The New Yorker Radio Hour - Children’s Letters to Satan, and a Changing of the Guard at the New York Times

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

Every year, countless poor spellers accidentally address their Santa letters to Satan.  Satan—played by Kathleen Turner—always replies Matt Passet’s Daily Shouts piece is performed by Kathleen Turner, in the role of Satan.  On January first, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who goes by A. G., will succeed his father Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., as the publisher of the New York Times. At 37, A. G. is young for the job and he’s taking over one of the world’s most important news institutions at an extremely complicated time for the business of journalism. But he is not afraid of the future: his 2014 internal report to the Times’ leadership, which Buzzfeed leaked to the world, is credited with jump-starting the paper’s transition into a digital-first news platform. David Remnick talks with Sulzberger about his apprenticeship at a small-town reporter, the “Trump bump,” and how long we can expect the print edition of the Times to remain. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Revenick. I hope the holidays are treating you well so far, and I wanted to share with you a little Christmas story of our own. From the New Yorker's daily shouts, here's Kathleen Turner, in children's holiday letters, to Satan. Dear Satan, what I really want this year more than anything is a Barbie dream house. It's pretty and pink, and I will keep it in my room near my bed. Merry Christmas. Allison, age six. Allison, huh.

I see what you've done here. You intended for your letter to go to Santa, but due to your poor grasp of spelling, it has instead come to me. It really should go without saying, but I will not be getting you this so-called dream house because, well, Because I do not want to.

But I will suggest this. Buy it yourself. Simply take $2 from your mom's wallet every day, and soon enough, you'll have your useless and silly miniature house. Regards, Satan. I am Daniel, and I love you. I want an Xbox for Christmas. Daniel, age nine.

Dear Daniel, am I getting your name right? You only mentioned it twice in your ten-word letter. I've wasted five minutes of my life, Googling this Xbox, and I suppose I'm left with one question. Why? This game, Grand Theft Auto, indeed seems quite fun. But why waste your day sitting in front of the TV when there are so many actual cars to be stolen?

Damn it, Daniel! Get out there and live. Your friend, Satan. Dear Satan, I just want my mom and dad to get back together. Stephanie, age 11. Stephanie, you're over 10. Stop telling people your age. It's childish.

As for your mommy and daddy. Maybe it's my own shit, but it feels as if you're blaming me for their separation. While I did put Vicky from accounting in front of your father to tempt him, I didn't make up your father's unconvincing lie about working late. He he he. But I feel bad. I'm going to send you something called an Xbox. Best Satan.

Here's Satan. I want a computer so I could do better in school and get a good job and make lots and lots of money. from David Dear David, being the embodiment of pure evil, I will not get you this computer. I'm not Mark Zuckerberg, or am I? Kidding, I'm not. But if you really want a job that allows you to make a great deal of money fast,

you can go ahead and send me your resume. I have a number of very close friends at Goldman Sachs. regards Satan. All for Christmas is a world of peace. Brian 8.4. Dear Brian. No. That's children's holiday letters to Satan by Matt Passett,

who's also a producer for John Oliver's last week tonight. Performed for us by the inimitable Kathleen Turner. Whatever else 2018 may bring us, one change is certain. On January 1st, the New York Times will be getting a new publisher. Now, you might not think of the New York Times as a family business, but it is. In 1896, Adolf Oakes bought the paper in a bankruptcy sale, and since then, the business side of running the Times has been overseen by five generations of his descendants. The current publisher is Arthur Oakes-Solzberger Jr., who announced this year that he would pass the baton to his son, Arthur Greg Salzberger, who goes by A.G.

A.G. is young for the job. He's 37. But he's about to take over leadership of one of the world's greatest news institutions and an extremely complicated time for journalism, which is an understatement, if anything. I sat down with A.G. Salzberger last week. I should begin by congratulating you. Do you feel like you should be congratulated or you feel like you should be given a cool glass of water? Well, thank you. It's definitely an honor and a privilege. in a daunting one. Maybe the best note I got from a colleague was congratulations slash sorry, which I think is probably a statement of, you know, the pretty profound challenges facing journalism in this moment. They're pretty profound.

And we'll get to all of that. I have to start by saying that I've had my whole career has been in competition with and in admiration of the New York Times, a bit of the Washington Post and the New Yorker. And at the Washington Post, Donald Graham was the, publisher and he was essentially raised to be the publisher. I mean, he worked as a policeman in Washington, D.C. to get to know the city. He was a sports editor.

He had all kinds of jobs that were, in a sense, to train him for this future. Did you always know, as a kid, that this was the likely future for you? I've always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians. and like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and I actually spent most of my life not thinking I would go into journalism. But you grew up with this in Harris, the Salzberger family in the New York Times, which is, I think, to my mind, maybe the most important private institution there is in this country and civic institution. Well, thank you for saying that. Well, I believe it. How could you picture yourself outside of it? Was that really open to you? Yeah. I mean, look, my parents. and the broader Salzberger family, you know, has always encouraged people to chart their own course.

