Diamond probes behind the scenes at New York Times

BEHIND THE TIMES, by Edwin Diamond, Villard Books, 437 pages, $24.

At last — a book about The New York Times that doesn’t perpetuate the vastly overworked myth that that newspaper is bigger than life; a book that reassures us that the editors and reporters employed there who wear pants do, in fact, put them on one leg at a time like the rest of us.

Edwin Diamond, media columnist for New York magazine and a journalism professor at New York University, has compiled a spirited analysis with the ring of authenticity to anyone who has ever worked in the newspaper business.

But the beauty of Diamond’s book is that it is not exclusively for newspaper junkies. Through interviews with past and present Times staffers, plus extensive use of the paper’s archives, he lays out the paper’s behind-the-scenes power struggles and petty feuds, as well as the triumphs and downers that are part of producing one of the world’s widest read and most quoted newspapers.

Diamond traces the great “rescue” of the paper in the 1970s and 1980s, when the whole enterprise appeared to be sinking, along with the municipal fortunes of New York City. In 1971, the Times lost 31,000 circulation in a six-month period and was down to 814,000 daily. By 1986, circulation had exceeded the 1 million mark and the paper was “a veritable money machine, throwing off operating profits of $200 million a year. The city had come back, and so had its leading newspaper.”

How this was accomplished, and the metamorphosis of the old hard news newspaper of record to the “new” New York Times of special interest coverage and soft features is the nub of Diamond’s story.

Approaching the task with the eye of a trained critic, Diamond declines to swallow the official company line about how the managerial triumvirate of publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, editor Abe Rosenthal and Walter E. Mattson from the business side remade the Times into the industry giant it is today.

“The actual sequence of events was at once less dramatic and more ambiguous” than the authorized company history would have one believe, Diamond writes. The paper suffered in the transition from the old to the new, especially in comparison to the Washington Post — which produced a stronger national report — and the Wall Street Journal, which turned out a stronger business-financial report. It lost some of its most talented men and women to the competition and was among the last major American newspapers to adjust its graphics and writing styles to a television-saturated society.

But neither did the Times devolve into a bland, suburbanized feature package, as some of its hard-line critics claimed. The paper did not suddenly turn its back on the urban squalor in its back yard in favor of a cosmeticized view of New York as a wondrous place to live and work. Its back yard had never been within the Times traditional ambit to begin with. It traditionally maintained more reporters in London or Paris than in its outer boroughs.

But those were the old days, when the paper’s authority was unchallenged and previous publishers could count on an intelligent audience that not only wanted to read the Times, but felt it had to read it. As Diamond points out, the Times is now just one of a number of national trend-setters in the print and electronic media. Old certitudes no longer exist. But new challenges do, in spades.

Kent Ward lives in Winterport.