From Bill to Jill at the NYT

What’s the Latest Development?

Hendrik Hertzberg on Bill Keller’s eight years in the saddle as executive editor of the New York Times. “I don’t know if the job is inherently harder now than it used to be, but it is certainly more inherently stressful. Keller has had to deal with something that none of his predecessors needed to worry about: a prolonged existential crisis of the institution itself.”

What’s the Big Idea?

“From the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job overall. Yes, the way that he and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., handled the aftermath of the Judith Miller/Iraq/WMD fiasco left a lot to be desired. …But there were countless triumphs as well, up to and including the Times’s painstaking curating of the WikiLeaks cables.”