News Analysis: It's the Culture

Jayson Blair. What an unlikely change agent. And yet the notorious young fiction writer and plagiarist has brought one of the world's great newspapers to its knees. Blair did what dozens of his honest colleagues at the New York Times could not do. He toppled one of the least popular executive teams in the paper's 107-year history. On June 5, only a year after the world's most esteemed newspaper won a record seven Pulitzer prizes, executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd stepped down. Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who tapped Raines for the job, was one of the few who managed to look sorry.

On the surface, the tumult at the Times was about Blair's brazen dishonesty and his failure to obey the first law of journalism: Thou shalt report faithfully what you see and hear. But it soon became clear that the story was really about the cruel and unusual management that Raines had practiced in the course of garnering all of those prized Pulitzers.

Part of the problem was Raines himself. For all of Raines's liberal politics and Southern gentility, he was an ego-driven autocrat who ruled by fear, played favorites, had an idiosyncratic news judgment (witness his Augusta National Golf Club obsession), and loathed hearing unwanted truths. Again and again, he gave Blair plum assignments despite warnings from other editors that the hyperactive, erratic rookie reporter was a disaster in the making. Everyone who has ever met Raines seems to have a colorful story about him, often an anecdote that hints at his resemblance to one of the more volatile Roman emperors, albeit one in a Panama hat. But Raines's problems preceded him. Linda Greenhouse, the distinguished reporter who covers the Supreme Court for the paper, told the Wall Street Journal: "There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical structure." Greenhouse points to the real villain in the New York Times scandal and avoids simply demonizing Raines. To paraphrase Greenhouse: "It's the culture, stupid."

Organizational cultures are not like breaking-news stories. They don't happen suddenly. They evolve slowly, imperceptibly, over years, if not decades. Unlike mission statements, they are never written down. But they are the soul of an organization and determine much of what happens within it. "It's the way things are done around here," one CEO told me, in defining his corporation's culture. Such cultures are collections of unspoken rules and traditions. They determine which offices are sacrosanct, whether the men wear ties, and who speaks to whom and in what tone of voice -- the red, amber, and green lights that aren't visible but that operate 24 hours a day and determine the quality of organizational life.

In the 19 months under Raines, the newsroom culture at the New York Times became more and more unhappy. Veteran journalists were routinely pushed aside, and green, malleable reporters were promoted beyond their talent or experience. Many of the seasoned writers went elsewhere -- something that has rarely happened at the Times, since it truly is the ultimate gig in journalism. Moreover, the newsroom values shifted. Hustle came to be rewarded above all. The long-accepted pattern had been for experienced reporters to spend much of their time on thoughtful, in-depth pieces. Now these same writers were expected to be plugged into their pagers at all times, so they could join 100 of their colleagues at a moment's notice to "flood the zone" on a breaking news story. It was clear that a reporter's family life was to be secondary to his or her uncritical willingness to go wherever the editors wanted.

Like all big-time newspapers, the New York Times is a pressure cooker in the best of times. It has had its share of hard-driving, insensitive managers. When Raines stepped down, former executive editor Abe Rosenthal told the media, "The management of Howell Raines won the paper seven Pulitzer awards in one year. If that reflects a poor management style, they should patent it and sell it all over the world." No wonder Rosenthal liked Raines's style. Rosenthal, too, was a newsroom tsar who controlled by fear. Just as Raines had an implicit family-last policy, Rosenthal once screeched at a favorite reporter who balked at reassignment because his wife had a good job in town: "If you're married, you don't belong in journalism!"

Forget the numbers game. Whether it's 7 or 15 Pulitzers, it doesn't matter how many prizes you win if you damage your real prize -- your talent -- in the process.