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cussing thread counts of bed linen at fancy hotels but foreign correspondents who knew
these countries intimately.
Mr. Leahy went far afield when commissioning stories from luminaries in other fields.
Muriel Spark, the novelist, wrote about Tuscany; V. S. Pritchett, critic and essayist, wrote
on Seville; Patricia Wells, the food critic, on Paris restaurants; Sari Nuseibeh, a Palestinian
academic, wrote on Jerusalem as an Islamic city; and Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor
and author, wrote about Jerusalem as the Jewish City of David. It didn't hurt that these
were the years that advertising from the tourism industry often accounted for one-fourth of
newspaper advertising revenue. “The sections were very, very fat but you had this Chinese
wall between the advertising side and the editorial side. All I knew is that I had great big
sections and the luxury of space,” said Mr. Leahy.
It meant that he could publish essays like Apple's article comparing British to contin-
ental European cuisine. “Eating in Britain, like most things there, has a good deal to do
with class,” he wrote. “French families of modest means save for months to eat a superb
meal on a birthday or a holiday. . . . They were accustomed, they told me, to eating in res-
taurants about once a week, and they went to the best bistros they could afford except for
their twice or thrice-yearly splurge. When they ate at home, I am sure, they also ate well,
if simply. There are just not very many people like that in Britain, and without people like
that, there is no way that good restaurants will ever be the norm, as they are in France and
Italy and Belgium.”
Those are strong conclusions in a nuanced and reasonable piece about Britain and its
place in European cuisine in the 1980s. It was not an exercise in self-indulgence that was
more about Apple than England. However, all of that was about to change.
Nancy Newhouse was in charge of the Travel section when the Cold War ended. “We
covered a great deal more of geography,” said Newhouse, who went to Eastern Europe to
see for herself the attraction of these newly open nations. Prague, she told me, “was defin-
itely a sleeping beauty. It was like opening a door and seeing this magical city.” Dresden in
the former East Germany was “sad, deeply sad and yet they saved all the art, an astonishing
collection.”
An elegant woman who had been the editor of the newspaper's influential Style section,
Newhouse was a veteran of the “lifestyle” genre of reporting. With so many more nations
to cover and technological changes in the travel industry, she refined her writers' mission
to concentrate on describing the experience of traveling to a certain destination and to
write consumer stories to help tourists make the most of those trips. “It was an evolution
from travel writing to up-to-the-minute consumer travel reporting,” she said in a long in-
terview at her brownstone in Manhattan. “We still had literary pieces but on the other end
of the spectrum we ran consumer pieces.”
These new consumer pieces were shorter and reported on lower fares and bargain
flights, and they were decidedly subjective, emphasizing the personal point of view. “If
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