SUMMER 2005

A Man for the Times

By ELAINE McARDLE | Photographs by Kate Swan

The powerful, the notorious, celebrities and heads of state — the security guards at the front desk of The New York Times have seen them all.

“We’ve even had the King of Jordan, although we haven’t had Bill Gates in here in a while,” a guard muses as he keeps a vigilant eye on the stream of reporters, photographers, ad salespeople and others pouring through the revolving doors of the world’s most venerable newspaper.

And Scott Heekin-Canedy ’79, the newspaper’s president and general manager?

“He just now came in. He had his suitcase, too,” the guard tells me, as he dials Heekin-Canedy’s extension. “I don’t know why he’s not answering his phone.”

Maybe it’s because Heekin-Canedy has barely had time to make it to his office, having just swept in from his latest visit to one of the Times’ new printing centers in middle America, as the country’s longtime paper of record continues its ambitious effort to dominate the national market. That plan — the Times has increased circulation in recent years while other papers have seen worrisome declines — was launched in the late ’90s by a team of visionaries, including Heekin-Canedy. But you’ll have a hard time getting him to take much credit. Colleagues describe him as a team player who’s remarkably humble, given his position.

On my way to meet him, I get off on the wrong floor and find myself in the newsroom, alive with reporters laughing and greeting a colleague who’s just returned from an overseas assignment. Finally, I make my way up to the 11th floor. Just outside Heekin-Canedy’s office is the Times’ hall of Pulitzer Prizes. It’s a daunting and impressive display of who’s who in journalism and photojournalism: Anna Quinlan, William Safire, Thomas Friedman. In 2002, the Times had almost a clean sweep of the prizes, primarily for its reporting on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Among the many famous photographs here is one that’s truly arresting: a shot of a starving girl in Sudan crouched on the baked ground as a vulture waits to pounce on her. The photographer, Kevin Carter, won journalism’s greatest honor in 1994 but killed himself a few months later. The hall is a stirring reminder of the critically important mission of the women and men in this building and in the Times’ outposts around the world.

When I finally make my way to Heekin-Canedy’s office, he stands to greet me with a handshake and smile, a trim man, neatly dressed in a blue-and-white striped shirt and navy slacks. He exudes a sort of low-key friendliness. We have one hour, exactly, I am apologetically informed by his colleague. It’s just that Heekin-Canedy has so much to do overseeing the newspaper’s $1.7 billion share of The New York Times Co.’s $3.3 billion empire. Named in 2004 as president and general manager of the newspaper and several ancillary businesses, he’s in charge of advertising sales, circulation, marketing, production and distribution of the newspaper. Though he’s in the office by 6 a.m. prepping for a long day of meetings, he’s also out by 5:30 in order to be home with his wife and 13-year-old daughter. It makes for little respite in the hours between. “We joke that you can either read The New York Times or work here,” the colleague tells me. “It was Scotty Reston who said that first, and there’s a lot of truth to it,” says Heekin-Canedy, nodding his head.

While Heekin-Canedy won’t take credit for himself, others are quick to give it. It is under his “quiet, determined leadership,” says Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The Times Co. and publisher of the Times, that the newspaper has continued to grow despite a very difficult business environment for media in the past four years. “Scott has helped us achieve significant success and he has done so with great grace. We’re damn lucky to have him.”

Leading by Example

Heekin-Canedy’s place here within the most famous newspaper in the country seems a long journey from the School of Law, which he chose for the Co-op Program and the school’s focus on public interest. But Heekin-Canedy views the newspaper bus-iness as a public service that’s vital for a healthy democracy. Other lawyers tell him they envy him, he says — not just for his job title but for the interesting career he’s forged. Still, he advises, “You have to be willing to endure a lot of challenges and difficulties.”

In our short interview, he is open, but not talkative; he answers every question with an efficient precision. He smiles often but has a certain reserve. He’s so understated that when I interview his coworkers, it’s almost impossible to find anyone with a colorful story to share. “He’s humble and quiet,” says Phyllis Calvano, controller for the Times. “He’s not at center stage, whereas there are other people and other executives where I could tell you 10 stories because they’re always at center stage.”

Heekin-Canedy is more a listener than a talker, they add, with an elegance to his management style that inspires loyalty. “He would never talk about anyone else,” says Calvano. “Other executives, sometimes there’s a lot of chit-chat, ‘I can’t believe that jerk.’ He would never do that. And by being that way, he really sets the tone.”

But he’s also extremely competitive, and, according to Calvano, “very, very demanding” of employees. As a competitive skier in high school in North Adams, Mass., Heekin-Canedy developed the fortitude and focus of a skilled athlete. After graduating from Williams College in 1974, he went to work for Ralph Nader in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, helping organize public interest research groups, including MassPIRG. The impeachment hearings of President Nixon were underway and the cachet of journalists was at its height. “It was a fantastic time to be in Washington,” Heekin-Canedy recalls. One memorable recollection: “I was riding the bus home to Georgetown, trying to get home in time to see [Nixon’s] resig-nation speech. The bus went down Pennsylvania Avenue, and all the klieg lights were around the White House. I saw Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw setting up. You knew — you just knew — it was a moment in history.”

