At The New York Times, Meislin Leads a Revolution in Technology

Richard J. Meislin '75, editor-in-chief of the web edition of The New York Times, has spent his life at the intersection of journalism and technology.

"You've got to understand how untechnological the news business was when he got into it to understand how well ahead of everyone he was," says E. J. Dionne '73, a longtime friend of Meislin's and a columnist for the Washington Post.

Meislin was one of a handful of people who understood the technology that was to revolutionize the way news was printed, presented and even reported well before anyone else did, say his colleagues at The Times.

In a career that has spanned 25 years, he spent 10 of them as a reporter. Since then, he has worked to modernize the way graphics are used at The Times, replacing scissors and glue with more sophisticated computer technology.

And he was instrumental, say his colleagues, in upgrading the technological infrastructure at The Times that finally allowed the Old Gray Lady to begin printing in color in 1997.

President of The Crimson while at Harvard, Meislin currently runs New York Times Digital, the company that operates The Times on the web. Two weeks ago, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, announced that the digital division would file for an initial public offering (IPO) under a separate tracking stock.

Starting Out

Meislin entered journalism in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, at a time of renewed interest in the profession. As Bob Woodward and Richard Bernstein gradually pulled down an embattled presidential administration, they also inspired rising journalists, demonstrating the powerful ways in which they could affect the world.

The Mather House graduate first applied for a job at the Washington Post, Woodward and Bernstein's newspaper. Suggesting that he should first get more experience elsewhere, the Post turned him down. Meislin applied to The Times, and got a job as a copyboy.

Shortly after he arrived at the New York daily, however, he was selected to serve as news clerk to the Times' former executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, flagging stories that other papers were covering but The Times was not.

"You learn a tremendous amount working at the office of the highest editor of the New York Times," says Meislin. "It was both an honor and a tremendous aid to my career to be selected for that job."

At the same time, Meislin worked as a programmer with Dionne, who is also a former Crimson executive, developing the methodology for the New York Times-CBS news polls. It was the first media poll in modern history.

When the poll was first conducted, in the New Hampshire primary in 1976, Dionne traveled to New Hampshire with a small computer, and Meislin stayed in New York to help with the poll.

"It seemed like magic when all these numbers started appearing on my screen up in New Hampshire," Dionne recalls.

After his first year at The Times, Meislin switched jobs, becoming a reporter trainee. He showed early promise. In some of his earliest journalism, he discovered that money intended for a school lunch program was, in fact, being diverted by corrupt administrators.

At the age of 25, he became bureau chief in Albany, covering the New York State legislature.

From there, he was appointed bureau chief in Mexico, and covered the war in the Falklands between Great Britain and Argentina in the early '80s.

Bumps in the Road

In 1983, shortly after he became bureau chief in Mexico, Rosenthal learned that Meislin was gay.

Two and a half years into his job in Mexico, Meislin was called back to New York.

"Rosenthal made his feelings known to a few other people at The Times that he was surprised and not very happy to find out about it," Meislin says.

Some members of The Times staff suspected that Meislin had lost his foreign correspondent job because he was gay, staffers say.

"That's what we all assumed," says Nancy A. Lee, who headed The Times picture desk. "In that era, you always thought 'well, there you go again.'"

At the center of the issue has stood Rosenthal, who hired Meislin as his news clerk when he was just out of college.

"Abe was perceived as hostile to gays by the people at The New York Times who were gay," says Alex S. Jones, co-author of The Trust, a history of the family that owns The New York Times. "He sees this as an absolute falsehood."

Rosenthal says his alleged homophobia is a fiction that has persisted as a rumor for decades. "It's a lie, it's been a lie, it's been a lie all along. It's been around for years and years," Rosenthal says. "My friends know it is not true."

Regardless, however, many around at the time say the climate of the newsroom in the '70s and early '80s was one that was not friendly to homosexuals, and most stayed deeply within the closet for fear that discovery would affect their careers.

"There's no question that there was a great deal of fear of Abe [among gay people]," says Jones. "Of course, he scared the crap out of everybody."

From Cut and Paste to Point and Click

The return to New York was a blessing in disguise, however, as Meislin was soon appointed to head The Times' nascent graphics board.

The new post was a prestigious one. Graphics at The New York Times are seen as not just as artwork and design elements, but as pieces of journalism in themselves, Jones says, and the challenge was always to "find a way to underscore something, simplify something, explain something," all the while keeping true to the story.

At the time that Meislin took over, recounts Lee, artists would piece together graphics by hand, pasting down names of cities on maps with glue. The sudden appearance of computers promised to revolutionize the way graphics and illustrations were put together for the paper.

Meislin, with his dual experience in computers and content, was in an ideal position to head up the board.

"The whole art of depicting stories graphically was a new idea, and we had no organized department to do that. Rich was just a perfect candidate," said Max Frankel, who succeeded Rosenthal as executive editor of The Times in 1986. "Here was a guy who was highly literate, adventurous with a computer, but was also a reporter."

In 1992, Meislin was appointed a senior editor for information and technology and was charged with overseeing the computer systems that were increasingly integral to The Times.

In this post, Meislin put in place the technological infrastructure that allowed the paper to switch over to color.

The change to color was "like changing the currency in a large industrial country," says Alan Siegal, "everything you change affects everything else."

Meislin put in place a system that allowed the newspaper to be designed on a computer screen and that allowed color-corrected photographs to be processed in only 20 minutes.

Two years later, Meislin, with his extensive technical experience, was put in charge of The New York Times Digital. As it was initially conceived, the digital arm of the paper was not under the control of staff from the news department, a decision that Jones characterized as "practically suicidal."

"It was a complete debacle, and was absolutely panned by people at The New York Times," Jones says.

Meislin was brought in.

Now, The Times on the web has more than 11.5 million registered users, and boasts as many as 115 million page views a month.

"Essentially, we don't want to be the newspaper online," Meislin says. "We want to take the material as a core and build around it with things like powerful financial tools."

Meislin sees a wealth of possibility for newspapers on the Internet, in part because it allows a newspaper to centralize content that may not have appeared on the same date.

"A movie review is of limited interest if you happen to be looking at it on a weekend when you're not planning on going," Meislin says. "A collection of movie reviews makes a terrific guide when you're looking for what to rent on a Saturday night."