The 'Times' Tries To Quash New Building Complaints

All is not well at the new New York Times headquarters. It seems the inmates are not pleased with their new asylum, and thus an "it's not so bad!" feature went up on Ahead of the Times, the in-house party paper of choice, to quell the brewing discontent. A highlight, regarding the sound the toilet makes when flushing: "Some people liken it to a small animal being strangled. Personally, I hear a couple of high, whiny notes from the Sopranos' theme music." Delightful! The article—rather great!—follows.

Greetings From Eighth Avenue! How's the new building? Lad Paul, executive editor of News Services, has kicked the tires and gives thumbs up to the new digs. It's still a work in progress with "Hardware Enclosed" signs taped to mailslots for name tags in the new mailroom.

When people learn that I have been working in the new building since the News Service and Web group moved in the week of April 23, the first question I invariably get is: "What's it like?"

It's open, bright, clean, orderly and quiet. You have a feeling that even the air you're breathing is somehow fresher.

But after the newness of those features wears off (less than the first full day), the irritations and frustrations of a brand new and largely unfinished building begin to set in. And newspeople being what they are, it's not long before kvetching becomes the norm. But that's not fair, because there is much that is surprising, interesting and plain enjoyable about 620 Eighth Avenue.

The first thing you notice is the light. Having windows on all sides is liberating and refreshing. The glass walls live up to Renzo Piano's vision and do make you feel integrated with the external environment. But then the automatic blinds come down and all you can see are fuzzy outlines of what's outside. Eventually the blinds go back up, although probably only part way. Then you have a half-obscured view of what's out there. But it's a view, which is a lot better than many of us had in the old quarters.

The antics of the blinds are amusing. When you first see the entire long wall of them lowering or rising in unison, it's arresting. Then they become a little mysterious. Their position doesn't always seem to correspond to light conditions. Finally, they can become troublesome as people discover how to raise and lower them locally. Some like them down; some like them up. You can anticipate the rest.

Another noticeable feature is the quiet. Nine floors up, we hardly hear any city noise at all. I don't know what the sound will be like on 2, 3 and 4 where the main news and feature departments will be, but it's got to be better than the din of car horns, sirens and street demonstrators on West 43rd, or the shrieks of MTV fans on the 44th street side.

The story you've heard about the lights is true. They are sensitive to movement, and in the first few days when only one late-night person was working in the News Service or the Web newsroom, the lights did not detect them and went off. The intrepid Ray Krueger, late editor in the News Service, found that if he got up and took a lap around the copy desk waving his arms every 20 minutes or so, the lights came on and stayed on. The sensors have now been adjusted so that they can detect fingers moving on a keyboard, and there are no more problems.

Cash flow has got to be “Pinching” right about now, too. Please forgive the pun...

Pinch apparently just got done scrounging up $100 mil by aborting Discovery.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Discovery Communications is actively looking for a partner to replace the New York Times in their aborted Discovery Times Channel joint venture, according to a report Tuesday in the Washington Post.
New Discovery Communications president and CEO David Zaslav aims to unload the 50 percent stake NYT had in the cable channel until April 2006, when the newspaper company exercised an option to exit the venture. Since joining Discovery at the beginning of the year, Zaslav has been aggressively re-evaluating every facet of the company, announcing the first phase of a broad restructuring plan in February.
Discovery declined comment.
The Washington Post reported that Discovery is targeting conglomerates with television holdings instead of newspaper companies, with an eye toward getting a partner to contribute on-air news talent to the documentary channel.
CBS is mentioned in the report as a potential suitor, one of several companies Discovery has attempted to lure into the venture. Discovery had approached CBS months ago, according to sources, but there are no active talks. A CBS spokesperson declined comment on the matter, saying it falls into the category of "rumor and speculation."
Discovery and the Times first announced their cable collaboration in 2002, transforming a channel once known as Discovery Civilization (which launched in 1996) into a current-affairs-oriented channel filled in part with programs informed by Times' newsgathering.
But in 2006, the Times exercised an option in the initial agreement timed to the channel's fourth year of operation that allowed it to sell back its $100 million investment in the joint venture. The publishing company said it wanted to redirect its investment into the newspaper's growing broadband video offerings. Three weeks later, the network's senior vice president and general manager, Vivian Schiller, departed to become senior vp and GM at NYTimes.com.
Zaslav's restructuring plan for Discovery has included two rounds of layoffs, including the one that saw several high-ranking executives depart in February and another in April that resulted in the layoff of 200 employees.
Other recent moves include the one announced in March in which Discovery had agreed to buy out 25 percent owner Cox Communications, which gets the Travel Channel in the deal, and last week's announcement that Discovery is closing its 103 stand-alone and mall-based retail stores, cutting another 1,000 jobs, or 25 percent of the company's global work force, in the process.

The Times Morgue Packs Up and Ships Out

Photo: The New York Times

File cabinets in the Morgue.

“I seem to be the last man standing here,” said Jeff Roth. Dressed in a sharp gray suit with a white handkerchief peeking from the pocket, Mr. Roth was 24 feet below sidewalk level, in the depths of the New York Times Building at 229 West 43rd Street.

Mr. Roth, a group-three clerk for The Times, is the keeper of the paper’s morgue, the files of millions of clippings that served as the institutional memory for a century. “There were probably 50 guys like me at one time, who knew where everything was.”

The clips currently take up a labyrinthine space, an intricate system of dusty file cabinets and stacked cardboard boxes. Only one elevator currently goes from the Times lobby down to the basement. It was once the pressroom, but the presses were packed up and shipped to the Philippines in 1997.

