PERSPECTIVES ON THE TIMES
The Romenesko Factor
Executive editors at The New York Times were once kings; now, apparently, they are prime ministers who can be recalled for what amounts to a no-confidence vote. And for the first time, the Internet played a role.
It was the newsroom's lack of confidence in Raines that mattered, of course, and the staff members' fierce rebellion that did him in. But the collection and dissemination of their wails on the Web added to its weight and velocity. For weeks, Times journalists posted internal memos and critical e-mail exchanges on the dominant Web site frequented by reporters, the site destination known simply as Romenesko (www.poynter.org/romenesko).
The vitriol in those e-mails kept the story roiling, exposed cracks in the once vault-like newsroom, and chipped away at authority at the top. The effect was to help atomize the power of Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, and to some extent that of the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. It wasn't exactly the slave uprising in Spartacus, but there were echoes.
It's a journalistic axiom that newsrooms aren't democracies — and shouldn't be. Someone has to create a vision for the paper and make final editorial decisions. But now, thanks to the Internet, every copy clerk and stringer can make his or her unhappiness known to millions. Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, may have been comfortable effectively ignoring more than 700,000 e-mail and postcard dissents to the FCC's proposed changes in media ownership rules, but the New York Times publisher felt differently. He knew that a top editor's power derives in large part from the consent of the governed.
The Internet was only one of a number of factors in the unseating
of Raines, who despite his manifold management failures is a superb
journalist and a lyrical writer. That it was a factor at all is
not necessarily a good thing. Journalists should hold their editors
accountable, especially in matters of ethics, but newspapers have
enough credibility problems without indulging in the Web equivalent
of Family Feud. The long-term effects of this phenomenon remain
to be seen. In the short term, what Raines learned — and
other news executives may, too — is that in the whirring
democracy of the Web, commanders who underestimate the power of
their troops do so at their peril.
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