Keller’s appointment comes slightly more than a month after Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, were asked to leave the paper by Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher. And the move was not unexpected. Just minutes before Raines officially resigned last month, Sulzberger, according to Times staffers who witnessed the exchange, told Keller in the elevator that he wished to speak to the former managing editor.
Keller’s appointment caps a period of unprecedented scandals at the paper. On May 1, Jayson Blair, a rogue reporter, resigned; it was later revealed that he had fabricated and plagiarized dozens of articles. In the month after that, the Times’s internal scandals became hot news. Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national reporter, resigned after he made derogatory comments about Times reporters’ use of stringers. Reporters and editors who had been upset by Raines’s imperious and autocratic leadership style felt emboldened to speak out.
No managing editor was named to replace Gerald Boyd. Keller, according to a Times press release, will assume his new role on July 30 and will spend the next several weeks assembling a new team.
Although Keller’s ascendancy was expected, the unprecedented, and tenuous, position of the Times–former executive editor Joe Lelyveld has been leading the paper since Raines departed–has caused no end of fevered, and occasionally bizarre, speculation. Nation columnist Eric Alterman suggested New Yorker editor David Remnick should get the job. The Washingtonian’s Kim Eisler wrote a column touting Craig Whitney as a lead candidate and Michael Oreskes and Andy Rosenthal as dark horses; those three assistant managing editors were seen, internally and externally, as being extreme long shots. But most of the speculation focused on Keller and two former Timesmen: Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Marty Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe.
Keller’s appointment comes three days after Raines gave an hour-long interview to Charlie Rose. Times executives, editors and reporters were all upset by Raines’s interview, which seemed to many to be an attempt to have his say before a replacement was named. In the interview, in which Raines said he hoped to follow the model of William Butler Yeats and Pablo Picasso as an artist with an “incredible burst of creativity after the age of 60,” Raines cast himself as a “change agent” sent to change a “lethargic culture of complacency” at the paper. He described the paper under his leadership as being embroiled in a kind of civil war, with Raines and a small cadre of adherents wanting to make the paper better and many of the paper’s editors and reporters resisting change because it would require more work.
The Charlie Rose interview caused some of Raines’s remaining supporters at the paper to distance themselves from his comments.
Both Keller and Sulzberger seemed to allude to Raines’s interview when they spoke to the newsroom this morning. Keller told his staff to savor life, adding, “That will enrich your work as much as a competitive pulse rate will.”
Sulzberger was even more explicit. In the Rose interview, Raines described himself as a “dear friend” of the publisher, and said Sulzberger had chosen him to shake up the staff. On Monday, Sulzberger told the newsroom, “There’s no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be.”
Meanwhile, Monday’s Times contains an unusual corrective article that shows the continuing effect the Blair imbroglio is having on the Times’s news hole. Monday’s story, titled “Music Executive Still Controls TVT Records,” ran on the front of the paper’s business section; the piece details how the entire premise of a piece that ran last Monday, written by Lynette Holloway, was incorrect. In addition, the Times ran a more traditional correction on the second page of its front section. Holloway’s piece is not the first story a reporter has written an article where inaccuracies undermine the very premise of the story, but it is one of the rare instances where the paper corrected the story with a new article.
