2019-10-21_Time

72 Time October 21–28, 2019

Uber was taking their fares, but because a mendacious city taxi-

cab commission pumped the price of a medallion to levels that

mathematically could not be paid back. But it’s something else

to hear the reporter walk you through it all on The Daily and

mention, in passing, “We talked to 450 people for this story.”

loomIng behInd all thIs newness is the baggage that

comes with “legacy” media. In the early 21st century the Times

accumulated a string of controversies including employment of

a fabulist reporter (Jayson Blair), the subsequent resignation of

its top two editors and the interrogation

of its pliant coverage of the George W.

Bush Administration’s rationale for in-

vading Iraq. Then on May 14, 2014, Sul-

zberger’s father fired Abramson, the first

woman to serve as executive editor. One

day later, a leaked copy of the Innovation

Report appeared on BuzzFeed, baldly

laying out the paper’s shortfalls in the

digital realm, and the reasons.

But what could have been another scandal was read, both

inside and outside the company, as a welcome dose of candor.

The reaction became the first expression of a transformation

nudging the Times toward the fail- forward culture of a startup.

Lots of things were tried: The first smartphone app, NYT Now,

turned out to be a flop, but was cannibalized wholesale to pro-

duce the one now on millions of phones—a long, rich scroll, con-

stantly updated, that drives the newsroom metabolism as the

front page used to. The cooking app launched in 2014, on the

other hand, was an instant hit, and puzzles a no-brainer (“I take

the teacher, Tracy Breton, a Pulitzer Prize winner who coaxed
him into an internship at a Providence, R.I., paper. “And so I gave
it a shot. And ended up loving it.” He moved on to the Oregonian
in Portland, and in 2009 agreed to come home to the Times.
Even—maybe especially—for a Sulzberger, the newsroom
was hugely intimidating. The Times has won 127 Pulitzer Prizes,
nearly twice as many as any other outlet, and projected the staid
confidence of the Establishment it embodies. While his last
name certainly got him a job at the Times and may have helped
him onto the front page, it was the quality of his reporting and
writing that landed him there some 40 times (though he may
be best remembered for a Food section cover about being a veg-
etarian: meaTleSS in THe midweST: a Tale Of SURvival).
“Probably one of the quickest studies I’ve ever worked with,”
says Adam Bryant, who was his editor when Sulzberger was the
Kansas City bureau chief, where he landed after a year and a half
in the newsroom. “He’s always learning and synthesizing and
asking ‘What makes sense here?’ whether it’s a story, a leadership
challenge or the strategy for the future of the New York Times.”
In 2013, Sulzberger was back in New York, learning edit-
ing on the metro desk and looking for-
ward to the possibility of the ultimate
adventure as a foreign correspondent,
when Keller’s successor as top editor,
Jill Abramson, asked him to steer the
committee on what the Times should be
doing online. “I wasn’t exactly the most
digital person in the newsroom,” he says.
He didn’t have a Facebook account, and had posted on Twitter
maybe twice. But he was told he had no choice.
“The miscasting ended up being a really good thing,” he says,
articulating what would become his management method, “be-
cause I went in absolutely certain that I did not know enough
and that I had to learn. As a reporter you know this, right? You
think you have the story, and the more you talk to people, even
when you’re hearing consistent things, not everyone else is con-
necting the dots. And at some you point you say, ‘Oh, here is
the story.’ And to me the story was that the New York Times
was holding the future at arm’s length.”
Not anymore. Five years later, the
Times still publishes in print (and makes
a nice profit on it) but seems to exist first
and naturally in the digital realm. Stories
appear in combinations of words, images,
video, and graphics with a fluidity that
feels both immediate and thoughtful. It
can reconstruct a fatal avalanche, offer a
tour of Guantánamo, get to the bottom of a chemical- weapons
attack and take the reader with its architecture critic to a new
office park he finds appalling.
And if it fails to grasp the idea of news alerts—the Times is
much less likely to ping a phone with actual breaking news than
with a tease for a story it wants to show off—there’s a lot to show
off. The newsroom produces a major investigation or ambitious
enterprise story almost daily—and in formats that serve both the
reader and the Times. Consider the case of a rash of taxi-driver
suicides in New York: It is one thing to read a long story explain-
ing that the drivers were unable to pay their debts not because

>

The newsroom

gathers in April

for Pulitzer

announcements

Business

The Times now

seems to exist first

and naturally in

the digital realm