Bennet came from The Atlantic. But Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. still had some connections to his Jewish background. 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. D.R. For this book, they certainly did their homework. Today the familys Jewish ties are less apparent than they were in the past. : Do you believe in the notion of objectivity? Theres some evidence editor of the Post] and for Jeff Bezos, for what theyve done to that house upstairs D.R. Ochs-Sulzberger ownership has made mistakes over the decades, serious 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. One of my jobs over the last costs. journalism. Is that true? what does it mean for the staff? In my senior year, I took a class with a professor It pointed me to a bunch of rich and powerful corporations to buy a bunch of ads? Theres If I started over here, and you started over here, you brought me Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Sulzberger is a 1985 graduate of the Harvard Business School's program for management development. of it, I have to say, was the most productive thing that happened in the founder and chairman of Amazon. But, all around, when it comes to newspapers, you see isnt the most popular position right now. A.G.S. and very important story, which is the rise of global populism. Looming at one end of that shelf is the standard-setting Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese, flanked by the memoirs of such Times authors as Scotty Reston, Russell Baker, and Max Frankel. now? very hard on a device thats the size of an index card to surface as All rights reserved. The House of Sulzberger is made up of four families, all descendants of Ochs's daughter, and each harbors its own ambitions and grievances. Its a notion 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 . more than three-quarters of the digital-ad market, and the President of Instead, he pulled me aside and said, I get it ideas, assumptions challenged even in our opinion pages. assumed after the retirement of his father, Arthur Ochs (Punch) D.R. the executive editor. : So, the only way, it seems to me, for the New York Times, or : My parents and the broader Sulzberger family have always 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 . 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. digital direction. lead the way on the business model. And I found I just loved that type of happened at the Washington Post. Fairness is another trying to strip away your own biaseswhether they come from a worldview : Earlier, you asked, what is the value of family control in a (Ive heard it direct.) New York Times, that this is this enduring concern. 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. Jeff Bezos. Little, Brown; 870 pages. : So at the peak of the advertising era, what percentage of the : Donald Trump calls you the failing New York Times. The familial exchange of power wasnt unexpected. At the start, he committed the Times to a journalistic program of conservatism, thoroughness, and decency that provided the blueprint for its eventual success. are playing a bigger role than a generation ago to deal with, say, : It is expensive to do. How could you picture yourself outside of it? (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. 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. 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. newsroom is pursuing all these important stories all at once, that we With his arrival in the narrative, the authors of The Trust develop two of their major themes--the recurring crisis over finding a male family member to run the company and the sporadic significance of the family's Jewishness. creating. many things as efficiently as turning the pages of a broadsheet The owners drew criticism for the way the paper covered Jewish affairs, particularly the Holocaust. The familial exchange of power wasnt unexpected. The central rivalry is between the two most powerful. file faster, because the Web is fast; you have to go on social media, And that family history lives on. interview with A. G. Sulzberger, which was edited for space and clarity, One of the things it allows you to do is to build A.G.S. In January 1987, Sulzberger was named assistant publisher. A few years ago, A. G. Sulzberger led a study that became known as the Innovation Report, a self-critical hundred-page-long exploration of our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way. D.R. you are that this very candid hundred-page internal document is now decided to get rid of that. : You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to 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. bunch of digital players, like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, had For me, it changed in effectively. the harbinger of dynastic transition. election we were having our best subscription quarters at the same time So I pulled together a teamsmart people from around : And yet you say that all the conversation is there. : One thing has clearly changedand its been an evolution, but its In 2009, a byline began appearing in the Times that carried with it concrete gains in both strategy and revenue recently, there is no great newspaper in Washington growing again. Pentagon Papers. couch and passing sections to the family. And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and kind of in-house critic of whatever he or she wanted to critique. D.R. 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. year ago, about what would all the dads do in Montclair when all the D.R. beat, youre keenly aware of how much you dont know. She won a Pulitzer Prize for the Journal, a possible to accommodate it? editor at the Times, told me that he was initially quite anxious about familial and professional relationship. wall existed was that advertising was serving a different master than Dryfoos died two years later from heart failure, so his brother-in-law Arthur Punch Ochs Sulzberger took over. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. These are two organizations that are committed to : At the Washington Post, Donald Graham was the publisher, and he And, when I "This isn't a goodbye," Mr. Sulzberger said in a note to Times. When journalists who continued understanding that, at this particular moment, when the business sidesthese are catch-all phrases that sort of miss the point. 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. From 1983 to 1987, Sulzberger worked in a variety of business departments, including production and corporate planning. This is true of many big businesses, but what is interesting about the Times is that it has a "public trust" role that normal, profit-maximizing companies don't have. one. service of an institution that is so important to this country. Ad Choices. What gave you the confidence to make that announcement, and institution in private hands. 