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McCandlish Phillips, Times Reporter, Dies at 85

April 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jaan Vaino, a friend.

Even in a newsroom that employed Gay Talese, David Halberstam, Richard Reeves and Ada Louise Huxtable, Mr. Phillips, who was with The Times from 1952 to 1973, stood out.

He stood out as a tenacious reporter and a lyrical stylist — an all-too-rare marriage on newspapers then — and in his hands even a routine news article seldom failed to delight.

Consider Mr. Phillips’s 1961 account of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, an annual millstone for the city’s general-assignment reporters:

“The sun was high to their backs and the wind was fast in their faces and 100,000 sons and daughters of Ireland, and those who would hold with them, matched strides with their shadows for 52 blocks. It seemed they marched from Midtown to exhaustion.”

In his 2003 memoir, “City Room,” Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of The Times, called Mr. Phillips “the most original stylist I’d ever edited.”

Mr. Phillips stood out in other ways. About 6 feet 5 inches tall and not much more than 160 pounds, he was often described as a latter-day Ichabod Crane — “the man of the awkward gait and the graceful phrase,” his editors called him.

An evangelical Christian, he kept a Bible on his desk and led prayer meetings for like-minded colleagues (there were none when he joined the paper, he noted ruefully) in a conference room off the newsroom.

He did not smoke, drink, curse or gamble, each of which had been refined to a high, exuberant art in the Times newsroom — the last of these to such a degree that at midcentury the newspaper employed two bookmakers-in-residence, nominally on the payroll as news clerks.

Mr. Phillips’s most renowned article appeared on Page 1 on Sunday, Oct. 31, 1965, under the headline “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.” It was a rigorously reported profile of Daniel Burros, a 28-year-old Queens man who was the Grand Dragon of the New York State Ku Klux Klan, a chief organizer of the national Klan and a former national secretary of the American Nazi Party.

Mr. Burros, the article went on to document, was also a Jew — a former Hebrew school student who had been bar mitzvahed at 13.

The article remains a case study in a reporter’s perseverance in the face of intimidation. It is also a case study in the severe, unintended consequences that the airing of fiercely guarded truths can have for the guardian: despite threatening to kill Mr. Phillips if the article went to press, Mr. Burros, in the end, killed only himself.

John McCandlish Phillips Jr. was born in Glen Cove, N.Y., on Long Island, on Dec. 4, 1927. His father was a traveling salesman, and young Johnny, as he was known, would attend 13 grammar schools across New York, Ohio and Massachusetts.

After graduating from Brookline High School, near Boston, he forwent college for reporting and editing jobs on small New England papers. From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Phillips served with the Army at Fort Holabird, in Baltimore, and it was there, he said, that he attended the church service at which he was born again.

Mr. Phillips joined The Times as a copy boy in November 1952, later working as a clerk on the city desk and in the Washington bureau. In 1955, he was made a cub reporter and consigned to prove his mettle in the paper’s Brooklyn office, then a dank, decrepit outfit near Police Department headquarters in the borough’s nether regions.

His account of life there, written for Times Talk, the newspaper’s house organ (“It is impossible to tell a plainclothes detective from a mugger here. You just have to wait to see what they do”), so delighted the newspaper’s management that his sentence was commuted to service in the main newsroom.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/business/media/mccandlish-phillips-times-reporter-dies-at-85.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: ,

Media Decoder Blog: Tony Ortega and Maura Johnston to Leave The Village Voice

September 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment

After five and a half years as editor of The Village Voice, Tony Ortega announced in a blog post that he would be stepping down to work on a book about Scientology. The music editor, Maura Johnston, took to Twitter to say she was leaving the newspaper as well.

Mr. Ortega said that he would leave next week and that staff members were available to handle the transition. No successor has been named, but Mr. Ortega said Christine Brennan, executive managing editor of the newspaper’s parent company, Village Voice Media, was looking to hire in New York — a fact he said “should please all the writers out there.”

That was a reference to the fact that Mr. Ortega, who came to The Voice from South Florida, led the publication through several rounds of layoffs as it confronted the headwinds buffeting newspapers of all kinds.

Michael Lacey, executive editor of the newspaper chain, credited Mr. Ortega with guiding The Voice through a tumultuous time.

“Tony Ortega did a great job for us and managed a difficult transition in a miserable economy,” he wrote in an e-mail. “During that time he became the single most informed reporter on Scientology. No one is better positioned to write the book on that organization.”

Mr. Lacey added, “His departure creates an opening for one of the most compelling jobs in journalism.”

