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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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forth, which I take all that with a grain of salt, but nevertheless I think there was some opening up.

I'm now looking at the chapter called “The New Feature,” which deals with the Op-Ed page, and I believe that in this one, I am Q, not whatever my other letter was, T, yes. I am here in “The New Feature,” I'm clearly Q. R is still Rosenthal. And Dan Schwartz, the Sunday editor, played quite a part in that discussion, and I really don't see his designation. It's D, I believe; the D that's listed here is, I'm pretty certain, is Dan Schwartz, who retired from the Times some years ago, who was Max Frankel's predecessor as Sunday editor.

Q:

Looking at that in the light of the multi-sectioned paper of today, do you have any comment about that? How do you feel about the so-called new New York Times?

Oakes:

Well, I don't like what has happened - while recognizing that the reason for it was to broaden the appeal of the Times, and to make it more economically viable, a perfectly good reason and one that I have to accept - have to accept in the sense that it's an arguable reason. I felt and feel that it might well have been better to have attempted to improve the economic viability of the Times by emphasizing our strengths, rather than by dissipating our human resources.

Let me explain what I mean by that. What we have, what the Times has done, deliberately, is to use its staff now to cover a far, far broader variety of human activities, all designed to appeal to the suburban areas, where we were trying to increase our circulation, and obviously we had to do something because we were losing circulation. We were losing





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