If this week’s book party for Adam Nagourney began with a question as to why a New York Times writer is chronicling the history of his own paper—long regarded as a bastion of journalistic excellence and secrecy—it ended with a clear answer: the paper is just too damn big for any outsider to fully grasp. In writing about the people who write about the Times, the word that seems to be used most often is “Kremlinologist.” But perhaps a more apt designation (especially at this point in history) would be “savant,” because to know all the personalities responsible for the newspaper is to be a certified genius. And that’s to say nothing of the other media barnacles the leviathan attracts.
Both species were in fine form at the Waverly Inn, in New York’s West Village, on Tuesday night, at a book party celebrating Nagourney, a 27-year veteran of the paper, and his well-regarded new history of it, The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism. The book covers the last four decades of news reporting and palace intrigue in vivid, unsparing detail. In an excerpt published in AIR MAIL last month, Nagourney recounts the newspaper’s response to the attacks of September 11, and how they not only defined the careers of a generation of Times journalists, but helped the broadsheet transition to publishing online as well as in print.
