For 48 hours, I didn’t speak with a single employee of the Times. By this afternoon, I’ll be in Abilene, Texas, eating chicken mole and drinking virgin margaritas. But before I head out, I need to put the accumulated knowledge in my brain to use–and, since I swore off gambling, I can’t place bets in Vegas. So here are my odds for the next executive editor of The New York Times.
Dean Baquet: 2-1. He’s popular in the Times’s newsroom and he’s done a whale of a job as the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. It’s not fair to say he’s one of the best African-American editors in the country because he’s one of the best editors, period. In an interview on Friday, Sulzberger said he didn’t know why people assumed the editor had to be in his mid-50s: “I’d love to know whose sense that is. Nobody who is going to be involved with this process has that sense.” Still, Baquet is young (he’s in his mid-40s), and he doesn’t have much experience with foreign news.
Bill Keller: 3-1. Keller’s mellowed some since he lost out to Raines for the Times’s top job. He was the managing editor during Joe Lelyveld I and clearly has the knowledge and experience needed to run the newsroom. He’s a true Timesman and is respected in New York. One possible pitfall: appointing Keller would be an admission on Sulzberger’s part that not only did he choose wrong last time, he also didn’t choose right.
Marty Baron: 5-1. Baron has taken the helm of two storied but troubled papers (The Boston Globe, where he’s currently the top editor, and The Miami Herald) and made them both better. He has experience running a fractured newsroom, and out of the top three candidates, is the only one who has headed his own shop. But his demeanor is somewhat distant, and it’s likely the Times will need some TLC.
John Geddes: 10-1. Geddes, the paper’s deputy managing editor, has been more or less running the paper for the last five weeks anyway. He’s of the last administration, but managed not to get tainted by its downfall. But there’s less buzz around him than Baquet, Keller or Baron, and, even in a newsroom, buzz matters.
Jill Abramson: 20-1. Abramson, the paper’s Washington editor, emerged from the Blair saga as somewhat of a hero. But Abramson suffers from having no constituency in the Times’s newsroom–Raines saw how well that worked. Jon Landman: 30-1. Another hero from the Blair saga, Landman’s early warnings about the rogue reporter went unheeded. But Landman is likely too divisive a figure to get the top job; many people inside the paper viewed his reaction to Raines’s troubles as a bit much, and what was perceived as his dissing of the sports department didn’t help matters.
Gail Collins: 30-1. Collins, the almost universally liked editorial-page editor, is also respected by Sulzberger. But she has two major strikes against her. As a liberal-identified editorialist, she would serve as fodder for people who view the Times’s news hole as activist. And her lack of experience managing a large group of people will likely scare off the publisher.
For managing editor, things get a bit more complicated. I still think Keller and Baquet would make a dream team, but I’m assuming it’d be hard to convince Baquet to leave L.A. without a promotion and impossible to convince Keller to go back to a job he already did once. (Of course, I’ve been wrong before: I didn’t predict Lelyveld coming back into the fray.)
Caveat: I haven’t called any of the above since last week. It seems unfair to be constantly harassing people who are potentially in the middle of a grueling job search, especially those people not currently employed by the Times. (If you’re Dean Baquet, what do you say? No comment? Then it sounds like you’re in negotiations. No, I haven’t been approached? Then what happens if/when you are?)
One last interesting note. Sulzberger–at least when I talked with him last week–does seem to be taking lessons from this Raines regime. When I asked him if he’s learned anything about being a manager, he answered: “I’m not going to share what those things are with you, but the answer is absolutely.” We’ll get our first look at his new approach when he appoints the person to lead his paper out of its current misery.
