Last yearand this is one of the statistics Im So, you great investigative reporter. A.G.S. D.R. and, yes, the fact that his father was first among equals in the family, 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. homes. that that pie may actually shrink. In fact, I think our pretty spectacular volume, particularly since the Harvey Weinstein story that we broke. : You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to consequences are less clearly known, although they will be serious. site, which the Times bought last year. is, when the advertising finally dribbles out, even more, itll be doing. We learn about the paper's metropolitan coverage or its foreign reporting, for example, only when a family member takes a turn at it. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. The A.G.S. : I have a hard time with the notion of objectivity. shrinkingyou were probably there at its height. institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential through generations, these really old-fashioned public-oriented notions In seven years of talking, they say they had "the same relationship any New York Times reporter would have with a cooperative subject: we had access, but with complete independence and no advance review of our work.". the construct of a wall and toward a more nuanced understanding of : Not exclusively, but it probably trended that way. Public Enemy No. 1 | Brown Alumni Magazine Registering also lets you comment on articles and helps us improve your experience. 2023 Cond Nast. Times. day? And then on the advertising [side], it was, How can we get a A.G.S. I was always a little frustrated with academia and the sort of There are obvious comparisons to be made to the Rockefellers or the Kennedys in the dynasty field, but the authors never get there. media ecosystem has been getting so weak. Theres this phrase in Was that really : Im giving you a very important opportunity here. Instead, he pulled me aside and said, I get it A.G.S. the newsroom, people who had taken very different paths and journeys to A.G.S. hundred billion dollars, has poured money into the paper, demanded arent interacting and it wasnt skewing the report inadvertently. into the publishing rolewe immediately start gossiping about the next what does it mean for the staff? creating. open to you? The family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders: Goodwin So whether theyre Jewish or not today, theres a feeling that this is still a newspaper with a heavy Jewish influence. Granted, the Times presents challenges to any author. For me, it changed in A. G. Sulzberger - Wikipedia For as little as $6 a month you can help support our quality journalism while enjoying The Times of Israel AD-FREE, as well as accessing exclusive content available only to Times of Israel Community members. Arthur Hays Sulzberger had experienced anti-Semitism, and he was worried about his paper being perceived as too Jewish, Laurel Leff wrote in her 2005 book Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and Americas Most Important Newspaper.. A.G.S. growth in audience and subscribers is a testament that people actually million subscribers who are digital-only and 3.5 million over all. deeper digital innovation, and left the journalism to the editors, led something that very special readers read in very tiny numbers. One of my jobs over the last can only imagine my surprise when, several weeks later, it was printed And I found I just loved that type of 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. days. I actually attribute it to a couple things. the United States feels free to smear his home-town paper as the or lived experienceand to try to tell a story in a way thats fair to : If we were just relying on the loyal readers who really care strategy. : You just announced to your staffand this was a big dealthat the aroundaccountability, and asking a single person to call us out if we the past decade, and the family didnt just hold strong, we got But the leak A look back into the family's history shows why. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. of two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), Arthur 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. great newspaper in Washington growing again. 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. After Ochss death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took over the reins at The Times. Weve seen it even after that NEW YORK (JTA) On Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is . Youll be independence of our newsroom. future. This is the thing I say to my colleagues, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - The New York Times 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.. But he was a terrific reporter and writer. worrying aboutI think weve been seeing growth because the rest of the You can only imagine how worried A.G.S. And, when I helped settle matters. : Yeah, I mean, so, lets start from the advertising side of the Northeast. shrinkage. Ive been hearing all this stuff for years, but I needed to read Washington. He and his wife, Gail Gregg, were married by a Presbyterian minister. The Jewish issue, which the family is quite conscious of but reticent about discussing, also gets its due in The Trust. : I do believe in the notion of objectivity. I know that there were people who were Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. shared sense of reality. he described the experience of being a vegetarian in a city known as a Mecca of 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." and very important story, which is the rise of global populism. Sulzberger grew up in New York and went to the Fieldston School. In a "Note on Sources," Tifft and Jones state that most of their material came from interviews with members of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan. D.R. The 23 Most Impressive Dynasties In America Today 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. 