The Changing Times

The best newspaper in the U.S. rarely uses up space to talk about itself. Recently the New York Times took two-thirds of a column to report how the American press is spending over $50 million on plant expansion. But the Times spared only two lines to tell about the biggest project of all, its own $6,000,000 rebuilding job.

By late next fall, when the hammers are stilled and the plaster dust settled, Manhattan's sedate Times will be settled in one of the fanciest quarters in the business. An air-conditioned building with pastel walls, glass-brick partitions and functional furniture, it has cozy bedroom suites for executives, playrooms and dining rooms for all 3,300 staffers and a city room so vast that the city editor has to use a microphone to page his far-flung reporters.

Meet the People. The Times no longer lives on Times Square (but still flashes its headlines to crowds there, from a traveling sign that girdles its old wedge-shaped building). Its present home is half a block away on West 43rd Street, with a new eleven-story annex that breaks through to 44th. This week it will open a fancy information center, where readers may pore over bound volumes and Microfilm editions of the Times that go back to 1851.

The rest of the floor, barred from the public's view, is all but finished. It is filled with the block-long city room, where Managing Editor Edwin L. James's staff nightly assembles all the news that's fit to print. Executives sit at the south end, a full block away from some of their reporters. Turner Catledge, assistant to James, was given a pair of opera glasses by his staff to survey the farthest reaches of the room. Near by sits City Editor David Joseph, a shy, balding, quiet-spoken bachelor of 61. His public-address system is one-way; staffers who want to talk back have to hike over to his desk.

Room with Bath. City Editor Joseph, who probably does less editing than any city editor in the business, has no need for one of the swank new suites. They are reserved for Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, General Manager Julius Ochs Adler, Editor Charles Merz, Sunday Editor Lester Markel, Columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick and Managing Editor James, in case they are stuck at the paper all night. Joseph takes his leave of his morning-paper staff by 6 p.m. He and his assistants assign the Times's 150 reporters to stories, but the editing is done by copyreaders, which helps explain why the Times sometimes reads as if nobody edited it at all.

As a documentary newspaper, the Times prints more news (165 to 185 columns a night) than any other paper; it is one daily where the editors, not the admen, determine the size of the paper each day. "We get a million words a day in here," said a Times executive. "Not counting what is duplicated, we have around 600 columns of news to trim down. The editing has to be for length and for accuracy; we can't stop to rewrite many stories." Readability, he added, "is a problem we still have to solve."

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