Mission Statement: excerpt from the Preface to Gray Lady Down.

I'd like to be seen as writing in the spirit of Loyal Opposition, somewhere between a bete noire and a buff, with an enduring appreciation for the paper, especially the awesome physical and organizational task of putting it out every night (and what a brick on Sundays!). Like the paper's first ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, I hope this book isn't seen as an ideological weapon; the only people I claim to represent are "readers who turn to The Times for their news" and "expect it to be fair, honest and complete." I am not one of those people "who love to hate the Times," as executive editor Bill Keller has phrased it. I've read it since I was a kid, am proud to have been published prominently in it very early in my career (the magazine and op-ed page; first things I ever published), still consider it "a national treasure" (albeit with a lot of tarnish on it), and confess to referring to it simply as "the paper." Pre-internet, I would find myself involuntarily wandering to my corner newsstands late at night, waiting there like a junkie for a fix in the form of the next day’s edition; if I was out of town and couldn’t find it, I would jones.

My aim is not to embarrass the Times, or to feed a case for "going Timesless," as some subscription-cancelers and former readers have called it. Some may think the Times to be irrelevant in this age of media hyper-choice. I think it's actually more necessary than ever. But if "These times demand the Times," as the paper's advertising slogan goes, they also demand a better Times than we are getting, especially at this fraught point in our political, social and cultural history.

---William McGowan