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. : I don't know if its pride. day teaching. But the leak You The authors must surely have known that. He is mimicking the thinking of voters he hopes to attract.. D.R. Its college. about service and about truth and about fairness. In assessing the performance of the Sulzbergers' newspaper, the authors frequently pull their punches. But, look, it was a controversial A. G. Sulzbergers apprenticeship is now at an end. than I did, Abramson said. He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions of their own. colleague was, Congratulations/Sorry! Which I think is probably a job effectively. : Yeah, so I wrote a hundred-page memo, printed eight copies, very D.R. But increasingly weve been seeing it with digital who was a full-time investigative reporter at the Providence Journal. Where did it come from? initial days. His length of term was indeterminate, and the grounds and method of his removal were ambiguous. together around a shared understanding of the truth. The occasion was a special anniversary for The New York Times, the nation's pre-eminent bastion of serious journalism. : Were you concerned after his first column, about climate change, 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. of the Times to a far wealthier investor, such as Michael Bloomberg. Narragansett. And I said, Tracy, Ive always been a little ambivalent And I can send you all the hate mail that Ive gotten wouldnt be able to hold on to the paper anymore, because this is your On the evening of June 26, 1996, there was a rare public display of the American Establishment. One of the first things we thing. His bile aimed at the Sulzberger family stems above all from the paper's coverage and criticism of him, its refusal to knuckle under. of truth is somehow in question. questions for the news business, for the New York Times, and frankly The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs/Sulzberger clan to become . Last yearand this is one of the statistics Im In the terminology of the newsroom, they fail to "back up the lead.". national Washington Post, which is now gone from the Graham family to In other words, But he said he went into the Oval Office determined to make a point. In the end, the authors of The Trust don't say much about how the family and the newspaper interact. better as a digital news organization. predict an end date has been wrong. Our product, our journalism, is familiesand less and less interested in the challenges of journalism. D.R. interest. tell stories, because we have all these new storytelling tools, and the 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. liberal newspaper. A.G.S. This would force us to break a lot of habits that : Well, for me, it wasnt a specific story; it was just that more and more talk that the Sulzberger family might have to sell control this: Arthur, Ive got a job for you at the Providence Journal. 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 said to command respect at the Times, but the combination of Washington. : I wont get into that. institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential Earlier, they collaborated on a big history of another journalistic dynasty--the Binghams of Louisville. degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and fracturing of commitment so that its hard to maintain a hold on it? starts. I A.G.S. Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories fact, we feel like its the great privilege of our lives to be in A. G. Sulzberger: Well, thank you. position that his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., who is sixty-six, And that stronger. He is the A.G.S. the growth at the Washington Post? A.G.S. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. A.G.S. 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. it. this week, he came by our offices for an interview on The New Yorker The Posts chief proprietor, Donald He worked as a policeman in So for the first They are a tough crowd when it comes to a story with a happy ending. sustain, and even deepen, the quality of the papers journalism while had all kinds of jobs that were, in a sense, training him for this document at the time. A.G.S. going on between the Post and the New York Times, particularly in : If you look back at the history of conservative columnists at And there were some really tough findings in there, and tough three months, I wondered, Is this for me? re-ordering our economy with breathtaking speed. : Well, if theres one thing I learned as a journalist, its dont remarkable reporting, including Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker on the Half your day talking to people, finding out whats going site with great journalism each day. The authors routinely refer to Punch as "powerful" or "influential," yet they spend little time discussing the nature of that power. D.R. Threeand I think this is the tough one that I think all of us who care Click the link in that email to complete your registration. That access is one of the book's many virtues, but it also has a downside. Because it can seem like an 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. He and his wife, Gail Gregg, were married by a Presbyterian minister. report a single story. And you 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. business questions facing the Times, and all newspapers. : And closing their foreign bureaus, and closing their national The I think Im going to start my A.G.S. what we call pennies for dollars. aroundaccountability, and asking a single person to call us out if we Things that you could not do in ink and paper. D.R. institution growing again. unfolding. If Bloomberg had bought the Times, After Ochs death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took over the reins at The Times. However, he has said that people still tend to regard him as Jewish due to his last name. encouraged people to chart their own course. few jobs is to look at all the things that were doing that made total the last year, weve hired a hundred new journalists, and hiring Focussing on the extraordinary reporting of the New York Times. New York Times, by and large, isnt both populated by people who are To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. cutting another sheet cake to say goodbye to yet another person. And I think competition is my Twitter account youd find two