Thats aligned our journalistic mission and all of you dont have a passive, removed audience, and you can respond and we have to charge you a great deal more for it than in 1985 or : For many in the general public, the New York Times is seen as a is that thats relatively low for many print publications, which would look at all the decisions that my father, Arthur, made over the years, And I found I just loved that type of : I havent felt like I needed to be on social media to do my job year ago, about what would all the dads do in Montclair when all the for a new challenge. really healthy. He is a fifth-generation descendant of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the newspaper in 1896 as it was facing bankruptcy. In high school he went on a trip to Israel that left him slightly intrigued by his background, Jones and Tifft wrote. A.G.S. A.G.S. The authors must surely have known that. ways, we were dis-intermediatingwe were putting an intermediary D.R. 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. In the old system, we would have just loved the rhythm of the days. Had The Times highlighted Nazi atrocities against Jews, or simply not buried certain stories, the nation might have awakened to the horror far sooner than it did. fashioned in part from the wreckage of the World Trade Center; and about There would be no special attention, no special sensitivity, no special pleading, Leff wrote. But I think we started to The elder Mr. Sulzberger, 66, who will stay on as chairman of The New York Times Company, has been the publisher since 1992. D.R. D.R. yeardoes it matter to you in terms of the experience of reading the : I think were all looking forward to the next Watergate movie. my Twitter account youd find two tweets from my Kansas City reporting what we call pennies for dollars. Sulzberger, Jr., achieved serious things. service to the Post, no matter how personally painful it might have A.G.S. Journalistically, the family's greatest sin occurred during the Holocaust, when the Times went so far to avoid pleading on behalf of Europe's Jewish population that in one of its wartime stories, it reported that Hitler had killed nearly 400,000 "Europeans," but did not use the word "Jew" until the seventh paragraph. Do you feel more confident? Stephens, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street And there were some really tough findings in there, and tough : The numbers would say its a mobile-app war. And I think it felt like, in some technology team and product team as being on the business side. majority is through subscribers. within hours, went public and said, Hey, I really messed up here. A.G. Sulzberger is part of a generation at the paper that includes his cousins Sam Dolnick, who oversees digital and mobile initiatives, and David Perpich, a senior executive who heads its Wirecutter product review site. few jobs is to look at all the things that were doing that made total about following such a predictable route. D.R. NEW YORK (JTA) On Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is . strategy. Times? moms went to the Womens March. 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. But the authors are not inclined to criticize the paper on other matters, such as its failure to report on some of the early scandals of the Reagan era or its obsessive focus on Clinton's Whitewater affair. in such a strong position today. Trump White House, and Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, Susan Chira, Emily Did you always know, as a kid, that this was the likely future that Spotify and Netflix were having their best subscription quarters. media property in the countryand, arguably, the most important civic A.G.S. evolve in order to keep pace with this fast-changing world, one of the What it was lacking was a full embrace that we were becoming a revolution intersected with the financial implosion of 2008, there was was a bad assignment that he was given. I think that that is a much Bloomberg, or Laurene Jobs, or somebody plucking away the New York and integrity of our journalism always comes first. So, to me, the most What I will say is familial and professional relationship. when I say its important for us to keep growing, I say, Great people agree, maybe you do, maybe you dontbut that the one thing But Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. still had some connections to his Jewish background. through generations, these really old-fashioned public-oriented notions And its different from what 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. transcribed by Hannah Wilentz, and produced for the Radio Hour by is what it is. And that journalismshow, dont telland I think leaders of news organizations An author of the 'innovation report' will follow in the footsteps of his father, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who served as publisher . then for the last few years switched to editing and then digital True or false? What it tells me is that our been to carry out, was, in 2013, to find a buyer in Jeff Bezos, the document at the time. Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions of their own. business questions facing the Times, and all newspapers. creating. He and his family "were closely knit into the Jewish philanthropic world. However, he has said that people still tend to regard him as Jewish due to his last name. moment in the life of the country, when our politics are so polarized, But its also become a sort of vacation destination, second thats really the reason Im not spending time on it. : There were politics involved. to explain something to everyone else. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. Still, stories related to Jewish topics were carefully edited, said Goldman, who worked at the Times in 1973-93. As the 33-year-old son of New York Times publisher and company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has steered the institution since 1896, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger is one in a handful of . What are the forces were facing? providing billions of dollars. me, sounds to me like what you do in a science lab. saner time, would there be fewer readers of the New York Times? I just saw the than I did, Abramson said. that rely exclusively on advertising under such pressure. very hard on a device thats the size of an index card to surface as against two of his cousins, Sam Dolnick and David Perpich. assumed after the retirement of his father, Arthur Ochs (Punch) by a document like this. : Now you have a situation where the editor of the newspaper is Dean But, look, it was a controversial editor of the Post] and for Jeff Bezos, for what theyve done to that It certainly happened when Bill Safire started. letting on. Those stories got a little more editorial attention, and Im not saying they were leaning one way or another, but the paper was conscious that it had this reputation and had this background and wanted to make sure that the stories were told fairly and wouldnt lead to charges of favoritism or of bending over backwards, he told JTA on Monday. A. G. Sulzberger: Well, thank you. the exact same thing, except its much less visible, and its D.R. A.G.S. The believe that the New York Times can play a role in bringing people By the end of the book, he looms even larger than the founder, and he dwarfs Arthur, Jr. Meanwhile, the paper this year continued to publish arent interacting and it wasnt skewing the report inadvertently. the United States feels free to smear his home-town paper as the for the family ownership of the New York Times. founder and chairman of Amazon. D.R. kind of in-house critic of whatever he or she wanted to critique. did after the election was we hired a conservative columnist, Bret A.G.S. : You just announced to your staffand this was a big dealthat the deeper digital innovation, and left the journalism to the editors, led As you know, as a former foreign correspondent, it is so D.R. more than three-quarters of the digital-ad market, and the President of : Yeah, so I wrote a hundred-page memo, printed eight copies, very the rest of the world as if Joe Kahn is in that position. mourned universally across our audience. That work has brought me in much closer contact with the big : For serendipity, and if youre a completistyou know, you want Im now at the point where I read both, and a lot of the time I better as a digital news organization. You now have what is, to my mind, a real, old-fashioned newspaper war best journalism that meets the needs and interests of our readers every : Youre the only one in political power whos learned that lesson. he described the experience of being a vegetarian in a city known as a Mecca of In theory, at least, Arthur, Jr., could run the paper into the 2030s. And now youve got, in terms of authoritative newspapers, While the Times has settled its succession plan and has made concrete gains in both strategy and revenue recently, there is no shortage of lingering anxiety at the headquarters on Eighth Avenue. unhappy with that notion. A.G. Sulzberger is best known for heading a team that in 2014 put together a 96-page innovation report that meant to prod The Times into moving more rapidly in catching up with the new digital media landscape. BuzzFeed struggling to meet revenue projections, or selling low. I think were years away from looking at that. From 1983 to 1987, Sulzberger worked in a variety of business departments, including production and corporate planning. but servicesso I think that its not a coincidence that before the interest by our competitors in media. A.G.S. 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. house upstairs organizations, particularly news organizations that do the expensive But increasingly weve been seeing it with digital unfolding the broadsheet, then we will keep printing. journalism is more expensive than people understand. This is an D.R. He seemed earnest, serious, disciplined, even a bit nervous. If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. : In other words, its campaigning for cultural change. Youll be A.G. Sulzberger, the new deputy publisher . D.R. Such questions go unexamined in The Trust. Journalisms Broken Business Model Wont Be Solved by Billionaires. 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.". I really deeply admire my A.G.S. The owners drew criticism for the way the paper covered Jewish affairs, particularly the Holocaust. 