The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney

This important work about the newspaper of record covers the years 1977-2016 and is compelling reading. The previous seminole work about the Times written by Gay Talese ended with with the death of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, in December 1968. It is must reading for anyone interested in the fourth estate.

However should a potential author decide to fill in the years1969-1977 at The New York Times, covering the business as well as the news side, here is some history which should be researched and covered (much of the following came from meetings with the late Ivan Veit, a former Times executive and Board Member who was close to the Sulzberger family, as well as first hand experience):

Mad Men Era New York Times Business Side History (1970-1980’s)
In this decade, mid 70’s to mid 80’s there was no one on the business more important to assuring a future for the New York Times, than Walt Mattson, who, because he had come up on the production side, was well positioned, as Executive VP, to take on the featherbedding, increasingly redundant craft unions who threatened the company’s very existence. Mattson, a University of Maine graduate, did not fit in with the more worldly and erudite Times crowd, but he was a strong manager who never showed his hand. He and Publisher Punch Sulzberger were not personally or socially close and, in fact it was partly because Punch didn’t fully trust him that he named his old buddy John Pomfret, having once worked together as reporters at the Milwaukee Journal at the beginning of their careers, to be Mattson’s number two, as Senior Vice President. Upon informing both Mattson and Pomfret of Pomfret’s impending job appointment, both independently went to the Publisher’s office and told Punch that each could and would not work with the other; However, Punch told them they had no choice and “work it out.” Pomfret was in many ways the opposite of Mattson and his arrogance made him persona not grata in the news department, which was his first love. While it took a lengthy strike (i was one of several managers trained in Craft production jobs at the non union Miami Herald, though that never panned out), the Times won the necessary concessions from the production craft unions, so Mattson fulfilled his main mission. (Later on, due to the lose lips of a Heidrick & Struggles recruiter, it came to Punch Sulzberger’s attention (through his confidant Sydney Gruson) that through that search firm Mattson had accepted an interview with the then Tribune owned Daily News for their top management job, though Mattson explained to Punch when confronted that he accepted the interview as part of a fact finding mission and was never contemplating the acceptance of the job).
Mattson and Pomfret had a bad record when it came to overseeing the advertising department, which they little understood and had limited interest. (Indeed when the newspaper was between optimum press run sizes, Mattson always chose to save money by choosing the smaller number of pages, often leaving advertising sales representatives having to tell advertisers that their ads were going to be left out of the next day’s paper). One thing Mattson was adamant about, Pomfret being the exception he could not control, was hiring people that owed him their total loyalty and getting rid of anyone who may have been there before (such as well liked John McCabe who had risen from old school”office boy” in the advertising department to Sr VP). While Fred Thompson was discussed in Part 1 of my posts, another person both Pomfret and Mattson had their eye on as having senior management potential (besides Lance Primis) was Peter Bonanni, whom Thompson had hired from the magazine business. Peter was a performance artist, arranging lots of after hours parties for his staff and was well known in the business for his personality. When out of the usual courtesy I took him to lunch at The Princeton Club on his first day of work (despite being having totally different management styles, we actually hit it off well) he made it very clear to me that his career was not based on loyally climbing the ladder, but using each job to find a better one elsewhere. He later proved his point when having been sent by Mattson/Pomfret to an Advanced Management Course at Harvard Business School, he summarily and with no notice resigned from the New York Times to accept a publisher’s job with a woman’s magazine (which left the field open to Primis, who with Mattson’s support worked his way up to Times President from where he was eventually ceremoniously and very publicly fired (allowed to”resign”). One story has it that Primis had installed an expensive overly large custom desk in his lavishly furnished office which then Publisher Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger ordered be cut in half in order to remove it).

In 1975 Fred Thompson was appointed VP Advertising of the NYT. At one point convinced his boss (who despised him) Sr. VP-General Manager John Pomfret along with then Executive VP Walt Mattson that if the Times retained advertising agency McCann Erickson as its agency of record, they, in turn, would convince their package goods clients to reduce their broadcast spend and advertise in the NYT.
Of course this idea was totally ridiculous, but no one in Times senior management would listen to reason. At the pitch by McCann neophyte Times senior management was totally so snowed by its slickness (involving over 20 optional story boards to confuse them), that they retained McCann as The New York Times agency of record, only to fire them in very short time. Of course Fred Thompson’s assumption about package goods advertising never materialized. Even then Sr VP John Pomfret was so taken by McCann’s razzle-dazzle that after the contract with McCann was terminated, he hired the McCann’s former account executive on the Times’ account as Promotion Manager, only to fire him after he was caught by Fred Thompson having sex with a female member of his staff during the annual holiday party (and apparently leaving his office door ajar).
Thompson was mega wealthy through marriage, having married the niece of DeWitt Wallace, founder of Readers Digest and his only heir. It was later revealed in a book about Readers Digest that she had been having a multi year incestuous affair with her uncle, while her husband, Thompson, was the Digest’s first VP of Advertising. Wallace’s wife, learning about the affair, had Thompson assigned overseas, but the trysts continued, leading to his being fired by Readers Digest, done quite publicly at a black tie dinner that was announced as being in his honor, but was in fact his retirement party a fact he only learned at the dinner’s first speech. He eventually then found a job with the NYT’s former magazine division, the head of which in turn wanted to get rid of him for poor performance. But he was a friend of NYT Board member Gardner Cowles Jr. and no one in NYT management wanted to offend him, so they needed to find a place where Thompson could land gracefully. This fit in with Mattson’s wanting to replace the NYT Adv Director, Warren Wolfe, because Wolfe had gotten the job instead of Mattson’s candidate, with whom he had worked on the ill conceived “western edition.” Hence he gave Thompson that job, freeing the magazine division to replace him.
Thompson was eventually kicked upstairs to the senior executive (14th at the 229 West 43rd Street headquarters ) floor in a trumped up position in charge of selling paper from the Times owned super calendared paper mill (used to print the NYT Magazine) but New York Times Publisher “Punch” Sulzberger found Thompson to be “quite odd and acting strangely” thus finding his presence so off putting he dispatched him an office in Rockefeller Center. That indeed was another era and I don’t think it could recur today.

Adam Nagourney is not only a top-flight journalist, but he has written an authoritative history of the paper of record. I recommend this volume highly to anyone wanting to understand not only the NY Times, but the transition of journalism to the digital age. A fascinating read by a master writer.

There is some good reporting in The Times, and it’s not badly written. But the book is too soft about many of the events it recounts. For example. we get numerous references to what an awful place the newsroom was under A.M. Rosenthal, but very few real stories about the cruel abuse he and his minions subjected so many good people to. Why not some details for history? Show, don’t tell. In other places, the book is too credulous. The author seems to think Andrew Rosenthal, A.M.’s son, was fired as Editorial Page Editor because he and the publisher had “quarrels” about things like mayoral term limits. That must be Andrew’s account — he is the only source cited for it. But It’s hard to believe someone with Andrew’s lineage was removed from a top job because of a few differences on relatively minor policies. The author does not mention how terrible he was as a manager and how abusive Andrew’s department was to staff (echoes of his father), a more plausible explanation. Nagourney also goes far too easy on Jill Abramson. Did he not have any good stories, which are certainly out there, or is he just too nice to include them? The book should be of interest to people who want to know more about the inner workings of the Times, but there was a better, more compelling book that could have been written.

It’s hard to beat the writing when the research on our nation’s “paper of record” is as profoundly deep as. in THE TIMES. To understand the New York Times is to understand the cross currents in America since 1976.