<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  In Bill Keller&amp;#039;s office at the New York Times Building, June 3, the day after he announced his retirement as executive editor. SCOTT RAAB: Ready to share your dating tips now?  BILL KELLER: I don&amp;#039;t have dating tips. I&amp;#039;ve been married for twelve years \u2014 I don&amp;#039;t date. In my case, it was sheer luck.  SR: &amp;quot;Hey, you wanna come up and see my Pulitzer?&amp;quot;  BK: [Laughs.] SR: Now, when we had lunch, you hadn&amp;#039;t spoken with your boss yet. BK: I had not. SR: But you were sure at that point?  BK: Eighty-five percent sure. I had a target date to talk to Arthur [Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times] in early May.  SR: Can&amp;#039;t you call him Pinch now?  BK: Nobody calls him Pinch. Only Gawker and the Observer and the New York Post. I had a date in my head. But I wasn&amp;#039;t going to deliver an ironclad decision. If he had some urgent reason why he thought I should stay longer, I would have been open to a discussion. It&amp;#039;s not like I&amp;#039;m walking out in anger. I&amp;#039;ve had a very, very happy time in this job.  SR: No one&amp;#039;s sending you flowers. They&amp;#039;re all going to Jill. BK: The flowers go to Jill. Somebody sent me a bottle of wine, though, which I&amp;#039;d rather have than the flowers.  SR: A good bottle? BK: A very nice bottle of Bordeaux.  SR: Have you gotten any nice calls?  BK: A lot of requests for interviews. The one that surprised me was from The Moscow News.  SR: You were the Moscow bureau chief during the fall of communism. They must still think of you as a homeboy.  BK: You know why they called? They could not imagine an editor of a major publication stepping down to become a lowly hack. In Russia that would be inconceivable. I reminded the reporter of a great line from Chekhov \u2014 who was, in addition to being a pretty decent hack himself, a medical doctor \u2014 something like, &amp;quot;Medicine is my lawful wife; literature is my mistress.&amp;quot; Being an editor has been a source of great satisfaction, but writing is the thing I truly love. The other part of the answer is: Wouldn&amp;#039;t Egypt be a much happier place if Hosni Mubarak had left fifteen years earlier? It&amp;#039;s a considerable source of tragedy in the world that people stay in powerful jobs long past the point where they&amp;#039;re a spent force.  SR: After you announced your departure, New York magazine used the term &amp;quot;old-media id&amp;quot; to describe your attitude toward the digital revolution.  BK: It&amp;#039;s a cute line. I could wear it with pride, but I think I&amp;#039;ll wear it with reluctance, if at all. One of the things I did in this job, which has helped secure the place for the long run, is about six years ago I wrote a memo to Arthur and the small circle of people who run the company, saying that having a newsroom of people who understood how to write for a once-a-day publication and a separate newsroom of people who understood the 24/7 world was a mistake, and we should move with alacrity to begin to integrate the place. So I may be the old-media id, but I think I may be entitled to some credit for being a new-media pioneer, at least within the context of the Times.  SR: And the paywall? BK: I think everybody&amp;#039;s watching to see how the paywall will work. There are people who think the paywall is itself a violation of some kind of dogma.  SR: But the Internet&amp;#039;s free, man.  BK: An awful lot of people who felt that way a year or two ago are now coming around. And we very cleverly designed a flexible pay model that allows us to put walls up and take walls down so that we don&amp;#039;t strangle the traffic.  My two columns that got me branded as a digital curmudgeon both said we should embrace the new but we should have our eyes open to the trade-offs. Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price. Better to acknowledge the price and look at it, rather than have it siphoned out of your bank account secretly. That&amp;#039;s true of Twitter. We have a group whose job is to harness social media to the purposes of the Times, both as a news-gathering tool and as a way of making sure we extend our reach as far as we can. After the reaction to the Twitter column, they said, &amp;quot;Just assure us that you&amp;#039;re not disowning us.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;No \u2014 I think Twitter is a fabulous tool. Crowd-sourcing by Twitter is useful in getting early warnings; it&amp;#039;s useful in knowing what&amp;#039;s going on in places like Iran during the post-election upheavals there, when reporters weren&amp;#039;t allowed to go. But it&amp;#039;s not the same as a reporter going into a place and bearing witness. And it&amp;#039;s probably not a wonderful thing for our attention spans, and as purveyors of long-form journalism, we are in favor of long attention spans.&amp;quot; And they said, &amp;quot;We get that. But we&amp;#039;re trying to proselytize for these tools in the newsroom, and the people who don&amp;#039;t want to do it are using you as cover.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;What do I do to make it up to you?&amp;quot; And they said, &amp;quot;The first thing is, get Jill [Abramson, Keller&amp;#039;s replacement] on Twitter.&amp;quot; Which I&amp;#039;m doing.  SR: I assume you&amp;#039;re gonna be tweetin&amp;#039; like a motherfucker now. BK: We&amp;#039;ll see. One of the reasons that I&amp;#039;m a lurker on Twitter is that every time I tweet an idea, I feel like I&amp;#039;m delivering something to the competition that I ought to be giving to a reporter here. SR: Do you leave with a sense of anything left undone, any particular regret?  