The Press Box - A Report From the GOP Debate. Plus: Adam Nagourney on Triumphs and Disasters at The New York Times.

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

Bryan is on the ground for the second Republican debate and discusses which Fox representatives he spotted at the event, where journalists watched it, and the aftermath in the spin room (0:31). Later, New York Times journalist Adam Nagourney joins to discuss his new book, 'The Times,' which covers four decades at the paper. They touch on the process of clearance for writing a book about his employer, review certain moments of the Times’ history, from coverage of 9/11 to the Iraq War, and discuss where the Times could be in a couple of years (10:56). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Adam Nagourney Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, media consumers. welcome to Pressbox final edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. We have an awesome show today. Readers of the New York Times will know the name and byline

of Adam Nagorny, who is a writer at that paper. He has been a bureau chief at that paper, and now he is a historian of the paper. His new book is called The Times, How the Newspaper of Record Survives Scandal, scorn and the transformation of journalism. I loved this book.

I loved every email and internal report quoting page of it. I'm going to quiz Adam on some of the most tumultuous moments in recent times history. Judy Miller, Jason Blair, the embrace of the internet. That's going to be in five minutes. But first, instead of weekend headlines, I want to tell you what I did tonight. I went to the second Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum here in Southern California

in Seamy Valley, northwest of Los Angeles. A couple notes on the debate itself. I thought the Fox moderators did a pretty good job. The debate got off to a little bit of a rocky start when Stuart Varney asked Tim Scott hey, if you become president, would you fire the striking auto workers? Which is a little bit like asking somebody, hey, if you become president, would you rescind the Dame Lillard trade to Milwaukee and instead insist that he be traded to the heat?

See, presidents don't get to do that kind of stuff. But after that, I thought the moderators recovered nicely. And as Benji Sarlane, the semaphore writer who was sitting in the row behind me noted, they actually asked some really substantial policy questions. Now, not all of those questions got answered, and Mike Pence executed the mega pivot of all mega pivots when he was asked a question about Obamacare and instead delivered an answer about executing mass shooters.

But that happens at a debate. and all in all, I thought the Fox moderators did pretty well. In fact, if I have a nitpick, it's exactly the same nitpick I had after the first Fox debate, which is, how can you not ask about Donald Trump? How can you not ask about the guy who is not only leading the nomination race, but is himself a huge issue? Don't we want to hear the candidates talk about Donald Trump? have they cowed the moderators out of asking about them? Because it's the last thing they want to talk about?

I don't know. I missed those questions. As for the candidates, I thought their performances were pretty similar to the first debate. Tim Scott had more energy. Vivekrama was nicer to his fellow Republicans, though it's an interesting question of how much we believe that nice. But Nikki Haley delivered just about the same performance she did in debate, number one. Same with Ron DeSantis.

Same with Chris Christie, though his material was notably worse, especially that awful Donald Duck line that got nothing but groans in the media tent. I guess the question is the same one I keep coming back to. It's not who's the Trump alternative. It's, is there an alternative to Donald Trump? Trump. I'm not sure tonight offered an answer to that question. A couple of notes about what it was like to cover the presidential debate. First of all, this was great fun for me because the debate featured a totally different cut of journalists than I would see in, say, a Super Bowl press box.

for example, I got to the library several hours before it began. I'm sitting outside in the shade and I see this man walk up. And the man is wearing a pinstriped Nathan Detroit suit, the kind of suit that NFL pregame hosts wore for a couple of years during a very unfortunate period of sports television history. The man in the pinstriped suit walks up to this chunk of the Berlin Wall that has been preserved there outside of the Reagan Library and he's sizing up the wall

and he's touching the wall, putting his hands on it. And it was around this time, maybe slightly before, that I realized the man was Fox News's Brett Bear and that Brett Bear was trying to shoot a little piece of video there in front of the wall, no doubt talking about the legacy of Ronald Reagan. A little bit after that, I'm in line to get a slice of pizza and next to me is Larry Cudlow, the Fox business personality,

