A Balanced Portrait of the Evolving Times   

Behind The Times: Inside the
New New York Times
By Edwin Diamond
Villard Books

Behind The Times: Inside the
New New York Times
By Edwin Diamond
Villard Books
424 pages; $23

On the Sunday I finished Edwin Diamond's excellent book (see page 16), the New York Times Magazine featured a color-splashed centerpiece on mail-order catalogues, with a bosomy photo from Victoria's Secret and an underwear-clad male model that left no doubt Lorena Bobbitt hadn't been anywhere near his vital parts.

The package would have been right at home in USA Today or People, and it embodied some key themes Diamond raises.

In part, the New York Times is sui generis, an icon that rightfully transcends the tribulations besetting today's plebian press. But it is also, in more mundane ways, just another news sheet scrambling to get readers.

The dramatic tension lies in that collision of iron tradition and forced change. A tabernacle of aristocratic eminence struggles to uphold its dignity as it slides toward the pop journalism it once could disdain.

News lovers watch with conflicting emotions, appreciating the skillful way the paper is remaking itself, yet feeling an almost spiritual sense of loss. In the age of infotainment, why can't the Times remain the Times?

Diamond shows why with numbers, from declining profits (down to 5 percent in 1991) to puny penetration in its local market (10 percent, compared with the Washington Post's 60 percent) to encroachment from a revved-up New York Newsday and a ground-down ad base.

"The traditional Times was a newspaper with a grand mission... The Times saw itself as the paper of responsibility, covering the American era," Diamond writes. "..[Now it] will try to engage new audiences with a relevant, reader-friendly Times of broad appeal."

Diamond, a media columnist for New York magazine, brings forth these issues with lively writing and insider anecdotes. Unlike many other looks at the paper, "Behind The Times" seems balanced, thorough and dispassionate. Diamond's tone is neither spiteful nor fawning. He presents detached criticism and due respect.

His material spans a watershed period: the handoff of the Times from Punch Sulzberger to his forward-thinking son Arthur Jr., the change of editorial command from "volcanic" Abe Rosenthal to "meditative" Max Frankel, and the repositioning from a nationally focused paper "edited by elites for elites" to "a New York City newspaper, with a distinctly popular appeal [for] a broader, younger audience."

For Diamond, a cardinal tenet is that the Times has long been a publisher's paper, with substantial business-side influence on content. In Punch Sulzberger's 29-year reign, he functioned as a "hidden hand," churning out story ideas, goading the news side to accept softer sections like Home and Fashions of the Times, constantly nudging the paper toward the center, and even writing letters to the editor under the pseudonym A. Sock (a pun on the nickname Punch).

While Rosenthal's fiery personality dominated the newsroom, Diamond argues, the tortoise-like tenacity of Sulzberger and company President Walter Mattson prodded the Times inexorably along a centrist, mainstream course.

When Frankel succeeded Rosenthal in 1986, the newsroom character changed somewhat. But it was the ascension of Arthur Jr. in 1992 as the Times' fifth publisher that, according to Diamond, cleared the way for truly fundamental shifts.

The younger Sulzberger moved quickly to promote diversity in staffing and content, introduce modern management and marketing, upgrade sports and other populist coverage, expand the range of voices in the paper's more than four dozen columns, and, perhaps most revolutionary, reduce dependence on advertising by increasing the proportion of circulation revenue.

Diamond efficiently recounts many old legends, including the paper's celebrated battles with reporters Ray Bonner and Richard Severo; its "little wild streaks" that brought embarrassing front page stories about Kitty Kelley and Patricia Bowman; the recurring charges of cronyism and the nonstop palace intrigue.

He provides useful mini-profiles of such interesting supporting cast members as Anna Quindlen and Paul Goldberger, and he even dishes out a little gossip (like the story about a contender to replace Rosenthal who was advised to dress better and marry his live-in companion).

Diamond also drops interesting tidbits about the paper: It has 27 news desks, the editorial section receives about 100 op-ed contributions and 300 letters every day, and its food critic runs up as much as $125,000 in expenses a year.

Where Diamond especially excels is in dissecting the subtleties of the Times culture. His sections on what makes a good Timesperson vividly show how everyone from book reviewers to foreign correspondents find themselves acculturated into the paper's clubby middlebrowness.

"New arrivals — young, eager, malleable — quickly pick up the not-so-hidden clues to what the news desks want. They learn, through the patterns of rewards and punishments, the values of 'the good Timesman' — just as employees of large companies like IBM or Citicorp learn what's expected of them... Punishment for 'bad' Times behavior is sometimes done so openly that the names might just as well have been posted on bulletin boards." The result, as former Times reporter Robert Darnton describes it, is "standardization and stereotyping."

Where Sulzberger and Frankel will take the Times is something Diamond doesn't try to predict, although he dourly judges the efforts so far as "limp banners for rallying the forces of sustained, serious journalism."

Ûo key questions remain. Can the Times modernize by adding powerful new attractions without compromising its devotion to serious news? Can it serve as a model in balancing unswerving quality with reader responsiveness?

Given its sacerdotal authority in setting standards, these are crucial questions.

Once there was a certain security in observing the unflinching majesty of such institutions as CBS News, the New Yorker and the New York Times. Let others blow with the breezes; the monuments stood firm.

Now CBS News is a pale also-ran, the New Yorker is being Vanity Fair-ized, and the Times devotes section-front packages to "General Hospital." Meanwhile, USA Today, with less public notice, seems to be closing in on the mainstream from another direction, running longer, meatier fare, more front page stories about NAFTA, for example, and fewer about, say, mail-order catalogues.

Maybe this is good. But let's hope all these grand institutions don't crash head on, as they converge pell-mell toward the center.