Diamond, Edwin. Behind the Times: Inside the New "New York Times." New York: Villard Books, 1994. 437 pages.

Edwin Diamond is a media columnist for New York magazine who has written ten books on media and politics. His career has included work for newspapers and wire services, a stint as senior editor at Newsweek, and now he is a journalism professor at New York University. This book is based on some 100 interviews with NYT staffers, and access to the NYT archives.

Diamond describes the New York Times as "a paper too smug to love, yet too important to leave." All of the voting stock in the NYT is closely held by the Sulzberger family, while nonvoting stock is publicly traded. At the top, in other words, it's a closed shop of old boys (no room for women). Things aren't much better at the bottom: an atmosphere of exclusiveness and presumed excellence, together with a tendency to worship anything that's elitist, has produced a self-importance at the Times that is disconcerting for author Diamond. The minimum salary for cub reporters is over $60,000, and the food critic gets an extra $125,000 a year just to try out New York's restaurants. NYT worries that Generation X isn't reading newspapers, but despite all the hand-wringing, NYT's tradition-bound upper management can't seem to find the on-ramp to the information superhighway. Give them another 15 years. If the ink from their annual 400,000 tons of newsprint is still coming off on your fingers by then, the New York Times is a lost cause.
ISBN 0-679-41877-6

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