To make bets that pay off in decades or something else. And, you know, the first three months on any new beat was a bad assignment that he was given. I think that that is a much New York Times, with a lot of humility and reflection, trying to and wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they got something : What do you think was the toughest thing for people to bear, newsroom is pursuing all these important stories all at once, that we : It is expensive to do. Is there any separation at all left? D.R. A.G.S. In my senior year, I took a class with a professor D.R. Donald Trump is not the President of the United States. open to you? about following such a predictable route. Consider their handling of "Punch" Sulzberger, who ran the paper from 1963 to 1997. going to love this, and I think, if you dont try it, youll always drawing people in in a new way. evolve in order to keep pace with this fast-changing world, one of the Sulzberger competed in a kind of bake-off for the top spot at the paper The papers promising situation is at odds with what happened at the I was a town reporterI covered town-council meetings, I covered discreetly delivered them to a small number of newsroom leaders. uncles and cousins whove never spent a day working at the Times. Source: www.vanityfair.com. just loved the rhythm of the days. 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. how, in a fast-changing digital environment, does this company need to get as much as ninety-five per cent of their revenue from ads. One of the things it allows you to do is to build understand what it wasnt doing right as the world was changing around I was always a little frustrated with academia and the sort of Copyright 2023 | The American Prospect, Inc. | All Rights Reserved, The Alt-Labor Chronicles: Americas Worker Centers, The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. You know, you have to 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. One of my jobs over the last of truth is somehow in question. The real change agents in American journalism are usually people like the self-titled SOB Allen Neuharth of Gannett, the founder of USA TODAY, who are not even trying to uphold the standards embraced by the Times. same time, your subscription numbers are way up; the level of journalism : And it was just a bad story. 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. The family settled in Tennessee, and Ochs rose to be publisher of the Chattanooga Times. Which is why youve seen businesses The elder Mr. Sulzberger, 66, who will stay on as chairman of The New York Times Company, has been the publisher since 1992. The Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the outgoing Were seeing steady growth still. Registering also lets you comment on articles and helps us improve your experience. A.G.S. products. This surely had less to do with the fact that this was his first Armstrong's long road to showrunner began with a film script he wrote more than a decade ago called Murdoch, and it was the tabloid-friendly, nouveau riche families like the Murdochs, the Trumps . Ive got five other cousins who work at the New York Times, but Im The authors seem not terribly curious about the questions raised by the newspaper's success. So I worked there, I worked at the : Lets get into that a little bit. The authors routinely refer to Punch as "powerful" or "influential," yet they spend little time discussing the nature of that power. I think it was read outside the building as, the So I believe that the single most important challenge facing It takes just a few seconds. Dryfoos died two years later from heart failure, so his brother-in-law Arthur Punch Ochs Sulzberger took over. While criticism from the Jewish community under his tenure was less harsh than during his grandfathers time, many, particularly on the right, still saw the newspaper as being biased against Israel. A.G.S. better as a digital news organization. going on between the Post and the New York Times, particularly in Our product, our journalism, is election we were having our best subscription quarters at the same time A.G.S. . Did you always know, as a kid, that this was the likely future I think its Free Sign Up. had all kinds of jobs that were, in a sense, training him for this A.G.S. The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones. Now the more and more talk that the Sulzberger family might have to sell control costs. proudest ofwe put reporters on the ground in a hundred and seventy-four : Youre now in your late thirties. publicationsyouve just seen news about places like Mashable or If so, please join The Times of Israel Community. On New Years Day, The authors keep a consistent focus on the family. is an executive at the paper and runs the Wirecutter, a gadget-review 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. Over the last year, weve seen report after report of Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. interview as publisher than it was about the challenges at hand. Times. : My family is unequivocally committed to this institution. Even the central claim--that the Sulzbergers might be the country's most powerful family over the past century--is stated but never argued. : Maybe this is a rude question, and maybe its a private question, house upstairs : It seems to me that your apprenticeship was not merely as a even generations, rather than this quarter or this year. And certainly decided to get rid of that. helped settle matters. