What, me?

London’s Times Online says it was bloggers that slayed the beast, in a story headlined “Editor falls to bloggers’ rapid poison”:

A proliferating band of independent writers known as “bloggers” (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.

The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power.

The article goes on to cover Kaus, Romenesko, Sullivan, et. al., with special emphasis on a memo to Times staffers by Adam “Big Time” Clymer that many read on-line before opening their email.

The fundamental problem with Raines, from the outside, was his use of the news pages to advance pet causes like Augusta, but from the inside it was the star system. Blogs or no blogs, Times staffers weren’t going to put up with the star system, and they would have found a way to bring him down, probably by leaking info to other media, so let’s don’t get too excited about our alleged power to manage the Times from afar.

Via Technorati.

Here’s your basic article:

June 08, 2003

Editor falls to bloggers? rapid poison
Sarah Baxter, New York

THE New York Times boasts on its masthead that it contains ?all the news that?s fit to print?, but the internet is challenging its pre-eminence as a provider of news and opinion in America.

A proliferating band of independent writers known as ?bloggers? (short for web loggers) is pumping out personal takes on the news, and one of the most persistent themes of their websites has been that Howell Raines, executive editor of The New York Times, would have to resign or be sacked.

The bloggers got their man last week and have been exulting in their power. After a rollercoaster two years in the job, Raines resigned from The New York Times last Thursday along with Gerald Boyd, the managing editor.

?If this had happened 10 years ago, when the internet didn?t exist, Raines would still be running the place,? crowed Mickey Kaus, whose ?blog? can be found on slate.com. The week before, his Howell Raines-O-Meter had put the chances that the editor would leave at 70%. Now it triumphantly announces: ?Resigned?.

The catalyst for the downfall of a powerful editor who won seven Pulitzer prizes for his newspaper?s coverage of the September 11 attacks, was the flagrant dishonesty of one of his favourites, Jayson Blair, a young black reporter who plagiarised and made up stories.

The article that gave Blair the most amusement was his account of the reaction of the family of Jessica Lynch, an American prisoner of war in Iraq, to the news of her release. It was datelined Palestine, West Virginia, and described how her father ?choked up as he stood on the porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures?.

?That was my favourite,? Blair mocked after he had been found out. ?The description was so far off from reality. I just couldn?t stop laughing.?

He had written it all from his flat in Brooklyn. Blair admitted that he was ?a total cokehead? and boasted that he had ?fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism?.

The biggest sucker was Raines, an autocrat who had chosen to shake up the staid so-called ?Gray Lady? with a star system that put prot?g?s on the fast track to top stories at the expense of more experienced and increasingly mutinous newsroom hands.

A liberal southerner, Raines made the explosive concession that he had probably given Blair a few too many chances because of his race. It was ammunition to right-wing critics, already angered by his hostility to the war in Iraq, who claimed that his politics were lowering the newspaper?s standards.

In a 7,200-word explication to readers, The New York Times set out in agonising detail how warnings from senior staff had gone unheeded while Blair?s lies mounted. In one instance, Blair had refused to contribute to the paper?s moving Portraits of Grief about the victims of the World Trade Center because, he claimed, he was grieving for a relative killed in the Pentagon. It was his way of avoiding a relatively lowly assignment.

One scandal led to another. Raines, a Pulitzer prize-winner in his own right for a memoir of his Alabama childhood, was an admirer of finely crafted, descriptive pieces. These were the speciality of Rick Bragg, another award-winner, who in one choice example described in lyrical detail the life of oystermen in Apalachicola, Florida.

Bragg had only briefly set foot in the town to justify the dateline: all the legwork had been done by a young freelance who received no credit for the story. After more turmoil, Bragg delivered his resignation.

It was a double blow to The New York Times?s prestige as the ?newspaper of record?, but neither incident would have amounted to a hanging offence for the editor but for the barrage of criticism of Raines inside the paper and on the internet. The saga stopped being about the misdemeanours of a few reporters and became a power struggle over Raines between the new media and the old.