Mr. Ortega said he was leaving because the increased profile of Scientology — including the release of “The Master,” a Paul Thomas Anderson movie about a Scientology-like sect, and a cover article about Scientology in Vanity Fair — made it a good time to shop a book on the topic. Mr. Ortega, who always wrote in addition to his editing duties, has published hundreds of blog posts on the religion in the last two years.

“I’ve been an editor in chief of The Village Voice for five years, and this seemed like a good time to try something else,” he said. “I think we did a good job of focusing the paper back on New York stories, and I helped turn a weekly newspaper with a Web site into a digital enterprise.”

Ms. Johnston, the music editor, said in an interview on Friday that, in her case, “the decision to leave was not mine.”

Ms. Johnston, who began her career in music blogs, churned out a constant stream of Twitter messages and Tumblr posts each day in addition to her work at The Voice, which included editing the paper’s music coverage and blog items by a stable of freelance and staff writers.

But she also embodied The Voice’s tradition of thoughtful cultural criticism, and resisted the kinds of light, easily consumable items, like Top 10 lists and photo compilations, that tend to draw the most traffic online.

Giving in to “the Darwinistic page-view coverage of anything,” she said, “is damaging to culture as a whole.”

It was unclear on Friday who would take her place. Last week, Village Voice Media appointed Ben Westhoff, the music editor of LA Weekly, to oversee music coverage for the company’s weekly newspapers, and Ms. Johnston’s dismissal was widely seen as a result of a power struggle over the direction of that coverage.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/at-village-voice-editor-and-music-editor-depart-and-weekly-will-have-a-new-address/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Economix Blog: A Challenge for Unions in Public Opinion

September 2, 2011 by Leave a Comment

A new Gallup poll has found that a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, approve of labor unions and that the difference in views between how Democrats and Republicans feel toward unions has reached record levels.

The Gallup poll, released on Thursday, found that the approval rate for unions was unchanged from 2010 and was up from 2009, when unions had the lowest approval rating, 48 percent, since Gallup began this survey in 1936.

Gallup

Showing a huge partisan difference in views, the poll of 1,008 adults found that 78 percent of Democrats approve of unions, while just 26 percent of Republicans do, the lowest percentage ever for Republicans.

Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup’s managing editor, wrote, “This could reflect a greater politicization of union issues given the fact that many state-level efforts to curb union influence were promoted by Republican governors often backed by a Republican-controlled legislature.”

After Republicans swept to power in many states last November, the Republican governors of several states, most notably Wisconsin and Ohio, moved to curb collective bargaining by public-employee unions, an effort that generated huge resistance from labor unions and Democrats.

Mr. Jones wrote that the huge debate over union rights this year “seems to have resulted in a draw in the court of public opinion, with labor unions neither gaining nor losing Americans’ support overall compared with last year.”

The Gallup poll found a strong rebound of Democrats’ and independents’ views toward unions over the last two years. Approval among Democrats rose to 78 percent from 66 percent in 2009, and to 52 percent from 44 percent among independents. For Republicans, the approval rating was 26 percent this year, down from 34 percent last year (and 29 percent in 2009).

This year’s poll found that 52 percent of Americans approved of unions and 42 percent disapproved. (The survey was conducted Aug. 11 to 14 with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.)

When the overall approval rating for unions fell to its lowest level ever in 2009, many labor relations said that was because many Americans believed that labor unions could be too stubborn and demanding and were a major cause of the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies that year. Union leaders maintain that a major reason for the overall decline in approval ratings in recent years — the approval rate was 65 percent less than a decade ago — is that conservative politicians and think tanks have been putting out a flood of negative information about organized labor.

Business groups say labor’s approval ratings have slid from decades past because many Americans feel they have good wages and benefits and no longer see a need for unions.

Labor leaders acknowledge that one of their biggest challenges is to figure out how to make Americans more enthusiastic about unions and unionizing at a time when many workers face stagnating wages, rising insecurity on the job and employers’ cutting back on pensions and other benefits — all while corporate profits have been quite strong.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ef1fd2af70f1f9cb116e96761e5eb2dd

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: , ,

Abundance of News, but Mixed Sales, for News Magazines

August 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But newsstand sales for the top weekly news magazines told two different stories. Time, the country’s best-selling news weekly, posted considerable gains. Newsweek, under the leadership of a prominent new editor, barely moved the needle despite creating provocative covers like one with a digitally altered and age-enhanced rendition of Princess Diana.

At Time, sales at the newsstand rose 16 percent from January through June, to 83,796 on average, a rate of increase far higher than others in the category. Total circulation at Time rose almost 2 percent to just under 3.4 million.

