Mikhail Storin

Boston Globe editor Matt Storin came to power amid promises of change. He brought reform, but reform was not enough. What was needed was a revolution, and time proved him unable -- or unwilling. Now there are whispers that his regime may be coming to an end.

by Dan Kennedy

It's a comparison you hear a lot these days from inside the tense, unhappy headquarters of the Boston Globe: Matthew V. Storin as William Jefferson Clinton.

Like the president, the embattled editor is unwilling to face up fully to how his own behavior has created his current predicament. Asked about his grotesquely inept handling of the Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith scandals, Storin told Newsweek: "I made each decision on the basis of the information I had in hand, and in each case I think I did the right thing."

Like Clinton, Storin has taken to feeling sorry for himself, railing indignantly at the fate that has befallen him. "I bear the responsibility," he said in an interview with the Washington Post. "But I also think I'm the unluckiest editor in America."

And like Clinton, his fiftysomething generational peer, Storin allows his personal agenda to affect his professional judgment. In the six years since his return to the Globe, Storin has espoused a brand of tough, unbiased journalism that was new to the paper, long a redoubt of liberal, and especially pro-Kennedy, cheerleading. But at the same time, he chose to ignore clear evidence that Barnicle, his star columnist, was a fabricator and a plagiarist. He handed Smith a coveted metro column despite serious questions about her work, and he stuck with her -- even nominated her for a Pulitzer -- after being presented with evidence that she was making up characters and quotes.

But there is an even more apt comparison. The world leader Storin most resembles is not Bill Clinton but rather Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who tried to reform the system that nurtured him and who, in the end, was swept away. Both Storin and Gorbachev sought to stand apart from the very culture that made them who they were. Both thought they could save the institutions they headed -- and win widespread respect -- through programs of cautious, incremental reform. Both received considerable public praise even while the internal problems they lacked the nerve or the authority to address festered within. And both, when the dam finally broke, were exposed as utterly inadequate.

Despite its status as one of the country's best regional dailies, the Globe has a well-deserved reputation as a playground for lazy, underworked journalists indulged by the Taylor family, which continues to run the paper as its personal plantation even though it sold out to the New York Times Company in 1993. Rather than promoting a bottom-up revolution, the Storin style has been to rant and rave at his top editors while leaving the teeming masses beneath largely untouched. The result is a newsroom gestalt marked by a curious, seemingly contradictory mixture of fear and lassitude. And even though being on the losing end of a Storin tirade is said to be a memorably unpleasant experience, there's also an unreal quality to it: people are rarely demoted, and firings are almost unheard of.

"The whole Pat and Mike thing is part of the sense of there not being any standards whatsoever. I haven't seen any heads roll," says an ex-staffer who, like most people interviewed for this article, insisted on anonymity.

This is not to say that Storin hasn't tried to do the right thing. From stamping out much of the liberal bias on the news pages to mending relations with the Catholic Church, from re-emphasizing the chase for breaking news to making the Globe more attractive and readable, Storin has made a difference. And the Globe has won three Pulitzers under his stewardship, ending a drought that began with the retirement of the seemingly larger-than-life Tom Winship in 1985.