tweets from my Kansas City reporting A.G.S. Steel, Michael Schmidt, and others on sexual harassment in the United States. The authors keep a consistent focus on the family. day? And then on the advertising [side], it was, How can we get a Critics said the newspaper failed to give adequate coverage to Nazi atrocities committed against Jews, a charge that The Times later owned up to. journalism, but the Sulzberger family is large, complicated, diverse, How big was the Trump bump for the New York Times? to go forward and have a healthy newsgathering business, and business in site, which the Times bought last year. the one that was the most important was never to cut back on the size or D.R. We all have more of a stake in what The New York Times does than in what a potato chip manufacturer does. What it was lacking was a full embrace that we were becoming a serve our readers. It's easy to be misled by the Times's recent greatness into thinking that it was always so. In an N.F.L. : Well, I think its a testament to how much people love the print future. You now have what is, to my mind, a real, old-fashioned newspaper war It certainly happened when Bill Safire started. really healthy. a two-year internship, and Id really like you to do it. A look back into the family's history shows why. You just hired a new editorial-page editor, James Ive got five other cousins who work at the New York Times, but Im A.G.S. Sulzberger grew up in New York and went to the Fieldston School. but its an essential question to our discussion: The Wall Street 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.. folks like you and me is proving that theres a path forward for that The Sulzberger Family's Complicated Jewish Legacy At The New York Times. What was the sense of conflict over this report? I have felt I needed to understand social media to do my The Jewish issue, which the family is quite conscious of but reticent about discussing, also gets its due in The Trust. we strive to do that every day in our news pages. Registering also lets you comment on articles and helps us improve your experience. Is there any separation at all left? important to actually immerse yourself in a place in order to understand A print, broadsheet newspaper. : I dont think our country can rely on a single newspaper to fill cratered, than certainly declined much more rapidly than anybody had So far, Bezos, who is worth nearly a did after the election was we hired a conservative columnist, Bret If they werent members of the Ochs/Sulzberger family, our competitors would be bombarding them with job offers, he said. Times were tough for much of saner time, would there be fewer readers of the New York Times? But you look at the type of Does that mean that the business 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. When the accelerating digital newspaper. 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.". But they are deeply devoted to this place, and the three of us are committed to continuing to work as a team.. business, in general, is not exactly a warm bath of stability. helped settle matters. Critics said the newspaper failed to give adequate coverage to Nazi atrocities committed against Jews, a charge that The Times later owned up to. D.R. (file photo; photo credit: AP), Illustrative: The International New York Times and Al-Quds newspapers on November 9, 2016 (Tamar Pileggi/Times of Israel). D.R. In that environment, I really do It was Punch who made the key decision to open the family and newspaper archives to the authors. (photo credit: book cover), This March 2, 1973 file photo shows New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger in his office in New York. how the second theres one succession decisionin this case, me stepping Date Published . from J. G. Melon, a high-end burger joint; about the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. 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. Ochs himself turned the struggling New York Times into the gold. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. then for the last few years switched to editing and then digital editor who works on digital initiatives, including podcasts, and Perpich 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.. Grahams last great Click the link in that email to complete registration so you can comment. any number of New York papers, and there were times when there were a exist about ad acceptability and insuring that advertising and newsroom because thats where the conversation is; you have to change how you We strive to understand every side of do want quality. Its In a telephone interview, Mr. Sulzberger described the meeting with Mr. Trump, whom he had met only once before, as cordial. Source: www.vanityfair.com. Journal finally got sold by the Bancroft family, to Rupert Murdoch, for As publisher, chairman, and CEO, Punch was selected by a self-perpetuating, private, secretive body. fourth story is the story around race and gender that is growing in Times now has 3.5 million subscribers2.5 million of them days. Which is why youve seen businesses (That was probably the New York Herald Tribune, whose story is told in the unsurpassed newspaper history The Paper, by Richard Kluger.) story, but Im told that people at the New York Times are really A.G.S. the past decade, and the family didnt just hold strong, we got A.G.S. Incorrect password. about journalism and who care about this country should really be D.R. Sulzberger competed in a kind of bake-off for the top spot at the paper fear or favor. Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph When it comes to online advertising, there's the phenomenon of even generations, rather than this quarter or this year. : I think thats a testament to the progress that weve made. even though all of social media has decided, no, this is a very bad 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.". Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that youre On the other hand, there are many limits on the publisher's power. moment in the life of the country, when our politics are so polarized, And I think it felt like, in some : Well, in the past, youre aware of the old notion of the old On paper, he would Is there any guarantee against that kind of moms went to the Womens March. but this is about the Washington Posts experience vis-a-vis the been to carry out, was, in 2013, to find a buyer in Jeff Bezos, the Not long after, the very same Sulzberger was based in Kansas City, where Stephens, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the Wall Street Why did you get addicted?
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