Bland Ambition: What the Joe Kahn Choice Says About the New York Times

Joe Kahn, who was just named the next executive editor of the New York Times, has the kind of background and temperament that was once a classic type for news organizations choosing newsroom leaders — a half-century ago.

Kahn is a white male born into a wealthy family. He graduated with an Ivy League diploma. He proved his skill as a reporter at a young age, then spent decades organizing his career around the ethos and values of an elite news institution.

His personality, reserved to a degree that is just this side of dour, according to a profile in his own publication, is reminiscent of the “Silent Generation” era of leaders. These were consensus-oriented people, a few years younger than their swashbuckling World War II-era colleagues, but older than the boat-rocking activists of the 1960s who came a few years later. This cohort, with its managerial mindset, basically ran most newsrooms (and universities and corporations) from the late 1970s til the turn of the century. After almost a quarter-century shimmying up the greasy pole of Times management, Kahn by outward appearances looks like a journalistic version of “The Organization Man,” the title of a 1956 classic book on modern industrial bureaucracy.

How in this entrepreneurial age — a moment of radical disruption in the news business — did the Times settle on such a profoundly traditional choice?

In the news business, three is usually regarded as the minimum number to declare a trend, and it is now official. We are moving away from the age of charismatic editors at America’s top news organizations.

The trend highlights a hunger for steadiness, and a heightened sensitivity toward risks, by the people making leadership choices at these institutions.

“If you are looking for a swashbuckling editor you also are deciding to take on more risk,” said Tina Brown, whose own career atop Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, among other publications, certainly qualifies.

“Most managements are quite afraid of people who ‘move fast and break things,’” she added, citing the Silicon Valley catchphrase. She said she was not making an adverse appraisal of Kahn, merely describing a broader dynamic she’s observed over decades in and around journalism.

That dynamic toward the safety of low profiles is lately in full force.

Kahn will replace Dean Baquet, himself a steady figure but one whose polished presence and status as a racial pioneer—the first African American to lead the Times newsroom — made him a celebrity in news circles.

At the Washington Post, new executive editor Sally Buzbee had almost no public profile until taking the job, after a long institutionally minded career at the Associated Press. She took over from Martin Baron, who was the main character in a Hollywood movie, Spotlight, about the investigative journalism into sex abuse among Catholic priests he oversaw while at the Boston Globe.

In recent years, the Wall Street Journal’s top editing job switched from Gerard Baker — an outspoken Brit who regularly generated controversial and sometimes publication-bruising publicity—to Matt Murray, a soft-spoken and affable American. Like Kahn and Buzbee, he is in his mid-50s and spent decades working his way up the ladder of a major news organization before landing the top prize.

A similar transition is underway at CNN, where the flashy and outspoken Jeff Zucker was recently pushed out, and television veteran Chris Licht — who CNN’s owners surely hope is a steadier and lower-key presence — is now at the helm.

All this is more than coincidence. A couple factors seem likely the root causes.

The first relates to the state of the media economy. Many national news organizations, unlike a decade ago, now are doing decently or even prospering. But the job of a modern editor is different than a generation ago. It now involves nonstop meetings and constant collaboration with colleagues on the technology and revenue sides of the shop about new “products” and how to get them sponsored, about “audience engagement strategies,” and on and on. It’s all important, but not necessarily the kind of thing that would have gotten the juices flowing for legendary 20th century editors like Ben Bradlee or Tom Winship.

The other factor is within newsrooms themselves. Nearly every modern newsroom — the Times and Post emphatically among them — have been buffeted in recent years by ideological and cultural fissures. Usually, this turmoil has had a generational dimension, pitting older traditionalists against younger employees who believe the profession’s old conventions about objectivity and neutrality are an obstacle to illuminating the true moral stakes on questions of racial or sexual equality.

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who selected Kahn, likely is hoping that a leader with a low-key temperament can tamp down conflict.

A strong leader with a flamboyant style, Brown notes, would be less likely to blur philosophical differences, creating more “sturm und drang” with newsroom activists.

There is something to that. As a young reporter at the Washington Post, I recall the uproar when Bradlee contemptuously ripped down a pro-union placard off the desk of reporter Tom Sherwood, a leader of the Post’s chapter of the Newspaper Guild. Baron, meanwhile, was facing controversy from staffers after he ruled that reporter Felicia Sonmez could not cover #MeToo stories after being outspoken about her own history alleging sexual harassment.

Joe Kahn has followed a career path altogether different than, say, Ben Smith, who recently announced his departure as the Times’ media columnist to lead a new startup designed to compete with the publication for a global audience.

Smith was an original star at POLITICO when this publication was a startup, then left to help lead BuzzFeed in its early days. His professional life has been shaped by entrepreneurial values; Kahn’s by institutional values.

Neither is right or wrong — just different approaches that are more or less useful in different circumstances. Like many young journalists of my era, I wanted to work for the Post in the 1980s because I was attracted by the charisma and fame of Ben Bradlee. But the people who actually shaped my views about the responsibilities of editors in more profound ways were Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser — the leadership team that followed in his wake. They were more laconic figures stylistically, but no less dazzling substantively. They both represented and inspired deep institutional loyalty. By the time Downie retired as executive editor in 2008, his Washington Post had won some two dozen Pulitzer Prizes.

As I reflected recently on POLITICO’s 15th anniversary, my belief is that the future of media depends on merging entrepreneurial restlessness — a commitment to nonstop innovation — with timeless institutional values. These timeless values include a belief that fair-minded journalism, animated by reportorial curiosity and skepticism, is as indispensable in this century as it was in the last.

The Times’ future will hinge on whether Sulzberger has found the right balance of these values in Kahn.