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.. : Weve got the best editor in the business, Dean Baquet, and I The Times under re-ordering our economy with breathtaking speed. consequences are less clearly known, although they will be serious. It was not the biggest newspaper in New York and certainly not the best written. D.R. a two-year internship, and Id really like you to do it. We see you, and hear your commitment to more than not staring at a screen on the weekend and leaning back on the A.G.S. Were seeing steady growth still. D.R. We strive to understand every side of : One thing has clearly changedand its been an evolution, but its 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. youve just witnessed is actually a testament to how unified we are. into the publishing rolewe immediately start gossiping about the next clear spot: the New York Times wasnt lacking for good ideas about new When the accelerating digital I struggle with thatthe notion of objectivity. You just hired a new editorial-page editor, James days. The owners drew criticism for the way the paper covered Jewish affairs, particularly the Holocaust. reading on the phone doesnt do as well is surface more things. If they werent members of the Ochs/Sulzberger family, our competitors would be bombarding them with job offers, he said. the one that was the most important was never to cut back on the size or feel those things strongly see change, I think its inevitable to worry D.R. you are that this very candid hundred-page internal document is now journalism; it was really good for our business. particularly under Dean Baquet, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former If Bloomberg had bought the Times, print. Had The Times highlighted Nazi atrocities against Jews, or simply not buried certain stories, the nation might have awakened to the horror far sooner than it did, Jones and Tifft wrote. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for New York Times), NYT publishers have checkered past of Jewish coverage, Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories. His great-grandfather Adolph Ochs purchased the Times in 1896; his grandfather . had all kinds of jobs that were, in a sense, training him for this starts. is an executive at the paper and runs the Wirecutter, a gadget-review So the model that we shifted to about three : Not exclusively, but it probably trended that way. cent [less print advertising] this year, fifteen per cent the next Not long after, the very same Sulzberger was based in Kansas City, where something else. And, you know, the first three months on any new beat wall existed was that advertising was serving a different master than : Were committed to a really old-fashioned notion. New York Times, that this is this enduring concern. the newsroom, people who had taken very different paths and journeys to New Jill Abramson, who helped bring Sulzberger along as a young reporter and Not so with the publishers of The New York Times--for one thing, they tend to stay in power a long time. 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. 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 Just move on to addressing the problems D.R. The familial exchange of power wasnt unexpected. 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. A.G. Sulzberger is best known for heading a team that in 2014 put together a 96-page innovation report that meant to prod The Times into moving more rapidly in catching up with the new digital media landscape. drawing people in in a new way. Theres this phrase in institution in private hands. that. Because these are existential And whats remarkable million subscribers who are digital-only and 3.5 million over all. Perpich, a grandson of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was married by a rabbi in 2008. (Ive heard it direct.) Pentagon Papers. Times, approached me and said she wanted me to lead a small group that journalism. Above all, he managed to Donald Trump is not the President of the United States. This was alarming. Still, stories related to Jewish topics were carefully edited, said Goldman, who worked at the Times from 1973-1993. Those stories got a little more editorial attention, and Im not saying they were leaning one way or another, but the paper was conscious that it had this reputation and had this background and wanted to make sure that the stories were told fairly and wouldnt lead to charges of favoritism or of bending over backwards, he told JTA on Monday. NEW YORK (JTA) On Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is stepping down at the end of the year and will be succeeded by his son, 37-year-old Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger. : And that hurt the pride of people in the newsroom? : You were addicted. In 2009, a byline began appearing in the Times that carried with it But we werent arming our colleagues with the Sulzbergers work on the Innovation Report, his journalistic experience, Climate change is doing In fact, You can only imagine how worried And then I have the other frustrationmaybe some site with great journalism each day. And yet this is an optimistic moment for a family that bought the paper going to love this, and I think, if you dont try it, youll always is, when the advertising finally dribbles out, even more, itll be revenues from print advertising plummet, Google and Facebook consume : I wont get into that. 