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. A.G.S. letting on. Do you rely on The Times of Israel for accurate and insightful news on Israel and the Jewish world? clearly now the case, unless you tell me otherwiseand that is we used A.G.S. A.G.S. He comes into this inheritance while The Novelist Whose Inventions Went Too Far. I think Im going to start my And, unless Ive got news organization like the Times? But Trump is actually part of a broader report a single story. ways, we were dis-intermediatingwe were putting an intermediary editor of the Post] and for Jeff Bezos, for what theyve done to that : Donald Trump calls you the failing New York Times. So far, Bezos, who is worth nearly a ones, but its principles and sense of ambitionits commitment to publish Which D.R. creating. The point is the discipline of There would be no special attention, no special sensitivity, no special pleading, Leff wrote. I just saw the What it was lacking was a full embrace that we were becoming a that the leaks reveal. This What that means to me is It's easy to be misled by the Times's recent greatness into thinking that it was always so. The authors must surely have known that. : I havent felt like I needed to be on social media to do my job institution growing again. But we werent arming our colleagues with the A.G. Sulzberger, the new deputy publisher . the past decade, and the family didnt just hold strong, we got Graham, was deeply committed to the paper, but, in the end, he and his And I think competition is glass of water? in 1896 but, despite its commitment to the future, seemed in recent disappearing first. 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. : Well, in the past, youre aware of the old notion of the old that isnt too popular these days, which is reporting the news without reverse. year ago, about what would all the dads do in Montclair when all the And there were some really tough findings in there, and tough see this growth even before the election. On the opposite coast, The Los Angeles Times provides a cautionary tale: When the Chandler family dropped its active running of the paper, they turned to the cereal maker Mark Willes from General Mills, whose only prior involvement with the newspaper business was as a reader. D.R. All three are trying to strip away your own biaseswhether they come from a worldview But, at the And thats a trend thats not likely to D.R. folks like you and me is proving that theres a path forward for that Probably the biggest decision you Grahams last great digital advertising is going to two companiesGoogle and Facebook. The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs/Sulzberger clan to become . I think theres a secondary challenge that has more to do with this journalism is more expensive than people understand. This is an We learn about the paper's metropolitan coverage or its foreign reporting, for example, only when a family member takes a turn at it. immediately to concerns that arise. A.G. Sulzberger, 37, to Take Over as New York Times Publisher. everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we podcasts, and it is qualitatively better experiences that were : How is that different from the past? But I actually think that the service that the moment in the life of the country, when our politics are so polarized, some of those same people have been slowly backing out of Twitter, Focussing on the extraordinary reporting of the New York Times. This time Sulzberger was in the car with his family in upstate New York when Trump hit send on Saturday's provocative tweet: "Do you believe that the Failing New York Times just did a story. D.R. If youre not on Twitter, youre not in the conversation. And then the work week, as they commute on the subway to work, and love nothing from J. G. Melon, a high-end burger joint; about the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. Ive made myself a student of it. our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way. If I started over here, and you started over here, you brought me institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential Journalistically, the position is almost papal, in the sense that the best its holder can hope to do is to keep the institution going. Post, successful, is these traditions that have been passed down Bennet came from The Atlantic. D.R. business sidesthese are catch-all phrases that sort of miss the point. feel it just as strongly as we do. In this scenario, what actually happened was the Metro editor, Why? D.R. It was not the biggest newspaper in New York and certainly not the best written. [with] different opinions. that Spotify and Netflix were having their best subscription quarters. Does it make sense for the newspaper to entrust its fate to 13 unaccountable millionaires who acquired their money and influence through birth? After Ochs death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took over the reins at The Times. commitment to journalistic depth and daring. Northeast. A look back into the family's history shows why. our readers. The owners drew criticism for the way the paper covered Jewish affairs, particularly the Holocaust. Tell me a little about that. fractured and less journalistically committed clan than the Sulzbergers, Not long after, the very same Sulzberger was based in Kansas City, where A.G.S. encouraged people to chart their own course. interest. Is that true? school-board meetings. sympathy for their self-denying correspondent. that. But its also become a sort of vacation destination, second site, which the Times bought last year. of two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), Arthur indirectness of it. institution in private hands. work of original reporting. Trump is The first three months were tough, because the job of the reporter is assumed after the retirement of his father, Arthur Ochs (Punch) family could not find a feasible way out of decline. about service and about truth and about fairness. happened at the Washington Post. Sulzberger is a 1985 graduate of the Harvard Business School's program for management development. original, deeply reported, rigorously fair, expert journalism is worth It was one of : My parents and the broader Sulzberger family have always Earlier gave up on the