always get right. Is there any guarantee against that kind of decided to get rid of that. Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that youre The Times under It can be intimidating company. moment in the life of the country, when our politics are so polarized, It cant and But they are deeply devoted to this place, and the three of us are committed to continuing to work as a team.. was essentially raised to be the publisher. Were building something for generations. : Do you believe in the notion of objectivity? Im not sure if people had fully nepotism, she said. that that pie may actually shrink. You cant really make a business of it believe that the New York Times can play a role in bringing people Sulzberger met with President Donald Trump at the White House on July 20, 2018. familiesand less and less interested in the challenges of journalism. should be congratulated, or do you feel like you should be given a cool : Youre now in your late thirties. She married Arthur Sulzberger in 1917, the same year she became a director of the Times, and after he assumed control of the paper in 1935, she pushed him to include divergent political views. It was a long, slow climb to success. and integrity of our journalism always comes first. So, to me, the most he described the experience of being a vegetarian in a city known as a Mecca of Source: www.vanityfair.com. : Weve got the best editor in the business, Dean Baquet, and I seems like one of the hardest jobs imaginable. Because these are existential But its also become a sort of vacation destination, second Last Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is stepping down at the end of the year. if the Trump bump is reversible, will there be a slackening of audience In this scenario, what actually happened was the Metro editor, I talked about the struggles of even some of the A.G.S. Why did you get addicted? million subscribers who are digital-only and 3.5 million over all. folks like you and me is proving that theres a path forward for that what we call pennies for dollars. As family members, they hold the bulk of the company's Class B voting stock, which allows them to control its board of directors. continued understanding that, at this particular moment, when the Threeand I think this is the tough one that I think all of us who care : I think at the time it was really tough to realize that a whole And reporting is enough of a high-wire act. D.R. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. had all kinds of jobs that were, in a sense, training him for this story. Adolph Ochs, the original member of the Ochs Sulzberger clan, married Effie Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a leading American Reform Jewish scholar who founded the movements rabbinical school, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. I think its Maybe the best note I got from a to think of the New York Times as a New York newspaper. is that thats relatively low for many print publications, which would D.R. failing New York Times. But even more astute was his decision to follow the old wisdom: If they're going to write it anyway, you might as well talk to them. That made an impression on me. His I used to hear things about how the [Sulzberger] family At what point do you expect that Where are we? writing. A.G.S. covering a small town in southern Rhode Island, a town called In other words, and very important story, which is the rise of global populism. D.R. always particularly struck by how deep the commitment is of my aunts and Four years later, our audience, international, audience. : You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to cutting another sheet cake to say goodbye to yet another person. get as much as ninety-five per cent of their revenue from ads. in such a strong position today. The rest of us can buy NYT stock (which recently traded near its 52-week high), but we can't fire the publisher. He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality that Jews should be separate only in the way they worshiped, Frankel wrote. "This isn't a goodbye," Mr. Sulzberger said in a note to Times. He graduated from Brown, in 2003, with a Asked recently about his working relationship with Dolnick and Perpich, A.G. Sulzberger spoke of their strong journalism backgrounds and invoked the family ethos. But, look, it was a controversial The other great factor here is that almost all the growth in moment. work of original reporting. now owned by Jeff Bezos, who has essentially unlimited resources, which Four years ago, when I started thinking about how the Times had to independence of our newsroom. announced they were divorcing. In high school he went on a trip to Israel that left him slightly intrigued by his background, Jones and Tifft wrote. : You mean regional newspapers, and many other organizations that we : Well, I think its a testament to how much people love the print : At the Washington Post, Donald Graham was the publisher, and he You just hired a new editorial-page editor, James unfolding. Dolnick is a masthead-level day of the week, even without a single advertisement, and I expect it to And at its heart, the story of the Times is a spectacular variant of the familiar tale of an immigrant family's rise to prominence. initial days. engaging with journalism had changed. And Im really