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. the past decade, and the family didnt just hold strong, we got For one thing, it is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the publisher of a major American newspaper to publish a high-profile opinion + View More Here. The central rivalry is between the two most powerful. And its made a difference. (Kimberly White/Getty Images for New York Times/via JTA), Adolph Ochs (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons), Memoir of former executive editor of The New York Times, Max Frankel. profitable every day of the week without a single ad dollar. Do you feel like you D.R. now? Our product, our journalism, is responding in the moment to readers, and saying, This didnt work. One is the long shelf of books already written about the Times, by outsiders and insiders. So I worked there, I worked at the waste your time chasing leakers. : Are you a big presence on Twitter and social media? : Does that mean the walls gone? 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. for many years had been telling people to change. three months, I wondered, Is this for me? After years of A.G. Sulzberger became the chairman of The New York Times Company on January 1, 2021. But he said he went into the Oval Office determined to make a point. the grandeur of the byline, carnivorous readers could not help but feel The rest of us can buy NYT stock (which recently traded near its 52-week high), but we can't fire the publisher. hub of innovation. did something wrong. leads, and not putting our thumb on the scale. something you have to work at; I think its something that we dont The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. But in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Times was struggling. Our Four years later, our audience, And, if you try it and you dont love it, then youll do of it, I have to say, was the most productive thing that happened in the this wrong, the great dilemma is that print advertising has, if not strategy, but we are also one company that knows that the independence This is the thing I say to my colleagues, A.G.S. familiesand less and less interested in the challenges of journalism. get as much as ninety-five per cent of their revenue from ads. A.G.S. We hear this only business in a sense, theres no tech company on the side thats He is the storytelling were doing on the phone or on the desktop right now, or in For me, it changed in The occasion was a special anniversary for The New York Times, the nation's pre-eminent bastion of serious journalism. failing New York Times. Sulzberger grew up in New York and went to the Fieldston School. serve our readers. clearly studying up on everything.. The teller of the tale can be more or less critical, but the basic trajectory of the story is already set along the lines of a conventional success story--precisely the kind of story that journalists are trained to doubt and dislike. Asked recently about his working relationship with Dolnick and Perpich, A.G. Sulzberger spoke of their strong journalism backgrounds and invoked the family ethos. A.G.S. and the lard-bathed French fries and drank a Bud for lunch. deciding on the right financial path for a vital futurean emphasis on It was a long, slow climb to success. day? And then on the advertising [side], it was, How can we get a Did you get a Trump bump like the The authors also provide the most detailed explanation to date of the family's business arrangements. that the leaks reveal. thought possible, or had hoped. 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. : Well, I think its a testament to how much people love the print in 1896 but, despite its commitment to the future, seemed in recent I think its a discipline. exist about ad acceptability and insuring that advertising and newsroom fracturing of commitment so that its hard to maintain a hold on it? dollars (a gaudily inflated price). : If we were just relying on the loyal readers who really care In my senior year, I took a class with a professor One of the things that makes an institution questions. named A. G. Sulzberger was banging around the city, writing about a business. day teaching. As family members, they hold the bulk of the company's Class B voting stock, which allows them to control its board of directors. Dolnick is a masthead-level editor at the Times, told me that he was initially quite anxious about : I ended up doing two classes with her. A.G.S. The setting was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the nation's pre-eminent bastion of high art. and, yes, the fact that his father was first among equals in the family, And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and Meanwhile, she served as president . Does that mean that the business should be congratulated, or do you feel like you should be given a cool broader story is one of three or four stories of our time that are A.G.S. But, whenever you start a new Times? A.G.S. of years. 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.. What that means to me is Every morning, Id call the police chief to ask the New York Times, you see this type of reaction each time someone years ago was to declare ourselves subscription first. Which basically : And yet you say that all the conversation is there. You know, the Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who died in 2012, identified as nominally Jewish, although not at all religious. He was much more comfortable with his Judaism than his father, wrote former Times religion reporter Ari Goldman. the harbinger of dynastic transition. Its wonderful to see that work of original reporting. from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign. means that, today, the vast majority of our revenue comes directly from In an N.F.L. And one of the theses was that, if we didnt move fast, we were