THE INSIDE MAN

Meet JOSEPH KAHN, the new, old-school editor of the Times.

- SHAWN MCCREESH

ABE ROSENTHAL, the totemic New York Times editor who published the Pentagon Papers, used to say that there was one path to the executive editor’s office—over the dead, burned, and maimed bodies of the ten other people who wanted the job. So I turned to Joseph Kahn, the new top dog at the Times, and asked whom he incinerated to get here.

“I didn’t kill anybody,” Kahn said, sup­ pressing a sly smile. It was late on a Friday afternoon, April 15—just days before it would be announced that he had ascended to journalism’s Iron Throne—and we were sit­ ting in a conference room high above the empty newsroom. “The truth is that we’re in a bit of a different era, and some of the transitions in the past admittedly have been rocky, and there have been more abrupt changes in leadership. I think we’re going to have a really smooth change in leadership.”

Rocky? There have been four executive editors of the Times in the past two decades, and two of them—Howell Raines (2001 to 2003) and Jill Abramson (2011 to 2014)— imploded spectacularly in public after losing the faith of the Sulzberger family. Was Kahn nervous? “I am,” he told me, “for a variety of reasons. Not really because I think that I’m going to self­destruct but because it’s an enormous responsibility to manage a newsroom of this size and ambi­tion at this particular moment.”