talking to an associate there about the candidates. I mean, again, at the Super Bowl, maybe you see Mitch Album. At the presidential debate, you see Brett Bear and Larry Cudlow. One of the notable things about covering a debate is that there is no press box per se in the Reagan Library

or really any of these venues where they have a debate. So reporters are not actually in the room with the candidates. They've put us in a big white tent, which was outside the library

tonight. And we watched the debate just like people at home were watching the debate on TV. And this was not a closed circuit broadcast where we could see

the pancake makeup being applied to the candidate's shiny foreheads during the commercials. This was literally just the Fox Business broadcast with the same commercials that the folks at home were watching. In fact, just a quick aside, I watched a lot of Fox business today. It was on TV at very loud volume from the time I got to the library about noon to the time I finished. finished my story for the ringer tomorrow and left about 1045 tonight. That's about 10 hours and 45 minutes more than I have ever watched the Fox Business Channel. And if on the next edition of the press box, you hear me mumbling about Mike Huckabee's sleep aids,

I want you to send an email to Sean Fennessey and insist on a wellness check because I will likely need it. So we watched the debate there in the media tent. And then afterwards, we all filed out of the tent and went to the spin room. The spin room is one of those fabled things in journalism. It reminds me a little bit of Radio Row at the Super Bowl in the sense that I believe reporters are conspiring to create an idea that these are hallowed, interesting places. And in fact, when you get to both of them, they kind of suck. I mean, they really do. They're not that interested.

Now, I know political reporters can go into a spin room, like the one I was in tonight, and get a lot more information. Because unlike me who's watching this campaign from afar, they've been talking to, let's say, Nikki Haley's surrogates all along. So if Nikki Haley's people say something tonight that's slightly different from what they've been saying over the last couple of months, their antenna will start to vibrate and the political reporter will say, aha, this is news, this is significant, this is something. But from my vantage point,

I walk in there and be like, why are we all in the lying room? What are we getting out of this? Also the spin room, I had imagined something like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange where everybody's yelling and going crazy. Kind of quiet.

In some cases, there were more surrogates and they were actual reporters looking for news, I had somebody come up to me from Vivek Ramoswami's campaign and say, are you a journalist? Because let me bring you over here and talk to one of our surrogates. That was kind of strange. I was able to get a question in to North Dakota Governor Doug Berger,

who you'll remember was the last Republican candidate to qualify for this debate. Governor Bergam and I had a small moment. he is still hobbling from tearing his Achilles, Aaron Rogers style, before the last debate. But he was a trooper and showed up tonight. From the spin room, we went back to the media tent. We wrote our stories. Here, the media tent seemed a lot like the sports press boxes I know,

all the reporters in the zone, making that face when they're trying to concentrate and trying to turn a phrase. reporters from the same publication talking to each other just like they do at sporting events to make sure they're not writing the same thing. I did my best Johnny Apple.

I turned in my story. I listened to a few more minutes of Fox business and then I left. Thus ending my adventure at least temporarily as a political reporter. And starting tomorrow, I will go back to my normal mode which is cosplaying as a sports writer instead.

That's my reports from the second Republican presidential debate. All right, Adam Nagorny joins us. Since 1996, Adam has worked at the New York Times in jobs ranging from political correspondent to L.A. Bureau Chief. He has a new book out called The Times. I devoured it. I think it will be fascinating for anyone who wants to understand how the media works. The Times covers the last four decades of the newspaper's history, a tale of deadline writing,

digital strategy sessions, editorial intrigues, and some incredibly freighted meals at Midtown Manhattan restaurants. Adam, welcome to the press box. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So during your long career at the Times, did you ever have a freighted midtown lunch? I don't, not that I remember. I can remember some in Washington, D.C. where they served wine. These are the old days at lunch and then having to go back and write a front page story, but they weren't freighted, so I guess I can't complain. I never became an editor, so that was my blessing. Why did you decide to write a book about your employer?

