The Press: Changes at the Times

As a paragon of journalistic gravitas, no newspaper can match the Sunday New York Times, all 4½ lbs., 450 pages and 500,000 words—give or take a few thousands—of it. Indeed, the city’s sanitation department once estimated it cost New York $6 million annually just to dispose of the Sunday Times poundage. For years the edition has provided a Sabbath’s activity for the city’s sedentary and a rich lode of guilt for those who know they should read all the news fit to print on any Sunday, but don’t quite succeed. Within the New York Times Co., it was a proudly independent kingdom, with a management and staff separate from that of the daily Times.

Thus it was with some gravitas of his own that Sunday Editor Max Frankel last week summoned his top associates to lunch and proposed a toast: “To the Sunday department.” It was a farewell salute; he informed them that the Sunday operation, after more than 50 years of autonomy, was being combined immediately with the daily paper under Managing Editor A.M. (“Abe”) Rosenthal, 54. Frankel, 46, one of the

Times’s most incisive news analysts and aggressive executives, would move on to take over, beginning next year, the editorial and op-ed pages.

Times staffers, whose assiduity in reporting on in-house power shifts can rival that which they display on their own beats, lost no time proposing Kremlinological explanations. The first instant replay went: “Max lost, Abe won.” Relations between the two had known points of strain since Frankel moved up from Washington bureau chief three years ago to command the Sunday edition. It was said that Frankel would sometimes commission pieces for his Sunday paper after learning daily staffers were already working on the same subject. In turn, Times managing editors have itched for years to seize the Sunday department’s talent and curb its independence. But in fact the merger had been proposed a year ago by Frankel himself.

“Max felt he had taken the Sunday department about as far as he could without the resources of the news department,” says one daily editor. One of Frankel’s own editors agreed that the two sides of the paper were isolated to the detriment of both, that a separate Sunday department “had all the usefulness of rumble seats.”

Unnecessary Work. The major factor in Publisher Arthur (“Punch”) Sulzberger’s break with tradition was simple editorial efficiency, and once the move was made, little defense was heard of the old duality. A year ago Sulzberger had warned the staff that the Times had “too many people doing unnecessary work.” Circulation has stagnated, and though the paper contributed 66% of the parent company’s revenues last year, it accounted for only 36% of its $12,754,000 earnings. The Times has had a freeze on hiring for two years and a hold-down for several more. Lively talent that could make the Sunday paper more of a pleasure and less of a duty to its 1.5 million buyers is in short supply.

A prize winning foreign correspondent, Rosenthal had one of the few distinctive writing styles on the paper. When he became metropolitan editor in 1963, he fought hard and successfully “to get New York back into the New York Times” as an admiring staffer puts it. A Rosenthal protege, Metropolitan News Editor Arthur Gelb, 42, who is a sensitive man with stories but occasionally an abrasive executive, has been named an assistant managing editor.

The Sunday editors admit that some sections will benefit from the infusion of the daily’s talent. One Timesman says the Sunday book reviews are “written too much for assistant professors of English at Rutgers.” As for the uncharacteristically concise Week in Review section, an editor says: “We’ve elevated the condensation of the week’s news to a skill, but not yet to an art.”

The combined operation’s first innovation is a Friday supplement due the end of this month, tentatively titled Weekend, in which the cultural news staff and critics will produce a guide to events in the New York area. The hope is twofold: to offer more for the active younger readers the Times needs, and to provide an attractive new stage for local advertisers.

Lighter Touch. Frankel will take over the editorial page from John B. Oakes, 63, who is Sulzberger’s cousin. Oakes, who will continue to write for the paper and advise his publisher cousin, has been running the editorial page for 15 years. He cut out the noncommittal “background” editorials of an earlier era and moved the page to a sternly liberal line on most social and economic issues, with special fervor for environmental and civil rights questions. Critics found the page excessively earnest and predictable; all credited it with courage and unshakable integrity. Philip Geyelin, who as editorial-page editor at the Washington Post is the Times s chief competitor as national newspaper opinion molder, expects the page to have “more humor and a lighter touch under Max.” Meanwhile, Frankel will be accorded the luxury of traveling for the next eight months, during which he can ruminate on a question that he puts with un-Timesian humility: “I keep asking myself, ‘Who elected me to tell the American people what to think?’ “