Information Superhighway Carried Raines to His Exit

Much was unprecedented about the events that on Thursday forced Times Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. to accept the resignations of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd and to summon Joseph Lelyveld, 66, out of retirement to assume the paper's interim leadership. Raines is the first editor to leave in disgrace since the Ochs/Sulzberger family purchased the Times more than a century ago. In fact, historians of the paper believe no similar resignation has occurred in its 152-year history. Nor has a former executive editor ever been brought out of retirement as has Lelyveld, Raines' immediate predecessor.

More significant, the Times scandal -- which began a little more than a month ago when it was revealed that 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized news stories -- was the first institutional crisis of its kind to unwind in real time. Just as live combat reports from the Iraq war transfixed a global audience, so too did reports on events inside the New York Times transmitted via Internet media news sites, online magazines and newspaper editions, blogs and e-mails.

Every significant turn in the entire sequence and every memo issued by Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd was immediately posted on the Internet. When Rick Bragg, the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and a Raines favorite, was suspended for turning in a story based on an unsalaried freelance writer's uncredited work, he defended his conduct as standard among the Times' national correspondents. For 24 hours or so, that defense caromed around the Internet, uncontradicted by Raines or Boyd.

Then, one after another, Times reporters began sending their own blistering rebuttals to the popular news media Web site maintained for the Poynter Institute by Jim Romenesko. Within hours, what amounted to a rhetorical free-for-all among Times reporters was on display for the whole wired world. Raines and Boyd were forced to issue a memo defending their national staff's practices, but it was too little, too obtuse and too late.