DIARY

Spectator, The, Jun 28, 2008 by CHANCELLOR, ALEXANDER

I'm just back from New York, where I met friends from the New York Times.

Their morale, they said, was low. This is a typical complaint of journalists everywhere; for not only are they seldom content with their lot but, more than people in any other trade, they love to analyse and expound upon their collective state of mind. But those at the New York Times do have reason for feeling a little glum. Circulation has been falling, advertising revenue is down, and the management recently made some 140 journalists redundant. It's the same sort of story on most newspapers, but the Times used to seem so mighty and impregnable that its present difficulties feel particularly ominous. Its editor, Bill Keller, told me that retrenchment was now complete and there would be no more editorial redundancies. But it takes more than that to cheer journalists up when they have decided to feel gloomy.

Something, however, recently lifted their spirits, and this was the occasion earlier this month when two men -- separately and just hours apart -- scaled the paper's spanking new 52-storey skyscraper on Eighth Avenue.

Although some veteran reporters find the new building too silent and sterile and wish they were back in their grubby old home on West 43rd Street, it is an elegant and lavishly appointed tower by the famous Italian architect Renzo Piano, who with Richard Rogers built the Pompidou centre in Paris. Every precaution was taken in its design to protect it against terrorist attack, but it occurred to nobody that anyone might want to climb it. In the event, it was made unusually easy to climb because of the ladder-like horizontal ceramic rods that encase it from top to bottom. The first man up was a 45-year-old Frenchman, Alain Robert, who has much experience in the strange business of 'buildering', as the passion for scaling buildings is called, and who counts the Eiffel Tower and the Sydney Opera House among his conquests.

Near to the top he unfurled a bright green banner reading 'Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week', which was odd because Mr Piano's tower is as green as green can be. In fact, the ceramic rods that enabled Mr Robert to clamber up it without ropes or harness were placed there to block direct sunlight and save energy on air conditioning.

The man who followed him up the building was a New Yorker with little experience, Renaldo Clarke, 32, who found the climb more of a struggle. At the 41st floor, he wearily mouthed through the plate glass, 'What floor am I on?', and a Times journalist inside spelled out '41' on his fingers. Mr Clarke looked downhearted, but made it to the top nevertheless. His message, emblazoned on a T-shirt, was 'Malaria no more'. The New York Times is both pro-green and anti-malaria, so doesn't deserve to be picked on by advocates of either cause. But people who go 'buildering' like it for the thrills and fame it brings, and seem only as an afterthought to dignify it with a mission. They would have been more convincing if, in scaling the New York Times building, they had claimed that their purpose was to bring joy into the lives of unhappy workers in a dying industry, for in that they certainly succeeded.

Well, maybe the press is not really dying, but it's a bad sign when vast new monuments are built to it. The latest such extravaganza is the 'Newseum' in Washington DC which opened this April on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Sponsored by, among others, the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch's News International, it cost $450 million and is one of the most lavishly appointed and overstaffed museums I have ever seen. Its purpose is to impress upon the public the importance of a free press, and I was glad to see that one of its 'core messages' is that 'freedom includes the right to be outrageous'. It contains seven levels of galleries, theatres and high-tech interactive exhibits, all designed to show the world what a great job journalists do (though the only bit that really interested me was the display of newspaper front pages, which showed how little papers have really changed over the past 300 years). The Newseum also commemorates more than 1,800 reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died in the line of duty, their names etched on soaring, two-storey glass panels. ('Reporting the story can be dangerous' is another of its core messages. ) I was glad that the memorial included the name of my old friend David Blundy, shot dead in 1989 in El Salvador while covering that country's civil war, though I think he would have found the museum embarrassingly pretentious, as I did. The frail old taxi driver who took me there lamented the burgeoning grandiosity of the city itself, where flashy new public buildings and luxury apartment blocks have been ousting the poor from their inner-city homes. As American power wanes, the more overblown Washington becomes. 'I remember when Washington was an unassuming southern city, ' he said, 'but that was before it was taken over by self-important people.'