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The Don't Quote Me archive
Next Tuesday, April 1, Benjamin B. Taylor becomes the fifth member of his family to be publisher of the Boston Globe. The circumstances of his ascension, though, are strikingly different from those of his predecessors: in 1993 the Taylors sold the paper to the New York Times Company for $1.1 billion. Thus the 50-year-old Ben Taylor assumes the reins not as an owner but as a hired hand. Taylor the Fifth
The Boston Globe's new publisher talks about the Herald, cyberjournalism, newsroom ethics, and more
by Dan Kennedy
It's a cliché to suggest that Taylor has a tough act to follow, but in this case it's demonstrably true. His second cousin William Taylor, who's retiring after 19 years as publisher, presided over an era in which the Globe won nine of its 14 Pulitzer Prizes and cemented its reputation as one of the country's great metropolitan newspapers. Bill Taylor's financial performance was, if anything, even more impressive: Globe stock valued at $1000 in 1973, when the company went public, was worth $120,000 in 1993, when the Times Company took over.
Ben Taylor is a man of boyishly craggy Yankee features, accentuated by a bad haircut and, during a recent interview, a red tie festooned with little elephants. He went to work for the Globe in 1972, and made his mark on the news side, where he was a general-assignment reporter, a Washington correspondent, and executive editor. He became president in 1993, a title he will retain. Affable yet cagey, Taylor's habit is to talk around questions and to deny vigorously even the slightest suggestion that his paper falls short of perfection.
A graduate of Harvard College, Taylor worked with gang youth as a Vista volunteer in Philadelphia during the early 1970s, an experience that he calls "a tremendous education for me." He's something of a history buff; his recent reading includes David McCullough's biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Mornings on Horseback, and Katharine Graham's memoir, Personal History. He, his wife, Katherine Taylor, and their three children live in Brookline.
Q: Nearly four years after the sale of the Globe, the loss of local ownership remains a hot topic of conversation. Why do you think it bugs people so much?
A: I don't know if I would use the word "bug." It's a topic that comes up in conversation. It's a sign that people care deeply about this newspaper. "Locally owned" is maybe a term that wasn't really accurate even at the time that the merger took place, because we were a publicly traded stock. I think that the newspaper has done quite well under the merger and continues to thrive.
Q: Where do you think the Times's New England edition fits in with the company's corporate strategy? Are you worried that it might cannibalize some of the Globe's circulation?
A: Well, obviously, we're hopeful that it won't. Personally, I don't think that it will hurt the Globe. I think you may find that the Times is able to sell a few more newspapers in this region.
Q: Do you ever look at Boston Herald owner Pat Purcell and feel nostalgic for the kind of hands-on control he's able to exercise?
A: "Nostalgia" is probably not a word that would immediately come to mind. I like Pat. I think he's doing his best to turn the situation around over at the Herald. But we have tremendous autonomy here at the Globe to put out a great newspaper. And I would much prefer, at the risk of sounding overly cocky or like a jerk, to be in our situation rather than to be in Pat's.
Q: Editor Matt Storin has given the Globe a more populist flavor and made a priority out of competing with the Herald on local news. Even so, there are days when the Herald bristles with an energy that the Globe can't seem to match. Is there anything about the Herald that you'd like to see the Globe emulate?
A: I guess I don't really accept the context of your question. I'm very proud of what we do in terms of local coverage, and I really don't feel that there is either a passion gap or a local-news gap or anything like that. I mean, today [March 11] we streamed across the top of page one this police-corruption case. That was broken by the Globe Spotlight team. That's a Globe story. Whose passion is that? Whose energy is that? I would consider that a typical example of what happens in this city every day rather than the exception.
Q: The Globe has been under fire on the ethics front twice during the past six months: for David Warsh's column in which he raised the possibility that Senator John Kerry had committed a war crime, and for Will McDonough's column in which he detailed his personal involvement in the long-running dispute between Patriots owner Bob Kraft and ex-coach Bill Parcells. What role you think a publisher should play when the ethics of his newspaper come under attack?
