The Paper

"That’s my point. The New York Herald Tribune was a great newspaper with an august tradition. It was actually the product of a merger of the two great mid-19th century New York newspapers, The Herald of James Gordon Bennett (which was the precursor of The Paris Herald ) and The Tribune of Horace Greeley. In the 20th century it came to be run by the Reid family and was, for many decades, up there with The New York Times . The Times leaned Democratic, The Herald Tribune leaned Republican. They were the two leading newspapers in the largest city in the country and, to a considerable extent, the country’s leading journalistic voices. That remained true, certainly through World War Two. And then by the late 50s, The Herald Tribune was in desperate trouble, and by the mid-60s it was gone. The Paper is a spectacular, nuanced, beautifully written story of how it happened. As always with any given organisation, the problems were partly particular to that place and the foibles of some of the people involved. But also, as so often with the fall of institutions, it went well beyond that. Particularly with the rise of television, there was no room in New York for two leading, serious, high-end newspapers. Kluger doesn’t entirely agree with this, but others made the point that The Times made an enormous investment in content during WWII, much greater than The Herald Tribune ’s, and The Times came out of the war much stronger. I wrote a book myself about the newspaper business, about Barney Kilgore, who was the father of the modern Wall Street Journal and the person who built it into what it was when [Rupert] Murdoch bought it. That book begins with Kilgore being brought in to consult on “is there any way to save The Herald Tribune ?” which is also a small episode in Kluger’s book. And the advice he gives them seems to me very relevant, even today. He talks about “distinctiveness” and how The Herald Tribune had lost its. That’s in 1958. So the paper had gone from dominant to existentially troubled in less than 15 years, and less than 10 years after that it was entirely gone. Yes! It’s basically true of all products. People don’t pay for the same old, same old. We’ve been very fortunate in that regard. It’s a good time – and it has been for the last three years – to be in the buyer’s market for talent. There’s an enormous amount of journalistic talent available, either people being cast off or, in many cases, at least when it comes to us, not getting the opportunity to do the work they want to do."