Mutiny at The Times

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At first, Raines seemed like the right man for the right time. The 9/11 attacks--which occurred six days after he took the job--required firm, aggressive leadership, and Raines mobilized the staff for all-out coverage. But the heads of the Times's bureaus traditionally had leeway in deciding what stories to cover, and as the crisis ebbed and Raines' top-down crisis structure became business as usual, it began to rankle. He shook up the staff, giving choice assignments to cronies. He was brusque and domineering. He launched a crusade against the Augusta National golf club's exclusion of women and then was at least partly responsible for spiking two sports columns that didn't square with the paper's position.

Of course, many successful leaders are not nice guys--your boss, perhaps. But Jayson Blair turned Raines' leadership into a national issue. That Blair, a smooth talker who ingratiated himself with Raines and Boyd, went so long uncaught despite warnings about his sloppy work was blamed on Raines' playing favorites and his unwillingness to listen to others. "This was very quickly not about Jayson Blair," says a Times staff member, "but about Howell and the star system he created. The level of anger was just out of control."

Sulzberger, who often tells interviewers about the importance of making mistakes in life, stood by his editor when the crisis broke, saying he would not accept Raines' resignation. But Sulzberger also took an aggressive role in trying to gauge newsroom discontent, including holding a meeting of hundreds of employees in a Times Square movie theater--which made it clear that Raines and Boyd needed to act very fast to fix morale. Among other things, the paper appointed a committee to make management suggestions--and began looking for other Blairs. Then came a second scandal: Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer prizewinning feature writer, was suspended after he filed a story about oystermen in Florida that had been largely reported by an uncredited intern. Bragg further enraged the newsroom when he claimed that Times national reporters did things like that all the time. When Raines issued a mild and tardy response, many of his people felt he had sold them out.

The Bragg case caused a minor public flap compared with Blair's, but it was ultimately more damaging to Raines. Journalists started giving anti-Raines quotes to competitors; they ranted against Bragg and Times management on a popular website for journalists. It didn't help that when Sulzberger went to the Times Washington bureau for a brown-bag lunch, an employee said, "he got a harsher message than he expected."

Some have speculated that his family, particularly his father, pressured him to act, but Sulzberger says that although he talked with family members, he made the decision to accept Raines' resignation himself. He also insists that he did not order the editors to quit. "There was no single 'aha' moment. There was a sense from the two of them that the hill that they had to climb was becoming too steep. And that the cost of that to the institution was becoming too great," says Sulzberger. "And, sadly, I had to agree."