It bought the podcasting company Serial, the sports site The Athletic, and a daily chunk of your procrastination time since it got ahold of Wordle. The company has some 5,000 full-time employees, and it produces documentaries and podcasts, newsletters and cooking apps. It can hardly even be called a newspaper anymore. The place was desolate, but the Times has never been bigger. Kahn had led me into the elevator and down the hallway lined with photographs of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize winners and into this room adorned with black-and-white pictures of the old printing press. He is the ultimate inside man, so sturdy, disciplined, and reverential to the mission of the Times that the very notion of him self-destructing seems improbable. Kahn is no prom king, but nobody is much surprised that the paper’s proprietors picked him. Not really because I think that I’m going to self-destruct but because it’s an enormous responsibility to manage a newsroom of this size and ambition at this particular moment.”Īfter Abramson, Dean Baquet took over in 2014 and became one of the most popular executive editors in the paper’s modern history. Was Kahn nervous? “I am,” he told me, “for a variety of reasons.
Rocky? There have been four executive editors of the Times in the past two decades, and two of them - Howell Raines (2001 to 2003) and Jill Abramson (2011 to 2014) - imploded spectacularly in public after losing the faith of the Sulzberger family. I think we’re going to have a really smooth change in leadership.” “The truth is that we’re in a bit of a different era, and some of the transitions in the past admittedly have been rocky, and there have been more abrupt changes in leadership. It was late last Friday afternoon - just days before it would be announced that he had ascended to journalism’s Iron Throne - and we were sitting in a conference room high above the empty newsroom. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he said, suppressing a sly smile. So I turned to Joseph Kahn, the new top dog at the Times, and asked whom he incinerated to get here. Abe Rosenthal, the totemic New York Times editor who published the Pentagon Papers, used to say that there was one path to the executive editor’s office - over the dead, burned, and maimed bodies of the ten other people who wanted the job.
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