New York Times Names Bill Keller Executive Editor

The New York Times on Monday appointed Bill Keller, a columnist, former managing editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, as executive editor, in a move widely seen as an effort to restore stability to the troubled newsroom.

Keller, 54, succeeded Howell Raines, who resigned last month amid tensions over the Jayson Blair scandal. Blair, a young reporter, was found to have plagiarized and fabricated information in dozens of stories during recent years, and the embarrassing revelations sparked a credibility crisis at the 152-year-old newspaper.

Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. stood next to Keller as he announced the appointment during a morning appearance in the newsroom. The sustained applause that greeted both men showed that “this is a very positive thing and people are quite happy about these changes,” Sulzberger said in an interview.

But he suggested the newsroom had already returned to stability under the leadership of former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld, who returned to run the Times temporarily after Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd resigned June 5.

Keller will take the reins July 30, Sulzberger said. A new managing editor will not be appointed, however, until Keller has time to review the newspaper’s organizational structure, and to digest the findings of an internal committee that has been examining news reporting and editing practices, the publisher added.

“Bill is well known to most of us and he’s widely admired as a journalist,” said Metropolitan columnist Clyde Haberman. Without specifically referring to Raines, Haberman also speculated that Keller’s leadership and his daily interactions with reporters and editors would be “calmer, more reassuring.”

Many Times employees had criticized Raines for an autocratic, distant leadership style, a point he conceded during an often angry town hall-style staff meeting May 14, two weeks after Blair’s resignation. Although Raines attempted to ease tensions, the climate worsened and Sulzberger asked for his resignation, Raines said during an interview Friday on the PBS program “Charlie Rose.”

Although he declined to discuss Raines’ comments -- such as his view that the newspaper suffered from a “culture of complacency” before he took over -- Keller’s initial statements Monday seemed to promise a new direction.

Unlike Raines, who often said he wanted to raise the Times’ “competitive metabolism,” the new executive editor encouraged his reporters to do “a little more savoring” of their personal lives, adding “that will enrich you and your work, as much as a competitive pulse rate will,” according to transcript released by the New York Times.

Sulzberger, who also declined to discuss Raines’ on-air comments, told Times staffers that “there’s no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be.”

But there is a determination to “finish the job that Joe Lelyveld has begun,” Keller said in an interview. “We have to get the newsroom fully focused on its work and not wallowing in the unhappiness of recent months.”

“We have committees that are looking at how we are operating everything from quality control to hiring and recruiting, and I take that very seriously,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be trying to implement some safeguards to protect our credibility and maybe to make the newsroom environment more inhospitable to rogues.”

Keller’s appointment was crucial for a newspaper that needs “a gentler kind of leadership now,” said Alex Jones, author of a history of the New York Times and director of the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Jones predicted that Keller -- while intensely focused -- would “not be as tightly wrapped as his predecessors.... He will be the least likely among recent appointees to get ulcers. While he takes the job seriously, he doesn’t take himself all that seriously. And he’s got a sense of humor that is off the wall.”

Keller showed flashes of this during Monday’s announcement, when he reflected on the events that catapulted him into the executive editor’s job.

He and Raines were finalists to succeed Lelyveld in 2001, and when Sulzberger picked Raines, Keller was given a post writing a Saturday op-ed column, as well as Sunday magazine pieces. He sparked controversy and gained praise for articles on nuclear terrorism, the Roman Catholic Church, the reasons why America should go to war with Iraq and the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative-action decision.

“I want to thank Arthur for entrusting me with the most coveted job in American journalism,” Keller said, recalling his comments to the newsroom. “And now I’m giving it up to become executive editor.”

Earlier, Keller served as New York Times bureau chief in Johannesburg and Moscow, winning a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the former Soviet Union. He served as the paper’s managing editor under Lelyveld from 1997 to 2001.

Born on Jan. 18, 1949, Keller graduated from Pomona College in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree and completed an advanced management program in July 2000 at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before joining the Times in 1984, he worked at the Dallas Times Herald, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report and the Portland Oregonian.

Keller is married to Emma Gilbey, a writer, and has three children.