In the early 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation considered it pertinent biographical information that The New York Times’ Tom Wicker suffered from “mental halitosis.” Since this is not, strictly speaking, a medical condition, they qualified the classification with “apparently.”
Internal documents obtained by Capital New York through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the bureau began keeping tabs on Wicker, who died last November, after he published a wide-ranging article for the New York Times Magazine asking, “What Have They Done Since They Shot Dillinger?”
The 1969 article took the F.B.I. to task for expending its resources on bank robberies and sensational murders that garnered them publicity while doing little to no work investigating criminal syndicates and the nuanced financial crimes of much more consequence to the national public interest. Wicker laid the blame at the feet of the man who embodied the bureau—its one and only director, J. Edgar Hoover—for being a practiced P.R. man more than a crime fighter, too concerned with bureaucratic protocol, too slow on civil rights, and too long in the job to right the bureau’s course.
With that article, the F.B.I. began a file on a man they had ignored as “a screwball” despite his having been the Washington bureau chief for the most influential newspaper in the country. It would contain rumors from an unknown third-hand source, a hunt for ulterior motives, and the director’s general disdain. In short, Wicker’s file provides a case study of the personal terms in which the bureau dealt with critical journalists in the final years of Hoover’s reign.
What J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. thought they knew about Tom Wicker of the ‘Times’
Almost exactly a year ago, on March 17, about two dozen New York Times employees gathered in a conference room not far from where the paper’s journalists were busy putting the next day’s print edition together.
It was a momentous day at 620 Eighth Avenue, one that had been several years in the making, and one that was arguably a watershed moment in the evolution of the media: After more than 15 years of giving its journalism to readers for free on the web, the world’s most influential newspaper was about to start charging for it.
A number of executives gathered with various web developers around the two long tables where the company’s strategy was about to pivot dramatically. There was Martin Nisenholtz, then the Times Company’s senior vice president of digital operations, who would go on to retire nine months later after steering the paper’s digital strategy for 16 years; Marc Frons, then the company’s chief technology officer, who was recently promoted to chief information officer; Denise Warren, the general manager of nytimes.com; Yasmine Namini, senior vice president of marketing and circulation; Paul Smurl, vice president for paid products; David Perpich, a promising young member of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan, which controls the publicly-owned company through a tiered stock ownership structure, who’d been recruited by the paper’s ruling family the previous year after resisting earlier offers to enter the company fold; and others who’d had a hand in the marathon effort to get the paid model off the ground. Times Company chairman Arthur Sulzberger stopped by for awhile to see how things were going.
The mood was anxious at first, and the work mundane, according to people who were in the room. Mostly, it was a bunch of people with their heads buried in their laptops monitoring the launch and making sure everything was running smoothly.
But the operation was fraught with larger questions. Newspapers were going down the tubes. Very few papers had managed to charge readers for content and still keep them coming. And revenue growth in digital advertising was growing at a snail’s pace while print advertising revenue was hemorrhaging. It’s hard to remember that, as little as a year before this day, there was talk in intelligent circles of a future without The New York Times. And that prospect, it was widely held, would mean a future without the kind of journalism the Times represents.
So the paid digital strategy was about survival, really.
10 Best Books of 2011 | The New York Times
Here’s a little something on how this list is assembled and what it can do for authors.
Fred Tomaselli paints intricate psychedelic patterns onto covers of the New York Times.
He thinks he’s clever, huh? We bet he’s never drawn an elaborate roller coaster on a newspaper page, like Express’ very own Coaster Doodler does.
Interactive hurricane tracker via NYTimes. Cool.
Betty Pierce. “White Cargo.” 1920s.
Temptresses of The Times: Sensational Pin-Ups From the Archives | NYT Lens Blog
Cheesecake in the Gray Lady? Goodness, no. But in the ‘teens, 20s and 30s, The Times made plenty of room in its Mid-Week Pictorial — a weekly rotogravure supplement — for some saucy publicity shots of female performers. Saucy, mind you. Never naughty. And always in connection with the young women’s appearances in the latest shows.
The American Journalism Review reveals how Arianna Huffington was able to lure Peter Goodman from the Times. It also reveals Goodman’s own self-loathing for taking the offer that was “too amazing to turn down.” So what did it? Freedom (and I’m sure the money wasn’t bad either).
