Patty Vest:
Welcome to Sagecast, the Podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest.

Mark Wood:
And I'm Mark Wood.

Patty Vest:
In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place.

Mark Wood:
This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today.

Patty Vest:
Today we welcome Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Bill Keller, class of 1970, former executive editor of the New York Times, and founding editor of the Marshall Project.

Mark Wood:
Welcome, Bill. It's good to have you with us, and not with us. [Laughter]

Bill Keller:
Thanks.

Mark Wood:
So, I should say, this is being recorded on April 21st, at the height of the epidemic in New York which is where you are. So, how are you adjusting to life in the time of plague?

Bill Keller:
We're incredibly lucky. Ten or 12 years ago, we came into some inheritance, and we bought ourselves a weekend house. When I retired, last year, it became our primary residence, and when the lockdown began, it became our full time residence. So, we're in South Hampton. We've got a routine. We built enough stuff into the schedule so that it feels almost normal. Cooking, family dinner, and exercising. We've been spending a little time, each day, assembling surgical gowns for first responders in our area.

Mark Wood:
Oh nice.

Bill Keller:
Yeah, it's with my wife and our younger daughter, Alice, and two dogs. The other Pomona member of the family, Molly, Class of '19, is hunkered down in her tiny little apartment in Flat Bush in Brooklyn where she's doing remote teaching to a bunch of middle schoolers who were her fifth-grade history class until the plague hit. We'd rather have her out here, but she's stubborn about staying independent. Pomona seems to encourage that in people, I think. [Laughter]

Patty Vest:
Lucia doesn't attribute most times. [Laughter]

Patty Vest:
Bill, you retired a little over a year ago from the Marshall Project. Does an event like this Pandemic make you wish you were back out in the front lines covering the news?

Bill Keller:
Oh, I get a little reflexive twinges of, "I wish I were there", but mostly no. I had my share of big stories to cover, either as a correspondent or as an editor. So, I don't really feel left out. In fact, reading the coverage, which I'm doing addictively, I'm finding it exhausting. So, you can imagine what the people are going through who are actually doing it. I read pretty veraciously. I start my day with NPR. I read the Times. I graduated to the Times online, but I discovered that they're still delivering the paper version out here, so we're seven days a week subscribers again.

Bill Keller:
I read the Washington Post Online, and then I follow a couple of aggregators who are this or in smart pre-selectors, and things I might want to read. Any news story, you feel a little tug, but, for the most part, I'm happy being a bystander.

Mark Wood:
You said you've been reading a lot of news. You're an outside observer now, but a knowledgeable one. How well do you think media is doing in covering this?

Bill Keller:
I think the major media, that I've read, have been heroic. I mean, the coverage has been deep, it's been hard-nosed. There's a lot of--at least, in the bigger papers that can afford the space--a lot of service journalism which people really need now, everything from what videos to binge watch to what to cook, to how to wash your hands. I have to say, I've been making a mental list in head of things I thought I'd never see in the New York Times, range from the ridiculous... They actually ran an article on how to teach your dog to crap indoors. [Laughter]

Patty Vest:
Potty training is more important.

Bill Keller:
But it's not something I ever expected to see in the New York Times.

Patty Vest:
Of course.

Bill Keller:
I mean, more on the more sublime side, they ran a wonderful article by Dan Barry, one of my favorite Times writers. He wrote a fantasy of the opening day of baseball season. He sort of assembled snippets from great historic opening days from the past, and they put it on the front page.

Mark Wood:
I missed that one. I'll have to look it up.

Bill Keller:
Definitely look it up. It's a real treat. But, they've run full-page photo essays on how to wash your hands. They've run patterns for how to cut out and sew a surgical mask. People want it, and it's a public service. I've thought for a long time, in this race for survival with the news media, the ones that will make it are the ones that can adapt. One reason I have a lot of confidence that the New York Times will survive this, I mean literally survive this, but survive the institution, is because they're experimental and innovative despite the entrenched reputation as being the "Gray Lady", and being dull. They've really reinvented themselves. It's easy to poke fun, as I do, at some of the weirder things that have been published since the Coronavirus, but I think they're a symptom of something really healthy, which is a newspaper trying to rise to the occasion, and do things in different ways that work.

