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Lean Times, mean times

Thursday, August 9, 2007

For some mediahounds this week the big news was smaller news. The New York Times’ long-planned shrinking of its paper finally happened (pictured left) -- part of its attempt to save $42 million a year, not least in the reams of expensive dead-tree material that its presses have been consuming every day. It’s amazing what one and a half inches along the sides of a page can cost.

The Times understandably didn’t want to make a big deal of it publicly (it’s not the wisest thing to emphasize to customers that they’re to be sold less of a favored brand) but internally Executive Editor Bill Keller was quick, in some relief after a smooth change-over to the new format, to thank his staff for pulling off “a big job”. He said the venture “entailed a heroic display of interdepartmental choreography”. As we know, the very sober NYT does not needlessly deal in superlatives.

 

But some internal spin-off from the company’s money-saving mission is not universally welcome in the Times building – a brand-new, 52-story, glass-festooned, Renzo Piano-designed money-pit in its own right.

 

Senior editors were shocked to learn, just before the weekend of the Big Shrink, that they were expected, as they produce a physically smaller paper, to pay their contributors smaller fees. Another choice suggested to them was to slice back the number of articles carried in their respective sections of the paper. To some this was even less appealing than trying to persuade big-name Times writers like, say, the Minimalist Chef Mark Bittman in Dining, novelist Walter Kirn in Travel, or social historian Caroline Weber in the Book Review (all freelancers, as are many of the paper’s stars) to take a ten percent cut in their fees.

 

The lunacy that such an “economy measure” should emanate from the increasingly twitchy business side of the paper beggared the editors’ belief.

 

At the buyers’ end of the process, I was tempted to engage in a similar fit of crude bean-counting when I picked up Monday’s suddenly-diminutive hard-copy at my local newsstand. I wanted to pay merely the old one dollar cover-price, instead of the recently-hiked $1.25. Less paper, less money, right?

 

Concerning that traditionally sacrosanct section Letters to the Editor, Editorial Page Editor Andy Rosenthal had a much less crude approach. He candidly admitted to potential contributors (who write for free, of course, simply expecting a prominent platform) that “the available space … has been reduced by about a third” but he reassuringly said: “Don’t worry. We are … expanding the letters section on our Web site, where space is not an issue”.

 

Hmm … I wonder how reassuring that really is. A reader with a serious gripe can weigh the virtues of voicing it amid the prime print real estate of the Editorial Page versus getting lost in the big wide blogosphere.

 

 

 

MORE DISTURBINGLY FOR ME, THERE WAS A STRONG NEWS STORY that got exiled to the Times’ website on the day of the paper’s format change – and still didn’t get much space there, either.

 

It concerned the outrageous information, which emerged from the US Congress’s General Accountability Office, that an astonishing total of 190,000 AK47 rifles and Glock pistols belonging to the US military, and intended for use by the Iraqi forces currently being trained, have gone missing. Yes, missing. Totally unaccounted for. Many are now presumed to be in daily use by insurgents against that self-same US military.

 

The reason this important revelation didn’t feature much in the Times, either on paper or electronically? Because it came out in The Washington Post.

 

Sloppily, New York’s “Old Gray Lady” didn’t react to its DC rival until midnight of Sunday/Monday – and then not by inserting any fast follow-up into its new, smaller paper. Instead night editors lamely posted on nytimes.com, at 12.43 am, just a brief and barely-retouched Reuters dispatch based on the Post's scoop.

 

Actually, quite a few people missed out here. The inside story of the story, as it were, is that the GAO released its analysis (essentially an audit of the George W Bush Administration’s efforts under the rubric “Stabilizing Iraq”) back on July 31st. No-one at the time - not even the usually reliable Associated Press who blandly noted the survey had been published, but didn’t delve deep - seemed to realize it contained such a damning indictment of the Pentagon’s arms-tracking.

 

(Just by way of historical contrast, the Bill Clinton Administration provided $100 millions-worth of weapons to local security forces in Bosnia during the 1990s, and they were all closely tracked and accounted for.)

 

But the significance of the GAO's July study certainly was appreciated by Post reporter Glenn Kessler, a long-time Capitol Hill hand. Modestly, Kessler tells me he investigated and wrote the story last week, and then “it hung around for a few days, looking for ‘its moment’".

 

Interesting, that ‘its moment’ should come just as the NYT was preoccupied with smoothly coming out smaller.

 

 

 

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL HAS BEEN CALLED THE "SULTAN OF SPIN", AN OUTRIGHT LIAR and much worse. His power as British former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s right-hand man for communications incurred the wrath of the Labour Party’s leftist elder statesman Tony Benn, who said: “Campbell was made deputy prime minister and that is totally unacceptable”.

 

Campbell has been in the US promoting his book The Blair Years, from Alfred A Knopf, a weighty (750-page) transcription of his diaries – or at least a fraction of them, about a seventh or eighth of the vast records he kept contemporaneously. As a former civil servant he had to submit the manuscript to official vetting, and by his own account to a fairly uncritical Blair himself.

 

Part of his American tour overlapped with the still-new PM Gordon Brown’s trip to Camp David, and when Campbell and I talked we followed up on Brown's possible policy shifts which I’d been discussing in last week’s THE MEDIA BEAT. He agreed there would be change, as well as continuity – the changes being partly determined by the altered context and partly - inevitably - by personal style.

 

“Look, Gordon is not a natural showman, unlike Tony who is an absolutely awesome communicator”, he said. But what he called “the big picture ideas” will remain the same, since Brown “has been every bit a part of forging our new politics as anybody, Tony included”. Campbell reminisced that with the two men, “I’d often be having the same conversation with the one that I’d had the day before with the other”.

 

On media relations, though, he had this to say: “Gordon has learned from what we did well and not so well. We succeeded at the strategic level in getting over the idea of major new policy directions, but it’s undeniable that our everyday relations with the media were not great, to put it mildly.”

 

Prime Minister Brown does indeed seem, since being tested early on by events like bombing attempts in London and Glasgow, disastrous floods, and even foot-and-mouth disease recurring, to be very calmly in control – in a very unshowy manner, of course, as Campbell suggested.

 

And so far Brown’s audience - both commentators and the community - is nodding in approval.

 

 

 

IN THE REALM OF FOLLOW-UPS, I WAS GLAD TO SEE the Los Angeles Times tackle the topic that has engaged me a lot lately – whether David Frost’s much-hyped interviews with Richard Nixon ever got him to admit guilt and apologize to the nation. As often with Hollywood’s hometown paper, the issue was prompted by the imminence of a movie – Ron Howard is to direct the film version of Peter Morgan’s part factual, part fictional play FROST/NIXON.

 

LAT writer Matea Gold steered a skilful course through the evidence (interviewing me along the way). She and her editors came up with a helpful word to describe what actually emerged from the videotapes. Maybe it wasn't nothing, as Bob Woodward, myself and several others have perhaps over-brusquely concluded in our various ways. But neither did it amount to the public “conviction” of the disgraced ex-President, as Frost team-member James Reston Jr claims in his new book.

 

In the interviews, said the LAT’s headline, Nixon offered up simply a “concession”.

 

I’m happy to leave it at that.