You know, when I was young, I read Gates-Talesa's book. I've always been fascinated by the Times. I've always been fascinated by journalism, and it's something I just always wanted to do. I mean, I think this is a very, very important player in America and life and in American journalism and American politics. and there's been two, in my opinion, great books done about this paper. Let's just say at least two, so no one gets a myth. The other one was by Alex Jones and Susan Tip.

And that was more about the family. And I just think this is a story that needed to be told. And, you know, we had reached a point where the players, the main players in this chapter, if you will, the paper's history were getting older. And I thought I was going to do it. I was going to do it now. And I gave a lot of thought to it. obviously there's a complication of working there, but I hopefully worked around that by

just writing about its history and any of the book in 2016 and not writing about what's going on now, for the most part. You mentioned 2016 when you started working on this project. Did the way the paper was sucked into the whole story of Donald Trump, did that encourage you to write this book at all? The book was already going on when that happened. And in fact, when I started the research reporting part of it. One of the first things I did was to attend some of the meetings of the editorial staff, excuse me, of the business editorial staff in the days after the Trump victory. I knew that I was not going to be writing that much about this period, but I wanted kind of an inside glimpse. So that was happening. What I did not know when I started writing this book is how it would end up, right?

I did not know at that point in 2016, you know, people were really asking me, well, the time still exist by the time you're done. I didn't think it would go out of business, but I thought it could be a very different paper. And in fact, one thing I think that was, you know, helpful to the narrative of the book is that there's a clear story as it sort of does this transition from an old-fashioned print-on-paper organization to what we have today. So you want to write a book about the modern history of the Times. Whose cooperation did you need to get first? Well, here was the process. just to be clear, this was not an authorized book. I was on my own.

The paper didn't review it. I went first to Arthur Solsberger, Jr., who was the publisher at the time, and I asked him if I did a book like this, would he sit down and cooperate with me? And Arthur is a very kind of deliberative kind of guy, and he said, let me think about it. I think he talked to a lot of people. Call me back a couple weeks later, and he said, I will cooperate with this. I will sit down and talk to you. He goes, I am not going to tell anyone else what to do.

And, in fact, I'm not sure anyone else will cooperate with you. And what I did not realize, and I think I should have realized, is that once he agreed to cooperate, pretty much every single major player in the story, in the history, agreed to cooperate. So, I mean, maybe with one or two exceptions, all the executive editors, all the main players, all the people involved in some of the papers, darker moments, different layers of people, pretty much everyone agreed to cooperate. And in the period before, say Max Frankel, with people who were not around, not with us anymore, for example, Punch Salzberger, the publisher's father, A.M. Rosasol, who's the first executive writer I wrote about, I came across all kinds of private oral histories they did at the time that were extremely useful in reconstructing this history. How did you find the experience of interviewing journalists about their careers? That's a fantastic question. pluses and minuses. I will give you the pluses and the minuses. The pluses is that it was enormously uncomfortable at times. Like all the kind of, I don't want to say tricks of the trade because it

sounds like it's cynical and it's not. But I was very self-conscious of the fact that everything I do they have done and they were aware of. But here's the other part of it and the more positive part of it. I was dealing with, for the most part, editors and journalists who are really good at what they do. Whatever else you want to say about them, they are really good at what they do. And I would find myself often at the end of an interview hearing a suggestion or a thought or a take or, as we would say, a big thought from one of these editors because they are editors that I would just incorporate into the way I was telling the story. So, you know, I think overall it was very much a plus. But you're right. It's difficult. I'm used to reporting. I'm used to interviewing politicians

or voters. And this was extremely different as you, as you suggest. They were doing that editor thing where they say, let me make a suggestion if I could. Yeah. Or they would say, you know, I mean, when you're writing a story and you're going, you see an editor, especially at the time, I assume it's true at every paper, they'll often have some kind of big thought, right, that you haven't thought of, right? Another way of framing the story, another way of thinking about the event, another more historical way of thinking about it. And that, you know, as opposed to like, you know, writing it down and ignoring it, I would go, hey, that's a really good idea. And I go back and type it into my computer. And it was really helpful. So in a way, they were.

