To Greener Pastures

The news burst today that Frank Rich was jumping ship and heading to rejoin his old friend Adam Moss at New York Magazine.

By lunchtime, Google's index had located more than 400 stories in the media and on the Internet on the personnel move. That sounds like an outsized reaction for a story that didn't make much of a splash in the Times.

Rich has, for another two weeks, a prime spot for political pontificators in his weekly column on Sunday. He trades this for a monthly column and some indistinct role at New York.

Of course, Rich and Moss, New York's editor, are very old friends. In fact, it was Rich who introduced Adam Moss to Joe Lelyveld, the former executive editor at the Times, and got him hired as a consultant with indistinct responsibilities. Moss was out of work and couldn't find a spot in the magazine world of New York after he spent the two years leading a new magazine 7 Days into the ground in 1990. According to contemporary accounts, Rich rescued Moss, who then went on to head the Times Magazine and later to New York.

Now, the Times is certainly very much alive if not well. It's also doubtful that the motive is money, because there's simply not that much swirling around the publishing world. But money's not the only thing of value in the world.

A year ago, two of Rich's fellow columnists, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, were identified as members of the faction that tried to hold off on a Times paywall. They didn't like the dramatic loss of readers that accompanied the Times's earlier experiment with charging for content.

Rich, who is perhaps more astute in office politics, wasn't mentioned in that context. But I don't imagine he relishes a dramatic loss of readers. And a second failure in an effort to wring subscription fees out of the Internet audience would look really bad. Bad for the writers; bad for the paper; bad for the stockholders.

Also by lunchtime, the Times issued its first quarter report to Wall Street. There was some slight improvement in financials (and the stock jumped over 3%, and the executives promised that the paywall is close, very close.

Perhaps what goes around ... and Moss is rescuing Rich.