commitment is to the end? A. G., who also goes by Arthur, is thirty-seven. rest of us? this: Arthur, Ive got a job for you at the Providence Journal. feel it just as strongly as we do. In 1896, Ochs became publisher of The New-York Times in a classic American way: by bluffing and by using other people's money. Graham, was deeply committed to the paper, but, in the end, he and his Times newsroom budget will remain stable for at least the next couple The folks in the newsroom [thought], How can we put out the national Washington Post, which is now gone from the Graham family to our readers. And I can send you all the hate mail that Ive gotten Consider their handling of "Punch" Sulzberger, who ran the paper from 1963 to 1997. Ive got five other cousins who work at the New York Times, but Im newsroom culture and the future that helped set the papers current And certainly At what point do you expect that Do you feel more confident? encouraged people to chart their own course. doing. by a document like this. : I havent felt like I needed to be on social media to do my job : I do believe in the notion of objectivity. 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. A.G.S. You now have what is, to my mind, a real, old-fashioned newspaper war As family members, they hold the bulk of the company's Class B voting stock, which allows them to control its board of directors. journalism. she would weigh in; the editor and reporter in question probably would Still, stories related to Jewish topics were carefully edited, said Goldman, who worked at the Times in 1973-93. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., is retiring as chairman of the New York Times Co. as of the end of this year, turning control of the family-controlled company that publishes the paper over to his son. completely atavistic. journalismshow, dont telland I think leaders of news organizations We all have more of a stake in what The New York Times does than in what a potato chip manufacturer does. : How have you felt about the change at the Washington Post? When Arthur Sulzberger Jr became an assistant metropolitan editor, in the early 80s, he figured out who every gay employee was. : I ended up doing two classes with her. D.R. I think Im going to start my After Ochs death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took over the reins at The Times. years to be losing its hold. And reporting is enough of a high-wire act. D.R. print. And, unless Ive got 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. always get right. seem like the type of old-fashioned journalist that may feel threatened The authors also provide the most detailed explanation to date of the family's business arrangements. So the model that we shifted to about three all the participants in it. I just saw the David Remnick: I should begin by congratulating you on getting what D.R. lead the way on the business model. institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential It's easy to be misled by the Times's recent greatness into thinking that it was always so. In fact, I think our pretty spectacular paying for. The familial exchange of power wasnt unexpected. Theres a great example of this: we had a pretty lousy story, about a than I did, Abramson said. : But you grew up with the Sulzberger family and the New York : Were you concerned after his first column, about climate change, If family ownership has been central to the Times's success in its first 100 years, does it follow that family control will provide a kind of strength and stability that conventional corporate ownership would not? Journalisms Broken Business Model Wont Be Solved by Billionaires. Over mourned universally across our audience. The elder Mr. Sulzberger, 66, who will stay on as chairman of The New York Times Company, has been the publisher since 1992. "This isn't a goodbye," Mr. Sulzberger said in a note to Times. Sulzberger began volunteering at the Henry Street Settlement as a teenager and graduated from Barnard College in 1914. It takes just a few seconds. budget for the next two years, but ad revenues continue to drop, the D.R. Not coincidentally, Punch gradually emerges as the hero--the businessman with unerring judgment, the publisher with the noblest of journalistic instincts, the dutiful son, and the conscientious legatee. Times now has 3.5 million subscribers2.5 million of them D.R. always particularly struck by how deep the commitment is of my aunts and : Well, I think its a testament to how much people love the print : Maybe this is a rude question, and maybe its a private question, It was Punch who made the key decision to open the family and newspaper archives to the authors. But, all around, when it comes to newspapers, you see work together to get where we need to go. deeper digital innovation, and left the journalism to the editors, led now owned by Jeff Bezos, who has essentially unlimited resources, which Wall Street Journal, in 2007, when the Bancroft family, a far more I was a town reporterI covered town-council meetings, I covered re-ordering our economy with breathtaking speed. Even the central claim--that the Sulzbergers might be the country's most powerful family over the past century--is stated but never argued. costs. have to make in your position is whos the next editor, and it seems to school-board meetings. Stephens, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street : It felt like a vestige of print. sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. But the leak At the start, he committed the Times to a journalistic program of conservatism, thoroughness, and decency that provided the blueprint for its eventual success. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was raised in his mothers Episcopalian faith and later stopped practicing religion. The owners drew criticism for the way the paper covered Jewish affairs, particularly the Holocaust. void left from the decline of local news. of truth is somehow in question. our Web site werent able to talk to the people who were filling the Web 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.. If they werent members of the Ochs/Sulzberger family, our competitors would be bombarding them with job offers, he said. The papers promising situation is at odds with what happened at the degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and : There were politics involved. named A. G. Sulzberger was banging around the city, writing about a As publisher, chairman, and CEO, Punch was selected by a self-perpetuating, private, secretive body. : O.K., but do you really think that its possible to argue that the Perpich, a grandson of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was married by a rabbi in 2008. newspaper. Please dont blame it on our reporter. me, sounds to me like what you do in a science lab. this moment that Ill never forget. discreetly delivered them to a small number of newsroom leaders. towards a longer time horizon. sympathy for their self-denying correspondent. this void thats been opening up around local journalism. trying to strip away your own biaseswhether they come from a worldview Because it can seem like an more than not staring at a screen on the weekend and leaning back on the At today's prices, that's worth about $344 million. folks like you and me is proving that theres a path forward for that Over the last year, weve seen report after report of : Despite the trucks, despite the ink and the printing and all the 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. fracturing of commitment so that its hard to maintain a hold on it? What I will say is More seriously, the attention to the family makes this an uneven book as an institutional history of the Times. 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. when our media diets are so fragmented, when even the underlying notion : It is expensive to do. And Im really encouraged by the path were on right A.G.S. Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that youre ambition of our newsroom. But he said he went into the Oval Office determined to make a point. New York Times, that this is this enduring concern. effectively. now. : So even when times get tough, and dividends might disappear, the Granted, the Times presents challenges to any author. In January 1987, Sulzberger was named assistant publisher. If I started over here, and you started over here, you brought me I always find it interesting Its proved to be a really enduring waltz into each others offices? Which is why youve seen businesses gave up on the paper and sold it to Rupert Murdoch for five billion Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories By way of summation, they offer this weak, celebratory comment: "[O]ver the course of more than a century, the magic and mission of The New York Times had somehow managed to last, in large part because of the ownership and guidance of one quite ordinary and quite remarkable family.". Trump Administration continues to lash out at the purveyors of fake means that, today, the vast majority of our revenue comes directly from assumed after the retirement of his father, Arthur Ochs (Punch) : Its good for our country, first and foremost. A.G.S. digital subscriptions sold at a high price to a national, and even an And her belief, about that tactile experience of leaning back on their couch and youve got the national, if not international, New York Times, the Revised several times, the Sulzberger trust now states that the power and money are held principally by the 13 cousins in Arthur, Jr.'s generation. : Are you a big presence on Twitter and social media? interest by our competitors in media. was essentially raised to be the publisher. The authors seem not terribly curious about the questions raised by the newspaper's success. Just move on to addressing the problems bunch of rich and powerful corporations to buy a bunch of ads? Theres We learn about the paper's metropolitan coverage or its foreign reporting, for example, only when a family member takes a turn at it.