were all, you know, in their own way, editors are parts of the book. You mentioned the oral histories. There are so many documents and emails and diary entries you quote from in this book. I really goggled at reading former executive editor Jill Abramson's very negative performance review that you quoted from. How many of those docs are in publicly available archives and how many did you have to convince people to give you? So the public archives go through, don't only the exact year I have to go look by. I think it's 84 or 86. And then the paper stopped doing it.

So through, without getting in the weeds with you, but through Max Frankel, the papers stopped, the papers stop requiring people to donate their papers, the editors to donate their papers. So after that, I made a point of asking everyone I interviewed, did you keep papers and would you share them? So as a result, you know, Bill Keller, Joe Lelybeil, Howard, Howell, Raings, Joe Abramson, And they all kept papers and they all shared them with me. And there were times when I'd be at their apartments and they'd come down with boxes and papers and say, go through it.

And it was extremely helpful. I spent months and months and months going through papers at the New York Public Library and at Columbia University. And that was very, very fruitful. But I think the unorganized rough data that I was able to collect from these executive editors was extremely helpful. The story you tell in this book is largely seen through the eyes. of the editors and publishers of the paper rather than the reporters of the paper? What was your thinking there?

It was an organizing kind of concept. I thought that was the best way to tell the story. I was aware of it. I didn't want to make it too much of a top-down story. There are chapters that you'll see where I make an effort and not any kind of calculated way because I thought I told the story better to tell it through people who were lower down in the newsroom.

We were sort of fighting every day. So when I told the story of how the digital people, the original generation of digital people were struggling to get, I would say respect as well as attention. I told us through a colleague named Lisa Tazi, right, who was one of the pioneers, I think, and who had to struggle with the fact that, you know, she wasn't gaining the kind of respect that she would get. And the chapter on 9-11, right, September 11th, it's told through a lot of different eyes. And I think that really works. But overall, this is a book that's organized in the chapters of the seven executive editors I write about.

and it's an organizing concept. I think it works, but I was very aware of not just to make it a story about powerful editors. So let's go to 9-11 for a second because when there was a huge breaking story at the paper, like 9-11, the paper would often ask one writer

to sit at a keyboard and write the lead story, a story in that case that was developing minute by minute. What was the art to writing a story like that? I mean, it's really difficult, and there's a couple of people who are really great at it. Robert McFadden is one of them.

He just couldn't get into the office in time to do it that day. Sir Shemann, who wrote it that day. The artist is to be able to accumulate all this information that's coming in from so many sources, you know, once just reporters filing memos from the field, obviously now television as well. On that day, people calling in just the White House, just tons and tons of stuff,

and organize it in a way that captures the moment and the history of the day. So you want it to be historical, you want it to be dramatic without hyped, you want it to capture the color of the day, and I think it takes a certain flair of writing, a certain appreciation of history, and a certain appreciation of what makes for a time to lead all.

And the September 11th one was a classic example. That was a classic of the type, and you can go back and look at it and study it. I wonder if that is an art that is going to be lost as we move into a more quick-paced world. I mean, I think it might be, but it certainly was great at the time. Right. Where you don't need in the digital world a story that captures the whole essence of the day

may be quite as much as you did when you were talking about an A1 story. That's exactly right. Because the premium now is understandably and correctly speed, right? Like, again, search member who was writing the lead all on 9-11 could sit back and wait till deadline, which was, let's just say 7 o'clock. I think it was 7 p.m. that day. It might have been a little later. And just wait to incorporate anything.