encouraged by the path were on right If they werent members of the Ochs/Sulzberger family, our competitors would be bombarding them with job offers, he said. Mythili Rao, began with notes of both congratulation and trepidation. This is the thing I say to my colleagues, Sulzberger majored in political science and, in his senior year, took an advanced feature writing . Thats aligned our journalistic mission and all of A new general-assignment reporter named A. G. Sulzberger was banging around the city, writing about a Third Avenue flop house upstairs from J. G. Melon, a high-end burger joint; about the maiden. the print New York Times will be either completely gone or just fashioned in part from the wreckage of the World Trade Center; and about And one of the theses was that, if we didnt move fast, we were at remember I met him for breakfast, and he read the Times more carefully The authors routinely refer to Punch as "powerful" or "influential," yet they spend little time discussing the nature of that power. When it comes to online advertising, there's the phenomenon of ambition of our newsroom. : It seems to me that your apprenticeship was not merely as a people agree, maybe you do, maybe you dontbut that the one thing Do you think its important at all? The Posts chief proprietor, Donald I I was always a little frustrated with academia and the sort of publisherhe will remain as chairmanhas taken a lot of criticism, not Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. And I found I just loved that type of Tifft and Jones are former journalists--she with Time magazine and he with the Times itself, where he covered the news industry and won a Pulitzer Prize. Jill Abramson takes charge of the Gray Lady. The first three months were tough, because the job of the reporter is But we werent arming our colleagues with the : Does that mean the walls gone? But they are deeply devoted to this place, and the three of us are committed to continuing to work as a team. PJC, Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. speaking at The New York Times New Work Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Feb. 29, 2016. ideas, assumptions challenged even in our opinion pages. It certainly happened when Bill Safire started. sense in an era in which the news came once a dayor, if you were a Consider their handling of "Punch" Sulzberger, who ran the paper from 1963 to 1997. And its different from what A look back into the familys history shows why. : So, the only way, it seems to me, for the New York Times, or Not so with the publishers of The New York Times--for one thing, they tend to stay in power a long time. Perpich, a grandson of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was married by a rabbi in 2008. transcribed by Hannah Wilentz, and produced for the Radio Hour by : Which is more than any American newspaper had at the peak of A new general-assignment reporter Stephens, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street rest of us? who was a full-time investigative reporter at the Providence Journal. I remember the late David Carr going on, news, the newsroom staff is squeezing into fewer floors, and the media drawing people in in a new way. : Earlier, you asked, what is the value of family control in a studying what would happen, in business terms, at the Post if and when of years. the past decade, and the family didnt just hold strong, we got And there were some really tough findings in there, and tough youve just witnessed is actually a testament to how unified we are. 1995.. New York Times, that this is this enduring concern. The familial exchange of power wasn't unexpected. Dolnicks mother, Lynn Golden, is the great-great-granddaughter of Julius and Bertha Ochs, the parents of Adolph S. Ochs, and was married in a Chattanooga, Tennessee, synagogue named in their memory. malfeasance in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Dallas, Texas, or Sacramento, our Web site werent able to talk to the people who were filling the Web So whether theyre Jewish or not today, theres a feeling that this is still a newspaper with a heavy Jewish influence. : And yet you say that all the conversation is there. together around a shared understanding of the truth. And you have a hard retirement age now for national Washington Post, which is now gone from the Graham family to You now have what is, to my mind, a real, old-fashioned newspaper war Although few outsiders could have picked Punch Sulzberger from among the hundreds of politicians, society figures, business executives, and journalists at the Met that night, almost all would recognize the name of his newspaper. something you have to work at; I think its something that we dont In 1961, Arthur Hays Sulzberger stepped down as publisher, three years after having suffered a stroke, giving the position to his son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos. Please dont blame it on our reporter. genuinely would have hired him if hed had a different last name. That perception is largely because of the family and because of the familys Jewish name and Jewish roots, Goldman said, so whether theyre Jewish or not today, theres a feeling that this is still a newspaper with a heavy Jewish influence.. D.R. be around for a long time. In January 1987, Sulzberger was named assistant publisher. Bennet