After a year in DC, Heekin-Canedy was ready for law school, and his colleagues in Nader’s office strongly recommended Northeastern. “I went to law school with the notion quite clear in my mind that I wasn’t intending to practice law,” he says. “I wanted to get into business management or media.” He also considered a career as a TV reporter covering legal issues. In his co-ops, he worked as a hearings officer for the state of Massachusetts in the welfare department, adjudicating appeals of people who’d been denied benefits. It was a job he continued for several years after graduation, and he was promoted to director of the division of hearings. He recalls a Medicaid recipient who wanted the state to pay for a liver transplant, at that time deemed an experimental treatment. Did he award the transplant? “I don’t think so,” Heekin-Canedy replies in a quiet voice.

While at first blush there might not seem to be a connection, he says the hearings job — where he was as much mediator as judge — was a fine training ground for his management role at the Times. “There was the human element of these cases and trying to get at the truth with a capital ‘T,’ because people’s lives were dependent on the outcome,” he says. “The lessons I learned from grappling with those things have served me to this day in my current job.” And, he adds, “The legal skills are enduring.”

Rising to the Top

When he was ready to leave the private sector for the public and switch from law to business, he faced a problem. It was the early ’80s, the days of Wall Street dominance, and there were plenty of newly minted MBAs; competition for good jobs was fierce. At the age of 32, he enrolled at the Columbia Business School in Manhattan. “Most of the students were in their 20s,” he says, with a wry smile. “I was in a group referred to as the ‘gray panthers.’ I knew I was making what was maybe a quixotic change, a mid-life career change.” Like a skier set on a fast run, he had a specific aim: blending his legal training with the media business. His first job out was at the Dow Jones Company. From that point forward, except for a brief stint in book publishing, his entire career has been in the business of producing newspapers. He joined the Times in 1987 as a circu-lation market planning analyst. A few years later, he went to the Los Angeles Times but returned to the New York paper in 1992 as an assistant manager of financial planning.

He moved quickly up the hierarchy at the company. “I believed newspapers were important to society and to our democratic way of life, some really lofty things as well as personal things,” he says. “So it was very easy to devote myself. And I loved the business.”

Heekin-Canedy reports to only two people in the company: Times publisher and company CEO Sulzberger, and Janet L. Robinson, president of The New York Times Co. “I have nothing to do with the operation of the newsroom or the editorial page,” Heekin-Canedy emphasizes. “We are structured in a way to the fullest extent possible to separate and insulate the news and editorial departments from the commercial part.” His peers on the editorial side — Bill Keller, executive editor, and Gail Collins, editorial page editor — report directly to Sulzberger. “These [interests] bump and maybe collide,” Heekin-Canedy explains. “His responsibility is to mediate those frictions and collisions.”

On the business side, things remain tough. In May the company announced 190 job cuts at the Times and several other newspapers the company owns, due in part to a poor ad sales climate. Yet in 2004, for the seventh straight year, the Times reported more than $1 billion in ad revenue, a record no other newspaper or magazine can equal. That’s why the Times is looking far ahead, positioning itself for long-term growth. In the past several years, it has undergone what Heekin-Canedy describes as a “transformation” from its role as a highly regarded but regional newspaper to a strong presence in the national market. It launched an ambitious project to go head-to-head with USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. It added printing sites around the country so readers could get the paper as fast as New Yorkers did, and it’s now available for home delivery each day in 315 markets. In 1998, all sections of the newspaper went national, to great success.

“We found a pent-up demand,” Heekin-Canedy says. “We’re now in middle America.” Circulation outside New York has grown dramatically in the past five years, increasing by 125,000 to 1.1 million in daily readers and by 180,000 to 1.7 million on Sunday, all the more remarkable because the Internet was taking off at the same time. These inroads have primarily come at the expense of the Journal, he says. As other newspapers struggle with sharp readership declines, the Times has grown through its “audacious” strategy, as he puts it. “Overall, it stands in pretty stark contrast to everybody else.”

The newspaper is also bucking trends by making strong inroads into a younger audience, and to that end, it has enhanced or redesigned it business coverage, travel and real estate sections, and arts reporting. It’s also broadened the brand by hosting the New York Times Travel Show. “These are all forms of business innovation to better serve our customers,” he says. “We want to ensure that the institution and the products it produces are around for years.”

At the same time, the company undertook such initiatives as The Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture with Discovery Communications, whose ad revenues grew 50 percent in 2004. It also has the largest newspaper-owned Web site on the Internet, NYTimes.com, with 1.5 million hits per day. Unlike with some print publications, the Times Web site has actually driven more readers to the newspaper rather than competing with it, he says.

“To achieve these newspaper results at the same time we built this tremendous Web presence is a testimony to the strength of our brand, but I think also the strength of the strategy,” he says. “I’m proud to say I was part of it.”

Precisely at the end of one hour, Heekin-Canedy’s colleague gently prompts me that it’s time for the interview to end. Heekin-Canedy stands again, smiles, shakes my hand — and turns back to keeping the most powerful newspaper in the country in the black.

Elaine McArdle, a former features editor of Lawyers Weekly USA, is a regular contributor to Northeastern Law Magazine.