At Newsweek, which has undergone significant changes both cosmetic and cultural under Tina Brown, its new editor who revitalized Vanity Fair and The New Yorker in the 1990s, overall circulation fell 5 percent, to just over 1.5 million. Sales of single issues ticked up nearly 3 percent to an average of 46,561 an issue.

On Tuesday, Newsweek business executives defended their strategy as a work in progress and swiped at the competition.

“If you take a look at the last five or six issues of Newsweek, and you compare them to the last five or six issues of Time magazine, you can see the different directions we’re going in,” said Ray Chelstowski, Newsweek’s publisher, who characterized Time’s news judgment as lacking urgency.

Time’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, said the sales figures showed that Time had become the preference of more readers. “There’s a continuing flight to quality,” he said. “And in difficult economic times, that helps iconic brands like ours.”

By and large, circulation trends at weeklies were flat from January through June as sales across the magazine industry fell more than 9 percent over all. Subscription numbers can be manipulated by publishers cutting prices or deciding to cut back on unwanted circulation. For that reason, newsstand sales are often seen as a good proxy for the overall health of a magazine.

Bloomberg Businessweek, which has also switched ownership and editors recently, held steady at just under 922,000 total copies. Copies sold at newsstands dropped by more than a third, to a weekly average of just 14,260. The New Yorker held steady with an overall circulation of just over 1 million. Single-copy sales rose 1.2 percent.

The Week, a digest of opinion and news that has been making steady inroads into the weekly news magazine market, ended the six-month period with a circulation of just over 525,000, up 2 percent. Newsstand sales account for only a fraction of the magazine’s circulation.

Entertainment Weekly (1.8 million circulation), Sports Illustrated (3.2 million) and People (3.6 million) — all published by Time Inc. — had relatively unchanged circulation. But their newsstand sales all slipped, including 11 percent for People.

Sales of other gossip magazines fell as well. US Weekly’s newsstand sales fell 17 percent to over 646,685. Star’s fell 17 percent to 442,131.

Beyond the weeklies, newsstand sales at many women’s and fashion magazines suffered. Glamour was down almost 18 percent. Cosmopolitan declined nearly 3 percent. The outlier among fashion magazine’s was Vogue, which rose almost 13 percent at the newsstand.

With newsstand sales falling, there was some concern that advertising could be next.

“The big question if you’re an advertiser is, how do you look at this in combination with all that’s happening on Wall Street?” said Steven Cohn, editor of The Media Industry Newsletter. “Are you going to sit on your hands? We certainly saw that two and three years ago.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=71bd7b42d06fb603db61da370204662f

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Critics Fume Over Intensity of News Coverage for Palin’s Messages

June 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The debate over the exhaustive efforts to analyze the e-mails by news outlets like MSNBC.com, The New York Times and The Washington Post erupted on Friday with the kind of partisan ferocity that tends to accompany anything related to Ms. Palin.

Another near certainty whenever Ms. Palin is involved: a media spectacle.

Scores of journalists descended on Juneau this week in preparation for the release of the e-mails. MSNBC.com deputized 40 volunteers, chosen with the help of the League of Women Voters and the Retired Public Employees of Alaska. They were the reinforcements for the team of two journalists from the Web site and six more from NBC News who flew to Juneau.

The New York Times and The Guardian sent reporters armed with scanners and then solicited readers’ assistance. Politico enlisted a dozen editors, reporters and interns who worked as a team from their Northern Virginia newsroom “plowing through” the documents, as one editor described it. The Washington Post initially asked for 100 volunteers to sift through the documents. They were quickly overwhelmed with too many applicants. Unable to screen all of them, the paper abandoned the plan late Thursday, opting instead to invite reader comments.

Were news organizations Dumpster diving, as one outraged reader of The Washington Post put it?

News outlets insisted that they were trying to be as thorough and efficient as possible while reporting on information that the public was entitled to know.

“This is not a witch hunt,” said Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at The Times. “There are 25,000 documents here, and we can use all the eyeballs we can get.”

The Times, like The Post and others, uploaded the e-mails onto its Web site and invited readers to sift through them and comment on anything compelling they found. (Because the state of Alaska made the e-mails available only on paper, news organizations had to scan them to make them viewable online.)

“From our perspective, we’re just providing the public records to the public, who own them,” said Bill Dedman, a reporter for MSNBC.com who was helping lead his Web site’s effort. “The people of Alaska will figure out what news or insights they find in their public records.”

