He sees the silver lining around N.Y.’s Gray Lady

Bill KELLER has been the executive editor of the New York Times for almost a year now, having taken control of the country’s most influential newspaper in the aftermath of one embarrassing scandal, in the midst of another and following the forced resignation of the paper’s two top editors.

I thought the paper seemed a bit flat in the early months under Keller, but it recently seems to have regained its stride, even amid the continuing furor over its pre-war coverage of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

So, what’s surprised him the most about the job?

“I’ve been amazed by how much fun it is,” he told me when we chatted recently in his office.

Fun?

When Keller first made this comment to me, he was still wrestling with how to handle the issue of the Times and Iraq’s WMD. He subsequently decided to publish a 1,700-word “From the Editors” note acknowledging how flawed that coverage had been, and when we spoke a few days after that, he said, “I won’t pretend that last week was fun. But I think it was the right thing to do -- healthy for the paper and overdue ... and, yes, I’m still having fun.”

Keller isn’t minimizing the gravity of the editors’ note or the institutional embarrassment that engendered it, but as he says: “This place offers instant therapy. You just have to sit down with someone and talk about stories, and I find that restores my spirits very quickly.”

Keller has the largest staff and biggest news budget of any newspaper, and he also has the luxury of working for the Sulzberger family, with its 150-year commitment to editorial excellence and independence. But the New York Times and its top editor, whoever he is, have long been the favorite whipping boys for every special-interest group and political or journalistic malcontent on the planet. In taking over for Howell Raines, who fled after a staff revolt triggered by the Jayson Blair fabrication humiliation, Keller has found himself under an even more powerful microscope than the men who preceded him in that job.

Criticism of the editors’ note he wrote on the paper’s weapons of mass destruction coverage -- many felt it was too little, too late -- only served to intensify that pressure. (I thought the biggest flaw in the editors’ note was its placement -- buried on page 10, with no reference to it on Page 1.)

So, fun?

“I thought being executive editor meant I’d have all these meetings and budget problems and personnel issues and pressures to deal with all the time,” he says, “and yes, we do have all that. But it’s a lot more fun to go to a meeting, for example, when you get to decide who else attends and what the agenda is.”

He pauses, seemingly aware that what he’s said might sound as, well, as imperious as Raines, who was widely seen as an arrogant tyrant in the newsroom.

Keller is neither arrogant nor tyrannical. He is confident and he is strongwilled, though, and I’ve always found him to be refreshingly candid in a low-key manner.

“When you’re the No. 2 man,” he says -- Keller was managing editor for Executive Editor Joe Lelyveld from 1997 to 2001 -- “if you do your job well, you won’t stand out. Frankly, it’s not very comfortable.”

Keller says that when Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, was initially interviewing him as a potential successor to Lelyveld in 2001, before picking Raines for the job, “I could tell that whenever I told him about something where I disagreed with Joe, he sat forward. That’s what he wanted to hear -- what was I going to do differently? But I felt disloyal so I’d back off.”

He pauses again.

“As much as I loved working for Joe, being No. 2 means suppressing a lot of yourself, and it can be a little frustrating. I didn’t really like being No. 2. I like being the executive editor.”

Being the boss means making tough decisions, and that’s what he had to do with the editors’ note on WMD coverage.

“What finally convinced us we had to do it,” he says, “was that a conventional wisdom had grown up about our coverage ... that there was something funny or odd about it ... and that made it hard to continue writing about the whole road to war without addressing it.”

WMD coverage aside -- Keller’s editors’ note said editors “who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper” -- how does his editorship differ from that of Raines, under whom those stories were published?

“I don’t want to be too critical of Howell, so let’s just say that when he was here, no one had any doubt about what he wanted, and the general feeling was that ideas would only be recognized and acted on and rewarded if they started in ... [his] office. I was surprised, when I took over, by how passive so many on the staff had become because of that. I knew we’d been through a really rough time,” he says, “but I didn’t realize just how badly beaten up the staff was and how demoralized many of the desks were.”

Picking his spots

As a longtime reporter -- a Pulitzer Prize winner -- Keller feels strongly that “the best ideas often come from the bottom up. “

He says he’s “more of a delegator by nature and I don’t want to step on the department heads’ toes.” Still, he knows that “everyday details are important, and you have to know enough of the details so that everyone realizes you’re really involved in the process.”

For him, that process began with replacing several department heads and beginning an overhaul of several sections in the paper.

“We’ve now gotten to the point where we can stop focusing on how the place is run and start focusing on what we’re supposed to do -- cover the news,” he says. “Readers don’t care whether the paper is run in a less authoritarian manner or if people are happier here now. They care whether the paper is doing a better job.”

Toward that end, Keller seems most focused now on remaking the paper’s cultural coverage. He’s already appointed new editors for the culture department and the Book Review, and he says more major changes will come by fall.

“The daily culture section is understaffed and needs more space and has to be newsier,” he says. “We need more coverage like those take-no-prisoner stories on the movie industry that Sharon Waxman has done for us recently.

“Howell was right to have identified this as a priority before he got stalled by the turmoil,” Keller says. “Our cultural coverage is one of the reasons the national edition has been so successful, and it’s an entry point for the younger readers we’d all like to attract, so we have to do it right.

“Our old Arts & Leisure section had become a series of niche publications for dance aficionados and longtime season-ticket holders of the New York Philharmonic,” he says. “We have to retain those readers but also figure out how to attract others.”

Still, he says, “even if we complete a successful serial revolution in our cultural coverage, there will be a pervasive sense of disappointment if we haven’t done a good job covering the news and especially if we fail on the two big stories of the year -- the presidential election and terrorism and the war in Iraq” (including, he says, aggressive reporting on the issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction).

And what if the Times discovers another Jayson Blair in its midst? What if there’s a repeat of the paper’s badly flawed WMD coverage?

“I’ve been very careful not to say a Jayson Blair couldn’t happen here again,” he says. “But if it did happen, I think we have sufficient safeguards in place that it wouldn’t go on nearly as long as it did last time before it got stopped.

“The other [WMD] is actually an easier one to guard against. If you’re doing things right, the self-correcting mechanism of daily journalism kicks in. An awful lot of what we put in the paper every day is incomplete. The next day’s paper tries to fill in the gaps, correct the things you got only two-thirds right the day before. If you’re attentive to your basic journalistic responsibilities ... you have to be careful to tell readers what you don’t know as well as what you do know. You have to be rigorous in explaining the qualifications and the motives of your sources, especially unnamed sources. You have to keep going back and testing the information against fresh reporting.”

The Times violated almost all those “basic journalistic responsibilities” in much of its WMD coverage. If it does so again, you can bet that Keller’s job will stop being fun.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.