Tom Bodkin (Chief Creative Officer: The New York Times)

THE FIFTH

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You cannot overstate how much Tom Bodkin has changed the Times. In fact, you can say that there was the Times before Tom and the Times after Tom.

The Times before Tom threw as many words as possible at the page, with little regard for the reader. The Times before Tom thought tossing a couple of headshots on the page was all the visual journalism we needed. The Times before Tom held to a hierarchy where designers were the other, somehow not quite journalists.

Then there is The New York Times after Tom.

Tom taught us that design was not only integral to journalism, it was in fact integral to storytelling at its height. The front page that listed the COVID dead was more powerful than any one story could ever be.

Roy Peter Clark, the writing guru at the Poynter Institute, captured it best: 

“Nothing much on that front page looked like news as we understand it, that is, the transmission of information,” he wrote. “Instead it felt like a graphic representation of the tolling of bells. A litany of the dead.”

Personally, Tom taught me something that made it easier to lead the newsroom in the digital age: Design demands a level of open-mindedness to the possibilities of different types of storytelling. It also rewards collaboration, since the most perfect stories are told by different disciplines working together to convey the best version of the truth every day.

Those, in fact, are the qualities that mark the modern, digital New York Times. Qualities that honestly have made it the most successful news report of the day.

Hard to imagine we—certainly not I—would have been prepared for this new world without Tom’s leadership.

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