who was made editor when Rosenthal retired in 1986, tried to play mentor and run interference for Arthur, often imperceptibly grimacing inside when Arthur Jr. made glib, inappropriate comments or went off in a mistaken direction. He played behind the scenes to rectify the damage and soothe ruffled feathers. (“I’ll say this about Arthur,” Frankel was said to have quipped privately. “He never makes the same mistake three times.”)
Despite the extensive grooming, as the time drew near for “Punch” Sulzberger to hand over the reins, questions about Arthur Jr.’s management style and personality were mounting. According to Tifft and Jones, at the board of directors meeting after Punch announced his intention to step aside and have Arthur Jr. step into his shoes, the hesitation in the boardroom was “palpable.” The single presentation that Arthur had made to the board left them unimpressed. Many of them didn’t know him at all except for his reputation; his lack of maturity and his questionable leadership skills had left them worried. “We heard a lot of stories,” one board member told Tifft and Jones. “People would say: I was talking to so and so and he tells me that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the most impossible SOB.”
The board responded by delaying the succession proposal. They were not rejecting Arthur Jr., board members wanted to ensure Punch; they just wanted to get to know him better. The board also wanted reassurance that naming Arthur Jr. publisher would not automatically mean that he would become chairman and CEO, out of concern for Wall Street’s dim view of “irresponsible nepotism.” Punch Sulzberger could have overruled the board. Instead, he chose to lobby them for a few months to set a better stage for Arthur’s debut. When the board assembled again in January, they ratified Punch’s choice.
According to Tifft and Jones, a pair of eerie omens cast shadows on the occasion. The day that Arthur was made publisher, the bulbs blew out on the large clock hanging outside the Times building on 43rd Street, with its Gothic letters spelling TIMES. Upstairs in the mahogany-paneled boardroom, just as Punch Sulzberger introduced Arthur as the man who was going to be named publisher, one of the heavy bottom windows in the august room flew up and a cold rush of wind caused a framed photograph of the Shah of Iran to crash onto the floor. One board member joked that it was the spirit of Adolph Ochs. Another jested, “No, it’s the winds of change.” Mike Ryan, the Times’ attorney, told Tifft and Jones that the experience was “frightening.” In thirty-five years he had never seen anything like it in the boardroom.
Insiders were right to worry about the transition. Sulzberger Jr. was about to face a financial and journalistic crisis even worse than the one his father and Abe Rosenthal calmed in the 1970s. As Edwin Diamond observed in Behind the Times, among these challenges was the need to create new news products for an emerging multimedia world while still maintaining the most important aspect of the organization’s franchise: the role of defining the nation’s news agenda and reporting news with fairness, accuracy and context. The paper also had to find a way to balance the interests of its older, elite audience with those of a younger readership—a readership increasingly foreign born. “The Times could once at a minimum count on an intellectual audience that not only wanted to read the Times but felt that it had to. The paper’s authority was unchallenged,” wrote Diamond, but “These certitudes no longer exist[ed].”
At the time of his ascension, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. had been running the paper on a day-to-day basis since 1988, casting critical votes in various company decisions, if not having explicit veto power. But with the new title, he began to act with more force, revamping both the management culture of the paper and its news product to fit his vision for the needs of the future. It was a vision reflecting his own values, beliefs, temperament and experience, defined by a combination of New Age management theory, aging liberal pieties, sixties-style countercultural advocacy and affectations, as well as the identity politics of the 1980s and early 1990s. It was a vision preoccupied with the pursuit of youth demographics, one that encouraged the Times to be self-consciously hip and its reporters to write with flair, or at least make the attempt. And it was a vision that promoted opportunities for “opinion” to an unprecedented degree.
A New Age management theory that Sulzberger found intriguing was William Edward Deming’s notion of “management by obligation.” Demingism asked managers to embrace three virtues: “self-esteem, intrinsic motivation and the curiosity to learn.” Sulzberger Jr. had been much impressed by his teenage experience in Outward Bound; and Demingism, with its emphasis on self-discovery, bonding and team play, has been likened to “Outward Bound in a business suit.” Deming’s ideas also provided Sulzberger with a way of adding gravitas to his leadership abilities.
But the management revolution that Sulzberger wanted to encourage stumbled badly from the outset, further damaging morale as egos were bruised and tempers flared in seminars that were supposed to help close fissures. Sulzberger was undeterred, however. When the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta told him some of the old-timers at the paper were complaining that he was trying to establish his legacy too quickly, Sulzberger quipped: “I’ll outlive the bastards.”
Meanwhile, Sulzberger took the concern over trends and age cohorts to a level beyond what drove the Sectional Revolution of the 1970s. The old thinking about the Times was that it “should not be too popular and should not try to be,” as Edwin Diamond phrased it. But as Diamond also explained, market research and focus groups indicated a disturbing trend toward “aliteracy,” with otherwise educated young professionals saying “they had no interest in picking up a copy of the Times.” And it wasn’t just a local problem. In 1967, roughly two-thirds of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine read a newspaper; in 1988 the figure was 29 percent.
The research commissioned by the Times showed that the paper was defining itself too narrowly to appeal to an elite that no longer existed in its traditional form. It needed to adjust its journalistic offerings, and its pool of talent, to appeal to an evolving elite that included the educated classes from the city’s booming immigrant populations.
One manifestation of demographic anxiety was the crusade for “diversity” that Arthur Jr. mounted in his newsroom and led in the newspaper industry at large. Diversity, he argued, was not just a moral issue, a vehicle for taking the civil rights movement to another level; it was also an economic necessity if newspapers were to survive in an America whose demographic reality was rapidly changing. Enthusiastically mouthing the slogan “diversity makes good business sense; makes moral sense too,” Sulzberger blithely ignored warnings that the ideological and political dimension of diversity risked fragmenting newsrooms along racial, ethnic and gender lines, and could make the Times more partisan as he forged ahead to make it “look like America,” in Bill Clinton’s words.
Arthur Jr. had clearly telegraphed his fixation on diversity before he assumed the throne at the Times. Shortly after he was named deputy publisher in 1988, he started assembling certain middle and senior managers and giving what came to be dubbed “The Speech.” At its intellectual center was one demographic fact that he believed had more resonance for the future of the Times than any other: by the end of the 1990s, 80 percent of all new American employees would be women, minorities or first-generation immigrants. This rapidly shifting demographic mix of future employees—and future readers—did not give the Times very long “to get its white male house in order,” Sulzberger told a management seminar in 1989, again stressing that diversity was “the single most important issue” the Times faced. At the 1991 convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Kansas City, Sulzberger spoke of the difficult climate for racial change and the roadblocks standing in the way of “our cause.” To considerable applause, he told the audience: “Keep pushing. Keep pushing to turn your vision of Diversity into our reality.”
Once he became publisher in 1991, he banged the drum even harder, amplifying, refining and implementing “The Speech.” As one of the principal figures in the American Newspaper