For me, it changed in college. I took a class with a professor who was a full-time investigative reporter at the Province Journal. A name is Tracy Bredden. One of the Pulitzer Prize for the journal has a bull in their leg from one of the stories. It's just like a great investigative reporter. And I found I just loved that type of role. writing. So you got the book from her? Well, so I end up doing two classes with her, the first semester and the second semester. And at the end of it, we had this moment. And the conversation basically,

you know, went like this. Arthur, I've got a job for you at the Providence Journal. And I said, you know, Tracy, I've always been a little ambivalent about following such a predictable route. And I think I'm going to start my career trying some other things. And, you know, she looked at me and she said, Arthur, I can just tell that you're going to love this. And I think if you don't try it, you'll always wonder. And you know, well, the first three months on any new beat are terrifying. What was your beat? Well, I covered a small town called Narragansett.

And I was a town reporter. I covered town council meetings. I covered school board meetings. Every morning, I'd call the police chief, what happened overnight. And, you know, those jobs have disappeared. And it's a tragedy because it's the single best way to come up in our profession. Smaller newspapers, regional newspapers. Yeah.

It seems to be your apprenticeship was not merely as a reporter in various bureaus, but maybe the most important phase of that apprenticeship was working on something that became known as the Innovation Report that was either leaked or creatively leaked in the midst of a crisis. Tell me a little bit about that. And by creatively leaked. I don't know. it somehow, it somehow arrived in the world. How did that happen? Yeah. So I'd been an editor on Metro for a couple of years. And Jill Abramson, who was then the editor of the Times,

approached me and said she wanted me to lead a small group that would be charged with coming up with a new product idea. So I pulled together a team, smart people from around the newsroom, and I did, you know, what I know how to do as a reporter, which is I just talked to a bunch of people inside and outside the building. And it pointed me to a clear spot, which is the New York Times wasn't lacking for good ideas about new products. What it was lacking was a full embrace that we were becoming a digital media company and that that would force us to really rethink a lot of what we were doing. So I wrote a 100-page memo, printed eight copies, very discreetly delivered them to a small number of newsroom leaders.

And you can only imagine my surprise when several weeks later it was printed in full on BuzzFeed. To all of our benefit elsewhere, by the way. I learned a tremendous amount from it. But when I say creatively leaked, I mean that somebody, somebody was not happy with the report. You know, there was politics involved. What was the sense of conflict over this report? Look, it was a controversial document at the time. And I think it was read outside the building as the New York Times trying to understand what it wasn't doing right as the world was changing around it.

And I know that there were people who were unhappy with that notion. I mean, you know, one of the things that makes an institution like the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Washington Post successful is these traditions that have been passed down through generations and these really old-fashioned public-oriented notions about service and about truth and about fairness. And when journalists who feel those things strongly see change, I think it's inevitable to worry that some of those special things. could be at risk. Was the conflict along generational and age lines? Not exclusively, but it probably trended that way. But the leak of it, I have to say, was the most productive thing

that happened in the evolution of the times. And I'll never forget. Because it forced the conversation? It didn't just force the conversation. You know, there's this phrase in journalism, show don't tell. And I think leaders of news organizations for many years had been telling people to change.

You know, you've got to file faster because the web is fast. You have to go on social media because that's where the conversation is. You have to change how you tell stories because we have all these new storytelling tools and the Internet's more visual. But we weren't arming our colleagues with this sort of shared sense of reality. Like, where are we? What are the forces we're facing? And there were some really tough findings in there and tough statistics.

What do you think was the toughest thing for people to bear, statistically or in terms of just the facts of the matter? I think at the time it was really tough to realize that a whole bunch of digital players like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed had rapidly eclipsed us in reach. I'm not sure people had fully engaged with how dramatically the way that people were finding

and engaging with journalism had changed. A Pulitzer Prize winner, actually a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, David Barstow, pulled me aside that day. And, you know, on paper, he would seem like the type of, you know, sort of old-fashioned journalist, you know, that may feel threatened by a document like this. And instead, he pulled me inside and said, I get it now. You're now in your late 30s. At what point do you expect that the print New York Times will be either completely gone or just a kind of, you know, something that very special readers read in tiny numbers? Yeah, I'm always amazed at how often this question comes up. Do you care?

Do you think it's really important at all? Well, I think it's a testament to how much people love the print New York Times. So this is this enduring concern. What I will say is that we've got a million loyal readers. The paper is profitable every day of the week, even without a single advertisement. And I expected to be around for a long time. For a long time is what we always say, and I say when I'm asked the same question because I want to fudge it too. But does it matter to you in terms of the experience of reading the time?

I'm now at the point where I read both. A lot of the sensation when I read the paper is, wait a minute, I read this two days. ago, more and more and more of these things that I've read two days ago. And then I have the other frustration, maybe some people agree with it. The one thing reading on the phone doesn't do as well is surface more things. It's very hard on a device that's the size of a kind of index card to surface as many things as efficiently as turning the pages of a broadsheet newspaper. So that's a big challenge, isn't it?

