Stylists of the Times

SPOTLIGHT

a 34 year-old journalist named Maureen Dowd arrived at The New York Times's Washington bureau in 1986, and it wasn't long before dutiful readers noticed—wow! —real writing in the Paper of Record. A classic, datelined Kennebunkport, Maine, August 7,1988: "There is only one way to describe the look on Vice President Bush's face as he pushes up the throttle on his cigarette boat, sending the craft crashing over the waves and the passengers careening around the deck like pinballs. George Bush looks demonic." Dowd's pieces were a single-handed challenge to the dreary parameters of classic Times reporting. Editorial-page editor Howell Raines, who was her boss at the time, calls her "the trailblazer in a talent revolution." From Houston, four years later, she would file the following: "Plucking at his chest, as though he could pull his soul out of a buttoned-down shirt, [Bush] told campaign aides, 'We got to get me out there; we got to get more of me out there.'" Dowd begat her friend Alessandra Stanley, who has jazzed up "The Metro Section" and will soon be attempting to enliven the Moscow bureau. And when the paper hired Michael Kelly, whose freelance coverage of the Gulf War had made jaded magazine editors weep with gratitude, it looked suspiciously as if the Times was finally putting a premium on writing talent. But a little stylistic glasnost is a dangerous thing. Before long the theater world's favorite husband-and-wife team, critic Frank Rich and reporter Alex Witchel, were getting into the act—Rich riding shotgun with Dowd for the 1992 conventions and the Clinton inauguration, and Witchel tapping out zingy profiles for the life-style sections. Warning to 43rd Street: Readers may be getting used to a little sizzle with their state of the world.