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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