WHY BE MISERABLE?
In all the coverage of the NYT imbroglio (here's Howard Kurtz's latest), nobody to my knowledge has bluntly stated what most journalists know: The New York Times is a miserable place to work. That was true before Howell Raines, though he apparently made things worse, and it will be true now that he's gone.
Times staffers are willing to put up with the paper's ridiculous hours and extreme office politics for the same reason I put up with the paper's demand for all rights to my articles: Because the benefits outweigh the costs. As long as the staff felt proud of their work, and of working for the Times, they put up with abusive management. But when the Times became a laughing stock, the tradeoff was no longer worth it, and a revolt was inevitable.
As befits a business paper, Friday's WSJ report (subscription necessary) emphasizes how bad management stifled needed internal feedback and led to a degraded product:
In less than two years as executive editor -- the second-shortest tenure in the Times's 152-year history -- Mr. Raines did two things that in hindsight proved to be a volatile combination. He consolidated power and control within a coterie of confidants and pet reporters, intensifying a culture that discouraged dissent and occasionally gridlocked the paper's operations. At the same time, he pushed his 1,000-person news staff to move faster and more aggressively to get stories into the paper -- raising its "metabolism," he said. Mr. Boyd was a close lieutenant of Mr. Raines and was widely seen in the newsroom as the executive who enforced his boss's demands.
The newsroom's unhappiness wasn't a priority for Times management until the paper wrote in painstaking detail on May 11 about how Mr. Blair, a rising star, repeatedly made up facts and plagiarized. Two weeks later, Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg quit after being suspended for taking credit for a story with substantial reporting by his unpaid intern. Messrs. Blair and Bragg were vilified internally. But because they were seen as favored by Mr. Raines, their resignations crystallized complaints about his leadership and systemic problems at the paper -- including some that predate the Raines regime.
"There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical structure," Linda Greenhouse, a veteran Times reporter who covers the Supreme Court, said in an interview last month. "And it's a culture where speaking truth to power has never been particularly welcomed."...
Mr. Raines's activism included picking and assigning stories for the front page very different from the Times's usual serious fare. Both editors and reporters alike were reluctant to report back that the story wasn't correct or interesting, staffers say. One staffer dubbed Mr. Raines's interest in pop culture as "charge of the lite brigade." Two reporters spent five days reporting Mr. Raines's contention that Britney Spears's career was over without feeling confident they could prove his hypothesis, according to a person involved with the process. The resulting story ran on the front page on Oct. 6 headlined, "Schoolyard Superstar Aims for a Second Act, as an Adult."
Mr. Raines's management style and that of Mr. Boyd have "created an environment where it is often seen as more important to get the story when and how you want it rather than to get it right," deputy investigations editor Julia Preston told Times staffers at last month's mass meeting.
One beneficiary of Mr. Raines's support was the paper's chief correspondent, Patrick Tyler. The Times hired him in 1990 at Mr. Raines's recommendation, and when Mr. Raines became editor he gave Mr. Tyler choice assignments. Recently, his stories have drawn some high-profile corrections. An Aug. 16, 2002, story, which Mr. Tyler wrote with Todd Purdum, said many senior Republicans, including Henry Kissinger, opposed a war in Iraq. Mr. Kissinger hadn't said that. Mr. Tyler says the story should have elaborated Dr. Kissinger's position further and that he agreed with the correction that appeared in the paper.
Maybe the next executive editor of the Times should take Andrew Sullivan a bit more seriously. Definitely the next executive editor of the Times should take Andrew Grove seriously. Read Only the Paranoid Survive. Pay attention to what Grove says about internal email and what the guys in the field knew that headquarters missed until it was almost too late. And realize that the news business is at an inflection point. If the Times is going to remain the Times, its management will have to change in ways that make the organization nimbler and the product better.