The next Globe editor? Who it could be It's not likely that Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor will replace editor Matt Storin on his own. Although Taylor is said to be concerned about his volatile editor's temperament, it was Taylor himself, according to informed speculation, who leaned on Storin to take Mike Barnicle back after Storin had demanded his resignation. If Storin had held fast, there'd be no crisis at 135 Morrissey Boulevard. And Taylor certainly knows that. But though the Taylors continue to run the Globe as though they own it, they don't. The New York Times Company purchased the paper for a whopping $1.1 billion in 1993. The Sulzberger family, which controls the Times Company board, enjoys friendly relations with the Taylors; but it also has both a fiduciary and a journalistic responsibility to protect its investment. New York Times editorial-page editor Howell Raines was no doubt acting on his own when he blasted the Globe for (temporarily) taking Barnicle back last month. But company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. can't be happy when he thinks about what's happened to his family's prize acquisition. For the Times Company, the bottom line is generally assumed to be the bottom line. Here, too, things don't look too good for Storin. Though the Globe is solidly profitable, its circulation has been sinking like a rock. The Times Company's 1997 annual report notes that the Globe's daily circulation had dropped by 5.1 percent, with a 3.4 percent decline on Sunday. By contrast, the Times itself was down only 1.6 percent daily and 1.9 percent on Sunday. Its regional papers performed better than the Globe, too: down 3.1 percent daily and 1.8 percent on Sunday. The Globe's long-term regional hegemony would appear unthreatened. But things can change. In New York, the Times overtook the Herald Tribune. The Washington Post came out of nowhere to demolish the Washington Star. And the Globe, in the 1960s, caught up with and passed the long-dominant Herald Traveler. With the Globe's credibility now under fire, some may choose to read the Times for world and national news, and the newly expanded Herald for local news and sports. Of course, the Globe remains a far better and more complete paper than the Herald, and it's unlikely in the extreme that the Herald could actually overtake the Globe. But even the remote possibility of such an occurrence may lead Sulzberger to conclude that he must act sooner rather than later. Certainly there's no consensus on who would take Storin's place if he were to go. Various possibilities are bandied about, all somewhat plausible, none based on any more than guesswork. One is a caretaker editor such as Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach, who made his mark as editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, or Gene Roberts, who transformed the Philadelphia Inquirer into a Pulitzer factory. Both are Times alumni,  with Roberts having recently finished a stint as the paper's managing editor. No one talks about either possibility as any more than wishful thinking. But by having an outsider serve a limited stint, the Times Company could receive some objective information on who among Globe insiders could emerge as a future editor. Then, too, a decision might be made to go inside right now. The candidate whose name comes up the most often is that of Washington-bureau chief David Shribman, who's well respected at the Times, although in some circles he has a reputation of being more interested in writing his column than managing his reporters. Deputy managing editor Ben Bradlee Jr. is seen as another possibility, although his gruff manner and narrow focus on the State House and City Hall during his days as metro editor, in the early '90s, might work against him. To Bradlee's credit, though, no one doubts where he stands on internal issues, and his current job of overseeing special projects has been marked by high-impact, thoughtful work. The choice of managing editor Greg Moore would be popular with some factions, and it doesn't hurt that he's an African-American. But he was Patricia Smith's immediate editor, and his reputation probably needs some time to bounce back. Moore's political skills and outgoing personality would be an asset outside the Globe, but the current crisis might favor someone with a lower profile. Ditto for vice president and assistant to the publisher Al Larkin, a newsroom veteran who may be tarnished for helping to broker Barnicle's temporary comeback last month. The consensus choice as the Globe's smartest editor is executive editor Helen Donovan, Storin's number two. And that raises the remote possibility that Ben Taylor, a former executive editor, could leave the editor's slot vacant for a while, or even name himself editor, leaving Donovan, who's uncomfortable in a public leadership role, as the insider in charge. However, Donovan's stock plummeted after an article in the American Journalism Review this week called her judgment into question. According to the AJR, columnist Eileen McNamara told Donovan last January that she suspected Smith was faking columns -- and Donovan admitted she never brought McNamara's concerns to Storin. Then, too, observers point out that the Times itself is loaded with bright, ambitious editors who aren't well known, but who would jump at the chance to run their own show. Or Bob Rosenthal, a Globe alumnus and former Times copy boy who's now editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, might be disgusted enough with Knight-Ridder's cost-cutting strategies to be lured back. More problematic is the status of Ben Taylor himself. For if the Times Company is unhappy with Storin, then surely it is at least as unhappy with Taylor. Trouble is, the Sulzbergers probably don't want to alienate the Taylors: Bill Taylor sits on the Times Company board, and several members of the family own large chunks of company stock. Perhaps the Sulzbergers will eventually ease the Taylors into largely ceremonial roles. Of course, the problem with speculation is that nothing may come to pass. A year from now Storin may still be the editor, with a newly united newsroom behind him and a newspaper firing on all cylinders. It would be a heartening development. At the moment, though, the odds against it are mighty long.