But there's another writer named James Barron who was writing for the web. This was really a turning point in the history of the paper because no one really realized that what he was doing was so important. And like whenever something happened, he would write it. He would retop the story. He put something on line because you want to keep people want to be up to date and what's going on. So another building collapses down at the World Trade Center site. You can't wait to the end of the day and sort of incorporated into your narrative. to get it out right away. A plane crashes in Pennsylvania, you've got to get it out right away.

And that's the way the world is today. You can see it in all the coverage of the major events on the Times website or the app all the time. We've talked a lot lately about newsroom reckonings at the Times and elsewhere. This idea that reporters find the value of the institutions they work for lacking and they're no longer beholden to the institution in a way reporters might once have been. One thing that's so fascinating about your book is you argue that this is not new at the Times. This was a regular occurrence over the last 40 years. What were some of the previous newsroom reckonings? I mean, you always have reporters or writers who are sort of bigger than the newsroom itself. And I think what you often find is people lead the times, not often, sometimes, and realize

that they're not as big a figure as they were before they at the times. Because, you know, if you're, just to use one obvious example, Adam McGarney of the New York Times, it's a lot different than some slub named Adam Degernie who grew up in Westchester, right? And people learn that. And so I think it changes some time to time. I think I do think it's more true now. I think you have less kind of loyalty. I don't need to use that word in a loaded way.

People work for the times, for the time. People used to really love it and make their lives there. It's a different world there. I think people are much more willing to go to other institutions and try the things. And they don't make their whole lives at the times as much as they used to. we could sit here and say it's a bad thing or a good thing. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter because, you know, it is what it is. And there would be all the way back.

You mentioned the Democratic Convention in 1968 when a lot of reporters came back and wrote about the police violence in Chicago in a certain way. You go into the 70s and 80s. We have a lot of reporters speaking up about the hiring practices at the times. This has been something that's occurred fairly regularly. Is that correct over the last four decades? I think so going back to the, it's the, it's not a few years. 1868 convention, I think that the executive editor at the time, Avis Rosenthal, thought some of the

coverage was too loaded. It was too sympathetic to the liberal demonstrators and to the people on the streets of Chicago. I don't think it was, I don't think it was reporters, you know, carrying out some agenda in the pages of the New York Times. I think it's what they saw and what they felt passionate about. And I'm, I am not 100% sure at all that Rosenthal was correct in the way he pushed back. He was very old school in a good way, and he was very wary of the times being used to promote any kind of political agenda at all. And I think that he was just very sensitive to that. I don't think people were doing that. A lot of the struggles through the 70s about representation were taking place more behind the scenes except for the court battles. So you obviously a big accept,

they didn't get that much attention or didn't get the attention they deserved in my opinion. So women, for example, were woefully unrepresented in the newsroom and finally filed suit against the Times and effectively won. Same with writers of color. So that kind of changed over the years. But I would argue the first time, and you see this in the book, when reporters really start to get vocal in pushing back against management, was when the Times published the name of a rape, victim who would accuse a nephew of Ted Kennedy of assaulting her in Palm Beach.

This is a pretty famous story at the time. And a lot of people, you know, the executive editor made what he thought was a principal decision. And when I say what he thought, I'm not snarking him at all. I mean, it's a legitimate argument that you should publish the name of an accuser. And a lot of people, women and men, were really upset about that and confronted him about it at a town hall meeting in the paper, at the newspaper's headquarters. and also talk to the Washington Post about it. And when you go back and sort of begin tracking the outspokenness of the newsroom,

and I think even the change in the political power dynamic between the newsroom and the executive editors, in my opinion, that was like, what, 83, 84, 86 about that. That's when it began. Let me dig into some of the stories you cover in the book. The Times got lots of praise for its coverage of the 9-11 attacks, and then it stumbled a bit in its coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War, in 2003. What happened there? That's a really good question. So initially the paper was very, very skeptical of the case being made by the Bush administration for war. And then there was a turn,

and the coverage became more accepting of the idea that there might be weapons of mass destruction. That was the sort of precept by which President Bush, 43, argued the nations should go to war. and a lot of the coverage sort of promoted that. And the coverage, I think, some of the coverage, a lot of the coverage, turned not just to be wrong. The administration was wrong, but the New York Times is wrong too. And I think that really hurt the paper. I think that part of what was going on was it was a post-9-11 thing. And there was this real feeling that we're all in this together.

