A new New York state of mind

One of the world's best-known quality papers has decided to make showbiz stories a priority. Is it a case of facing up to the real world, asks Andrew Gumbel, or simply dumbing down?

They are questions that have dogged newspapers since the dawn of the pop age. Should the culture pages of a serious broadsheet focus on art, or on entertainment? Is there a way of writing about pop culture without pandering to that culture's crasser commercial instincts? At what point can a newspaper, with one eye on the advertising revenue that comes with a resolute focus on the mainstream, be said to have sold out?

Whether you call it getting hip, or just dumbing down, the siren call of pop culture – driven by round-the-clock multimedia, glossy marketing and the cult of celebrity – has altered just about every high-minded publication in the past decade. And now even The New York Times, the good, grey doyen of American journalism that still believes in being a newspaper of record, not just one trying to impress its shareholders, has been forced to confront the issue.

The New York Times's newish executive editor, Howell Raines, has made it clear he wants to shake up the paper's cultural coverage and tilt it more towards middle- and low-brow topics. According to a phrase picked up last week by the entertainment journal Variety, Mr Raines has expressed a desire to see "less Peking Opera, and more Britney Spears". Apparently, he finds the Sunday Arts & Leisure section, with its lengthy ruminations on porcelain, ballet technique and Upper West Side beaux-arts collectors, as well as its essays on the movies and its rendering of the cultural gossip of the moment, to be "boring". It's something he intends to remedy when he replaces John Rockwell, the solid, well-respected Arts & Leisure editor who announced his departure in December.

At any other newspaper – take this or indeed any of the British broadsheets, all of which have tilted towards the Britney side of things for quite some time now – Mr Raines's policy pronouncements might not seem much of a big deal. After all, we're not talking kiss-and-tell revelations about the sex lives of hot young movie stars, just an acknowledgement that such subjects as Botox, Mariah Carey's tottering career and the tugs-of-war over late-night television chat show hosts are worth covering.

Then again, The New York Times is not any other newspaper, and the very suggestion of dipping a well-manicured toe into the murky waters of cultural populism has created anxiety, and a certain wistfulness, among the newspaper's more established writers and editors. "One of the pleasures of working for this newspaper was that it was not afraid to come off as a little boring if it thought a subject was worthwhile," one culture section writer said. "It's a shame to be losing that."

It is perhaps a testament to the finer virtues of American journalism that The New York Times has held out this long. One of the great pleasures of picking up the paper, with its crowded, finely groomed front page and vaguely retro print design, has always been the sense of travelling back to an idealised time of purer journalistic standards and public-spirited integrity. A similar time-travel sensation applies to The New Yorker, which retains much of Harold Ross's original design concept from the 1920s and 1930s; or – pending an imminent redesign, at least – to The Wall Street Journal, with its inkpen sketches of business leaders and itty-bitty front-page dispatches.

On the other hand, none of these publications has been able to escape the real world, and the creeping tabloidisation of public life that characterised America in the 1990s – the era of OJ and Monica – has got to them all. The New Yorker enacted perhaps the sharpest break with tradition when Tina Brown took over in 1992, got rid of the more longwinded members of the old guard, introduced photography and opened the pages to literary celebrities, big and small, from Martin Amis to Henry Louis Gates.

But The New York Times was not without its own soul-searching moments. It raised journalistic eyebrows everywhere when it chose to name the victim in the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991. During the presidential impeachment saga, it had to decide just how much oral sex in the Oval Office it was prepared to tolerate within its pages. Reading the coverage at the time was to observe a publication in a state of inner turmoil.

The pop sensibility may only now be creeping into the culture pages, but it has been permeating other parts of The New York Times for some time. Maureen Dowd's biweekly column, in addition to its satirical takes on the politicians du jour, regularly focuses on fashion, celebrity, and what girlfriends talk about in times of crisis, terrorism and war. Frank Rich, the fearsomely eloquent former theatre critic for the paper, is as much at home dissecting crass TV reality shows as he is placing a film such as Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley into the grand tradition of literary-cinematic disquisitions on the American psyche.

There have been some inelegant lapses along the way. Just recently The New York Times's Sunday magazine – itself keen to keep pieces shorter, zippier and more driven by attitude and personality – was forced to admit that a feature about impoverished African children was largely fabricated.

Generally, though, it is impressive how high The New York Times's standards have remained – particularly in these times of 24-hour celebrity television, sluggish newspaper sales and depressed advertising revenue. There are still aspects of its culture pages that are unmatched by any other publication. For example, having leading luminaries of the film industry – people such as Woody Allen, or Harvey Weinstein, the gruff co-chair of Miramax, or Walter Murch, the celebrated editor and sound designer – either writing about their craft or sitting with a reporter and giving a running commentary as they watch one of their favourite movies unspool in a private screening room.

Even Hollywood's own hometown newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has been unable to pull off that kind of absorbing, high-profile coverage (although under its own new management it has vowed it is going to try). The New York Times is still The New York Times, largely unbothered by the overexcitable screaming headlines of others, or even by the prospect of a new broadsheet competitor, The New York Sun, which is due to go on sale sometime this month. If Howell Raines wants to write more about Britney Spears, it almost certainly does not spell the end of the journalistic world as higher-brow Americans know it. Dumbing down one of the world's most famous newspapers is not going to be as quick or as simple as that.