We Want Media

When Jonathan Landman walked into the room, I had him pegged for a New York Times guy. With his squared glasses and graying hair, he looks like a Times guy. With his composure and enunciation, he talks like a Times guy. But what he told me was not exactly what I was expecting from a Times guy.

As deputy managing editor for digital journalism at that old bastion of a newspaper, Landman has had his hand in the Times' reinvention of its online persona, and it's clear that he's both intelligent and qualified enough to handle such a gargantuan task. But among the soft-spoken rhetoric and the eloquent explanations, his admission that the Times doesn't know precisely what its game plan is for the web -- aside from the knowledge that whatever it is, it carries enormous gravity -- was surprising to me. As I said to him myself, the Times is so large it's hard to realize people work there, much less take chances on a crapshoot.

Landman's strained, muted comment that reporting on colleague Judy Miller was the toughest thing he's had to do in 19 years on the job showed a side of him that went beyond his relaxed composure, making him take pause to gather the thoughts that otherwise so effortlessly flowed forth. So what did I learn from him? Jonathan Landman showed me that living, breathing people work at the Times -- and the guy who gets the big piece of chicken at the dinner table each night might just be that guy who shoulders global responsibility.