Patty Vest:
Bill, let's back up, for a moment, to your Pomona College years.

Bill Keller:
Okay. If I can remember back that far.

Patty Vest:
Oh, I'm sure you can. How did you end up at Pomona, and what was that experience like?

Bill Keller:
Well, let's see, the application would've been '66. I remember I applied to about half a dozen places. One of them was Stanford, which was, among other things, about a 15 minute drive from our house, which, in hindsight, is a good reason I didn't go there. Good thing I didn't go there because I would've been coming home every weekend to get my laundry done. I had this lifelong, bizarre relationship with Stanford. I was born in the Stanford Medical Center Hospital because it was the closest hospital from where we lived. My father died there, in that hospital. I've lectured three or four times at Stanford, and I didn't get in. And not only did I not get in, but a friend of mine who works at Stanford looked up what the acceptance rate was in the year 1966. It was 62%, and I still didn't get in. So, just as well.

Bill Keller:
Anyway, while I was looking for places to apply to, I was tempted by Reed College, in Oregon, which had a reputation for being a... I'd been a radical which sounded sort of appealing, and my father, who went to MIT and used to do alumni interviewing for people who were applying from California to MIT, sort of knew the school landscape pretty well, and he said, "You should look at this place called Pomona. It's like read with shoes". The irony was that my roommate at Pomona was Dave Smith, who was a surfer from Santa Cruz who never wore shoes. I loved it. I think, my daughter who graduated last year from Pomona, had the same experience. We were doing the west coast swing of the colleges, and we did all of the usual suspects, and she got to Pomona, and she just knew that was where she wanted to go. I don't think it's because I went there, maybe, more likely, in spite of the fact that I went there. It felt right, from the beginning.

Mark Wood:
How did you become interested in journalism, and what's kept you interested all these years?

Bill Keller:
Well, when people ask what my major was at Pomona, I always say only half vicisciously, "I majored in the school newspaper", which, in those days was called the Collegian. Student life existed, then, but it was a Pomona paper. There was a paper called the Collegian, which was twice weekly, and was by-college paper. I joined up my freshman year and spent a lot of time. That was my friend cohort. It was a pretty lively time. We had Anti-war movement, the black student movement, and even though Pomona's not exactly in a major metropolis, it was hard not to give into the excitement of those days.

Bill Keller:
I've just been thinking, recently, because I'm an [inaudible 00:12:20] trustee, I still get copies of Gabby Star's news reports and updates on what's going on with the campus, and I've been following this class of '70s virtual ending. They're not going to have a conventional commencement, and I know that's a hard thing for a lot of students. It's actually quite similar to what happened to the class of '70. We did have a commencement, but the last three weeks of school, they just ended because of the demonstrations in class associated with the war. So, three weeks before the end of the season, they basically said, "Okay, no more classes." They had a big debate over how they were going to handle grades, and they basically put everybody on a pass-fail system, and it kind of ended with a whimper.

Mark Wood:
So the biggest part of your career has been with the Times. Let's jump forward to that. How did you become a foreign correspondent there, and tell us a little bit about where you served.

Bill Keller:
Sure. I joined the Times in the Washington Bureau, and spent the first couple of years covering the Washington equivalent of general assignment, and then I come to the Pentagon for about a year. One day, Bill [inaudible 00:13:58] who was the bureau chief, came over, sat down at the corner of my desk with his cup of coffee, and said, "I seem to recall you saying when you were hired that you'd be interested in being a foreign correspondent. What kind of places did you have in mind?" And I said to myself, "Well, doing a little career planning. That's cool." And I thought, "Where on earth would they be likely to send someone who's never been a foreign correspondent before and has only been working her for two years?"

Bill Keller:
So, I started talking about Africa. I traveled both to East Africa and West Africa either as a tourist, or, one of two cases, on press junkets. I started talking about my interest in Africa, and the bureau chief, I could see his eyes were glazing over. It was not really the conversation he planned to have, so I just finished that up, and he said, "Have you ever thought about Russia?" And I hadn't, but I said I would take a day to think it over, but sort of knew from the moment I would say yes. This is very early in the Gorbachev years. It was clearly a moment where not everybody had confidence that he was going to survive, or manage to pull of any serious changes, but whether he succeeded or failed, it was going to be a big story.