I mean, you know, Americans and journalists and government that we've been attacked on our soil. And it was harder to write stuff that would have seemed challenging. of the administration at a time when the administration said the country was under assault, or under threat at least. And I think that wasn't going on there. And I think the result was a lot of that coverage turned out to be wrong. The paper, they came back and corrected it and wrote stories about what they did wrong. But it was a real lesson. And I think that it hurt the paper's credibility, the Iraq coverage, Judy Miller, for a long, long time. I mean, I still hear about it from time to time. You mentioned Judy Miller. So there was a big editor's note.

about some of the stories she and her colleagues wrote about weapons of mass destruction. And then another piece in 2004 about covering the whole run-up to the war and the intel that included some of the time stories. My question reading your book was, why did Miller keep writing for the paper for another year after she had been corrected so publicly in its own news pages? Yeah, that's a really good question that I think the executive editor at the time asked. It's just one of those things that's very New York Times. She was, in many ways, a really good reporter, very aggressive, very pushing in getting her stories in the paper. And I think he felt that every time he turned around, there she was writing stories again. And, you know, it's not that clear because I want to make clear that she is very talented or she was very talented. So, but she just, people just weren't saying no. And, you know, eventually it came to a point where they finally had to reach an agreement for her to leave the paper. But that's a, you know, that's a very New York Times kind of thing. Like, Why? As I was researching it, I kept asking the same question again, like, why is she still there? Or why is she still writing there? There was a couple of times when Bill Keller was executive editor told her specifically, you know, you can say it to paper, but I don't want you writing about, you know, these subjects ever again. But she kept coming, writing about them again and again.

You note that for a period, it was kind of hard to get fired from the New York Times unless you committed very, very egregious offenses. Punch, both souls, sold. or said, God is our personnel manager. Right. Meaning you retire or die rather than being pushed out by the paper. I think there's still an element of truth to that. It's always been a place where people just keep succeeding in or keep working. Like if somebody gets too old or loses their age or whatever, drinks too much or, you know, they'll end up being sent to go cover some.

I'm going to say New Jersey without putting down New Jersey. I love New Jersey. But that's the kind of thing that would happen. That was part of the culture. I think it's more of a result culture now. I think it would be harder to succeed, but the paper was always a place that people assumed that once they got there, they would never leave short of some major scamper. And that's the way it was for a long, long time.

Jason Blair was a reporter who in the early 2000s put a bunch of false and plagiarized material into the Times. And as you note, the Times did something interesting after discovering that. They assigned their own reporters to write a very long story about the paper's performance, turned out to be very damaging for the top editors. One of the reporters doing it compared to cops working in internal affairs. Why did the Times do that? So initially the response of the editors, second level editors, was we're going to investigate this ourselves, right?

Like, we're going to look into this. This is an editor's problem. We'll deal with it, blah, blah, blah. But Halla Raines, who was executive editor at the time, came in to the office and said, this needs to be a story. We need to regain or try to establish our credibility with the public, with our readers, and they assigned a team of reporters to do it. And they gave them full reign pretty much to report it and so they would not interfere with it. The result was, I think in 98, this is

kind of lost my memory right now, the 9,800 words story. I mean, it was really something. And I think some of the editors looked at it and said, this was a little bit too much, But it's done in the spirit of transparency. And like, at times there's something wrong, the Times repair its mistakes itself. And those reporters that were on it were some of the best people in the business. And, you know, I've gone back and read it a couple of times. It was really well written. I think that ultimately it probably led to the ouster of the executive editor,

Howard raised of Joel Boyd. It was very, very damaging. But that's just kind of what the Times does. When these moments happen, it comes back and examines itself. That's a default position. Because again, they had gone the other way and just had editors do it and just sort of issue a report or maybe discipline, you know, people evolve. I don't think it would have had anywhere near the kind of impact with the readers or with the people or in the newsroom as it had the way it was done. You've been at the paper for a long time.