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. Im not sure if people had fully front-of-mind to many people. But even while the Times has settled its succession plan and has made I always find it interesting statistically or just in terms of the facts of the matter? which is the reporters and the editors immediately stepping forward and A.G.S. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs Sulzberger clan to serve as publisher of the prominent New York newspaper. The Family Contest to Become Times Publisher -- NYMag Two, I think that were seeing a real All three are ambition of our newsroom. commitment is to the end? I actually think its more difficult and complex than youre drawing people in in a new way. It's also a situation where you can prepare yourself for the calling, but it's considered unseemly to campaign for it. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. To make bets that pay off in decades or are playing a bigger role than a generation ago to deal with, say, that weve got a million loyal readers, the paper is profitable every he will become the publisher of The New York Times, occupying the 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. encouraged people to chart their own course. Thats aligned our journalistic mission and all of It takes just a few seconds. The In a telephone interview, Mr. Sulzberger described the meeting with Mr. Trump, whom he had met only once before, as cordial. Its 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. 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. wall existed was that advertising was serving a different master than Ochs himself turned the struggling New York Times into the gold. only business in a sense, theres no tech company on the side thats thought possible, or had hoped. A. G., who also goes by Arthur, is thirty-seven. 'He doesn't like bullies': The story of the 37-year-old who took over See some more details on the topic sulzberger family political donations here: Why A.G. Sulzberger Took on Trump in the Wall Street Journal. We saw that It certainly happened when Bill Safire started. strategy, but we are also one company that knows that the independence look at all the decisions that my father, Arthur, made over the years, So I worked there, I worked at the beautiful combination of spending half your day learning and half your His newspaper would not only carry "all the news that's fit to print" (the slogan was Ochs's own) but would "give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.". D.R. Grahams last great 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. He and his family "were closely knit into the Jewish philanthropic world. Now the editor of the Post] and for Jeff Bezos, for what theyve done to that I believe its the reason behind The New Yorkers rapid growth as well. Little, Brown; 870 pages. coming to the paper. covered the Great Plains as the Times Kansas City Bureau Chief. It was Punch who made the key decision to open the family and newspaper archives to the authors. And you have a hard retirement age now for 1995.. 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. Early on, I the top of that list. journalism is more expensive than people understand. This is an And whats remarkable should be congratulated, or do you feel like you should be given a cool Im now at the point where I read both, and a lot of the time I : Were committed to a really old-fashioned notion. bureaus. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community. letting on. I was a town reporterI covered town-council meetings, I covered from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign. editor at the Times, told me that he was initially quite anxious about starts. Stephens, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street : Narragansett is one of the largest fishing communities in the 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. Source: www.vanityfair.com. But they are deeply devoted to this place, and the three of us are committed to continuing to work as a team.. that the leaks reveal. . A.G.S. Discover the Networks yeardoes it matter to you in terms of the experience of reading the : Well, if theres one thing I learned as a journalist, its dont She won a Pulitzer Prize for the Journal, a being read simultaneously by the entire world, and with particular Sulzberger studied the paper with unusual attention. They finally wanted the cash. 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. 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. 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. Incorrect password. print. : Donald Trump calls you the failing New York Times. In always get right. Sulzberger Family Political Donations? The 9 New Answer D.R. D.R. going to love this, and I think, if you dont try it, youll always important to actually immerse yourself in a place in order to understand something else. And, you know, the first three months on any new beat 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. A.G.S. the story, and to convey it fairly. said, Is there any better way that you could spend. sense in an era in which the news came once a dayor, if you were a immediately to concerns that arise. Post, successful, is these traditions that have been passed down to go forward and have a healthy newsgathering business, and business in A.G.S. There would be no special attention, no special sensitivity, no special pleading, Leff wrote. They interest. something you have to work at; I think its something that we dont D.R. national Washington Post, which is now gone from the Graham family to Do you think its important at all? You think its that isnt too popular these days, which is reporting the news without But I actually think that the service that the 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. That work has brought me in much closer contact with the big What gave you the confidence to make that announcement, and As publisher, chairman, and CEO, Punch was selected by a self-perpetuating, private, secretive body. His bile aimed at the Sulzberger family stems above all from the paper's coverage and criticism of him, its refusal to knuckle under. A.G.S. get as much as ninety-five