The Times

April 1, 2023

At the New York Times since 1996 and currently reporting on West Coast cultural affairs, Nagourney covers four decades of ferment at the paper, from Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger's era to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. While embracing high points (e.g., coverage of 9/11 and the U.S. Challenger explosion) and challenges (e.g., questionable reporting on the Iraq War, the ouster of two executive editors), the narrative reflects on key crises in journalism today. Prepub Alert.

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September 4, 2023
New York Times journalist Nagourney (Out for Good) offers a fly-on-the-wall history of his workplace focused on the paper’s struggles between 1976 and 2016 “to come to grips with a changing business model and a changing world.” During this period, the Times had to adjust to the rise of the internet (its business model shifted from advertising- to subscriber-based), diversify its staff after two discrimination lawsuits, and adapt to evolving journalistic norms and expectations (Nagourney tracks how competition from the Drudge Report and other blogs during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal taught the Times it needed “to be part of a world where stories were being published as they happened”). Among other journalistic scandals that rocked the newspaper, Nagourney recounts Judith Miller’s overly credulous acceptance of U.S. intelligence reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the discovery in 2003 that Jayson Blair was fabricating his articles. Drawing on extensive research and original interviews, Nagourney provides astute insight into leadership under crisis as well as a window onto recent decades of polarizing politics. The result is both a valuable case study of an industry in flux and a unique angle on American history.

September 1, 2023
A deep-dive history of the New York Times in an age of transformation. The Times, writes veteran political reporter Nagourney, has long borne the sobriquet "the Gray Lady," but women have seldom figured in its management and upper ranks. The same was true of anyone but white males. As Nagourney, who covered the 2020 election for the paper, writes, this became a source of much concern to the publishers, members of the Sulzberger dynasty, and the paper's editorial and business leadership, who oversaw its transformation not just into a more diverse organization but also one at the forefront of the digital age. It came at a cost: "Newsrooms as a rule are unhappy places: roiled by self-doubt, anger, competitiveness, resentments, and vindictiveness," and the Times was no exception. Accordingly, episodes of massive bloodletting were not uncommon. In an absorbing case study, Nagourney revisits the checkered career of serial fabulist Jayson Blair, who, in the end, took down his editor, Howell Raines, with him when his inventions were exposed. "I've got more arrows in me than Custer's horse," Raines once quipped, but this time the horse died. Another critical juncture in the book comes with the tortured saga of the Times' first woman executive editor, Jill Abramson, whose dismissal stirred up unpleasant memories of a sexual discrimination class action lawsuit filed decades earlier. Nagourney's account of the Times' performance during the fraught days after 9/11, the good with the bad, is outstanding. Still, students of the journalism business will most value his study of the halting steps the paper took toward becoming a digital giant, with, today, far more online subscribers than print ones, lending weight to one editor's observation: "Readers love news articles and narrative. But they clearly want more journalism that doesn't consist mostly of blocks of text." An exemplary work of journalism about journalism, of surpassing interest to any serious consumer of the news.

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