GENEVA, SWITZERLAND / EDITOR’S NOTEPAD – Yesterday was the final day of the International Herald Tribune: today it takes the final step in a five year transformation and becomes officially the international edition of the New York Times.
I have a soft spot for the IHT, even though it always seemed an odd little newspaper with a reputation larger than made sense – much of its news was produced elsewhere and most of the columnists had already been writing for years when I was a young journalist in Paris. That must put several of them well past retirement age.
The IHT in the 1980s was an odd place, with power struggles among those who had ties to one owner, the Washington Post, and those with ties to the other owner, the New York Times.
The lower echelons, the editorial staff, were rife with anger and jealousy and ego games; each time I visited the offices I wondered how they managed to get a newspaper out every day. I’ve rarely seen an office where so many people disliked each other, and this seemed to be the case even under different editors.
The writers and editors all seemed to have one thing in common, however, a belief that Paris was the centre of the world, a fact that the bosses back in the US clearly didn’t understand. But readers in Paris, who were at that point the majority, appreciated it.
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©2013 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International New York Times, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.I wrote a handful of articles for the newspaper as a freelance journalist and was paid $120 for each one, a shockingly bad rate then (many journalists today would jump at the chance to be paid anything rather than nothing, so $120 doesn’t sound so bad). I was struggling to make ends meet so a senior editor gave my name to the IHT supplements editor and I began to write special sections for them, including several on Switzerland and regular articles there on Swiss wines.
The pay was double and the work more frequent – but when I went back to the features editor with a new story idea she looked at me as if I had a deadly disease and told me that the IHT could never work with writers who stooped to doing advertising supplements, even their own.
My argument that I was not even in touch with the advertisers carried no weight. And with time, as money at the newspaper grew scarcer, the ad supplement writers at the IHT and elsewhere did indeed find themselves pressured.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Washington Post eventually got out of the business and the NY Times had to rethink it. The good old days were gone, but so was I, having moved to Switzerland, where the IHT began to feel very parochial until the NY Times gave it a new lease on life.
Today we see the result, a very different newspaper with more financial backing than in the squabbling old days and an international rather than Paris readership. Amazingly enough, some of those writers, surely at least 100 years old by now, are still there.
Here’s what Roger Cohen says about it in an Op-Ed article in the new paper today. I disagree only with his headline, for it’s not adieu, but au revoir to the IHT. The INYT, even as an abbreviation, is a different beast.
“… romance was by no means the whole story. Newspapering in the global marketplace has not been an easy ride of late.
Still, the romance was there. The Trib was a paper made for the world in the French capital by Americans, a trans-Atlantic hybrid that flattered Parisians, made them feel more important. Bergman to Bogart: “What about us?” Bogart to Bergman: “We’ll always have Paris.” And in Paris, it seemed, there would always be the Herald Tribune.
The paper was a refuge for the holed-up expat, a good excuse for the second chilled Brouilly on the terrace of Le Select, a discreet statement of worldliness, a ticket to membership in a borderless club, and a venue for exploration of all the French-American rivalry that turned out to be just another expression of the eternal French-American love affair.
The Trib was sexy. It got to the point while French papers meandered like the Seine through Normandy. American journalists knew how to find the facts and tell a story without frills.”