BK: There is a fairly long list of things that I&amp;#039;ve done that were stupid. SR: Such as? BK: I came in well aware that we had published some bad stuff about WMD in Iraq. I should have written a fulsome mea culpa and put [Judy Miller] on a leash. Instead I waited a year to do that. I should have just taken that thing by the lapels and done it sooner. And I would confess that some of the shots I&amp;#039;ve taken at various people or news outlets were a little intemperate. But on the whole I feel a sense of satisfaction. We&amp;#039;ve covered two full-blown wars. Katrina. Government eavesdropping. We&amp;#039;ve handled these Wikileaks data dumps professionally and well. We&amp;#039;ve covered the financial meltdown, we&amp;#039;ve covered some elections. We&amp;#039;re covering the hell out of the Arab Spring \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve got the budget overruns to prove it. We&amp;#039;ve kept the newsroom pretty much intact while other people were desperately throwing furniture overboard to keep their ships from sinking \u2014 and some of those ships sank anyway. Obviously, I didn&amp;#039;t do any of this. We did it. And the we is pretty expansive. The paper is banging away on all its cylinders, and we have a lot to be proud of. SR: Julian Assange \u2014 he&amp;#039;s the new version of the guy in Three Days of the Condor and all those other movies who has the manila envelope with the Times&amp;#039;s address on it. Are you as conflicted as it sometimes seems about him? BK: The main source of tension between us is that I see him first and foremost as a source, a provider of raw material. He is not a participant in making our journalism in the sense that he gets to look at it before we publish it or edit it any way or write it in any way. Julian sees himself as something more than that \u2014 either as a partner of the Times or a scourge. It&amp;#039;s fair to say he&amp;#039;s an important figure. I&amp;#039;m not sure he&amp;#039;s important in quite the ways that he thinks he is, but he&amp;#039;s had a huge influence. There are people who demonize him, and I don&amp;#039;t think that&amp;#039;s right. He&amp;#039;s got a cult following, and I think that&amp;#039;s not right, either.  The really interesting question is, Where will he be in five years? If you believe the U.S. prosecutors, 98 percent of his impact has been the result of one incredible leak from one disenchanted Army private. Are others out there who have things of comparable value and are willing to give it up and risk going to prison to do it \u2014 and if so, is Wikileaks going to be the place that they choose to deliver that stuff? Before you declare that Wikileaks has changed the world, I think you want to know the answer to that question.  SR: It&amp;#039;ll be interesting to see if competitors crop up. BK: There&amp;#039;s OpenLeaks, which was set up by a defector from Wikileaks in Germany. Al Jazeera and The Wall Street Journal have both said they&amp;#039;re setting up anonymous drop boxes for digital information. And we&amp;#039;re studying the technological, journalistic, and legal implications of doing it. I was talking this morning to the editor of our investigative unit, who&amp;#039;s one of the people studying whether we want to do this, and he pointed out that one of our reporters just this week got an absolutely fascinating trove of documents that relate to a story that will be coming out in the next couple of months. It&amp;#039;s quite wonderful stuff and he didn&amp;#039;t need Wikileaks or OpenLeaks or some kind of a magical drop box to get them. He got them the old-fashioned way. SR: In a parking garage. BK: It might have been in a parking garage, I don&amp;#039;t know.  SR: Al Jazeera is a great story in its own right, but Comcast cable won&amp;#039;t carry Al Jazeera-English.  BK: You can stream it on their Web site. SR: I do. They&amp;#039;ve done great journalism, and they&amp;#039;ve been hugely influential in helping to create the Arab Spring. BK: They have. One of the most interesting things about Al Jazeera is, it is the property of the government of Qatar, which has its own interests, and there have been occasions where the masters were not all that happy with what Al Jazeera was up to. Over time, the editors and reporters have wanted to establish that they&amp;#039;re not hand puppets. There&amp;#039;s a kind of Arab Spring going on within Al Jazeera. I think the cable companies should be a little ashamed of themselves that they won&amp;#039;t carry Al Jazeera. SR: It&amp;#039;s un-American! Don&amp;#039;t you want America to win the War on Terror, Bill?!  BK: We&amp;#039;re supposedly a country that protects the freedom of people who say things we don&amp;#039;t like.  SR: When Frank Bruni was recently named an op-ed columnist and he was widely referred to as the Times&amp;#039;s first &amp;quot;openly gay&amp;quot; columnist, I felt the same way I did in 1988 when Doug Williams of the Redskins was referred to as the first black quarterback in the Super Bowl \u2014 &amp;quot;Are we still talking about that?&amp;quot;  BK: We didn&amp;#039;t call him [the first openly gay Times columnist].  SR: I know you didn&amp;#039;t. I just wanted to tell you that when the Times is ready for its first openly psychotic columnist...  BK: You&amp;#039;re putting your hand up for that? Openly psychotic?  SR: I have a new version of my baseball-bat question. If you had one swing: Arianna Huffington, Howell Raines, or Sam Zell.  BK: It&amp;#039;s tempting, but \u2014 what do the lawyers say? &amp;quot;Asked and answered?&amp;quot; Asked and not answered. SR: Do you have a cell phone on your belt? BK: I do. SR: All right. I dis-recommend that. BK: It&amp;#039;s a BlackBerry.  SR: You always wear that on your belt? BK: I don&amp;#039;t wear it to the beach, but I&amp;#039;m supposed to be accessible to the people who are manning the ship when I&amp;#039;m not.  SR: You won&amp;#039;t have that on your belt in a couple of months, will you? BK: Probably not. I think I&amp;#039;ll find that an easy habit to kick.  EARLIER: Part One of Scott Raab&amp;#039;s Conversations with Keller "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a10047/bill-keller-new-york-times-exit-interview-5873583/>