Katharine: an elegy for the Trib

JeanPaul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle

Jean-Pa

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From the NY times

Op-Ed Columnist

Adieu IHT, Bonjour INYT

By ROGER COHEN

Published: October 14, 2013

The Boulevard was long and straight. On one side there was shade under the plane trees. On the other the sunlight shone white. I would walk down the Boulevard to work, looking in the windows. It was pleasant. Sometimes the beautiful American girl was seated at the café reading the International Herald Tribune. I glanced at her. She never smiled. At the kiosk I bought my own copy of the paper. I sat nearby and ordered a cold beer. The waitress placed it on a felt pad on the table. I drank the beer. 

Repressing one’s inner Hemingway was never easy with the Trib in Paris. Now that the paper is gone it seems forgivable to indulge a fantasy or two and be romantic about it, at least for a moment.

The paper ended its days at the Place des Vosges. That would be the Place des Vosges in Courbevoie, not the beautiful eponymous square in the Marais where I spent the dog days of 1976, talking about the heat, watching the fountains dry up and discovering the Herald Tribune.

As the suburban denouement suggests, romance was by no means the whole story. Newspapering in the global marketplace has not been an easy ride of late.

Still, the romance was there. The Trib was a paper made for the world in the French capital by Americans, a trans-Atlantic hybrid that flattered Parisians, made them feel more important. Bergman to Bogart: “What about us?” Bogart to Bergman: “We’ll always have Paris.” And in Paris, it seemed, there would always be the Herald Tribune.

The paper was a refuge for the holed-up expat, a good excuse for the second chilled Brouilly on the terrace of Le Select, a discreet statement of worldliness, a ticket to membership in a borderless club, and a venue for exploration of all the French-American rivalry that turned out to be just another expression of the eternal French-American love affair.

The Trib was sexy. It got to the point while French papers meandered like the Seine through Normandy. American journalists knew how to find the facts and tell a story without frills. If anyone doubted a newspaper could be sexy, all they had to do was watch the pert Jean Seberg, wearing a Herald Tribune T-shirt, hawking the paper (then The New York Herald Tribune) in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” Case closed.

In Paris 35 years ago I started working for Paris Metro, a biweekly city magazine enjoying a certain vogue. Back then to write was O.K. but to write in Paris was to be halfway to becoming a writer. Metro was good but its finances were parlous. Rumors abounded for a while that it would be bought by the Herald Tribune and become its weekend magazine. There was a frisson. Nothing more glorious or glamorous was imaginable. (The talk came to nothing. Metro folded.)

Hendrik Hertzberg caught the essence of the matter earlier this year, describing in The New Yorker his arrival in Paris at age 17: “At the earliest possible moment, I did four things. I sat down at a little table at an outdoor café. I ordered a glass of red wine. I lit a Gauloise. And I opened up my copy, freshly bought, of the Herald Tribune. Only then did I no longer feel like a tourist or a high-school kid. I was suddenly something better: an American in Paris.”

An American in Paris: Four words that conjure a milieu, now long gone.

The Avenue Gordon Bennett commemorates one such American. It is named after James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher who founded the predecessor of the International Herald Tribune 126 years ago. Disgraced in New York, he had seen the potential, as American power spread, of an English-language paper in Europe — and of his own redemption. When he died in 1918, as the Trib’s last publisher Stephen Dunbar-Johnson noted last year, a trade publication declared: “The New York Herald, Paris edition, was probably read by more rulers, potentates and men of high officialdom than any newspaper published.”

The Trib in reality has not died but been reborn in new guise. The International New York Times, which begins life today, will bring the same global but distinctly American prism to bear on the world’s affairs, and no doubt attract just as many rulers, potentates — and women of high officialdom.

The very essence of America is creative churn. This is no time to be nostalgic or sentimental. The world has a desperate need for high-quality journalism and in-depth international coverage, however it is delivered. No brand name is more synonymous across the globe with the commitment to such quality than The New York Times. This lover of the Trib loves The Times even more.

Will the romance be the same? Up to a point, Lord Copper. These are digital times: Hemingway flops at 140 characters or less. No matter, it is time to move on under a new name in the sophisticated spirit of the Trib: A voice for America in the world at a time of American retrenchment — a reference, a refuge and a bridge.