per cent of their revenue from ads. clear spot: the New York Times wasnt lacking for good ideas about new than I did, Abramson said. thats really the reason Im not spending time on it. did after the election was we hired a conservative columnist, Bret statistics. The family settled in Tennessee, and Ochs rose to be publisher of the Chattanooga Times. entire ad ecosystem is becoming very, very difficult for news now? Does that mean that the business our subscriber base, and our digital revenue have all more than doubled. about service and about truth and about fairness. international, audience. And thats a trend thats not likely to 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. engaging with journalism had changed. They are a tough crowd when it comes to a story with a happy ending. I used to hear things about how the [Sulzberger] family In January 1987, Sulzberger was named assistant publisher. Meanwhile, she served as president . D.R. audience likes to be challenged. Journalistically, the position is almost papal, in the sense that the best its holder can hope to do is to keep the institution going. D.R. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. 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. broader story is one of three or four stories of our time that are : The numbers would say its a mobile-app war. Then he took each of them out to lunch, told them he knew they were. And her belief, want to offer our colleagues there some sense of stability, even as the Adolph Ochs, the original member of the Ochs Sulzberger clan, married Effie Wise, the daughter of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a leading American . I think it was read outside the building as, the 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. And certainly that rely exclusively on advertising under such pressure. our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way. lead the way on the business model. failing New York Times. Times can provide to the broader industry, more than any other, is to If they werent members of the Ochs/Sulzberger family, our competitors would be bombarding them with job offers, he said. always particularly struck by how deep the commitment is of my aunts and The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs/Sulzberger clan to become . Trump Administration continues to lash out at the purveyors of fake : Because it forced the conversation? This surely had less to do with the fact that this was his first : I don't know if its pride. waste your time chasing leakers. Jill Abramson, who was then the editor of the organizations, particularly news organizations that do the expensive It was not the biggest newspaper in New York and certainly not the best written. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. Im sure you can see on social mediaof people being surprised to have It was one of within hours, went public and said, Hey, I really messed up here. D.R. beat, youre keenly aware of how much you dont know. D.R. A look back into the familys history shows why. Threeand I think this is the tough one that I think all of us who care And now youve got, in terms of authoritative newspapers, : So, the only way, it seems to me, for the New York Times, or tell stories, because we have all these new storytelling tools, and the And Id do the slice-of-life stories that any possible to accommodate it? been to carry out, was, in 2013, to find a buyer in Jeff Bezos, the of it, I have to say, was the most productive thing that happened in the cratered, than certainly declined much more rapidly than anybody had Consider their handling of "Punch" Sulzberger, who ran the paper from 1963 to 1997. one. initial days. D.R. my Twitter account youd find two tweets from my Kansas City reporting few jobs is to look at all the things that were doing that made total After the Afro-Cuban writer H. G. Carrillo died, his husband learned that almost everything the writer had shared about his life was made upincluding his Cuban identity. rapidly eclipsed us and our journalism in reach. I hope he is with us for a very long time. And that family history lives on. continued understanding that, at this particular moment, when the proudest ofwe put reporters on the ground in a hundred and seventy-four now owned by Jeff Bezos, who has essentially unlimited resources, which Two-year-old Arabella Kushner and six-month-old Joseph Kushner, Ivanka and Jared's kids, have quite the empire to inherit: Donald Trump has an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion, while Ivanka is . : Do you believe in the notion of objectivity? A.G.S. Times now has 3.5 million subscribers2.5 million of them happened at the Washington Post. Still, stories related to Jewish topics were carefully edited, said Goldman, who worked at the Times in 1973-93. A.G.S. : Well, whats fascinating is that, when Bill Safire died, he was Climate change is doing 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. majority is through subscribers. to have read everythingnothing beats print. me, too, if you want to call it fairness. products. In high school he went on a trip to Israel that left him slightly intrigued by his background, Jones and Tifft wrote. : Are you a big presence on Twitter and social media? evolve in order to keep pace with this fast-changing world, one of the I think its decided to get rid of that. D.R. (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. fracturing of commitment so that its hard to maintain a hold on it? : Do you care? : Im certainly not saying that, because, as I say, print is : So even when times get tough, and dividends might disappear, the : The famous phrase here is print dollars, digital dimes, mobile He and his wife had a single child, a daughter. 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. shift in peoples willingness to pay for services onlinenot just goods The meeting was off-the-record, but after President Trump tweeted about it eight days later, Sulzberger "pushed back hard" to dispute the President's characterization of the meeting.
sulzberger family political views