Bill Keller:
So, they put me in language school for nine or ten months, and off I went to Moscow to do the most amazing... I was there for almost five years, including some time when I was working on a book that never got finished.

Mark Wood:
That was definitely the deep end of the pool.

Bill Keller:
It was the deep end of the pool. I've always wondered why me? There was no obvious reason why they would have sent me off to do that, to cover that story. I think it was because my last year at covering the Pentagon, I had done a lot of arms control stuff. The Russia story was, kind of, and arms control story in the conventional wisdom. Of course, when I got there, I had probably wrote a few stories about arms control when there were presidential summits, but I'm sure I did, but that was not the main story at all. It was a story of whether this country that we'd spent most of our lives regarding as an existential threat to our existence, whether it could change and become a more humane and less threatening country.

Bill Keller:
And, up to a point, it did.

Mark Wood:
For a while.

Bill Keller:
Yeah.

Patty Vest:
Bill, you also spent some time in South Africa as a foreign correspondent, and from your time in Russia. I can only imagine you have great stories from your time in both countries. Can you share one or two of those with us?

Bill Keller:
Sure. I think South Africa was the only job I've had that I actually, actively applied for. I just stumbled luckily into great assignments, but when I was coming to the end of my time in Moscow, and I'd won a big prize or two, and I figured I had some leverage, and I asked for South Africa and got it. When I arrived, the classic Apartheid system had mostly been dismantled, but the question was whether... I mean, it looked pretty obvious that whites were going to have to see power. The question was whether that was going to happen in a bloodbath or in a more nonviolent transition. I was there for about three years. It was an amazing place. I consider myself lucky to have covered some of the great figures of the 20th century; Gorbachev and Yeltsin in Russia, Andrei Sakharov the great dissident, who I came to know very well.

Bill Keller:
Mandela is in a class by himself, and he was remarkable accessible, including about a year after the election when he became president. I asked him if I could spend a day tagging along with him and watching him be president in South Africa, and, amazingly, he said yes. To be a fly on the wall watching Mandela be president was, I mean I wasn't allowed to sit in on the security briefing. Transparency has its limits, but I sat in his office while he fielded phone calls, and I got a real sense of politician. That's always been my take on Mandela. Yes, he's a heroic figure, but first and foremost, he's an incredibly skillful politician. I remember, while I was sitting in his office and he got a phone call from the head of the country's largest supermarket chain, who had supported him in the election, and who had a problem with a strike that was going on.

Bill Keller:
From a jaundiced journalist point of view, the fact that Mandela was taking a phone call from a campaign donor to help talk the labor movement out of a strike. The labor movement being a huge Mandela constituency, was both a little shady, but it also, when I say he's a politician, I mean he's a politician with... I mean, he's not a purist. He's clearly a heroic figure, but there was an element of pragmatism that sometimes gets lost in the glory of the man.

Mark Wood:
Yeah. The art of the possible.

Bill Keller:
The art of the possible. Yeah.

Bill Keller:
I mean, South Africa, which is still suffering under tremendous inequality and, in some portions of the country, the AIDS epidemic has not been stopped, and they have yet to feel the full force of the Coronavirus impact. So, it has not turned all rosy, but it is a functioning democracy with a lively opposition of pretty unfettered media and a deep bench of talent. That's, more than anybody else, to Mandela's credit. I mean, speaking of the art of the possible. One of the things that he did in cutting a deal in writing a new constitution and then moving to the first election that blacks were allowed to vote in, was he basically guaranteed that there would not be a purge of the military and civil service, or all the plum jobs were held by whites, and it wouldn't confiscate the white farmer's lands.

Bill Keller:
That was a hell of a compromise, but it allowed them to make the transition without spilling a lot of blood. They spilled a bit of blood, but not what you would expect of a country going through that kind of transition.

Mark Wood:
So, after you came home... So you were bureau chief, right, in South Africa? Is that right?

Bill Keller:
Yes.

Mark Wood:
And so that was already a step into...

Bill Keller:
A bureau of one.

