It is an efficient, if more staid, bureaucracy these days. There are 10 million subscribers and lots of moving parts, not all of which are particularly newspapery - games and recipes and product reviews and wellness content. What was once a daily newspaper of record is now a global continuous news source, endlessly churning out journalism at all hours and in all formats. was just 37 when he took over and has since overseen a vast transformation. who’d taken over in 1992 from his father, Arthur Sr. Nagourney ends the book just before Arthur Sulzberger Jr. ( Jayson Blair! Judy Miller! Raines versus Abramson! Abramson versus Baquet!) Who could resist one last chance to … correct the record? When I called around last week to old-school Timesfolk to ask if they’d read an early copy yet, people kept asking me, with a mixture of panic and pride, Am I in there? I was really involved with … and then they’d recount some long-ago controversy. Lelyveld and Keller literally handed me boxes of stuff and said, ‘Have at it.’” “Lelyveld, Keller, Raines, and Abramson shared documents with me. “What I didn’t realize was that once Arthur agreed to do it, everyone was going to agree to do it,” says Nagourney. Nagourney also interviewed every living former executive editor that would be Max Frankel (he ran the paper from 1986–1994), Joe Lelyveld (1994–2001, and again for a spell in 2003), Howell Raines (2001–2003), Bill Keller (2003–2011), Jill Abramson (2011–2014), and Dean Baquet (2014–2022). He began working on it in 2016, after convincing the publisher of the paper at that time, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., to sit for interviews. He took a leave to work on this book and says that the Times had no approval over what he put in or left out, and did not review it prepublication. Nagourney, who is 68, was first hired at the paper in 1996 (to cover Bob Dole’s campaign) and is still employed there, writing about politics. “People who leave the New York Times frequently find that they feel like they’ve fallen off the face of the earth,” he adds between bites of a cheeseburger. We got one of those good round tables in the corner up front by the bar. “It’s part of the DNA of the Times and it’s part of the reason the newsroom is so tightly wound.” It was late one night in mid-September and we were meeting at JG Melon on the Upper East Side. “People who work there often judge their self-worth by how well they do there,” says Nagourney. The book’s pages are splattered with pulped ego, and the career body count is high. And when you look too closely, as Nagourney does, there’s not always a lot of dignity or decorum to be found. But this is mostly a story about a lot of very smart and ambitious people caught in the thrall of their employer. It’s the story of the paper trying to change with the times, while never forgetting that it is the Times - a “medieval modern kingdom,” as Talese called it back then, “a bible emerging each morning with a view of life that thousands of readers accepted as reality.” These days, it’s millions, reading it on their phones, or getting it in podcast form. Its subhead reads: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism. In the second chapter of The Kingdom and the Power, the 1969 book about the first 75 years that the New York Times was owned by the very same Ochs-Sulzberger family that owns it to this day, Gay Talese writes that “if the Times were covered as the Times covers the world,” then the office of its top editor “would lose much of the dignity and decorum that it now seems to possess.” Such was the goal of his now-famous book, and in a way it is also that of Adam Nagourney’s new book, simply called The Times, which picks up a few years after Talese’s book ends and continues until Donald Trump’s election. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photos: Getty Images Ruth Fremson/Reuters Damon Winters/The New York Times/Redux
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