Next month, the morgue is due to move out, too. While The Times relocates into its new ultra-modern office tower on Eighth Avenue, the morgue will go to the basement of the former New York Herald Tribune headquarters on West 41st Street—no longer inside the main Times building, but still hanging on.

“It’s just next-door,” Mr. Roth said, meaning next to the new Renzo Piano skyscraper, not the old building. “They were thinking about sending it to Edison, but the newsroom made a big to-do. The newsroom is always the final decider.”

Mr. Roth, giving a tour, turned questions about himself to the subject of the “working, living, breathing archive” that he tends.

The morgue was already into its afterlife when Mr. Roth first encountered it in 1995, visiting the paper to research his distant cousin, Times reporting legend Meyer Berger. The clipping of stories had officially stopped in June of 1990, with the rise of electronic archiving. The morgue was on the third floor then; Mr. Roth was hired on a part-time basis as it was being moved to the basement. Portions of the holdings were shipped off to the New York Public Library (e.g., biographies, aircraft, Connecticut) and to the University of Texas (e.g., Lyndon Baines Johnson, foreign coverage).

That still left plenty of material at The Times. From the file cabinets in the industrial cavern, Mr. Roth turned up multi-referenced folders on Gary Hart’s doomed Presidential campaign and clips from the Daily Worker criticizing The Times’ coverage of socialism. One June 1951 piece, headed “Soviet Laughter and Capitalist Frowns,” found fault with The Times’ reporting on Stalin.

There were the collected writings of T. Walter Williams, a shipping-news reporter, who Mr. Roth said created “completely fanciful stories with these crazy characters.” Written as straight news, the pieces tipped off the joke by including the likes of Marmaduke M. Mizzle, of Mincing Lane in London.

The morgue was born in the early 1900’s, when clerks began clipping the various editions of each day’s Times, along with the city’s other daily newspapers and important magazines. Images were preserved in the picture library, originally part of the art department, which joined the clippings down in the basement.

Allan Siegal, who retired last year as The Times’ standards editor, said that when he started as a copy boy in 1960, reporters would send him down to the morgue for clips. “There were people who had worked there for many decades,” Mr. Siegal said. “They knew far more than you would think to ask.”

And the files have a breadth unavailable to reporters who punch search terms into Nexis or ProQuest. “With the morgue,” Mr. Siegal said, “the more time you had to work with the clips, the richer the material you would get out of them. You had time to meander with them .... [Without access to them,] what you finally produce is less rich than if you had been able to run your fingers through the clips.”

The clips, he added, convey information that the searcher may not have known to look for—often simply through the layout and typeface, which an engine such as Nexis doesn’t preserve. “You can instantly, viscerally, spot the importance by the size of the heading and style of the headline,” Mr. Siegal said.

Mr. Roth likewise praised the serendipity that occurs only when one digs through clips or photo contact sheets. He once discovered a set of unseen photographs of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock—not in the legendary guitarist’s folder, but on a contact sheet mostly taken up by shots of the festival crowd. In August 1969, an apparently unhip clerk had labeled the back of the sheet “Jim Hendricks, rock and roll performer.”

The files have also yielded a picture of Pete Seeger at age 2, a June 1921 shot in the folder of his father, music professor Charles Seeger, and an engagement photo of Diane Arbus.

The clippings include stories that have never made it into any database, including ProQuest. Although ProQuest contains nearly 130 years’ worth of late-edition stories, it doesn’t include the early editions, which were clipped and filed as they came out. The files also contain some stories that made it into galleys but were never published. “We are literally the only copies in existence,” Mr. Roth said.

In another room with boxes and papers strewn about, there are the advance obituaries, literally under lock and key.

Other documents include newsroom copy schedules from the 1960’s. From Nov. 22, 1963, there is a record of the frantic effort to cover the John F. Kennedy assassination. “From a historic standpoint, these are pretty incredible,” Mr. Roth said. “You really see the inner workings of the paper on major events.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, the folders were called into duty as the paper put together pieces on the World Trade Center attacks—especially with many of the T1 lines down that day. “These redundant systems are here if there is something that happens,” Mr. Roth said.

And a basement full of newspaper still makes newspaper people feel better. “You’ll find a lot of sentiment for its own sake,” Mr. Siegal said. “There is a certain generational sentiment that is overly oblivious to the electronic facts of life. They think the clips ought to be there because the clips ought to be there, because the clips ought to be there.”

As they ought! “Anybody who wants to understand the 20th century should take a look at the New York Times newspaper morgue,” novelist Nicholson Baker said. (Officially, the morgue isn’t open to the public, according to Mr. Roth.) Mr. Baker has been on a mission for several years to save physical copies of books and newspapers from being discarded in the name of microfilm or online databases.

“Even though it has had several weedings,” Mr. Baker said of the Times morgue, “it’s still a monstrous, messy marsh of information.”

Is it all going to fit in the Herald Tribune’s cellar? “This argument just came up literally a half-hour before you came here,” Mr. Roth said. “How do you fit a camel through the eye of a needle?”

Mr. Roth said he doesn’t expect any major purging to accompany the move. For one thing, he said, there isn’t time to go through the clips and make decisions about what to cull.

“It’s been a paring-down of the operation for 20 years,” Mr. Roth said. “It never seems to die.”

In fact, it keeps being fed. Though the clipping ended as a matter of policy 17 years ago, Mr. Roth adds more articles to the files when he sees fit, on subjects he deems worthy.

Recently, Mr. Roth felt it was necessary to add clips to the following folders: Herschell Gordon Lewis, the splatter-film director; Jack H. Jacobs, the Medal of Honor winner and NBC military analyst; and Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.


Based on an amused spectator's list Send FReepmail if you want on/off MSP list
The List of Ping Lists