, management style, and so on. It makes for an interesting and long story.
Nagourney, himself, a longtime political journalist who eventually gave up his mostly national politics focused beat when he moved to Los Angeles, nowhere appears in the book. For a while, he was the Los Angeles bureau chief and then a cultural correspondent and now is back to covering national politics, though still based in Los Angeles. For some of us, it had been a bit of a mystery of what he had been up to, but now we know. He was writing this heavily researched and detailed book.
As a longtime reader of The New York Times, I wish there had been more discussion of its editorial and op-ed pages. For example, while William Safire’s controversial hiring in 1973 took place before this book begins, there might have been some mention of his success at being a mostly conservative columnist who also wrote a brilliant column on language for the paper’s Sunday magazine supplement. (Safire had been a speech writer for Vice President Spiro Agnew and was famous for phrases heavy in alliteration, such as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”) The New York Times has not been as successful in hiring other interesting conservatives as columnists. The book’s discussion of columnists is mostly about their being consulted by others.
In addition, missing is much discussion of how the reporters were impacted by this tumultuous period, except in broad generalities. Also, there is no discussion of the work life at foreign bureaus or U.S. regional bureaus, with the exception of Washington, DC. The tensions between the home office in New York and the Washington, DC bureau does play a significant role in the narrative.
Nevertheless, this book, while both long and limited in focus, is interesting, especially for devoted readers of The New York Times. For all its troubles and missteps, the Times is undoubtedly the most important English language newspaper in the world, and its influence is broader than its readership, because it plays a significant role in setting the news agenda for other news outlets in the United States, including for television and cable news.
It is reassuring that the story Nagourney tells has a mostly happy ending. That was not inevitable; the paper could have disappeared in a bankruptcy proceeding. It is also reassuring that the Washington Post, with a significant assist from Jeff Bezos, is providing serious competition. This makes both papers better. In addition, The Wall Street Journal does provide some competition in its news pages. I wish that other papers, such as the Los Angeles Times, would provide more competition at the national level.
To an extent, the British newspaper, The Guardian, provides web competition for U.S. papers, especially because it provides significant coverage of U.S. news. During the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I thought The Guardian’s coverage was more reliable than that of U.S. papers, including the Times. It turns out I was right.
Nagourney ends his book on an
optimistic note concerning how The New York Times has reinvented
itself and continues to provide much needed journalism. I agree with that and
can recommend his book to those interested in journalism in general or The
New York Times in particular. The book is well-written and, for all its
length, never boring.