The scope of the coverage led one close Palin associate to equate it with a mass attempt at “gotcha journalism,” using a favorite characterization the former governor often uses to criticize the news media’s taste for blood.

Greta Van Susteren, the Fox News host, asked if all the fuss amounted to a “media colonoscopy,” and pointed to comments from her readers who asked whether news organizations had devoted such energy to the 2,800-page health care overhaul bill that passed last year.

Charles Mahtesian, national politics editor for Politico, said he was sympathetic to critics who said the news media went into unnecessary overdrive on anything Palin-related. “I think there’s some truth in what the critics on the right say about a double standard for Sarah Palin,” he said. “Having said that, she is an incredibly compelling character. And anything she says or does will have a bearing on the 2012 presidential election cycle. So it’s a pretty easy call as a news story.”

Others said they hoped news outlets would use such vast resources on more urgent stories.

“It seems to me like some kind of swarm,” said Jane Hall, a professor in the School of Communication at American University. “This is not WikiLeaks. This is not the conduct of the war in Afghanistan or the war in Iraq.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=193b3bebc012a3d40ea6f3e76cc17b31

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Abramson Named Executive Editor at The Times

June 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Ms. Abramson has been one of Mr. Keller’s two top deputies since 2003, serving at his side as he steered The Times through a period of journalistic distinction and economic distress. Mr. Keller said that with the paper’s finances now on surer footing, he felt at ease handing the reins to Ms. Abramson.

The move was accompanied by another shift in senior management. Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief and former editor of The Los Angeles Times, will become the managing editor for news.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher and the chairman of The New York Times Company, thanked Mr. Keller, calling him a “truly valued partner” in a speech Thursday morning in the Times newsroom, where the staff stood shoulder to shoulder to hear the publisher announce the first changeover in the top editing jobs in eight years.

Turning toward Ms. Abramson, who will become the first woman to be editor of the paper in its 160-year history, Mr. Sulzberger said, “Jill, Bill’s decision to step down may be bittersweet. But the thought of you as our next executive editor gives me and gives all of us great comfort and great confidence.”

The appointments are effective Sept. 6. John M. Geddes, 59, will continue in his role as managing editor for news operations.

Over the course of Mr. Keller’s tenure, the paper won 18 Pulitzer Prizes and expanded its online audience to some 50 million readers worldwide. But the economic downturn and the drift of readers and advertisers to the Web also forced the paper to lay off members of the news staff and tighten budgets considerably.

“A couple of years ago, everybody was wringing their hands about doomsday for the news business,” Mr. Keller said to the staff, his voice emotional at times. “People talked, some of them rather smugly, about even The New York Times not being long for this world. And now you look around, and we are economically sturdy. We are rich in talent. We are growing.”

Mr. Keller will continue to write for The Times Magazine and as a columnist for the new Sunday opinion section, which will make its debut this month. Mr. Sulzberger said he accepted Mr. Keller’s resignation “with mixed emotions,” adding that the decision to leave was entirely Mr. Keller’s.

Mr. Keller, 62, is still a few years shy of the paper’s mandatory retirement age for senior executives, but he held the top job for roughly the same period of time as Max Frankel and Joseph Lelyveld, two of the editors who preceded him. Mr. Frankel and Mr. Lelyveld returned to the newsroom for the announcement.

Mr. Keller had asked Ms. Abramson to be his managing editor in 2003 as he assembled a team that he hoped would restore confidence in the paper after the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Ms. Abramson had been part of a group of editors who clashed with Howell Raines, the executive editor who was forced out after Mr. Blair’s fraud was discovered.

Ms. Abramson, 57, said being named executive editor was “the honor of my life” and like “ascending to Valhalla” for someone who read The Times as a young girl growing up in New York. “We are held together by our passion for our work, our friendship and our deep belief in the mission and indispensability of The Times,” she said. “I look forward to working with all of you to seize our future. In this thrilling and challenging transition, we will cross to safety together.”

The selection of Ms. Abramson is something of a departure for The Times, an institution that has historically chosen executive editors who ascended the ranks through postings in overseas bureaus and managing desks like Foreign or Metro.

Ms. Abramson came to The Times in 1997 from The Wall Street Journal, where she was  a deputy bureau chief and an investigative reporter for nine years. She rose quickly at The Times, becoming Washington editor in 1999 and then bureau chief in 2000. She stepped aside temporarily from her day-to-day duties as managing editor last year to help run The Times’s online operations, a move she asked to make so she could develop fuller, firsthand experience with the integration of the digital and print staffs.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ed8e2d42156442caa7ed44b10ff38179

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