A: I'm not sure I totally would agree with the way you framed the question in terms of the ethics of the Globe being brought into question. I think that in both cases the two columnists involved -- and it's important to point out that they were both columnists -- were essentially doing their jobs the way they saw fit. We as an institution take responsibility for publishing both columns. And in a way they show the strength of the newspaper: the fact that we were able to publish those columns, and then also publish many other things that reacted to those columns.
The day after the Warsh column was published, we led the paper with Kerry's press conference criticizing what Warsh wrote. With regard to Will, I personally thought it was an extraordinary piece of journalism. I think it shed a lot of light on how the Patriots worked -- how Bob Kraft did his job, how Bill Parcells did his job, and also how Will McDonough did his job.
Q: If there was one single thing about the Globe that you could change tomorrow, what would it be?
A: I think we need to figure out a way to add more letters to the editor.
Q: The circulation of the Globe, like that of nearly all urban dailies, has been slipping during the 1990s. Certainly higher prices necessitated by rising paper costs have had an impact, but the culture is changing too, with more competition for people's time from cable and the Internet, even from longer workdays. Can the drop in circulation be reversed?
A: I believe that we can turn the circulation numbers around. I feel very strongly that it's a direct result of the higher circulation prices. We'll build it back. I think if you look at our circulation by the end of this year, you'll start to see more-positive numbers.
Q: Boston.com has established itself as one of the more successful media websites, but where do we go from here? Will the Globe and other newspapers be delivered primarily by electronic means one day?
A: I don't think anybody knows what exactly is going to happen with electronic publishing. We're experimenting with it. If the world goes electronic, we want to be there when it does. But I think words on newsprint -- and advertising, I might add, on newsprint -- is still an extraordinarily good way to get a lot of information across to people. It's portable. You know, [retired editor] Tom Winship used to say that as long as there are bathrooms, there will be newspapers.
Q: How do you respond to the critique that old media are dead, and that the future will be dominated by interactive communication unfiltered by the media elite?
A: I think that we actually do a great service for people. We try to sift through all the events that are going out there, and we try to make some sense of it every day. I'm not sure how many people want to go on the Internet, with the chaos that's there, and try to make some sense of what's going on in the world through some sort of unfiltered lens.
Q: Your editorial pages have some strong, independent voices: editorial-page editor David Greenway, deputy editor Renée Loth, and chief editorial writer Robert Turner. Yet editorials are an area where publishers sometimes get directly involved. How do you anticipate your own role on the editorial pages?
A: I think that there's a pretty-well-understood relationship between the editor of the editorial page and the publisher, and I don't anticipate that relationship changing at all after April 1. What you try to do is pick a good editor of the editorial page, which we have, and let him have autonomy to do the job well. That doesn't mean that the publisher is either a caretaker or just a fence-sitter or anything like that.
Q: How would you describe the editorial slant of the editorial pages? Do you think it's changed under Greenway?
A: Fundamentally, I don't think it's changed. I think that David believes that the Globe should be a liberal newspaper. He also recognizes that it's important for the state to have a strong business environment, and that the two aren't mutually exclusive. Renée Loth likes to talk about how you can be a liberal with a brain, and you can also be a conservative with a heart.
Q: During the early 1980s you were a Washington reporter for the Globe. How has Washington changed since those days?
A: My sense is that less has changed than meets the eye. Certainly between the Vietnam War and Watergate, the press was extraordinarily aggressive. Twenty years later, is it more or less so? I don't know.
Some people criticize the press because they think we can't distinguish between the little stuff and the big stuff in terms of our desire to ferret out malfeasance. I'm not talking about the Globe now in particular, but there might be a legitimate argument there for us to think about. On the other hand, I generally subscribe to the theory that more information is better than less, and that our job is to try to find out the truth and share it with our readers.
Q: Publishers have a reputation for taking a background role compared to their editors: Punch Sulzberger and Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times, Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, even Davis Taylor and Tom Winship at the Globe. What's your view of the publisher-editor relationship?
A: The editor is really responsible for running the newsroom. It's up to the publisher to start by picking an editor that he or she has confidence in and then supporting him. One of the great things that every one of those publishers that you mentioned did from time to time was to back up their editor in moments of crisis. I think we've got a terrific editor in Matt Storin.
I'm not looking to be an out-front guy. I don't think it's the role of the publisher to meddle too much or to try to be the talk of the town.
The Don't Quote Me archive
Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
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