Joseph Lelyveld at the EXPRESS

Related Stories ‘State Govts have no autonomy, Centre should simply grant funds and leave spending to states’‘HP has Rs 1,50,000 cr in forest wealth, yet we are in debt. We should be compensated for our forests’‘The question is whether India’s dynamism of economic growth is matched by equivalent dynamism in political extroversion’‘There are many stars, few actors and fewer brands. I am happy to qualify for the last two’‘There’s no single area you can clamp down on to curb inflation. You have to use many measures’

•AASTHA MANOCHA: When you returned to the New York Times, it was going through a credibility crisis. How did you go about correcting the situation?

It was a funny occasion in my life because a lot of people who were not particularly distressed to see me leave, welcomed me back like some kind of reborn saint. My theme when I returned was that we are just going back to work and we are going to do things the way we know was the right way to do them and stop talking about ourselves. I thought my task was to get the New York Times to forget about the New York Times for a little while. It was 2003 and America was already in Iraq. I was also trying to push authority down, because one of the features of the previous regime was that there were a lot of edicts out there and people were afraid to do things without making sure that the guys on top were going to approve it in advance. So I was trying to get people to calm down and do their work in the way they are supposed to.

•AASTHA MANOCHA: What do you have to say about the difference in philosophy between you and your successor, Howell Raines?

I wasn’t there when he was there. I’ve not exchanged a word with him since all this happened. So I don’t really know what happened then. He wrote about what he thought the differences in our philosophy were, and I refer you to that. I think that if we had actually talked, there would have been a fair amount that we would have agreed on and he would have been surprised. I have been very careful not to say a word about him since all this happened and that’s my plan for the rest of my life.

•COOMI KAPOOR: What is the guiding philosophy of the New York Times which makes it such a standard of excellence in journalism?

Basically, the New York Times covered everything — the whole world, culture, business and finance, sports, everything. And did it in a responsible way with its own reporting and a high standard of journalist excellence. It was a general interest newspaper with a vengeance. Now the New York Times and all other papers are getting smaller because of the finances in the newspaper business and it can’t promise quite as much. It’s shaken in its conviction that people wanted it to weigh the news and say this is what we should be talking about in our country. For myself, it’s still what I want because I don’t have time to spend my whole day at a computer, I don’t want to spend my whole day looking at websites in order to figure out what really matters today. I welcome the gatekeeper who tells me what matters. Today, reporting staffs are getting smaller. Major news organisations that maintain large foreign staffs have gotten smaller. Television networks used to be all over the place — they are in only a few places now. The number of American news organisations that still cover the world the way they covered it in 50 years earlier is two or three. And in the US, it’s also about the number of reporters the national news organisations maintain around the country. It’s just down, down, down.

Meanwhile, the reporters’ days are getting much longer because they are supposed to multi-task and write for the Internet and make a video and do a TV interview and then write their story and revise their story for the late edition. So there’s less time for reporting.

•COOMI KAPOOR: Has television taken over the role of a newspaper’s reporting team?

No, no, television is sort of over. It’s between the Internet and newspapers now. Only newspapers still maintain large reporting organisations but even the New York Times had to announce cuts of over a 100 journalistic positions. They have a staff of over a 1,000 journalists and a large a foreign staff. A website tends to have half a dozen reporters, a couple of websites have a dozen or so reporters, but there’s not one that has a 100 reporters or even 50. So, the new media draws on the content of the old media and if the old media fade away, the new media will not have the robustness to maintain that kind of reporting.

•SANDEEP SINGH: Don’t you think newspapers have failed to engage with people? And why can’t the old and the new media tie up?

I was talking about the amount of reporting going on in the world. And the new media does very little reporting. They don’t break stories. Of all the things that journalism does, I place the highest value on getting the information out, breaking stories, opening new subjects, and so I am concerned about where the reporting is going to come from as newspaper reporting diminishes.

•RIJU DAVE MEHTA: How do you account for the tremendous public interest, worldwide, in the US presidential elections?

It’s been a remarkable American presidential campaign There’s dramatically more public engagement in this year’s presidential campaign than there’s been in American politics for decades. A lot of that has to do with the particularly interesting elements in the campaign: the first woman or the first non-white might be president. But a lot of it has to do with the Internet and the traffic that goes on in the Internet. And people’s swift reactions to everything that happens.

•MINI KAPOOR: Your opinion of Barack Obama?

He is phenomenal. He is a wonderful speaker and he seems to be a man of really good judgment, talking about the need for a new kind of politics, a new kind of engagement in the public. He is the most exciting new personality we’ve seen in my adult life because he’s happened so suddenly.

Ads By Google