Mark Wood:
A bureau of one? So you're managing yourself. [Laughter]

Patty Vest:
That's hard to do sometimes.

Bill Keller:
It's not easy.

Mark Wood:
Then you became managing editor at the Times, executive editor. What's involved in the move from being a reporter to being an editor?

Bill Keller:
Well, when I was in South Africa, Joe Lelyveld came to visit, who was the Executive Editor at the time, and my mentor at the time at the New York Times, and he had had a brilliant tour of duty covering South Africa, and he wanted to come take a look at it. So, we spent a lot of time driving around together, it's big country, and we had conversations that he tried to convince me that being an editor, of some kind, would be a satisfying next step, and I essentially told him I'd rather stick pencils in my eyes than be an editor and give up this roaming around, finding stories, and having responsibility for covering a whole piece of the world, as opposed to being chained to a desk and processing other people's work.

Bill Keller:
But after I'd been in South Africa for three years, Joe sent me letter saying "I know you're probably going to say no, but I'd like you to be the foreign editor." And it's one thing to say you don't want to be an editor, it's something else to say you don't want to be the foreign editor of the New York Times, a paper that cares hugely about the state of the world and is read by people who care about the world. So, I said yes, and I came back, and I discovered that I actually liked it. There's a weird thing about journalism that we tend to take reporters and turn them into editors, and the skillsets are so different and the frame of mind are so different.

Bill Keller:
Reporters tend to be loners, they tend to be questioning of authority, including our own bosses. They tend to have a fair amount of ego invested into the job, and as editor, you're supposed to suppress your ego, not get into the bad habit of ordering people to do the story the way you would do it, but serving as the first knowledgeable reader of their stories, letting reporters tell you what the story is write it with some of their own voice. Almost all of the editors, that I've seen, who failed at editing, it was because they couldn't let the reporter own the story. They had to do it their way even if they were farther back than the front lines.

Bill Keller:
So, I guess, I tend to be good at delegating and had the luxury of having free reign as a correspondent. I realize the value of that. So I was foreign editor for a few years, and then moved up to managing editor under Joe Lelyveld. Then in 2001, Joe announced his retirement. We had a bake-off. There were really two serious candidates, me and Howell Raines, who had been editor of the Opinion Pages for nine years at that time. I've told people that if it had been my choice to make, I would've chosen Howell, and the publisher did choose Howell, and they arranged for me to go into a happy exile as Op-ed columnist. About three days after I started my life as an Op-ed columnist, 9/11 happened.

Mark Wood:
Oh wow.

Bill Keller:
Talk about, having to watch from the sidelines when a story of huge magnitude hits. That was... I really felt the sense of being out of it. Obviously, I wrote columns about 9/11, including some stupid columns, but it was not the same as being in on the story day-to-day. So, a couple years pass. I wrote columns that Times won, I think, seven Pulitzers in one year for the coverage of 9/11, and then Howell ran out of good will. The catalyst for his demise as executive editor was Jason Blair, a young reporter who was caught fabricating stories. He would call in stories from his living room and claim that he was at some location across the country. He would plagiarize material from other people. It went on way too long, and Howell ended up paying the price for it.

Bill Keller:
The second time around, I got the brass ring.

Patty Vest:
Bill, today, the New York Times seems to have secured its niche as a national newspaper while the LA Times has really fallen on hard times. What do you think has made the difference for the New York Times?

Bill Keller:
The main thing... and I agree with you, by the way, that the Times feels pretty secure now, and I certainly hope that's true because they pay me a pension. I mean, I love the place on its merits, but I also enjoyed the comfort of having a pension.

Bill Keller:
The short answer is the Salzburger Family. The Times is one of very few of the family-owned newspapers that is still run by the family, and it's run by a family that has bought into the values of quality journalism. When times were tough, they took a big hit in dividends so that the paper could continue to maintain the high level of equality. And so, when I was executive editor, the population of the newsroom was about 1,200-1,250. It fluctuated a bit. I think it's 1,600 now. A lot of them are doing things that didn't exist when I was executive editor; greatly expanded interactive graphics and video, they're doing the daily, which is a great morning podcast.

