Thursday, December 17, 2009

"We're Scared."

Those were the words of a reporter inside the NYT newsroom yesterday, echoing the emotions of a staff now motivated to perform out of fear that they might one day lose their jobs.

As they watched former star reporters like Sara Rimer, Christine Hauser and Eric Konigsberg prepare to leave the NYT involuntarily -- the victims of layoffs engineeered by their employer's failing fortunes -- they knew they could well be next.

"You can't rest on the fact that you once wrote a great story five years ago," one reporter told us. "Now it's all about what you did six months ago. Three. You're being evaluated constantly, and if you don't measure up, you're gone."

Sources suggested to us that those who got laid off yesterday weren't blindsided by their fate; the shock was felt more by their colleagues, who wondered whether another round of cuts might reach them. NYT newsroom managers put together an annual written review that assesses each employee's strengths and weaknesses, and several sources said those reports figured heavily in the decisions.

Others got laid off at least in part because they'd only recently arrived in the NYT newsroom. Reporters like Konigsberg and business staffer Kate Galbraith had gotten their jobs only in the last few years, and neither had yet done stories that cemented their reputations.

The decisions were, of course, driven by economics. The NYT managers had to consider the complex equation between salary and substance, and measure every employee's performance in a cost-benefit analysis.

It's a far cry from the NYT culture that once gave new hires the confidence that they had been given a job for life. In decades past, a reporter past his prime might be sent to cover New Jersey, or assigned to real estate -- and there they would linger until they were either old or bored enough to retire. Those days are over.

Reporters like Rimer (who joined the NYT in 1983, and has been based in Boston) and real-estate reporter Josh Barbanel (a 1981 arrival who once covered city and state politics) had each distinguished themselves earlier in their NYT careers; but in recent years, both had diminished numbers of bylines, fewer scoops and lower profiles. They knew -- as did their bosses -- that their salaries outweighed their value. When the time came to cut, their names surfaced immediately as possibilities.

So now, as reporters continue the daily task of putting out the paper they love, they have to consider a fate that once seemed unthinkable -- the possibility that their bosses might be weighing their work on a daily basis as a reason to let them go. Few at the NYT believe that this latest bloodbath will be the last.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any more bylines that we won't be seeing any longer-- at least in the NYT.

Anonymous said...

Um, wait a sec. Re. this quote:

"You can't rest on the fact that you once wrote a great story five years ago," one reporter told us. "Now it's all about what you did six months ago. Three. You're being evaluated constantly, and if you don't measure up, you're gone."

Help me understand. There's something wrong with this?

Chris said...

There is something wrong with that, I would guess journalism is one of those fields where everyone doesn't exactly break something like Watergate every few weeks. Just like you wouldn't expect scientists to discover something every few weeks. Not really trying to defend them here, just pointing out that the journalism industry is based on the success of huge stories and that there really aren't as many groundbreaking stories as we all would like to think there might be.

Anonymous said...

While I agree with Chris that good reporting takes time to collect, I also think that life at the NY Times can be mind numbing. If I had a dollar for every time I heard about how someone with great promise got (1) hired with fanfare, (2) given a page one story a week later and (3) generally forgotten, I would have $10 or $15.

There's a reason why Herb Caen and Red Smith wrote their columns every day. Many race horses need to run. Yes, there's a place for deep investigation and Fletch-style journalism, but my main hope is that more voices will get to run more often.

At least that's the silver lining I'm clinging to.

Anonymous said...

This is too bad. I turn to the Times for good writing and stories that take a little digging. Too often, the NYT is celebrating machines like Sewell Chan and Brian Stelter who churn out breathless by-the-numbers briefs with very little depth or context. Just b/c people can blog and tweet all day doesn't mean they should.

Hey, NYT, how about running fewer-but-longer stories in your diminished pages and letting your reporters have more room to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack that you once held out at arm's length? Instead, you seem to be embracing the very things at which you once turned up your nose.

Anonymous said...

So... in general... when was the last time that the NYT broke a really BIG story? One would guess there are no Watergates,no Pentagon Papers any longer... how about the depressingly disastrous health care sell-out going on as we speak? What they need to do is hire people on an incentive basis. Provide bonuses for great stories. Perform like the rest of us in the work world or go write PR releases.

Anonymous said...

whatever...

Anonymous said...

Fear is nothing but a palpitation of the cunt.

Urnaut Goodenough said...

Emancipate the for-profit Co. from mental slavery to nPR-style institutional and individual, fictive and transactive underwriters.

Anonymous said...

Here's a question: How much are they paying people like Dick Cavett to blog? How much are they spending on those "vows" wedding videos? How much are they spending on frivolous web content, when they should be focusing on news? (And one more question, albeit off topic: Why did they decline to run the "stolen" emails calling into question the hockey stick global warming data, but instantly ran a "leaked" document making the other case?)

Anonymous said...

The recipe for dismissal: If you're writing anecdotal ledes, you're expendable. Too much softness in The NYT.