But now the whole city is watching, waiting to see whether Storin can -- should -- survive the implosion of his newspaper. His notorious temper, always an issue, is now widely reported to be out of control. Serious, responsible insiders who've long argued that his critics exaggerated his rages say his outbursts recently have become so frequent and so unnerving that it's difficult for people to do their jobs. (These insiders are so afraid of being identified that they wouldn't allow the Phoenix to quote them, even without their names.) Staffers, meanwhile, are eyeing October 1 -- the date when the Times Company's five-year noninterference agreement expires -- wondering, in many cases with gleeful anticipation, whether Storin will be removed (see "The Next Globe Editor", right).

"This may be the lowest point in the Globe's history since the paper almost went belly-up in its earliest years," Storin wrote in an e-mail to the staff on August 20, the day after revelations by the Phoenix and the Weekly Standard finally forced Barnicle's resignation. "Now it is time for each and every one of us to determine what we are going to do about this. The solution is in the mirror for each of us. . . . For years we have had to fight complacency here. That at least is one problem we don't have this morning. . . . You'll be amazed at how easily your good work restores a good mood."

If Storin's intention was to rally his frazzled staff, it didn't work. "It's terribly insulting," says one reporter. "We have as much invested in this place as they do. And we're not the ones who fucked this up royally."

Storin declined to be interviewed for this article. Globe spokesman Rick Gulla says Storin believes there's nothing more he can say about his role in the Smith and Barnicle affairs.

In person, Storin comes across as an unlikely candidate to find himself enmeshed in such a mess. Bespectacled and with thinning hair, Storin on his better days is soft-spoken and respectful, a good listener who, despite a sometimes awkward way of dealing with people, projects a modest sense of humor and camaraderie. He is also a very different presence compared to Winship, who, through sheer force of personality and intellectual firepower, transformed the Globe from a backwater into a paper of national repute.

But Winship broke some rules along the way. Favored writers such as Barnicle were indulged, even when questions about their professionalism and ethics arose. Political prejudices were played out on the news pages. Editors huddled with public officials to plot strategy, away from the prying eyes of mere readers.

The Globe is by far the most important and influential media organization in New England, the agenda-setter for the political and business communities, a force that can be used for good or for harm. The question now is whether Storin can clean up the corrupt culture of the Globe once and for all. It won't be easy, especially for someone so lacking in charisma and inspirational qualities. If he fails, he may soon find that the game is over. And that, like Gorbachev, he'll wake up one morning to find some journalistic Yeltsin standing on the tank, proclaiming victory and the death of the old order.

---

Tom Ashbrook was pumped up. It was December 14, 1993, nine months into the Storin regime. And Ashbrook, then a deputy managing editor, had just finished reading a remarkable column by Mike Barnicle.

Two off-duty cops, Barnicle wrote, were on their way to a hunting trip in Maine when they caught a couple of punks trying to break into a van parked outside the Liberty Tree Mall, in Danvers. The cops, not wanting to mess up their holiday with red tape and paperwork, loaded the pair into the trunk of their car. They released the kids 90 minutes later and -- after first pretending they were going to blow them away -- ordered them to take a long, don't-look-back walk into the woods.

"For all they know," Barnicle wrote, delighting in this ostensibly real-life parable of rough justice, "the pair might be six miles west of Buffalo this morning."

At that morning's news meeting, Ashbrook suggested that a reporter do a follow-up story. Who were the kids? Had they turned up? Were they going to sue? "It seemed to me," recalls Ashbrook, who's now an Internet entrepreneur, "like civil liberties had been trampled."

According to one version of this story, then-metro editor Walter Robinson made a sarcastic remark that implied he thought Barnicle's column was something less than 100 percent true, although Robinson himself declines to comment. Ashbrook says he doesn't remember.

But this much is known: Barnicle's column was the first and last time the Globe ever reported on the case. The Boston Herald didn't follow up, either. Which leaves two possibilities. Either the city's daily papers were so incompetent and slothful that they let two cops get away with a four-alarm case of brutality, a case that would easily have become a national story. Or the Globe's editors believed that Barnicle -- who failed to identify the cops or even the department they worked for -- fabricated all or part of the column.

