Gray Lady Down Read Online Free PDF

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 Publishers Association, Sulzberger pushed diversity as an industry obligation. At the Times itself, he encouraged a variety of corporate and newsroom initiatives to get the paper into the Promised Land. He aimed to replace the Times’ pledge to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor,” with the more amorphous promise to “enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.” The new motto never got any traction in or out of the newsroom.
    On a more practical level, Sulzberger put all managers, especially newsroom