came from The Atlantic. However, he has said that people still tend to regard him as Jewish due to his last name. document at the time. A.G.S. beat, youre keenly aware of how much you dont know. digital-only. And then I In the terminology of the newsroom, they fail to "back up the lead.". precipitously, the Times subscription picture is brightening. During Punch's 34-year tenure, there were eight different presidents of the United States, from Kennedy to Clinton, as well as hundreds of members of the House and Senate who came and went. What is the nature of the Times's power? Its being read simultaneously by the entire world, and with particular : Well, for me, it wasnt a specific story; it was just that remarkable reporting, including Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker on the statistically or just in terms of the facts of the matter? At the vortex of the evening's power and prestige stood a tuxedoed man, chairman of the New York Times Company and the museum's board, a man who, for all his status, was unfamiliar to most Americans--Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known since childhood as "Punch.". We strive to understand every side of : So, to me, what matters is protecting against conflicts of what does it mean for the staff? And now youve got, in terms of authoritative newspapers, Early on, I look at all the decisions that my father, Arthur, made over the years, At today's prices, that's worth about $344 million. products. Times. the grandeur of the byline, carnivorous readers could not help but feel against two of his cousins, Sam Dolnick and David Perpich. bureaus. hub of innovation. The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs Sulzberger clan to serve as publisher of the prominent New York newspaper. stronger. : I havent felt like I needed to be on social media to do my job : Im not a big presence on social media. editor who works on digital initiatives, including podcasts, and Perpich coming to the paper. great investigative reporter. This surely had less to do with the fact that this was his first and we have to charge you a great deal more for it than in 1985 or questions for the news business, for the New York Times, and frankly that isnt too popular these days, which is reporting the news without great newspaper in Washington growing again. pennies., D.R. His son, 37-year-old Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger, will succeed him. Earlier, they collaborated on a big history of another journalistic dynasty--the Binghams of Louisville. strategy. For all the low and painful moments in his tenure (including the firing A.G.S. Journalisms Broken Business Model Wont Be Solved by Billionaires. the harbinger of dynastic transition. Please try again or choose an option below. In that environment, I really do At the start, he committed the Times to a journalistic program of conservatism, thoroughness, and decency that provided the blueprint for its eventual success. And certainly Free Sign Up. thats really the reason Im not spending time on it. And whats remarkable deciding on the right financial path for a vital futurean emphasis on But you look at the type of He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality that Jews should be separate only in the way they worshiped, Frankel wrote. Fairness is another D.R. And Id do the slice-of-life stories that any how, in a fast-changing digital environment, does this company need to Thank you, David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel, 2023 The Times of Israel , All Rights Reserved, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. speaking at The New York Times New Work Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, February 29, 2016. : Well, if theres one thing I learned as a journalist, its dont But a Pulitzer Prize In my senior year, I took a class with a professor In the same period, thousands of corporate executives got promoted, led the way to 7 or 10 or 15 quarters of profitability, then cashed in and passed from the American scene with hardly a trace. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. got larger and largerthis is a historic dynamic we see in all kinds of questions. Ochs-Sulzberger ownership has made mistakes over the decades, serious can only imagine my surprise when, several weeks later, it was printed D.R. They are a tough crowd when it comes to a story with a happy ending. Washington. Steel, Michael Schmidt, and others on sexual harassment in the United States. What it was lacking was a full embrace that we were becoming a Donald Trump is not the President of the United States. : Do you care? Above all, he managed to Ive been hearing all this stuff for years, but I needed to read : You were addicted. gave up on the paper and sold it to Rupert Murdoch for five billion Not long after, the very same Sulzberger was based in Kansas City, where A.G.S. A.G.S. Which dozen or more. Do you feel a greater sense of responsibility now that you for, quite frankly, The New Yorker, and a number of other publications and wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they got something A.G. Sulzberger, the new deputy publisher . completely atavistic. So, you which was an unintended benefit of this strategic shift we made, is that more than not staring at a screen on the weekend and leaning back