The story of the cops and the kids is worth recalling because it suggests a deep-seated sense of institutional compromise that incubated intellectual corruption. Both Barnicle and his editors were complicit in this compromise, but Storin -- brought in to lead the Globe into a new era -- chose to look the other way. One insider suggests that Storin had far more important problems to deal with at the time, but that proposition is difficult to swallow. Three years earlier, the Globe had paid a $75,000 settlement to Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz rather than defend Barnicle's claim that Dershowitz had made a sexist, racist remark. Two years earlier, Boston magazine had published a series of articles strongly suggesting that Barnicle fabricated columns. And one year earlier, Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko had accused Barnicle of lifting his ideas on at least three occasions. Yet when Ashbrook's innocent inquiry gave Storin the opening he needed to deal with Barnicle, he flinched.

Storin, after all, knew how business was conducted at the Globe. And if he wanted desperately to make it a better paper, he was also cautious enough not to mess with independent power centers such as Barnicle. He may have regarded the columnist -- perhaps rightly -- as the pouty star center fielder who, with a snap of his fingers, could get the manager fired.

The protection Barnicle enjoyed was unique, but the corruption that allowed it was not. In the 1960s and '70s, according to J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground (1985), the Taylor family brought in by-the-book outsiders such as Robert Phelps, a former editor at the New York Times, to keep an eye on Winship and his gang of gung-ho, overly self-confident news jocks. In the 1980s, the late Kirk Scharfenberg -- a brilliant city editor, metro editor, and editorial-page editor who believed fervently in the marriage of politics and journalism -- made the Globe's city coverage an extension of then-mayor Ray Flynn's permanent campaign. "He was practically writing Flynn's speeches at Doyle's, and everybody knew that," says a long-time staff member. "It was a terrible time for those of us who think that stuff is important." In the 1990s, what was left of the old guard -- Barnicle, political columnists David Nyhan and Martin Nolan, and retired executive editor Robert Healy (who'd hired Barnicle in 1973) -- served as pallbearers at Tip O'Neill's funeral, to the bemusement of Globe watchers and the consternation of Storin.

Maybe Storin thought he could outlast this corrupt culture -- that eventually people would retire, and he wouldn't have to take any of the difficult steps needed to eradicate it. If that's the case, then obviously he was wrong.

Storin's shortcomings are all the more frustrating because, as both an insider and an outsider, he was uniquely positioned to succeed. A middle-class product of Springfield's Catholic schools and a Notre Dame graduate, Storin had spent most of his professional life at the Globe, rising to managing editor, the number-three position in the newsroom hierarchy. But he quit in 1985 after a falling-out with Winship's successor, the cerebral Michael Janeway, who himself lasted only a year in the corner office. Following stints at U.S. News & World Report, the Chicago Sun-Times, the alternative Maine Times, and the New York Daily News, Storin was lured back in 1992 to serve as executive editor under Jack Driscoll, who had lost control of his fractious staff. The following year, Storin -- to no one's surprise -- moved to the top slot, and Driscoll, after a brief, uncomfortable stint in the front office, retired.

There's an old story that at one of Storin's first news meetings as editor, his underlings took all the available chairs and Storin was left standing at the head of the conference table. Storin reportedly left the room, grabbed a chair, and theatrically slammed it on the floor. In retrospect, that action said much about what was to come. For the first time since Winship's retirement, the Globe had firm, decisive leadership. But it was a style of leadership that all too often expressed itself -- to borrow a phrase Storin recently used when describing Barnicle -- in the manner of "a petulant 14-year-old."

---

There's a widespread, if not universal, perception within the comfortable confines of the Globe that the Taylor family -- given the choice between a mediocre newspaper with a happy staff and a great newspaper with a disgruntled staff -- would willingly choose the former.

Not that the Taylors are always sweetness and light. They removed Michael Janeway as editor before he even had time to prove he was the wrong choice, and they were less than sensitive in the way they handled the departure of Jack Driscoll, one of the most respected editors in the building for several decades. But, overall, the Taylors are seen as almost comically conflict-averse. And the current publisher, Ben Taylor, who ascended to that position a year and a half ago, is widely viewed as being an even softer touch than his predecessor, his older cousin Bill Taylor, now the chairman of the Globe's board.

Thus it is not surprising that Storin, in pursuing his agenda of reform, chose to concentrate on areas where he could issue Gorbachev-style edicts -- beat the Herald, stop sucking up to liberals -- without seriously challenging the power of the apparatchiks who stood in his way.