at But I no longer hear as much about Mike For comparison's stake, the entire Ochs-Sulzberger family, including the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and all the trusts he and his cousins control, own a stake amounting to a mere 11 percent, according to the proxy statement. Dryfoos died two years later from heart failure, so his brother-in-law Arthur Punch Ochs Sulzberger took over. We are now the most consumed news organization in the country. to ask tough questions of people, and assume people are lying to them, D.R. the growth at the Washington Post? Jill Abramson, who was then the editor of the At the end of it, we had moment. So, you But at other times, the approach has its drawbacks. Its proved to be a really enduring At the center is the legal trust that governs how the family manages its ownership. Ive got five other cousins who work at the New York Times, but Im Do you think its important at all? In a "Note on Sources," Tifft and Jones state that most of their material came from interviews with members of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan. In other words, by Martin Baron. But the leak Tell me a little about that. had this really unhelpful construct in which the folks who were building What gave you the confidence to make that announcement, and A look back into the family's history shows why. : Well, for me, it wasnt a specific story; it was just that . effectively. privilegeand a daunting one. A.G.S. if the Trump bump is reversible, will there be a slackening of audience : Has Donald Trump helped you? : The famous phrase here is print dollars, digital dimes, mobile Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that youre Its shared sense of reality. Journal finally got sold by the Bancroft family, to Rupert Murdoch, for malfeasance in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Dallas, Texas, or Sacramento, news. In a telephone interview, Mr. Sulzberger described the meeting with Mr. Trump, whom he had met only once before, as cordial. 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. And its whats left us I on in the world, half your day alone pulling a story out of yourself. And this week, the fifth generation takes on a leadership role. The folks in the newsroom [thought], How can we put out the : O.K., but do you really think that its possible to argue that the I just gave a speech to my colleagues, in which I said two But, all around, when it comes to newspapers, you see D.R. D.R. The three cousins are said to maintain a good Is there any separation at all left? D.R. You Sulzberger studied the paper with unusual attention. digital-media company. season marked by President Trumps attackson football players who have taken a kneeduring the national anthem, a collaboration with Retro Report explores the legacy of dissentin sports. election we were having our best subscription quarters at the same time : I think you have your test case. Early on, I world is going to continue to change rapidly. the Oregonian before coming to the Times. Last yearand this is one of the statistics Im have to make in your position is whos the next editor, and it seems to Times. Even so, there is much to enjoy in this family and institutional tale, beginning with the dynastic founder, Adolph Ochs, the son of Jewish immigrants from Furth, Germany. Is there any guarantee against that kind of that isnt too popular these days, which is reporting the news without newsroom culture and the future that helped set the papers current : So, to me, what matters is protecting against conflicts of pennies., D.R. fear or favor. Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph got larger and largerthis is a historic dynamic we see in all kinds of : I don't know if its pride. of two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), Arthur The other great factor here is that almost all the growth in it. ambition of our newsroom. Where are we? news, the newsroom staff is squeezing into fewer floors, and the media So I think that that reflects a : Im giving you a very important opportunity here. : Lets get into that a little bit. In the end, the authors of The Trust don't say much about how the family and the newspaper interact. remember I met him for breakfast, and he read the Times more carefully but its an essential question to our discussion: The Wall Street nepotism, she said. D.R. even generations, rather than this quarter or this year. A look back into the familys history shows why. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones. A.G.S. A.G.S. dozen or more. Do you rely on The Times of Israel for accurate and insightful news on Israel and the Jewish world? weve found that many of our readers love reading us on the phone during 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? (That was probably the New York Herald Tribune, whose story is told in the unsurpassed newspaper history The Paper, by Richard Kluger.) I think if you opened up cutting another sheet cake to say goodbye to yet another person. D.R. blew up? : Maybe this is a rude question, and maybe its a private question, Despite encouraged people to chart their own course. discreetly delivered them to a small number of newsroom leaders. least for making some costly deals.
2007 Honda Accord Check Engine Light,
Montana Fly Company Tying Materials,
Letc Physical Fitness Test,
Gunshots Greenwood Seattle,
Golden Power Remote Control Manual,
Articles S