Skip to content
Culture & Religion —

From Bill to Jill at the NYT

“I don’t know enough about the inner workings of (The New York Times) to offer definitive judgments, but from the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job.”
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

What’s the Latest Development?

Hendrik Hertzberg on Bill Keller’s eight years in the saddle as executive editor of the New York Times. “I don’t know if the job is inherently harder now than it used to be, but it is certainly more inherently stressful. Keller has had to deal with something that none of his predecessors needed to worry about: a prolonged existential crisis of the institution itself.”

What’s the Big Idea?

“From the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job overall. Yes, the way that he and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., handled the aftermath of the Judith Miller/Iraq/WMD fiasco left a lot to be desired. …But there were countless triumphs as well, up to and including the Times’s painstaking curating of the WikiLeaks cables.” 

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people
Related
Up Next