So you saw a lot of the events you write about in this book firsthand. Which one did your reporting give you a different understanding of? Probably Judy Miller and Jason Blair. I mean, when that stuff was going on, I was out of the road, so I was sort of following it from a distance. And, you know, when you're in the middle of stuff, you don't really understand it. And one of the advantages of a book like this is that you're coming back and talking to people, what, 20 years later with more candor, you have access to documents, right? Like, I went through Jason Blair's personal file that helped a lot. I saw a lot of memos that were written about Judas Miller among the editors.

And, you know, I was trying to figure out, like, how did this happen, right? And I think it's much easier to figure out when you're able to kind of come back and reconstruct it 20 years later. As this going on, it's just sort of a big swirl around you. In some ways, I think I was lucky that I was covering the national politics at the time. In some ways, I think I was lucky that I wasn't there when I went back to write about this because I didn't have that many sort of preconceived notions. I didn't really know the – I mean, I knew Jason Blair from around the newsroom, but I didn't really know – and I didn't really know Judas Miller.

I didn't know the characters. So I think that really helped a lot. Times puts up its website, its full-blown website anyway, in 1996. And people forget now it was free if you registered to the better part of 15 years. Then in 2010, they announced a paywall. what were the arguments like inside the paper for and against a paywall? So this was a critical moment in the history of the paper and why I think the paper is here today, right? There was always a feeling on the digital side that information should be free, right?

Without resorting that old cliche. But like the way you build revenue is you get more and more readers or you get more and more advertisers, then that pays for it. and that if you begin charging for it, you're going to scare away readers. And that was the argument that they were involved with for about nine months. I think the people, I don't think I know, the people on the editorial side, the news side, really thought that if they did not begin figuring out a way to make money, the paper would not exist. And among the people who thought that was Arthur Salzberger, Jr., who was a publisher,

he walked into the office of Martin Niesenthalz, who was the head of digital one morning and said, listen, they were in the middle of an economic downturn. And they were like, you know, if this happens again in three years, we're going to have to lay off a third of the newsroom. And this economic model we have is not going to work. And he wanted to start studying the idea of a paywall. And, you know, Salsberg is an interesting character. I think that what defines his legacy more than anything else, more than Jason Blair, more than Howell Raines, more than Jill Abramson, was the fact that he decided to instill the paywall. He didn't do it alone.

A lot of people advise him to do it. I don't want to minimize anyone else's involvement. But ultimately, he's the boss, right? So if it had failed, it would have fought on him. And he said, like, well, if it would have, you know, if this hadn't succeeded, we would have done something else. I'm not so sure. The paper was at a really critical time.

Readership, print readership was cratering. Advertising revenues were cratering. You can see where we are today. And I think looking back, everyone, including the publisher at the time, is shocked at what success it is. I mean, I think they're up to like 10 million, 10 million paid subscribers now. I mean, that's unbelievable.

And I think, you know, the Times has sort of set the standard for how you transform from an old-line legacy print newspaper that all these people grew up reading, paying for, to what it is today. We hold them up now as a model, perhaps the model,

when it comes to newspapers about how to do that. How much of that says, success do you think they've had happens without Donald Trump being elected president of the United States in 2016? Yeah, this is a fantastic question. I think it's going to be easier to, I'm not not answering you, but I think it's going to be easier to answer in 10 years when things kind of shake out. The papers are a big bump in readership after Trump, obviously the Trump bump. It's kind of receded a bit, but the numbers are still going up and they're doing all this kind of other stuff, you know, to try to keep subscribers coming. And they, you know, they,

