We had planned on spending the Holiday cleansing ourselves of New York media—an OTR detox—and getting reacquainted with the hometown daily (while it lasts), maybe bickering with our family a bit. But the news coming out of The New York Times proved too compelling a saga, brimming with more affection and resentment than our family could offer up.
‘Twas the night before the night before Christmas when the union representing Times reporters quietly published an open letter to company scion Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., on SaveOurTimes.com.
Regarding the union’s ongoing contract negotiations, the letter asked Mr. Sulzberger to call off two of his lawyers’ demands: freezing the pension plan and ending the employees’ independent insurance.
“Many people have spent their entire careers at the Times—indeed, some have letters from your father explaining the pension system—and deserve better treatment,” the letter said.
As of this writing, 473 current and former Times editors and reporters have signed, including beloved veterans who took buyout packages this month like Don van Natta, George Vecsey and Clyde Haberman.
This round of buyouts felt especially bittersweet to us; perhaps it was all those tender internal tributes circulating. It seemed symbolic: The buyouts, though voluntary, were only offered to older staffers still on the company’s print-only contract.
The separate print and digital contracts are a vestige of the paper’s pre-integration days—no Timesman is print-only now—so the union has been trying to negotiate an umbrella print-and-digital contract.
The Times, on the other hand, wanted to extend the terms of the digital contract to all employees, according to an October interview with union president Bill O’Meara. Compared to print employees, digital employees have less job security and work more hours. As such, switching from print to digital would amount to a 16 percent pay cut.
We imagine it was quite a headache for Mr. Sulzberger, who is serving as interim CEO since Janet Robinson stepped down this month.
Her departure certainly fueled unrest among the undersigned. Ms. Robinson’s $4.5 M. one-year consultant’s salary alone sent eyes rolling (Times Co. shares went down 80% during her 7-year tenure, after all) but later that week, Reuters revealed that the truly golden parachute was the $10.9 million in pension benefits that the company agreed to pay out even though, at 61, Ms. Robinson was ineligible. (Perhaps it was to defray the cost of Ms. Robinson’s departure that the Times raised its weekday newsstand price to $2.50.)
“All of us who work at the Times deserve to have a secured retirement;” the guild letter said, “this should not be a privilege cynically reserved to senior management.”
Things only got worse after Christmas, when, on December 28, an e-mail showed up in our inbox asking us to reconsider cancelling our subscription. We panicked, assuming our credit card had been cancelled, too.
There was a number to call and when we did, an automated voice said they were experiencing unusual call volume. Unusual, indeed.
The email went out to some 8 million people. It was intended for 300.
Times PR originally said the message was external SPAM, but later admitted the missive came from inside the company, in error.
The New York Post, predictably, reacted to the flub with glee. The story made the cover, and occasioned the use of that one awful photograph of Mr. Sulzberger with a black eye, of which they’re so fond. But then, there wasn’t a paper in town that could resist the schadenfreude, especially during the sleepy 2011 home stretch.
As for its own end-of-year doldrums, the Times filled the paper with usual holiday season groaners: a first-person cat-training memoir in the Home & Garden section, a “What We Talked About” listicle in Styles, and, an investigation into the spiffy new polar fleeces all the cable guys are wearing these days on, um, the front page.
But there’s always one surprise under the tree, this year, a December 26th stunner by Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Harmon, called “Navigating Love and Autism.” The piece is an intimate portrait of Jack and Kirsten, two college students on the autism spectrum and in love.
“This piece is an important example of why big journalistic institutions like The New York Times are such a vital part of our society,” media reporter Seth Mnookin wrote on his media and science blog. (Ms. Harmon signed the union letter to Mr. Sulzberger.)
In the comments section, Jack’s father, John Elder Robison (the author of a bestselling Asperger’s memoir), praised Ms. Harmon’s reporting as well as the work of staff photographers and videographers.
“Their dedication is most impressive,” he wrote, “and it makes clear why the Times remains the paper of record.”
The Times is so committed to its watertight reporting, in fact, that it did not allow a slip-up about a character on the cartoon series “My Little Ponies: Friendship Is Magic” to mar her otherwise flawless 5,000-word piece.
Describing the therapy Kirsten undergoes in hopes of making her relationship with Jack more stable, Ms. Harmon wrote that she and her therapist devised a plan to “visualize Fluttershy, the nerdy intellectual character in the animated children’s show ‘My Little Pony’—of which her knowledge bordered on encyclopedic and whose goofiness made her laugh.”
But, as any self-respecting Brony will tell you, Fluttershy is the kind, animal-loving Pegasus pony character. It’s actually Twilight Sparkle, the Ponyville librarian and Apprentice of Princess Celestia, who’s the brainy one.
“As an adolescent with Asperger’s myself, all I can say about this article is they got the pony wrong,” joked Times commenter Ganondox, from Brazil.
The next day the following correction was appended: “A previous version of this article misidentified the “My Little Pony” character that Kirsten Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, not Fluttershy.”
“I hate to get anything wrong, but I confess to some enjoyment in finding the right way to phrase this one,” Ms. Harmon wrote Off The Record in an e-mail.
“I heard from one My Little Pony fan by email who praised the story but wanted me to know this for my own edification,” she continued.
“And at least one other called the Times and spoke, I gather at some length, with an editor who handles calls from readers.”
Sure, every holiday season has such moments of gaiety, but our ancestors planned it this way, so we could forget how dark and cold it is, and that yet another year has gone by. On New Year’s Eve, Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir announced the end of her Metro section nightlife column, The Nocturnalist.
“This is our final column,” Ms. Nir wrote, “the last opportunity this reporter will have to refer to ourselves in the plural (that is, without raising concern for our mental health).”
In the past year-and-a-half, Ms. Nir and a small army of stringers documented more than 200 parties in her signature, slightly agog third-person plural. But in between the charity galas and film premiers, Ms. Nir reported on the darker side of human society. In recent weeks her byline appeared on stories about grisly crimes and accidents in the region, including the Prospect Heights elevator murder and the tragic Connecticut house fire. Next month the Times’ program of rotating cub reporters will take her to Queens full-time, so, for now, she’s hanging up her stilettos.
“Both are time consuming beats,” Ms. Nir told Off the Record. “I don’t think you can do both well any more than you can be a cobbler and a baker at the same time.”
Five years after Joe Sexton and Bill Keller killed Boldface Names, Ms. Nir was the inadvertent architect of the gossip revival at the paper of record. In early 2010 she began writing City Room blog posts about quirky nighttime adventures, and, as rival the Wall Street Journal bolstered its nightlife coverage under Marshall Heyman, she eventually worked up to penning two multi-party columns a week.
Ms. Nir assured Off the Record that her after-hours stamina won’t go to waste.
“Now I can go out for pleasure, which I haven’t done in one year eight months, nine days,” she said. “And I can have a glass of wine if I want.”
To your health, Gray Lady.
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