America's Two Best Newspapers

By common consent, the two best newspapers in America are the New York Times (daily circulation: 803,123) and the Washington Post (530,031) --and they far excel the rest. Most Americans seldom see them, but both are thoroughly read by those on the air or in print who bring others the national news Now the nation's best newspaper has just restyled itself as the New New York Times; and when so pivotal an institution changes, something important is being said about American journalism. It is as if a dignified old lady, much revered in her own stately way but feeling a little dowdy, decided to adjust to the newer fashions--without tarting herself up too much. The change so far is one of personality, but it could become unintentionally a change of character.

The Times, to be sure, has undergone considerable evolutionary change over the years; but it long considered itself an encyclopedic "newspaper of record" for "thoughtful, pure-minded people," as Adolph Ochs defined his audience when he took over the paper back in 1896. Even a decade ago, you had to be uncompromisingly thoughtful to read the Times. The only relief in columns of soberly worded dispatches was a crossword puzzle or a chess problem, never a comic strip. Gossip was minimal, scandal sanitized--in keeping with the prim slogan, "All the news that's fit to print." The paper seemed edited for someone with a meticulous interest in the rise and fall of Cabinets in obscure countries. TIME, in its own parvenu days in the shadow of the august Times, used to refer to it saucily, with a mixture of admiration and exasperation, as "the good grey Times."

In recent years the Times has successfully revamped its entire news coverage, as if its editors had heard a message beyond the grave from its last formidable rival, the New York Herald Tribune, which went down to defeat sloganizing, "Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?" Instead of being a paper where specialists write for specialists, the Times now goes after the general reader. Foreign coverage focuses, and well, on how other people live, their problems and moods, rather than on changes of ministers. Once the rest of the U.S., outside of Washington and New York City, was terra incognita to the Times, but it now provides excellent regional coverage. In its own backyard, the Times has discovered neighborhoods and suburbs it formerly ignored. Stories are built around people; interpretation is freer.

The basic strength of the paper is that from Washington to Boston--among businessmen, academics, magazine editors, network newsmen, Government officials--the Times is the daily shared data base of the Eastern Establishment. "Getting through" the Times every day, as the practice is known, is a duty, sometimes a pleasure, but always a time-consuming habit. On Sundays it can easily take more than two hours.

Pity that compulsive reader now.

Lately the paper has added an ad-fat Weekend section on Friday, about theater, film, art and music (subjects already gone into lengthily on Sunday), and an ad-fat Living section on Wednesday, running often to 24 pages, full of recipes and food chatter. Another weekday section called Home threatens to surface soon. These new protuberances on the body of the already obese daily Times are what the promoters mean by the New New York Times. The changes seem designed less to expand coverage than to expand profits. This is understandable; considering its dominance, the Times has never earned what it should, and with an editorial staff of nearly 600 has never stinted in covering the news. Many American papers that make less effort have better-looking balance sheets--content to get their news from the wires, their opinions from canned columnists and their satisfactions from the counting room.

Fashion Image. Borrowing heavily from the weekly New York magazine, the Times now pursues an urban consumer audience whose trendy spenders are told what to eat, where to go and how to buy. Or, as the Times quotes the president of Macy's: "Food is part of a fashion image these days, and the really with-it person has to be interested." He could not have summarized better the philosophy of the New New Times. The daily Times has added more than 35,000 readers on the days its supplements appear. But in the schizophrenic division of its appeal between the well-informed citizen and the well-heeled consumer, there is a real danger of a trivialization of the Times.

Once you allot news space in the Times according to the category of advertising that surrounds it, a distention sets in. In the new sections are a number of useful things, including good theater criticism (Walter Kerr), tart restaurant judgments (Mimi Sheraton) and personal health advice (Jane E. Brody). But assorted critics and writers who also appear Sundays turn up again during the week with nothing special to say, and their words do run on. Enough in the sections demands attention, however, and the poor old conscientious reader has more to get through.

