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Newsweek
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June 16, 2003.

Everyone knew what the e-mail meant. The Thursday-morning staffwide memo was a sure sign that the surreal nightmare that had begun in late April was coming to an unexpectedly quick conclusion: Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, The New York Times's executive and managing editors, were resigning. Stepping into the crowded elevator that would take him to the third-floor newsroom for the announcements, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times's publisher and chairman, ran into Bill Keller, the paper's former managing editor and the man Sulzberger had passed over when he tapped Raines for the Times's top job. "I want to talk with you," Sulzberger said, according to people who witnessed the exchange. "Some time soon."

On the third floor, Raines stood before the staff that had risen up against his reign. As staffers--some of whom had openly lobbied for his departure--wept, Raines said, "Remember, when a great story breaks out, go like hell." He then grabbed his straw hat and walked out of the Times's newsroom one last time, his new wife, Krystyna Stachowiak, by his side. According to more than a half-dozen sources at the paper, Raines headed to his car and drove immediately to his country home in Pennsylvania, without stopping at his West Village town house. "This was like a cold-water shock," Gail Collins, the Times's editorial-page editor, told NEWSWEEK. "Even for those people who wanted to see him go."

Raines's drive to the country took place five weeks to the day after Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old national reporter, had resigned after being charged with plagiarism. Blair's departure, and the revelations that he had lifted quotes and invented scenes, threw the country's most admired journalistic institution into a paroxysm of rancor and recrimination. At first, staffers hoped that an exhaustive 14,000-word probe of Blair's work, published on Sunday, May 11, would put the matter behind them. But Raines, the iron-fisted leader given the assignment of shaking up the tradition-bound Times, soon lost his grip in the face of a rising tide of increasingly vitriolic complaints that seemed to come from all corners of the newsroom. As late as last Tuesday, when Sulzberger flew to Washington to meet with the paper's angry D.C. bureau, Raines was still struggling to regain power. In a meeting that afternoon with department heads, Raines, for the first time since Blair resigned, presented a new paradigm for how to run the paper. But by late Wednesday, it was all over, and a search for the person whom the Los Angeles Times called "the most powerful journalist in America" was on. That person will have his work cut out for him. Raines, despite winning eight Pulitzers as executive editor, was ultimately brought down by the dissent in the ranks, and the next editor inherits a newspaper still reeling from the aftershocks of bloodlust and revolution.

It fell to Joe Lelyveld, Raines's predecessor and the man tapped as the paper's interim editor, to restore a measure of calm. On Friday he spoke before a much-relieved newsroom. Tieless, in a yellow button-down shirt, the sleepy-eyed Lelyveld scanned his troops. Speaking forcefully, he made clear there would be an immediate change from the 21-month, autocratic tenure of Raines and Boyd. "The newspaper works best when editors listen," he told an approving crowd.

Still, the immediate sense of relief brought about by Lelyveld's encore performance didn't completely obscure a number of outstanding questions swirling around the newsroom. Had Raines and Boyd left of their own volition? Was Sulzberger, the headstrong 51-year-old publisher, feeling pressure from the paper's board? And most important, how would the Times, an institution built on trustworthiness and respect, recover?

In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Sulzberger said he had not been pressured to dump Raines and Boyd either by the paper's board or by members of his family, who control the vast majority of the company's voting stock and have run the paper for more than a century. "Towards the end of last week, and even more towards the beginning of this week, it became clear to them and in turn to me that the best thing for this paper would be for them to resign," Sulzberger said last Friday afternoon.

Sulzberger knows the paper still has a tough road ahead. Lelyveld has told friends he expects to be in place only for a month or so; the handicapping for the paper's next leaders has already begun. Keller is one obvious choice--he has experience running the newsroom and is respected internally. Two former Timesmen, Dean Baquet (now the managing editor at the Los Angeles Times) and Marty Baron (currently the top editor at The Boston Globe, a New York Times property), are also strong candidates. John Geddes, the paper's current deputy managing editor, and Collins, the editorial-page editor, are seen as dark-horse options. If Sulzberger has a preference, he isn't talking about it publicly, although he did say he wanted someone with experience running a large operation. "This is a newsroom of over 1,200 men and women. Managing that is a complex task," he told NEWSWEEK.

The eventual choice will face a staff that seems emboldened by its success in ousting a much-reviled leader. "We've told everyone, 'If you want to cast stones, you can hit the target, you can take somebody out'," said one longtime Times staffer, noting that people internally are recognizing the dangers of mob rule. "We've created a situation where management is impossible." Indeed, as the crises set off by Blair's serial deceptions rippled outward, everyone assumed the debate should focus on their concerns. Reporters who didn't end up on the front page complained the cause was favoritism; minority journalists wondered why Boyd, the highest-ranking African-American in the history of the paper, was forced to resign; right-wing ideologues tried to make the Times's implosion a cautionary tale about affirmative action or perceived liberal bias. On the day Raines and Boyd resigned, Blair himself tried desperately to regain the spotlight, doling out interview after interview. In the newsroom on 43d Street, there's a palpable sense of relief that Blair's voice won't carry much anymore. But there's also a deep fear that it may be some time before the paper has completely repaired the damage from the events he set in motion.