Bill Keller:
The family support was absolutely essential. Other families have sold off papers in Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, and once the element of corporate responsibility... When you're obliged to be appeasing stockholders, and paying out big bonuses, it costs you, in terms of the quality. That said, I don't know enough about the LA Times today to prognosticate, but it falls into a class of newspapers I think are just following the oligarch model. The Washington Post has Jeff Besos. Amazon has the owner, and so far, he's willing to invest lots and lots of his billions into increasing the staff and blowing out the coverage, doing a great investigative work.

Bill Keller:
The LA Times also has a billionaire owner. Bloomberg's another example. Bloomberg News. They kind of harken back to the days when those with Pulitzer and Ramfirst were the oligarchs who owned the newspapers, and that didn't always end well. So you had to be a little bit wary of trusting the values and the objectivity of the new landlords, the new press parents. Hurst and Pulitzer didn't only abuse their powers, they used them sometimes for good, and now who knows.

Mark Wood:
So, you left the Times to go to a nonprofit journalistic startup, kind of experimental thing, called the Marshall Project. What drew you to that? Why'd you decide to make that leap?

Bill Keller:
Well, again, I luckily stumbled into it. Neil Barsky, who was the founder of the Marshall Project. Neil started out as a reporter, worked for the Wall Street Journal, covered Donald Trump. He was very proud of the fact that in one of his books, Trump referred to him as one of the most obnoxious reporter who had ever been with him.

Mark Wood:
That is quite a compliment.

Bill Keller:
Yeah. That's one that you frame and hang on your wall.

Mark Wood:
Yes.

Bill Keller:
So, Neil likes to say that reporting for the Wall Street Journal, he realized he didn't have to be all that smart to get that rich. So he went into trading. Started a hedge fund, sold it and started a second hedge fund, and the decided he wanted to be a bag. He recognized that, first of all, the criminal justice system was in sore need of attention, and second of all because of the crisis in the news business, those issues weren't being very regressively covered. The investigative reporting, generally, was suffering, and particularly investigative reporting about things like prisons, which don't exactly practice transparency anyway.

Bill Keller:
He invited me to breakfast and asked me if I would like to be the first editor of it, and, at that point, I was in my second go-around as an Op-ed write where you could write whatever you want. So, to satisfy my curiosity, I wrote a couple columns about criminal justice issues, which meant spending a lot of time on the phone talking to interesting people, academics, and practitioners, lawyers, defense lawyers mostly, and I fell in love with the subject. There was just so much there that was being missed, and I had, at that point, 30 years at the New York Times. It felt like the chance to start something new. There's always the feeling to start something from scratch.

Bill Keller:
So I retired from the Times and joined up with them about six years ago, and it was great. It's only gotten better since I left, I hasten to add. I went out and hired staff. Because it was a startup, we were hiring people with not a lot of experience. At that time, you couldn't hire away the people leaving the New York Times or the Washington Post to go be a reporter at a startup with an uncertain future. Since then, over time, it's acquired enough of a reputation that, in fact, you can hire away from the Washington Post and the New York Times. It's got a pretty good reputation. We won a Pulitzer early on, which is, for a nonprofit's start was highly unusual. I think we were not the first. I think Republica was the first nonprofit to win a Pulitzer, but we were second or third. That bought us a lot of credibility in the journalism world.

Bill Keller:
When Neil and I had our first meeting, I asked him what success would look like, and he said, "Success would be going into the next presidential election and having the serious candidates feel they were obliged to come up with a plan to reform criminal justice." And if you follow the Democratic debate, at least, going into the 2020 elections, that's happened. It wasn't just the Marshall Project that made it happen. There were a series of killings of black men by white cops and some stories of wrongful convictions that got people more aware of the failings of the system.

Bill Keller:
People picked up on the numbers which show that we're the most incarcerated country on earth. I think we all felt a sense of accomplishment that we, at least, had something to do with giving it a higher profile.

Patty Vest:
What do you think about the future of nonprofits in journalism? Is the Marshall Project a model for tomorrow's journalism or is it an outlier?

