An Obituary of The New York Times

A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Bill Keller at The New York Times building on Manhattan. Keller was the long time editor in chief of the newspaper and Sulzberger its proprietor. We met at what must have been the 50th floor of the company headquarters, on 8th Avenue. I write company headquarters, instead of newspaper, because this part of the building was accessible only through a separate elevator-system and was strictly off-limits for the regular New York Times reporters. 

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We spoke for about an hour and a half for the film Mediastan that I was shooting at the time, and now in hindsight, I’m both grateful and surprised by how honestly the administrative and real heads of the enterprise described the nature of their work. Grateful, because the degree of openness they exhibited is a rarity in the backrooms of journalism. Surprised, because what they were doing wasn’t journalism, at least not in the sense that I had been taught in journalism school in Sweden. 

No, the work that Keller and Sulzberger were describing was something entirely different, and as such it was a shame that this part of the building was off-limits to the journalists of their own newspaper. Because, as I would soon realize, the upper levels of the New York Times building was a place where a variety of important political decisions were negotiated and taken. A space, ironically, very far from scrutiny of the pubic eye. READ MORE...