E-mails, magazine websites and blogs poured out gossip and venom against Raines at a speed that left the slow-footed, bureaucratic newspaper looking like a media dinosaur.

In the midst of the storm, Raines told staff at a crisis meeting that he had no intention of resigning: ?My plan is to have this job and perform it with every fibre in my body.? Fatally for an editor, however, he lost control of his own story.

A website run by Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute, a respected journalism school, became the forum where staff vented their anger about the goings-on at the paper. Adam Clymer, one veteran political correspondent, was so dismayed by the open warfare that he sent an e-mail to colleagues begging them to ?stop feeding this destructive monster?.

Some hope. With the click of a button, Clymer?s memo was leaked to the same site. ?Several people told me they read me on Romenesko before they had opened my e-mail,? he said.

Where staff grumbling would once have been confined to the canteen, the disaffection was so widely known that Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher, who had vowed not to accept Raines?s resignation, ended up pointing him towards the exit.

As Raines made his farewell speech to staff, some reporters sobbed ? out of pity for him, horror at the humiliation for the paper and shame at the role that their own friends and colleagues had played in his ousting.

?I?m sad,? said Clymer. ?Howell is a great journalist and a great friend. I wish it hadn?t come to this.? Yet he admitted that Raines had become isolated. ?If he had had a large measure of support, that would have been reflected on the internet as well. People would have said, ?He screwed up here, but remember the other great things that he did?.?

The ?screw-ups? were obsessively tracked by bloggers. Like British tabloid newspapers in hot pursuit of a wounded politician, they never gave up on their quarry.

The paper was pilloried for distorting polls on President George W Bush and for running the most doom-laden stories it could find on the war in Iraq. From the claim that Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, was against the war (his position was more nuanced) to revelations of a financial link between a columnist and Enron, the collapsed energy company, no subject was too large or too small for their notice.

Their latest target is Maureen Dowd, a star writer who jeered at Bush for claiming that Al-Qaeda was ?not a problem any more? and has yet to acknowledge that she played fast and loose with his words.

One of the most influential blogs is written by Andrew Sullivan, the Sunday Times columnist who is based in Washington. Long before the Blair scandal, his website andrewsullivan.com, which receives 500,000 hits a month, was blasting Raines for bending the news to fit his liberal political agenda. Before him, sites such as smartertimes.com kept a watch on the paper and others, such as Kausfiles and Instapundit, jumped in.

?The New York Times used to be so powerful that anybody who was a professional journalist was leery of taking it on,? said Sullivan.

?For the first time you could have sustained criticism of the paper and people working for it began to send us the latest dope. The blogs created a narrative which was ?Howell Raines?s reign of terror? and that defined the way in which the Jayson Blair affair was interpreted.?

The first indication of the rival power of the net came when Matt Drudge published the story of Monica Lewinsky?s trysts with former president Bill Clinton on his website drudgereport.com after Newsweek magazine chose not to publish its own scoop about the relationship.

The attacks on The New York Times have added to the suspicion among Democrats that internet pundits are part of the ?vast right-wing conspiracy? once alleged by Hillary Clinton. The right is certainly gloating over the newspaper?s discomfiture. According to Kaus, a Democrat, ?the blogosphere does tend to skew to the right, though not as badly as radio?.

Nevertheless, the clearest example of the bloggers? ability to take scalps was the forced resignation of Trent Lott, the Republican Senate leader, after he was vilified for making a racist remark at a southern politician?s 100th birthday celebration last year.

Only when left-wing bloggers began to make a fuss did newspapers such as The New York Times begin to notice that anything was amiss. Eventually Lott was shunned by the left and the right, including Bush.

Raines?s departure is allowing bloggers to indulge in further self-congratulation. The internet?s new breed of media commentators is already savouring its potential impact on the 2004 presidential race.