It's a much more, you know, it's a bundle of different services now. It's games, it's cooking. But it's also, I think, importantly, some really good coverage. So my gut tells me that it was important and transitional, but not critical. We'll, again, like, it would be folly for me to try to predict where the paper is going to be in, let's just say, in five years when Trump is gone, who knows, you know, attention will go up and attention will go down. But I think right now the paper appears to have built a pretty strong base upon which to have revenues to bring in subscribers. A couple quick ones before you go. Mark Thompson, the former CEO of the New York Times, was just hired to run CNN after Chris Licked. What did Mark Thompson do for the paper?

I think Mark Thompson was a critical player in helping in this transition. I mean, he was a much more forceful and active kind of CEO than others in the past. He was much more you've got a change. I think some people in the newsroom, including Joe Abramson, the executive editor, would say that he was too involved in the news report. But I think that when you sit down and think, why is the paper, the success that it is today, it's because of Mark Thompson. I mean, he would tell you that he's a journalist as well as a business person. Fair enough. I mean, that's where he kind of started. But, I mean, I think that he's a big player in the paper's history. You hear this buzz phrase all the time. We need more coordination between business and editorial than

we had in the past. What does that mean, practically speaking, at the times today? That's tricky stuff, right? I mean, again, one of the things you'll read in the book is how Joe Abramson was trying to sort of resist and understandably so some of that stuff, right? On the other hand, if you're in the newsroom, and this is more complicated than it sounds probably, you want to know what stories are getting lots of readership, right? You just need to know that. Should you be making decisions based on, you know, what stories get the most readership? Not, no, certainly not entirely, but like, you know, Taylor Swift was going to do a lot of hits, right? So therefore you want to cover Taylor Swift. So those are the kinds of things, right?

You'll see like, again, on sites like Wirecutter, they link to advertisers now. I mean, I don't think you would have done that 20 years ago, but on the other hand, I'm not sure that there's full disclosure. I'm not sure that compromises what sites like Wirecutter are doing. This is a difficult process that was being worked out during the period of my book. And I think it's still being worked at, and I think we'll see in a couple of years how successful it is. It's a difficult kind of balance to achieve between being aware of the business exigencies of running a newspaper and maintain the independence of an organization like the New York Times or for that matter, the Washington Post or the Washington Journal. As you say in the book in 2016, those stories about Hillary Clinton's emails that critics of the paper also still talk about. Yeah.

That was held up inside the paper and internal memos as, hey, look at the traffic we're doing on these stories. Readers are really interested in Hillary Clinton's emails. Yeah, I came across these internal memos from early in the year when those email stories were first written that talked about the traffic. And I think that gets at what I was saying to you a moment ago. Like, you have to balance off what's significant, what's newsworthy with the obvious appeal of getting more readers in there for more revenue.

I mean, Hillary Clinton to me, Hillary Clinton to me, was a story that the paper, you know, just trying to maneuver its way through. I think I got it right in the end, but only in the end, as the book makes clear. Last question, Adam. Journalists can be persnickety. Has anyone objected to the way they were portrayed in your book? Yeah, as someone who is persnickety and a little paranoid.

I've been waiting for that, but the book was published today, so it's still a little early. I, listen, I'm sure so will be. I tried to be really, this isn't a newspaper story, and I tried to be really careful and insiduous in checking facts, in making sure I got stuff right with the sources. I combed through it to avoid taking the kind of snarky, cheap shots that might sometimes show up in a newspaper story, even by me.

So we'll see. But look, this book is 600 pages long, almost. And, I mean, I assume that somebody is going to be unhappy with something. I just hope that people look at it and go that it is a fair and honest accounting about this really important American institution. All right. As Adam waits for reaction from his colleagues go by the Times, how the newspaper of record survives scandal, scorn, and the transformation of journalism. Adam, thanks for coming on the press box. Hey, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantus. David Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.