Some months ago, while exploring files in the nearly empty, ink-blackened basement of the old New York Times building on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan, I came across a 1968 memorandum from Seymour Topping. The longtime foreign correspondent had just been put in charge of foreign news, and his memo outlined the changes he planned.

The emphasis on getting spot news first, Topping argued, was outmoded. This he chalked up to the “special challenge” of electronic journalism, with around-the-clock radio news and what he perceived as the glimmerings of real-time television coverage. “Foreign news dispatches on news agency printers,” he noted, are “shown on TV screens at about the same time those dispatches come into the wireroom.”

He also insisted that it no longer made sense for the Times to view itself exclusively as the paper of record, simply reproducing arcane diplomatic documents. “For much of the detail of the daily developments, which we formerly reported,” Topping wrote, “the historian will go in the future to the computer-regulated data bank rather than specifically to The New York Times.” This observation—made when computers were large, clunky machines owned by institutions, not individuals—was so far ahead of its time that someone had scribbled “?” in the margin of the file copy.

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