Bill Keller:
I think it's a model. I don't think that it's the model. There are a number of news organizations that have tried that model. Some of them are subject-specific, like Chalk-B which does education, and there's one that does climate news. Kaiser Health does health, obviously. And a number of nonprofit regional and investigative newsrooms have started. I don't know how many of them all survive through economic trauma, but I do think that that's one way that news organizations will find to assure their survival.

Bill Keller:
The ultimate nonprofit is probably NPR, which I don't think shows any signs of decline. Nonprofit is one avenue. I think the oligarch model, which we talked about earlier, is another. I think there are a few places that will figure out how to do subscriber model. The New York Times still has some ad revenue, but it's main source of revenue is subscriptions. One of the last things they did, when I was at the Times, when I was executive editor of the Times, was I was on a committee that had to decide whether or not we were going to start charging for content online, and fortunately we had the right decision because as long as you're putting out a good product, there will always be subscribers, but the advertising base has been spirited away by Facebook and Google.

Bill Keller:
So I think there will be some places that will get by on a subscriber model, notably the Times. There may be some that will figure out a sort of local niche where they can assemble enough local advertisers. Although, the real trauma in the news industry has been local coverage. I think, in the last 15 years, 2,000 local newspapers have died. That's a horrifying [inaudible 00:42:35] rate.

Mark Wood:
A lot of others have been bought up by chains, and have become less than they were.

Bill Keller:
Yeah. That's certainly true. We tend to talk of newspapers being killed off by the internet, and there's a lot of truth in that, but I always remind people that before the internet started killing newspapers, newspaper publishers were killing newspapers. I've worked in two cities that went from two newspapers down to one. When I was at the Origami at my first newspaper, we competed with the Oregon journal. The journal folded a while after I left Portland. I worked for the Dallas Times Herald. After I left, the owners of the Dallas Morning News bought the Times Herald and shut it down the next day.

Bill Keller:
So, newspaper publishers, understandably, they did see the revenues to support competing newspapers, but the newspaper industry profit motive was killing newspapers before the internet was even invented.

Mark Wood:
So it's still kind of strange time in journalism with a president who calls the media, and the people, and a lot of people don't trust the media. Looking at the world of journalism today, what worries you, and what gives you hope?

Bill Keller:
There's a book that came out about two years ago called How Democracies Die, by a couple of political scientists at Harvard, and...

Mark Wood:
One of them is a Pomona Grad.

Bill Keller:
Is that right?

Mark Wood:
Yeah.

Bill Keller:
It's become a genre of books of the threats of Democracy, and I take that very seriously. How Democracies Die was a textbook based on a number of European and Latin American countries that had democracies and lost them to authoritarian regimes, and they go through and identify a number of the danger signs; refusal to accept the legitimacy of opposition, refusal to abide by the norms of democracy, or to accept limitations on your power, and one of them, prominently, is intolerance of a free press. I'm, obviously, not an objective judge, I'm a subject, and I genuinely agree that we're seeing this now in the coverage of the Coronavirus. Information is essential to sustaining democracy and actually to sustaining the health of individual people.

Bill Keller:
I guess what makes me optimistic about the news business is, what has always made me optimistic, is that there's a demand for it and a need for it. Where there's a need, people will figure out a way to get, edit, and pay for it. What scares me, I guess, although I don't despair, but one of the things I find worrying is, and here we go blaming the internet again... We've raised maybe a couple generations of people who get their information from the internet, but have never had a civics class or a class in news literacy.

Bill Keller:
I've recently gone on the national advisory board for something called the News Literacy Project, which makes educational videos and materials mostly for middle school and high school students on how to tell the difference between trustworthy news and the fake stuff. The business model is still sorting itself out, but I don't think we should be so preoccupied with the business model that we don't think about the audience problem. We need to have an audience that senses when it's being lied to, and that approaches news organizations, news reports with a level of skepticism. Nonetheless, I persist in my optimism, stubbornly optimistic that we'll be around for a while.

Mark Wood:
So, on that note, I think we're going to have to wrap this up. We've been talking with retired journalist, Bill Keller, Class of 1970, one of the Pomona's favorite sons. It's been good to talk with you, Bill.

Bill Keller:
You, too. Thanks for inviting me to do this.

Patty Vest:
Thank you, Bill. And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the Podcast of Pomona College. Stay safe, and until next time.