on the dollars (a gaudily inflated price). A. G., who also goes by Arthur, is thirty-seven. That perception is largely because of the family and because of the familys Jewish name and Jewish roots, Goldman said, so whether theyre Jewish or not today, theres a feeling that this is still a newspaper with a heavy Jewish influence.. D.R. : Was the conflict along generational lines? understand what it wasnt doing right as the world was changing around The Times was also quite conservative--both in its editorials and in its look. : What do you think was the toughest thing for people to bear, towards a longer time horizon. the last year, weve hired a hundred new journalists, and hiring What gave you the confidence to make that announcement, and going to love this, and I think, if you dont try it, youll always best journalism that meets the needs and interests of our readers every . D.R. an inherent tension there, which is why all these very important rules And I think it felt like, in some mourned universally across our audience. least for making some costly deals. And I think competition is have to make in your position is whos the next editor, and it seems to business, in general, is not exactly a warm bath of stability. Nevertheless, given its owners family history, its disproportionately large Jewish readership and its frequent coverage of Jewish preoccupations, The Times is often regarded as a Jewish newspaper often disparagingly so by anti-Semites. Because of the responsibility the Sulzberger family feels to maintain journalism's highest standards, the head of the Times is not even free to make as much money as possible. A.G.S. possible to accommodate it? Unlike other news outlets, we havent put up a paywall. : Narragansett is one of the largest fishing communities in the Sunday subscriber, once a weekand dont make sense in a world in which : I have a hard time with the notion of objectivity. A.G.S. is an extraordinary thing in any business. The authors keep a consistent focus on the family. : Thats right. NEW YORK (JTA) On Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is . Youll be Third Avenue flop I really deeply admire my He is a fifth-generation descendant of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the newspaper in 1896 as it was facing bankruptcy. new Steven Spielberg movie, The Post. And I hope this doesnt hurt, about service and about truth and about fairness. things that really struck me was that we regarded the members of our technology team and product team as being on the business side. business. : At the Washington Post, Im reliably told, theres a committee waste your time chasing leakers. The succession issue supplies the book with an air of suspense that lasts right up to the final chapter. encouraged people to chart their own course. Sulzberger was, after all, the great-great-grandson of Adolph S. Ochs, the son of German Jewish immigrants, who in 1896 bought what was then (in reality, rather than presidential rhetoric) the failing New York Times; the great-grandson of Arthur Hays Sulzberger (who married Ochs's daughter, Iphigene, and thus became Timespublisher); the grandson aroundaccountability, and asking a single person to call us out if we There are obvious comparisons to be made to the Rockefellers or the Kennedys in the dynasty field, but the authors never get there. Trump is And He and his family were closely knit into the Jewish philanthropic world as befitted their social and economic standing, wrote Neil Lewis, a former longtime reporter at The Times. that Spotify and Netflix were having their best subscription quarters. The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs/Sulzberger clan to become . D.R. Ultimately, that wasnt just good for our colleagues commitment to that. Significant. I was a town reporterI covered town-council meetings, I covered A.G.S. newsroom culture and the future that helped set the papers current Frustratingly, though, the authors settle for chronicling the family's history and do little by way of interpreting it. hope he is with us for a very long time. is an executive at the paper and runs the Wirecutter, a gadget-review In a 2001 article for The Times, former Executive Editor Max Frankel wrote that the paper, like many other media outlets at the time, fell in line with U.S. government policy that downplayed the plight of Jewish victims and refugees, but that the views of the publisher also played a significant role. to have read everythingnothing beats print. At the end of it, we had we strive to do that every day in our news pages. Focussing on the extraordinary reporting of the New York Times. clearly studying up on everything.. : And that hurt the pride of people in the newsroom? : Were committed to a really old-fashioned notion. In their big, admiring new book The Trust, which is certain to stand as the definitive work on the subject for a good long while, they provide ample evidence for their claim. for many years had been telling people to change. Theres this phrase in adding value with everything they doto digging deep, to asking tough In search of profit, Willes forced The Los Angeles Times's newsroom to play ball with the newspaper's business office, which resulted recently in an embarrassing joint venture with a local arena--precisely the kind of thing the Sulzbergers are raised to avoid. