Wall Street Journal Adds a Page To NY TIMES...Shades of things to come?

April 6, 2005
The Times Appoints a Successor to Its First Public Editor
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

The New York Times announced yesterday that it had named Byron E. Calame, who recently retired as a top editor at The Wall Street Journal, to succeed Daniel Okrent as the newspaper's public editor.

Mr. Okrent, the paper's first public editor, is to leave The Times next month when his 18-month contract expires.

Mr. Calame (pronounced kuh-LAME), 65, worked at The Journal for 39 years, starting as a reporter and finishing in December as deputy managing editor in charge of quality control. He was responsible for maintaining the paper's ethical standards and was widely regarded as the conscience of the paper.

In making the announcement, Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, described Mr. Calame as a "resident pillar of integrity and common sense" and said he would "bring a lifelong, in-his-bones sense of how a daily newspaper operates and a deep, demonstrated commitment to the highest standards of our craft."

When Mr. Calame retired from The Journal, Paul E. Steiger, The Journal's managing editor and Mr. Calame's close friend, printed T-shirts for him that read: "What would Barney do?" in recognition of his status as the paper's arbiter of ethics, taste and standards.

Mr. Calame is to start at The Times on May 9 and has agreed to take the job for two years. Mr. Okrent had a fixed tenure of 18 months.

Mr. Calame said in an interview yesterday he wanted to do the job for 18 months, in part because he had just retired and was enjoying it, but Mr. Keller told him he wanted to establish the job as a two-year proposition.

He said he was persuaded to end his brief retirement because The Times was making what he said has been called "an ostentatious display of openness" and he saw it as "a very unusual opportunity" to serve readers and journalism.

"When The Times approached me, I thought what a marvelous opportunity this is for illuminating good journalism and helping to make journalism better, and that's one of the things I wanted to do in retirement," he said. "In a perfect world, I would be the public editor half time, but it doesn't work that way."

He said he had yet to formulate how he saw the role.

"Most jobs you take, they are pretty well defined, and this job is not," he said. "I think Dan Okrent has done a tremendous job of showing the independence of the public editor and addressing some of the key issues in American journalism. However, there are many ways to do the job and I just have to think more about it."

Unlike Mr. Okrent, who did not come from a newspaper background, Mr. Calame has spent most of his life in newspapers. Mr. Keller said in an interview that newspaper experience was not a prerequisite for the job and that he had interviewed other candidates "who were not from the newspaper world," whom he declined to name.

Mr. Calame's first paid newspaper job was sweeping the floor after school at The Wheaton Journal, a weekly in southwest Missouri, when he was 13.

Mr. Calame, a Missouri native, received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a master's degree in political science from the University of Maryland. During the Vietnam war, he served in the Navy as an officer on a minesweeper in South Vietnam.

He joined The Journal in 1965, working as a reporter in New York, Los Angeles and Washington. He became deputy managing editor in 1992.

When Mr. Calame announced his retirement from The Journal, Mr. Steiger said in a memo to the staff, "Barney has run the entire paper in my absence and much of it in my presence."

Mr. Calame said he did not have any qualms about going to a newspaper that competes with The Journal, though he has twinges of nostalgia. When he retired, he said, he did not know that the opportunity at The Times might present itself.

"I feel that for my 39-plus years, I gave The Journal the very best that I had," he said.



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