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"We have three men to do the work of one," but sometimes this overstaffing pays dividends. When a hurricane struck Long Island and New England in 1938, killing 500, the Times put 35 men on the job, pulled together a comprehensive story in a few hours.
But when Howard Unruh went berserk and killed 13 people in Camden, N.J. last September, the Times sent just one good man from New York to handle the story. Thin, gentle Star Reporter Meyer ("Mike") Berger, 51, had hardly picked up his mail that morning when Assistant City Editor Frank Adams got an Associated Press bulletin about the killings. Reporter Berger took a look at the dispatch, then headed for Camden. Tramping up & down River Road, thorough, painstaking Mike Berger talked with more than 50 people, making detailed notes and diagrams to resolve the conflicts in their stories. All the while, he kept trying to put himself in Unruh's shoes to recreate exactly what had happened. This week Berger's restrained, fully detailed smooth-as-glass story (the city desk never touched a word) won Mike his first Pulitzer Prize* for the best local reporting last year, and the Times its 22nd.
The Pipelines. Though the local staff is far bigger, the 22-man Washington staff gets far more stories on Page One. It is the biggest staff maintained by any daily in Washington, has top prestige, pays the biggest salaries. The Timesman with the fattest salary and the most prestige in Washington is the boss of the bureau: Correspondent Arthur Krock, 63, who has won two Pulitzers, gotten two exclusive interviews with Presidents of the U.S. (TIME, Feb. 27). The rising star of the bureau is British-born, Illinois-educated Diplomatic Correspondent James ("Scotty") Reston, 40, (TIME, Feb. 20), who has furnished a large number of the 30 important news beats that the Washington office has turned in so far this year. Some of the bureau's beats come by digging, or through the pipelines that the Times has to most top officials; others are virtually handed to the Times by officials eager for a sounding board and aware that the paper will print prominently (and uncritically) what they have to say.
Copy filed by the foreign correspondents is handled with kid gloves in New York. Says Managing Editor James: "We either print foreign correspondence or we throw it away; we don't rewrite it."
Bias & Accuracy. Like every other paper, the Times has occasionally thrown the wrong stories away or played them down. One notable example: when the Teapot Dome scandal first broke, the Times buried the story and editorially denounced the Senate investigators as "mud-gunners."