Times editors, very defensive on the subject, insist that the amount of regular news space for serious coverage in the daily paper has not been cut back. Yet the old Times found room for significant documentation that no longer interests the New New York Times. Since the Times still documents more thoroughly than any other newspaper, editors can't be blamed for wanting to lay some of the burden down--like the full text of treaties, which possibly interested 5% of the readers. But the general reader now misses valuable documentation that he might be happy to read. The Times merely excerpted Saul Bellow's Nobel acceptance speech. It played as the day's most important story the Supreme Court decision on low-cost housing in the suburbs. The story was well reported and analyzed by Lesley Oelsner, but the Times printed not one full sentence from either the majority or minority court opinions. It did not even excerpt Theodore Sorensen's statement withdrawing from his CIA appointment. The New Times has become an erratic supplier of the raw materials of history.

Because of its indispensability, the Times unfairly often gets only grudging appreciation from its critics. Put it this way the Times is an improving great paper, with some worrisome tendencies.

Is the once unique Times going the way of the standard American newspaper? If so, the direction it is heading in is well exemplified by the Washington Post. Ask A.M. Rosenthal, the Times's executive editor, to name the best American papers and he will tell you. "The Times--space--the Washington Post --space--and then the others." The Post's executive editor, brash Ben Bradlee, agrees, although he thinks his own paper in some ways better. Bradlee envies the Times its careful editing, its good desk work, its "cruising speed." But he also finds the Times "too constipated."

The Washington Post is an ordinary American paper that willed itself to be better. It still carries much of the standard dreck--lovelorn columns, horoscopes, beauty hints--as well as 25 comics. But to this compost heap the Post has added solid and penetrating reporting and an engaging flair.

Its finest hour, of course, was Watergate, which it now finds hard to live up to. Watergate made folk heroes and millionaires out of Woodward and Bernstein, sent up Bradlee's ego when he saw Jason Robards' fine film portrayal of him in All the President's Men, and in the face of economic and political threats to the paper, proved Publisher Katharine Graham's courage. Hard to top all that--last year's exposure of Congressman Wayne Hays and his dolly seems much less momentous. Cartoonist Herblock is bereft without Nixon to kick around. The paper is suffering from post-Watergate blahs.

Less Deep. The Post practices a lively, aggressive journalism that reflects Bradlee's jaunty quirkiness, giving it an individuality the institutionalized Times lacks. The Post often overplays its own stories. It doesn't try to cover everything; though it has some good correspondents spotted around the world, it relies a great deal on news services. The Post is a high-wire act. It is less deep, less thorough than the Times, but it has an air. As Bradlee says, "We don't print the truth. We print what we know, what people tell us. So we print lies."

It should be possible to compare the two papers side by side (the Times, a better financial page, the Post, better in sports), but in fact they serve quite different cities with different needs. In a one-industry town, the Post excels in its reporting of Congress and the bureaucracies. In a city more than half black, it covers black news extensively, and in Columnist William Raspberry has discovered a reporter able to write honestly as a black rather than as self-appointed spokesman for all blacks.

Overall, the Post is better written with a pervading sense of self-deprecating irony. The Times, like a baseball manager who sends in a designated hitter, achieves its lighter effects with designated humorists: Israel Shenker, who merrily wanders the halls of academe, or Columnist Russell Baker, the best satirist in the American press. The Post's daily Style section takes itself less seriously than does the Times in its cultural coverage; but then in Washington there is less to take seriously, even if you add in the Kennedy Center and the Hirshhorn Museum. The Style section's reportorial star is Sally Quinn, who with sharp eyes and a mischievous ear is expert at waylaying visiting notables. (The Times had in Charlotte Curtis a reporter with a wicked gift for deadpan reporting of society's banalities, but instead put her in charge of the increasingly cumbersome Op-Ed page.)

The editorial pages are where the differences between the two papers are most marked. In the hands of Philip Geyelin and Meg Greenfield, the Post has the best editorial page in the country. It achieves an urbanity of tone, reasoning conversationally with lawmakers and officials, and frequently surprises with unexpected insight. A bright, idiomatic tone has crept into the Times editorial page since Max Frankel became its editor on Jan. 1. He seems determined to modulate that Ugh, Big Chief Has Spoken voice of the Times.

Both papers have great strengths. Abe Rosenthal and Ben Bradlee, both able, intensely competitive men, are convinced that a good newspaper doesn't have to be dull. And also convinced that success doesn't require flash and trash.

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