For serendipity, and if you're a completist, nothing beats print. But you look at the type of storytelling we're doing on the phone or on the desktop right now or in podcasts, and it is qualitatively better experiences that we were creating, things that you could not do in ink and paper. Has Donald Trump, in a sense, helped you? Did you got a Trump bump like the rest of us? Yeah, the Trump bump for your listeners is the surge in subscriptions that many news organizations experienced right after the election. We started to see this growth even before the election.

And I actually attributed to a couple of things. I mean, one, we've gotten much better as a digital news organization. I think our product, our journalism is drawing people. in a new way. Two, I think that we're seeing a real shift in people's willingness to pay for services online. It's not a coincidence that before the election, we were having our best subscription quarters, the same times that both Spotify and Netflix were having their best subscription quarters. And then I think three, and this is the tough one, this is the one that I think all of us

who care about journalism and care about this country should really be worrying about, I think we've been seeing growth because the rest of the media ecosystem is getting so weak. You used to have, until very recently, a public editor who was the kind of in-house critiquer of whatever he or she wanted to critique. It was probably not the fastest way to become a popular person in any newsroom, but it was a role that was in the New York Times for quite a long time. You've decided to get rid of that. Why? it felt like a vestige of print. I mean, one of my jobs is to look at all the things that we're doing

that made total sense in an era when the news came once a day or if you're a Sunday subscriber once a week and don't make sense in a world in which you don't have a passive removed audience. And I think it felt like in some ways we were disintermediating. disintermediating? I think disintermediating works. Is that right? Okay, disintermediating accountability

and asking a single person to call us out if we did something wrong. And I actually think that there's a much better model, which is the reporters and editors stepping forward in those moments and responding to readers and saying, this didn't work. And there's a great example of this. We had a pretty lousy story about a year ago about what would all the dads do in Montclair when all the moms went to the Women's March. Ouch. And it was, you know, in the old system, we would have waited a week for the public editor to decide whether or not she would weigh in.

the editor and reporter in question probably would have crossed their fingers and hoped that she deemed that it wasn't bad, even though all of social media has decided, no, no, this is a very bad story. In this scenario, what actually happened was the Metro editor within hours went public and said, hey, I really messed up here. This was a terrible story. And please don't blame it on our reporter. It was a bad assigned. that he was given. And I think that that is just a much more responsive model that fits much better at the moment. I just saw the movie The Post, and I hope this doesn't hurt.

But this is about the Washington Post's experience vis-a-vis the Pentagon Papers, the new Steven Spielberg movie. Now, The Times has given kind of credit for breaking the story, which they did in the beginning, but I'm told people at the New York Times are really annoyed with this movie. Oh, I don't, I wouldn't say really it.

Really annoyed. What I would say is... No, I mean, super annoyed at this movie. I think we're all looking forward to the next Watergate movie, focusing onto the extraordinary reporting of the New York Times. That's fair. That's fair. A.G. Salzberger, thank you very much. Thank you. Arthur Greg Salzberger will take over as publisher of the New York Times on January 1st.

Greetings, dear friends. Welcome to my 2017 holiday newsletter. I'm David Remnick and you're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. And now a few words from Tony Hale. Whether you light the menorah or deck the halls with boughs of Holly, we can all agree that the most beautiful thing about this season is the chance to catch up with the most treasured people in our lives.

And for me, that's you. And boy, am I lucky to have such observant friends? Several of you were in touch after my holiday newsletter last year, which I will admit may have contained a few misstatements. I'm in a much better place this holiday season, and I am determined to set the record straight now. Okay. All right, let's do this.

Number one, while I am a potential organ donor, you can check my driver's license on that one, I was getting a little ahead of myself when I implied that my kidney had already saved the life. of a little girl named Samantha. I apologize about that. Number two. While it may have been a stretch to say that I'd volunteered to tutor children at the local

elementary school, I did once volunteer to give a volunteer a ride to the school. Ah, twice. I did that twice, actually. Yep. All right. Number three. When I said that my big new passion is the saxophone, I'm afraid I may have given a some people the impression that I had been playing one. Number four, yes, I did quit drinking

cold turkey. Bam, but it was not in fact owing to the strength of my willpower alone. The police monitored attendance at the 12-step meetings deserved a lot more credit than I gave them. So, thank you, boys. Number five, this one's close to home. Unfortunately, I was not able to honor my father's request to have his ashes scattered over Loon Lake, where he fished all of his life. But, boy, did I ever come up with a unique plan B, involving an unlocked minnow tank at his favorite live bait establishment? Woo! Dear friends, I feel so much better now.

It is nice knowing that this year's holiday greeting is really worth the paper it's printed on, which the old me would have said was 100% recycled. and that would have not been true. Best wishes to one and all in the new year, sincerely, Bill. You're welcome, Dad. Miss you. Corrections to my Christmas newsletter by Bill Franzen. It appeared in the New Yorker's Shouts and Murmys page and was performed by Tony Hale.

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