“My Times” by Howell Raines, in The Atlantic Monthly (May 2004), 77 N. Washington St., Boston, Mass. 02114.

Is the day nearing when The New York Times will be no more? That prospect—and not the scandal over reporter Jayson Blair’s deceptions that led last year to Howell Raines’s resignation as the paper’s executive editor—is one of the more interesting subjects of this much-noted article.

When Raines took the helm of the Times, six days before the events of September 11, 2001, the paper’s circulation had fallen by 100,000 or more from its early 1990s peaks of 1.8 million on Sundays and 1.2 million on weekdays. (Roughly a third of the papers are distributed in New York City, another third in the rest of New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and the balance in the other 47 states.) Readers and potential readers—40 million of them, by one count—had become “smarter, more sophisticated, and broader in their range of curiosities and interests than the Times had,” writes Raines. Though he assumes that newspapers will one day migrate entirely to the Web, the rivals he seems to fear the most all exist currently on paper; they include not just traditional daily competitors such as The Wall Street Journal but publications as various as The New York Review of Books, The Econ­omist, and Entertainment Weekly.

In the top spot at the paper, Raines saw himself as a “change agent,” and he engaged in a titanic struggle with “the newsroom’s lethargy and complacency,” its chronic slowness in anticipating the news, and its indifference to competition. The Times, he argues, remained strong in traditional areas, such as foreign-affairs reporting, but about culture, social trends, and business it had become stultifyingly dull: “One of our dirty little in-house secrets was that even we, who were paid to read it, often couldn’t hack the Sunday paper.”

The fall of the twin towers sparked a “magnificent” months-long effort at the Times, but the “culture of complaint” among certain segments of the staff was unrelenting. (Raines contributes some bitter complaints of his own about entrenched mediocrity at the paper.) The Blair scandal brought staff members’ unhappiness with Raines and his leadership to a head, and that discontent was at least as responsible for his downfall as the scandal itself.

The print version of the Times is the company’s “economic engine.” But ad revenues peaked at $1.3 billion in 2000 and have since fallen to about $1.1 billion. What Raines fears is that the Sulzberger family might eventually be tempted to sell its controlling interest in the paper to an owner more interested in the bottom line than in journalistic quality. The Times “is the indispensable news political, diplomatic, governmental, academic, and professional communities. . . . And yet a harsh reality of our era is that if the Times ever ceased to exist, it would not be reinvented by any media company now in operation, in this country or in the world.”