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Icons are falling at The New York Times in the wake of its Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal.  

Executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned Thursday. Both had promoted serial plagiarist Blair, ignoring a mounting pile of corrections and other warning signs. Last week, Times feature writer Rick Bragg, one of Raines’ conspicuous favorites, resigned. 

If I had the ear of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. or its new interim executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, I’d urge them to consider these deeper issues. 

First, although Raines’ departure was overdue (he’d lost the staff’s confidence) and Boyd’s was understandable, Bragg’s is unfortunate. 

Bragg, author of the memoir “All Over But the Shoutin’,” is a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the few Times national staffers who wrote with real style. 

The offense for which he was suspended—putting his byline on a story that had been reported largely by a freelancer who received no credit—was basically Times standard operating procedure. And the Times admitted that Bragg had repeatedly asked to share bylines with his freelancers, but was told it wasn’t Times policy. 

There’s a good case for the Times to give due credit to all the writers who do its legwork, and to honestly tell its readers who’s written what they read. This should be general policy at the Times, too. Instead, the Times arbitrarily provoked one writer—one of the paper’s best—to resign over one story, because he happened to be Raines’ pal. 

I wonder where this will end. What about Verlyn Klinkenborg, the editorial writer whom Raines hired to write staggeringly slow-motion columns about bugs and flora on his upstate New York farm? Did Klinkenborg really see that leaf turn? With his own eyes? 

How do we know he didn’t leave a young stringer to stake it out for a week—sustained only by a Thermos of lukewarm apple cider—then pluck the notes from the kid’s frostbitten hand? Inquiring minds want to know. The leaf’s not talking. 

Stylists like Bragg may not win popularity contests among resentful, less able colleagues. But copy written in a distinct voice like his is black gold for a newspaper industry that’s been steadily losing younger readers. 

Second, readers are the point—and the Times isn’t really managed as if they matter. That’s the paper’s real sin, and it’s more systematic than letting one Jayson Blair run free or treating any number of Rick Braggs with arbitrary fear or disfavor. 

The Gray Lady has a history of imperious executive editors who, upon arrival, slam their “stamp” on the paper without ever addressing longstanding flaws. Raines demoralized much of the staff by promoting favorites to Page One, and by uprooting respected veterans—several of whom then quit, leaving desks short-handed and colleagues exhausted. 

The paper’s longstanding flaws are more consistent: Except for a brief experiment with writing readable leads under Max Frankel in the early nineties, loquacious writers don’t get enough editing to sharpen their reports into cohesive “stories.” Headlines remain laughably awkward and obscure. Leads are murky and baffling. The day’s most important news is often buried on unread inside pages (with an ad shoved in readers’ faces on most right pages). And despite the Times’ slow embrace of color, its front page layouts are still 19th-century relics. 

And, as Bragg’s saga shows in the extreme, the Times’ few really good “writers” don’t tend to end up on the news pages. Why does the nation’s foremost news-gathering institution produce a paper that is such a chore to read? 

Bragg will do okay: He reportedly has a million-dollar contract for his next two books. Blair’s sins and Bragg’s sacrifice may win overdue credit for the anonymous scribes who get “All the News” into the Times and other publications. 

But is the Times starting to think about us readers? Just wondering, Arthur and Joseph.