Yet Storin needn't have been quite so cautious. Consider the example of editorial-page editor David Greenway, who was named to that position just a few months after Storin became editor. Almost before he'd finished moving into his new office, Greenway broomed four long-time liberal columnists, replacing them with moderate and conservative voices. (One of those columnists -- Alan Lupo, currently a bright light at the paper's CityWeekly supplement -- is a street-savvy veteran who ought to be considered for one of the two open metro-columnist slots.)

To be sure, Storin brought in talent, such as Charlie Sennott, from the Daily News, and the late Karen Avenoso, from Newsday. He played a large role in persuading David Shribman to leave the Wall Street Journal to become the Globe's Washington bureau chief, and in talking Eileen McNamara, a veteran reporter who'd quit in a huff several years earlier, into coming back as a metro columnist. Those moves paid off big-time, with Shribman winning a Pulitzer in 1995 and McNamara in 1997.

Still, critics say the Storin regime has been marked by a lot of mediocre hires and promotions -- far too many for a paper where some of the best talent in the country clamors to work. This has been especially true in the paper's local coverage. Storin replaced metro editor Ben Bradlee Jr. with Walter Robinson in late 1993; three years later, Robinson was succeeded by his city editor, Teresa Hanafin. Opinion is divided about their tours; and Hanafin, a smart, hardworking editor, is seen by a number of critics as deficient when it comes to leadership and vision (see "Get Me Rewrite," News, May 22). Then, too, with the exception of a few topnotch veterans such as Shelley Murphy, Ric Kahn, David Armstrong, and Charles Radin, local coverage -- which should be the Globe's most important mission -- has long been the refuge of the paper's rawest recruits and slowest-moving old-timers.

That mediocrity extends to too many other sections of the paper as well. The business section is reasonably lively, if a bit more pro-business than some might like. But Living/Arts is a long way from the cutting edge. The Sunday magazine can usually be thrown out without risk of missing anything worthwhile. And though it might be too much to expect that the Sunday Focus section would be up to the standards of the Times' Week in Review or the Post's Outlook, neither is there any excuse for its week-after-week irrelevance.

Business as usual has been Storin's credo when it comes to dealing with the paper's pampered columnists. The public got an unattractive look into how much leeway Globe pundits have on the eve of the 1996 election, when business columnist David Warsh wrote an outrageous piece suggesting -- on the basis of an abstruse military document and an interview with a source who immediately repudiated his own ambiguous remarks -- that US Senator John Kerry might have killed an unarmed Viet Cong soldier, thereby committing a war crime, during the Vietnam War. Storin defended Warsh's piece as a columnist's prerogative; but Warsh, one of the smartest writers at the Globe, was not well served by his editors either before or after publication.

As for Smith and Barnicle, the early line -- that Storin did the best he could with a difficult situation -- has crumbled under the weight of the evidence. Yes, Storin looked strong and tough two months ago by coming clean when Smith admitted to faking at least four columns. And yes, one can sympathize with Storin's desire to salvage the career of a smart, talented African-American. But it's clear now that he should have quietly let her go when he was first presented with evidence that she was a serial fabricator, in 1995. Instead, he covered up, let her continue to work with little editorial supervision, and then submitted her work for a Pulitzer -- a decision said to appall those editors who knew of Smith's previous transgressions.

If Storin had long suspected Barnicle of misconduct, as he suggested when he explained why he'd kept Smith three years ago, then he should have conducted an internal probe. Absent that, he still could have spared the Globe last month's humiliation if he had simply suspended Barnicle pending further investigation after the Herald revealed Barnicle had lifted one-liners from George Carlin. The information Storin would have needed to get rid of Barnicle would have emerged soon enough.

Instead, at a news conference at the Globe on August 11, a pained-looking Storin and Taylor looked on while Barnicle pugnaciously proclaimed, "I've never lied. I've never plagiarized." Rather than taking charge, Storin sat back passively; other media soon proved Barnicle wrong on both counts. It's hard to believe that, in his heart, Storin really expected the final outcome to be otherwise.

---

According to those who were there, at a recent party celebrating her departure for a fellowship, staff writer Tatiana With said to Storin, "See you in nine months." Storin's reported response: "Don't be too sure." A little dark humor? Of course. But there could be some truth to it, too.