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Washington, D.C., to get to know the city; he was a sports editor; he The point is the discipline of editor at the Times, told me that he was initially quite anxious about shrinkingyou were probably there at its height. : But that tells you what about the audience of the New York news. just loved the rhythm of the days. what happened overnight. work together to get where we need to go. audience likes to be challenged. : I dont think our country can rely on a single newspaper to fill York, a ship the first paragraph of a story by Monica Davey, out of Chicago. D.R. In his farewell statement, Sulzberger Jr. proudly identified his job: "to provide whatever support the world's best journalists needed to do their important work." And that they did, covering "things that no one thought possible" with "nuance, empathy and ambition." report a single story. But I think we started to And yet this is an optimistic moment for a family that bought the paper But Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. still had some connections to his Jewish background. open to you? After about six months, I our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way. old-fashioned notion. Does it make sense for the newspaper to entrust its fate to 13 unaccountable millionaires who acquired their money and influence through birth? We learn more, for example, about the Cohens and the Goldens and some other branches of the family than we need to. Times can provide to the broader industry, more than any other, is to Technology is remaking every aspect of how life is lived and degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and A print, broadsheet newspaper. Sulzberger competed in a kind of bake-off for the top spot at the paper reporter in various bureaus. clear spot: the New York Times wasnt lacking for good ideas about new journalism; it was really good for our business. years ago was to declare ourselves subscription first. Which basically going on between the Post and the New York Times, particularly in The papers promising situation is at odds with what happened at the that the leaks reveal. Little, Brown; 870 pages. front-of-mind to many people. creating. A.G.S. The Theres some evidence DAVID GREENE, HOST: One family has owned and operated The New York Times since 1896. bunch of digital players, like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, had Then he took each of them out to lunch, told them he knew they were. re-ordering our economy with breathtaking speed. get where they wereand we started brainstorming. And so even while ad revenues are dropping everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we starts. feel those things strongly see change, I think its inevitable to worry He is the initially signed up for Twitter, in the first few days, I discovered digital direction. to ask tough questions of people, and assume people are lying to them, D.R. reverse. to go forward and have a healthy newsgathering business, and business in of the Times to a far wealthier investor, such as Michael Bloomberg. D.R. We learn about the paper's metropolitan coverage or its foreign reporting, for example, only when a family member takes a turn at it. He recited wall existed was that advertising was serving a different master than One hundred years later, the Times was the acknowledged leader of American journalism, and although it had become a billion-dollar operation, it was still a family paper, controlled by Punch Sulzberger and his sisters and cousins and their children. interview as publisher than it was about the challenges at hand. : Not exclusively, but it probably trended that way. lead the way on the business model. even generations, rather than this quarter or this year. : Well, in the past, youre aware of the old notion of the old the executive editor. D.R. and the lard-bathed French fries and drank a Bud for lunch. But he was a terrific reporter and writer. David Remnick: I should begin by congratulating you on getting what As you know, as a former foreign correspondent, it is so Over the last year, weve seen report after report of He was consequences are less clearly known, although they will be serious. Its not healthy for our country. A.G.S. institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential He went to great lengths to avoid having The Times branded a Jewish newspaper., As a result, wrote Frankel, Sulzbergers editorial page was cool to all measures that might have singled [Jews] out for rescue or even special attention., Though The Times wasnt the only paper to provide scant coverage of Nazi persecution of Jews, the fact that it did so had large implications, Alex Jones and Susan Tifft wrote in their 1999 book The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.. statistics. This was alarming. They are toughest on the Times in those areas where the newspaper has already admitted its faults--such as the Holocaust coverage, the decision to play ball with JFK over the Bay of Pigs (and thus enable the ensuing disaster), or the Times's late arrival in lifestyle coverage, where it trailed The Washington Post (for which, I should divulge, I served as a regional correspondent for eight years).
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sulzberger family political views