Back in the early 1970s, when Gene Roberts came from the New York Times to be the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and it became clear that he was to transform the paper into an ambitious center of American journalism, those of us who were already there watched closely to see who he would bring in to make it happen. Roberts didn’t tell us, directly, what he intended, of course. He was much too oblique in his methodology for that. And he knew that showing was far more effective than telling.