In fact, if Storin were compared not to Bill Clinton or Mikhail Gorbachev but rather to a top executive at a large corporation, there would be little doubt that he would be directed to fall on his sword. Even if it's not entirely fair to blame Storin for the current debacle, a strong case can be made that he should go, as the CEO of a high-tech company would be forced to go if the public were starting to associate the brand name more with scandal than with excellence.

If Storin stays, the biggest danger is that he will become the Velcro editor, the guy to whom everything sticks, dragging the paper's reputation down. Look at Kevin Cullen, long one of the paper's best reporters, now the London bureau chief. Cullen is being openly mocked in the Herald and elsewhere for his reporting on Joseph Yandle, a convicted murderer who talked his way out of prison in 1995 by claiming to have been a war hero in Vietnam. No one detected Yandle's deception -- not 60 Minutes, certainly not the Herald. Yet Cullen, because he works for the Globe, is being treated as though his work is automatically suspect.

Though Storin still has some supporters in the newsroom, the breadth and depth of off-the-record discontent is nothing short of astounding. Storin may well have to go to save those beneath him: some are grumbling that managing editor Greg Moore, who was Smith's direct editor, and managing editor for news operations Tom Mulvoy, who supervised Barnicle, should follow Storin out the door. Yet if Storin were to leave, it's likely that emotions would subside and people would understand that Moore, a possible future editor, and Mulvoy, an invaluable nuts-and-bolts guy, should not be held responsible for an institutional failure. Even though they obviously should have been more diligent.

If Storin is, in fact, campaigning to save his job, he's not off to a particularly auspicious start. There was, for instance, his blowup with assistant metro editor Joe Williams, witnessed by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz. And there were the incidents of last Friday. First he reportedly lost his temper with executive editor Helen Donovan, who without Storin's knowledge helped put together a deal to have the paper sponsor an on-again, off-again debate between Democratic gubernatorial candidate Patricia McGovern and Board of Education chairman John Silber. Then he erupted in rage when the results of a forthcoming Globe/WBZ-TV (Channel 4) poll leaked out to the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Malone -- whose operatives called Storin to complain.

As is often the case with Storin, his disproportionate response served to obscure some legitimate gripes. The McGovern-Silber debate, after all, will give a boost to one gubernatorial candidate at the expense of the others, just the sort of political favoritism that has long driven Storin crazy. (Last winter, for instance, Storin was reportedly miffed when political columnist David Nyhan wrote a column calling on McGovern to become Scott Harshbarger's running mate, and then invited Harshbarger over to the Globe for a basketball game. The hoops might have gone unnoticed except that Harshbarger suffered a ruptured Achilles' tendon.)

And though it's not exactly unheard-of for poll results to leak out in advance, neither does it help the integrity of the Globe's political coverage to have political operatives jawboning the editor of the paper before the results can even be published. Some staffers are outraged that Storin decided to do additional polling after the call from the Malone camp. But political editor Doug Bailey insists that it was his idea, and that the numbers were sufficiently strange to warrant a second look.

"He wasn't the only one who lost his temper over it," Bailey says of Storin. "There were tempers flying. I was pretty damn pissed myself."

But if Storin's low standing means he now looks wrong even when he's right, that may prove to be an additional argument for new leadership.

The scenarios can be spun out endlessly. The best guess is that Storin will be given an opportunity -- perhaps a few months -- to prove he can right the ship and begin moving forward once again. If he fails, look for a quiet resignation before the end of the year.

Storin, naturally, would not like to fail at the job he'd wanted for most of his career. Assuming he still has time to salvage his position, he could do worse than look to the example of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. The world was filled with the heady talk of freedom. And Gorbachev flinched, thus sealing his doom two years hence.

The departure of Mike Barnicle, no matter how badly it was handled, gives Storin the opportunity for a fresh start. As he told his shell-shocked staff on August 19, everyone was finally on "the same ethical page." But he must prove that he's able to take advantage of this unexpected chance, stop yelling, start leading, and change the culture of the Globe once and for all.

Storin needs to declare his own policies of glasnost and perestroika. For if ever there was an institution in need of openness and restructuring, it's the Boston Globe.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.