Editor Was Asked to Quit N.Y. Times

Former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, in his first public comments since resigning, said Friday that he had tried to shake up a “complacent culture” at the newspaper, but that the furor over the Jayson Blair scandal had made it impossible for him to continue at the helm.

Raines, who appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show,” also said that he and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd had been asked to step down by Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. In earlier statements, Sulzberger said the two had voluntarily offered to resign.

“This is a very old culture,” Raines said in describing the Times before he took over as executive editor on Sept. 5, 2001. “And it has entrenched folkways, deep pride and a sense of self satisfaction that developed over a generation. I felt that the challenge for me was to raise the energy level of the paper so we were maximizing the resource advantages we had over other papers.”

Raines, 60, was credited with re-energizing the paper, even though many critics said his management style was distant and autocratic.

“But we stepped on a landmine called Jayson Blair,” he conceded, referring to the 27-year-old reporter who resigned amid revelations that he had committed acts of plagiarism and fabricated stories and datelines in dozens of stories.

The revelations sparked a furor at the 152-year-old paper and an anguished round of soul-searching that is still continuing. Sulzberger is expected to announce a new executive editor and managing editor sometime in the next few weeks.

Raines said several times in Friday’s interview that he took full responsibility for the Blair fiasco. But he also sounded combative in describing a war that he said had erupted behind the scenes at the paper over its present and future role.

“There was an ideological battle going on at the Times [fought by] people who wanted to continue the status quo, as to how stories are selected and how the newsroom is run. This same group of people in general wanted the paper to ... be more of a New York paper and less of a national and international paper,” Raines said. “But the problem is, the publisher and the business leadership of the paper had all decided that the paper’s future is in the national and international arena.”

Earlier in the day, Raines gave his version of events in the Blair scandal to an internal Times committee investigating the matter, and he offered a surprising insight: Although Times Metro Editor Jonathan Landman had written a memo last year strongly urging that Blair no longer be allowed to write for the paper, Raines said he had not seen the memo until the reporter had resigned on May 1 of this year.

“After four weeks of working our way through these problems, Arthur asked me to step aside and I did,” Raines noted. “It was going to be a huge management problem. It would take one to two years of very careful internal bureaucratic work to get back to the agenda I believed was needed.”

Asked if he felt that Sulzberger’s request for his resignation was an overreaction , Raines said “that’s for others to judge. It happened, and people reacted in the way that they did. I was disappointed, frankly, that many people on the paper who shared my vision didn’t speak up.”