Why the New York Times’ new food critic could be the paper’s next editor.

It might seem odd to claim during the week that Condé Nast closed Gourmet magazine—famously presided over by the former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl—that the newspaper’s new restaurant critic has a shot at becoming the paper’s next editor. Yet Sam Sifton, who starts this month, is unlike any other previous choice for the paper’s restaurant critic. He has more management experience than the job has ever called for.

When Bill Keller announced in August that Sifton, who has been the culture editor of the Times for the last four years, would become the paper’s new restaurant critic, he took great pains to point out that the fast-rising 43-year-old was not being put out to pasture. In his staff memo, Keller wrote, “For the record, it is our expectation that this will not be the end of Sam’s career as an editor/manager/entrepreneur/mentor. He has run two departments exceptionally well, and nobody would be surprised to see him running something in the future.”

OK, but all the way to the top? Really? Here’s the case.

The New York Times has always subscribed to a lead-husky style of editorial management. The paper’s top editor is expected be able to pull the sled harder, longer, and faster than any other writer on the team. To establish the editor as alpha reporter, the job has always gone to someone who has distinguished himself on a prominent beat. And, in the modern era since mid-20^th century, the job has always gone to someone who has won himself a Pulitzer Prize.

But the prize does not have to be from some bomb-strewn battlefield. Yes, Keller, Max Frankel, Joe Lelyveld, and A.M. Rosenthal all won theirs for international reporting from the central hotspots of their respective eras. But Howell Raines, tellingly, won his for mythopoeticizing his Southern upbringing. Under Raines’ leadership, the Times was criticized externally and internally for bringing a broad range of nonnews subjects from the dark wings of their respective sections to the center stage of page one. And it is with Raines that the complicated history of the 21^st-century New York Times begins.

Consider this bit of Times gossip about a confrontation between Managing Editor Jill Abramson and Adam Moss, then editor of the Culture and Styles sections. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, the Times was trying to recover its dignity, re-establish its authority, and still deal with a rapidly shifting mediascape. Moss was being wooed to take over the editorship of New York magazine. Abramson is said to have rushed into Moss’ office with an armful of periodicals. In a fit of frustration with Moss—who clearly had one foot out the door—she threw a copy of the Times on the desk between them and said forcefully, “This matters.” Then, pausing just a beat as she dropped a copy of New York magazine on the desk, she said drily: “This doesn’t.”