Tarting Up The Gray Lady Of 43rd Street

By Richard Lacayo

The New York Times has long had more in common with the Congressional Record than with its distant cousins, the tabloids. It has never had much of a nose, or a tolerance, for either gossip or nonpolitical scandal. So what on earth is going on at the Times these days? Why is the Gray Lady leaning over the back fence and acting like a garrulous matron? Why has she suddenly started kicking up her heels -- occasionally tripping over her own feet? Why are Times readers -- and staffers -- wondering whether the paper is abandoning its old standards, as well as loosening its style?

These questions have come to the fore in recent weeks because of several stories the Times has chosen to run in quick succession. By far the most serious surround the paper's treatment of the woman who has accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her at the Kennedy family's retreat in Palm Beach, Fla., in March. One day after the NBC Nightly News disclosed her name, with an elaborate justification, the Times abandoned its own long-standing practice of withholding the names of sex-crime victims and followed suit.

Worse still, it identified the woman in an unflattering profile that seemed sure to raise questions about her character. The piece, written by the Times's Boston bureau chief Fox Butterfield and Mary Tabor, reported that the woman had mediocre grades in high school, a daughter born out of wedlock and 17 tickets for speeding and unsafe driving. It quoted an anonymous friend's assertion that the woman had "a little wild streak." For good measure, it detailed her mother's divorce and remarriage to a wealthy Midwestern industrialist.

The controversy over the Palm Beach coverage blew up just one week after the Times had published a front-page Sunday piece by Maureen Dowd on Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan. In its rush to get the book's allegations into print, the paper made little attempt to substantiate Kelley's more purple passages or to question her notions of fact gathering.

After the Palm Beach story appeared, feminists and other outraged readers picketed the paper's headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The New York tabloids, the Daily News and the Post -- neither of which has printed the alleged victim's name -- cluck-clucked at their august competitor in editorials for violating journalistic ethics. Even Dan Schwartz, the editor of the National Enquirer, which also did not print the woman's name, was claiming that "I think we took a more ethical standard than they did."

A still angrier reaction was gathering within the Times itself. At an emotional meeting in the paper's Manhattan headquarters -- which was simultaneously piped to its 50-person Washington bureau -- 300 staffers hissed, booed and hooted their displeasure before some of the Times's top brass. Many complained that by disclosing the alleged victim's personal history, the Times profile seemed implicitly to give substance to the notion that some rape victims are asking for trouble. While defending their decision, Times editors promised to produce a balancing profile of Smith that would also look into his sexual history. To many, that seemed to offer no more than a dismal kind of justice. Complained one Times reporter: "It's two wrongs trying to make a right." Another asked, "Do we now run a piece about Willie Smith's father's sex life?" Popular Times columnist Anna Quindlen wrote in the newspaper the following Sunday that the daily's decision to publish the alleged victim's name was "beneath its traditions."

Finally, the newspaper itself published an extraordinary article last Friday about the controversy. The piece quotes executive editor Max Frankel as saying, "This is a crisis, because many people feel the Times betrayed its standards." In a separate editor's note, the Times also said it "regrets" that its original article might have given the impression that the newspaper challenged the woman's account of her ordeal.

+ The paper's stumbles appear to be the result of tension between its reputation for prudence and cautious news judgment and its recent attempts to develop a more with-it image. Since he took charge in 1986, Frankel has tried to liven up the 140-year-old paper with more flavorful writing and beefed-up coverage of sports and city news. But the Times has also been giving more prominent play to softer features, such as a piece last week on how celebrities are dealing with a local strike of apartment-building doormen.

Other stories have been more eye-opening, like an article reporting on the campaign by a younger generation of gay militants to label themselves "queers." Says Everette Dennis, executive director of the Gannett Foundation Media Center: "The Times has been ahead of the pack recently in bringing more soft news and how-to stories, plus adding a touch of tabloid sensationalism." Other newspeople are more judgmental. Says a Washington bureau chief: "The front page isn't the gauge of important news that it used to be."

Media observers say the Times is not moving to appeal to blue-collar tabloid readers; they are of little interest anyway to the kind of upscale advertisers the paper attracts. Instead, it is straining to keep up with the evolving taste of younger readers, who have come of age expecting a lighter, more gossipy style of journalism. This year Frankel hired consulting editor Adam Moss, the former managing editor of Seven Days, a defunct New York weekly that was popular among the yuppie Manhattanites whom the Times must hold as readers. The hope is that Moss -- "He's not a news person," grumbles a staff member -- will enliven the paper's Metro section, which has become something of a showcase for good writing.

Frankel's strategy is driven partly by a fear of red ink. While the paper's readership numbers remain healthy -- the 1.2 million daily circulation is up 5% over last year -- advertising is down, as it is generally throughout the newspaper industry. The New York Times Co. newspaper group reported a 52% drop in profits, to $18.6 million, for the first quarter of this year. The Times is also keeping an eye on six-year-old New York Newsday, which is trying to fashion a niche in Manhattan as a thinking person's tabloid. If Newsday can outlast the other tabs, both of which are perennial money losers, it could give the Times a taste of serious competition.

"We all feel areas in which the Times can do better and must be competitive with the local papers," says the Times's Sunday magazine editor, Warren Hoge. But, he adds, the goal "is not to be like them." In a city where tabloids run front-page headlines like TEDDY'S SEXY ROMP! the Gray Lady will surely never be ranked as the gamiest daily in town. Meanwhile the new breeze blowing through the Times is raising some storms along its path.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and Leslie Whitaker/New York