Seven storeys above the turbulent newsroom of The New York Times on West 43rd Street lies the corridor that time forgot.
There is a sense of musty, almost monastic calm. Only the brass plates betray the nature of the tasks engaged in behind all those closed doors —William Safire, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd … and Bill Keller.
This is where Keller retreated to be a writer two years ago when passed over for the executive editorship of The Greatest Paper on Earthâ„¢. And it is from here — his elegant book-lined eyrie — that he has quietly observed the man who did get the job preside over the equivalent of an institutional nervous breakdown all those floors below.
All that is about to change. Any day now Keller is going to relocate to the less rarefied air of the third floor and finally take command of a paper that, for months now, has been shaken by repeated scandals, leaks, apologies, rumours and revelations.
If he is daunted, he doesn’t look it. Last week he was in early, reading through the report that had just landed on his desk from three external journalists hired by the newspaper to carry out an audit of the mistakes that occurred under the previous watch.
That is due to be published next week — and will doubtless inspire another festival of schadenfreude among rival journalists, for whom kicking the Times is a bloodsport. Shortly thereafter there will follow another, internal, report by the legendary assistant managing editor Al Siegal. After which exhaustion, if nothing else, should help achieve closure.
If his predecessor Howell Raines was (in caricature, at least) brash, Southern and showy, Keller is modest, understated and thoughtful. He is measured in his criticism of the previous regime.
But the ability to criticise the Raines era was made much easier a fortnight ago when the former editor gave an extraordinarily uninhibited interview in which, in the words of one media writer, ”he got things off his chest which he probably should have saved for the dinner table”.
Raines suggested that he had been betrayed by the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jnr, after being given licence to be a ”change agent”, to shake up a newsroom that had ”settled into a kind of lethargic culture of complacency”. All of which enabled his opponents to take both gloves off.
”I don’t think that anyone acquainted with the newsroom before Howell’s arrival could genuinely believe that,” says Keller, mildly.
So what went wrong? ”It is possible to introduce an autocratic leadership style to an organisation of a certain size and have it work well. A lot of magazines are run … where all the decisions and the power flow from a central percolating authority.
”But it’s hard to run an organisation of 1 200 people that way, particularly when this is a place as demanding and insecure and anxious as a newsroom is. If you try to go for one centralised source to deliver charisma then two things happen: one, a lot of people will feel frustrated and denied and, two, the flow of ideas — which in a newsroom should flow up, not down — gets choked off.”
He warms to his theme. Raines, he acknowledges, had to run the paper as a militaristic operation from the moment he took over, which coincided with the biggest story in the paper’s history — the September 11 attacks. His mistake was to carry on running the paper on military lines once that crisis was over.
”It’s a tendentious analogy, but it’s a little like what happened in the Soviet Union, in which they had militarised political, cultural and media systems because they had a war to win, but then they never de-militarised. ”
Keller, a 54-year-old former foreign correspondent, will undoubtedly be a reassuring and calming figure once he re-emerges on the third floor. Whether he welcomed being dragged back into the newsroom cauldron is uncertain. Last year he was very happily settled into a life on the 10th floor.
”I was happy. Blissfully happy. But, no, I didn’t hesitate.” He emphasises he managed to get to his daughter’s sixth birthday party immediately after his appointment was announced.
He claims to have no mandate from Sulzberger beyond observing that no new editor is interested in preserving the status quo. Does he agree with his publisher’s oft-quoted remark that the future of the Times will be ”platform agnostic” — deliverable through a variety of media, including the Internet?
”Ex officio, I’m platform agnostic,” he smiles. ”I mean, personally, I’m a newspaper guy.” Does he agree with the analysis that the American press, generally, has been through an undistinguished period in holding the Bush administration accountable? He pauses, and points out that most criticism of the Times is that its agenda is too liberal.
He concedes that, in some instances, the American media in general has been too slow to attack stories such as intelligence failures over Iraq. But he points to the post-September 11 mood.
”It was a kind of shared sense of sympathy. Not for the president and his administration, but an almost universal sense that everyone wanted them to get it right.”
And with that he is up, clutching at the still half-read external auditors’ report. There is, he knows, much to do. — Â