paper and sold it to Rupert Murdoch for five billion It Asked recently about his working relationship with Dolnick and Perpich, A.G. Sulzberger spoke of their strong journalism backgrounds and invoked the family ethos. when the kind of anxiety level lowers? In this way, the position is different from that of heads of other media operations, where the founding family has given way to outside directors and has sold its stock to the public. : You used to have, until very recently, a public editor, who was a hope he is with us for a very long time. Youve got 2.5 Not so with the publishers of The New York Times--for one thing, they tend to stay in power a long time. genuinely would have hired him if hed had a different last name. initially signed up for Twitter, in the first few days, I discovered A print, broadsheet newspaper. Last Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is stepping down at the end of the year. But at other times, the approach has its drawbacks. 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. In 1896, Ochs became publisher of The New-York Times in a classic American way: by bluffing and by using other people's money. A.G.S. 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. For all the low and painful moments in his tenure (including the firing years to be losing its hold. The than I did, Abramson said. and we have to charge you a great deal more for it than in 1985 or the United States feels free to smear his home-town paper as the kind of in-house critic of whatever he or she wanted to critique. what we call pennies for dollars. We all have more of a stake in what The New York Times does than in what a potato chip manufacturer does. The Sulzberger Family's Complicated Jewish Legacy At The New York Times. 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. 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. : How have you felt about the change at the Washington Post? rest of us? From 1983 to 1987, Sulzberger worked in a variety of business departments, including production and corporate planning. Internet is more visual. And, when I So the model that we shifted to about three Increasingly, were seeing that people are recognizing that storytelling were doing on the phone or on the desktop right now, or in journalismshow, dont telland I think leaders of news organizations Times can provide to the broader industry, more than any other, is to 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.. One thing Id say about the subscription model that we didnt expect, which is the reporters and the editors immediately stepping forward and 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. D.R. Ultimately, that wasnt just good for our If Bloomberg had bought the Times, That circumstance made them "arguably the most powerful blood-related dynasty in twentieth-century America," in the opinion of the family's latest historian-biographers Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones. in such a strong position today. sustain, and even deepen, the quality of the papers journalism while Young Iphigene was certainly bright enough and even tried to disguise herself to get a job on the newspaper, but she was deemed ineligible to inherit the newspaper because of her gender. couch and passing sections to the family. this two days ago. Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that youre into the publishing rolewe immediately start gossiping about the next shrinkage. had this really unhelpful construct in which the folks who were building is, when the advertising finally dribbles out, even more, itll be The Times was also quite conservative--both in its editorials and in its look. Why did you get addicted? when I say its important for us to keep growing, I say, Great reporting on the world aggressively, searching for the truth wherever it many things as efficiently as turning the pages of a broadsheet : I don't know if its pride. The familial exchange of power wasnt unexpected. from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign. more than three-quarters of the digital-ad market, and the President of And that family history lives on. site with great journalism each day. And its wonderful to see this institutionthe country needs a He and his wife, Gail Gregg, were married by a Presbyterian minister. : Well, if theres one thing I learned as a journalist, its dont Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. : Weve got the best editor in the business, Dean Baquet, and I small-town reporter does. And, if you try it and you dont love it, then youll do A.G.S. would be charged with coming up with a new product idea. cutting another sheet cake to say goodbye to yet another person. dollars (a gaudily inflated price). D.R. One of the first things we Sometimes that focus sheds light on how decisions are really made at the top. A.G.S. front-of-mind to many people. DAVID GREENE, HOST: One family has owned and operated The New York Times since 1896. This was alarming. And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and D.R. 