Trochilus said...

Anon, December 18, 2009 12:41 AM,
you ask:

"(And one more question, albeit off topic: Why did they decline to run the "stolen" emails calling into question the hockey stick global warming data, but instantly ran a "leaked" document making the other case?)"

Two reasons.

Because of the very scope of the documentation, e.g., containing a lengthy time span, including obviously long-archived e-mails, some going back over dozen years to March of '96, the likelihood that this was an overnight hack of their computer system is far less believable than that it was a leak, or that it was at least assisted by a leak from someone inside -- someone who was sickened by what they knew was going on.

Secondly, the story reaches far beyond what the NY Times has reported so far.

Perhaps someone there is still digging for a deeper story, though I wouldn't count on it.

For example, the climate change story (as opposed to the warming story) has been so bogus from the start that you would think someone at the NYT would have taken the alarmists' predictions over time -- including those of the Gore propaganda -- lined them up alongside current reality, and simply asked,

"Why should anyone place any faith in any of your prognostications?"

But, in my opinion, the only plausible explanation is that the current "leadership" at the NY Times doesn't have the stomach for taking on an in-depth search, one that they suspect might shed light and credibility on facts or hypotheses running counter to what is really an ideology masquerading as science, one that they have been supporting for so long.

Denial is a powerful force, even at the NY Times! It is sad, but certainly not unprecedented! See, e.g., the NY Times coverage of the Cold War.

Anonymous said...

Re: "Because of the very scope of the documentation, e.g., containing a lengthy time span, including obviously long-archived e-mails, some going back over dozen years to March of '96, the likelihood that this was an overnight hack of their computer system is far less believable than that it was a leak,"

That fails to stand up to facts like the Pentagon Papers, which reached farther back than Climategate.

Trochilus said...

Anon. December 19, 2009 4:56 PM:

The only point I was making was that common sense strongly suggests the manner in which the East Anglia data and e-mails got out into the public arena, was 1) via a leak (made to look like a hack); or, 2) via a hack, but with a real helpful assist from someone within the East Anglia community itself.

In other words, because of the broad timeline covered by the e-mails alone (over 13 years), the possibility of a hacker getting in and sweeping up all that relevant information so quickly -- much of which would have been long since archived -- suggests to me that this was an inside job, or, that someone inside gave a roadmap to the hackers, telling them where to go.

One possibility is that a group inside had been given the responsibility to collect data and communications for complying with one or more FOI requests that had been filed (some several years old), and that there was an internal repository where that information was being stored.

Non-compliance with those FOI requests was obviously in the "interest" of the participants, as was openly alluded to in some e-mails. That can also be inferred from the persistent failure to comply with the FOI requests.

Perhaps a decision had been taken NOT to comply, or at least until AFTER Cop-18.

In that light, a whistle-blower telling a hacker where to go to get at that information would make sense. So would a leak made to look like a hack.

If the insiders were going to hold off on compliance with those requests until after COP-18, someone inside may have felt that the scientists were intentionally withholding critical information and deceiving the public about a whole series of questions, including how the modeling was done, and, therefore, what the state of the science really was and is. It's hard not to agree!

Interesting, isn't it, by the way that somehow the 12 year old e-mails were kept, but the original data from earlier times was discarded? How unscientific can you be? If the intention in destroying the data was to make real peer review impossible, how fundamentally dishonest can you be? And, given the huge economic implications of all of this, one has to at least suspect serious criminal action.

As for the Pentagon Papers, that was essentially an internal history of American policy making regarding Viet-Nam. We know that was leaked.

And, at the time the NY Times salivated all over it.

But, as for this story, they seem highly restrained. Diffident, really!

Not their agenda, I guess. Beyond that, I don't make any kind of comparative judgment between the two, one way or the other. You brought it up.

Coward Huge said...

Whereas decades of scientific analysis converges on the negative impacts of fossil fuel use on climate stability, the industries most resistant to innovation are at work intimidating.
Far more pervasive is the repressive persecution by Big Pharma of life scientists. In fact, a major breaking story about intimidation of students and researchers at Harvard Medical School. This story only ran in the Business section of the paper.

The Science Section of the paper might as well be the in-house supplement of Big Pharma. Might as well put a special advertisement banner on top of it, and make some money.

Omnibux said...

Or how about this story about Monsanto's agrarian dictatorship, which is again in Business, not the Science pages, and doesn't even bother getting a line in on non-GMO plants, the p.o.v. of a small/organic crop farmer, or on scientists critical of monoculture.

Though irrelevant to the thread above, narrow-sighted reportage is precisely the kind of mindset the Inc. should entirely fumigate in its race out of a cloudy business model.

Anonymous said...

I counted a total of 49 Sara Rimer bylines from Jan. 1, 2007 to Jan. 1, 2010. That's 16 a year, or just over 1 a month. I am astonished that Rimer, knowing how unproductive she has been, did not jump at the buyout when it was offered.