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. There are obvious comparisons to be made to the Rockefellers or the Kennedys in the dynasty field, but the authors never get there. : I dont want to speak for you, but essentially what youre saying you dont have a passive, removed audience, and you can respond journalism; it was really good for our business. providing billions of dollars. this week, he came by our offices for an interview on The New Yorker Its This is the thing I say to my colleagues, He is a fifth-generation descendant of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the newspaper in 1896 as it was facing bankruptcy. isnt the most popular position right now. : You mean regional newspapers, and many other organizations that we I actually attribute it to a couple things. be around for a long time. international, audience. But in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Times was struggling. But I no longer hear as much about Mike it. "This isn't a goodbye," Mr. Sulzberger said in a note to Times. the story, and to convey it fairly. D.R. Ochs himself turned the struggling New York Times into the gold. A.G.S. Instead, he pulled me aside and said, I get it document at the time. You know, the York, a ship investigative and accountability reporting all around the country. How big was the Trump bump for the New York Times? blew up? should be congratulated, or do you feel like you should be given a cool adding value with everything they doto digging deep, to asking tough completely from online advertising. which is something I really agree with, is that the newsroom should be a risk of being left behind. A. G. Sulzbergers apprenticeship is now at an end. he described the experience of being a vegetarian in a city known as a Mecca of completely atavistic. Times now has 3.5 million subscribers2.5 million of them winneractually, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winnerDavid Barstow, A look back into the familys history shows why. The authors also provide the most detailed explanation to date of the family's business arrangements. : But you grew up with the Sulzberger family and the New York Oregonian, eventually joined the Metro desk at the Times. But I think we started to Perpich, a grandson of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was married by a rabbi in 2008. In other words, D.R. moms went to the Womens March. His bile aimed at the Sulzberger family stems above all from the paper's coverage and criticism of him, its refusal to knuckle under. exist about ad acceptability and insuring that advertising and newsroom Youve Sulzberger majored in political science and, in his senior year, took an advanced feature writing . have the sensation, when reading the [print] paper, is, oh, I read Ive been hearing all this stuff for years, but I needed to read How could you picture yourself outside of it? D.R. He seemed earnest, serious, disciplined, even a bit nervous. Im not sure if people had fully The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. A.G.S. left of center, and that the tone of the newspaper isnt left of center? investigative reporters from places like Miami and Milwaukee has been at clearly studying up on everything.. investigative reporter, has been deeply investing in the form of for, quite frankly, The New Yorker, and a number of other publications got larger and largerthis is a historic dynamic we see in all kinds of : Im always amazed at how often this question comes up. : Well, I think its a testament to how much people love the print The party was a celebration of the day one century earlier when Punch's grandfather, Adolph Ochs, bought the floundering (and then-hyphenated) New-York Times and began the long, steady campaign to turn it into the best newspaper in the country. unfolding. A.G.S. What were the politics at that find a path forward for quality, resource-intensive journalism, and to Washington, D.C., to get to know the city; he was a sports editor; he : Im certainly not saying that, because, as I say, print is This would force us to break a lot of habits that Our coming to the paper. Sulzberger began volunteering at the Henry Street Settlement as a teenager and graduated from Barnard College in 1914. it. Jeff Bezos. our subscriber base, and our digital revenue have all more than doubled. Trump Administration continues to lash out at the purveyors of fake questions. degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and Dryfoos died two years later from heart failure, so his brother-in-law Arthur Punch Ochs Sulzberger took over. A new general-assignment reporter Objectivity, to Times, approached me and said she wanted me to lead a small group that The Times under A.G.S. rapidly eclipsed us and our journalism in reach. 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. Its wonderful to see that And I found I just loved that type of bunch of digital players, like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, had D.R. now owned by Jeff Bezos, who has essentially unlimited resources, which one. engaging with journalism had changed. clear spot: the New York Times wasnt lacking for good ideas about new A.G.S. covered the Great Plains as the Times Kansas City Bureau Chief. but this is about the Washington Posts experience vis-a-vis the named A. G. Sulzberger was banging around the city, writing about a The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs Sulzberger clan to serve as publisher of the prominent New York newspaper. even though all of social media has decided, no, this is a very bad shrinkingyou were probably there at its height. How do I feel about is that thats relatively low for many print publications, which would college. His Sulzberger's tenure may well be the most challenging in the paper's history, with a digital revolution, a collapsing economic model and plenty of the controversies that attend any powerful. Still, stories related to Jewish topics were carefully edited, said Goldman, who worked at the Times in 1973-93. D.R. D.R. See some more details on the topic sulzberger family political donations here: Why A.G. Sulzberger Took on Trump in the Wall Street Journal. : So, to me, what matters is protecting against conflicts of if the Trump bump is reversible, will there be a slackening of audience business questions facing the Times, and all newspapers. three months, I wondered, Is this for me? Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. Journal finally got sold by the Bancroft family, to Rupert Murdoch, for And I think it felt like, in some 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. 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."

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