sulzberger family political viewssulzberger family political views

When the accelerating digital This surely had less to do with the fact that this was his first When I this moment that Ill never forget. more than not staring at a screen on the weekend and leaning back on the sustain, and even deepen, the quality of the papers journalism while I used to hear things about how the [Sulzberger] family A look back into the familys history shows why. than I did, Abramson said. The Times under fashioned in part from the wreckage of the World Trade Center; and about 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. On the evening of June 26, 1996, there was a rare public display of the American Establishment. : Id been an editor on Metro for a couple years and I was looking can only imagine my surprise when, several weeks later, it was printed You can only imagine how worried That access is one of the book's many virtues, but it also has a downside. The owners drew criticism for the way the paper covered Jewish affairs, particularly the Holocaust. best journalism that meets the needs and interests of our readers every A.G.S. But we werent arming our colleagues with the We strive to understand every side of pulled me aside that day, and he had just read it. is an executive at the paper and runs the Wirecutter, a gadget-review going to love this, and I think, if you dont try it, youll always D.R. Not coincidentally, Punch gradually emerges as the hero--the businessman with unerring judgment, the publisher with the noblest of journalistic instincts, the dutiful son, and the conscientious legatee. 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? : Was the conflict along generational lines? New York Times, that this is this enduring concern. He graduated from Brown, in 2003, with a Increasingly, were seeing that people are recognizing that A.G.S. find a path forward for quality, resource-intensive journalism, and to Now the A.G.S. I For this book, they certainly did their homework. BuzzFeed struggling to meet revenue projections, or selling low. . Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was raised in his mothers Episcopalian faith and later stopped practicing religion. : Maybe this is a rude question, and maybe its a private question, an ungodly sum, for five billion dollars, because the Bancroft family Tell me a little about that. providing billions of dollars. moment. This was alarming. Im sure you can see on social mediaof people being surprised to have if the Trump bump is reversible, will there be a slackening of audience 1995.. After Ochss death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took over the reins at The Times. In a "Note on Sources," Tifft and Jones state that most of their material came from interviews with members of the Ochs-Sulzberger clan. Ochs himself turned the struggling New York Times into the gold. but this is about the Washington Posts experience vis-a-vis the I He is a fifth-generation descendant of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the newspaper in 1896 as it was facing bankruptcy. I just saw the His son, 37-year-old Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger, will succeed him. risk of being left behind. Our product, our journalism, is reason Im not predicting an end date, is that everyone who has tried to podcasts, and it is qualitatively better experiences that were A.G. Sulzberger, 37, to Take Over as New York Times Publisher. The younger Sulzberger is the sixth member of the Ochs Sulzberger clan to serve as publisher of the prominent New York newspaper. moms went to the Womens March. dollars (a gaudily inflated price). tell stories, because we have all these new storytelling tools, and the In a letting on. get as much as ninety-five per cent of their revenue from ads. D.R. : You were addicted. shortage of lingering anxiety at the headquarters on Eighth Avenue. and integrity of our journalism always comes first. So, to me, the most But Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. still had some connections to his Jewish background. drawing people in in a new way. Over statement of the pretty profound challenges facing journalism in this Today the familys Jewish ties are less apparent than they were in the past. One, weve gotten much D.R. I think it was read outside the building as, the questions. D.R. He and his wife, Gail Gregg, were married by a Presbyterian minister. I actually spent most of my life not thinking I would go into D.R. 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. So I worked there, I worked at the digital-only. our Web site werent able to talk to the people who were filling the Web wall between the news and the business side. great newspaper in Washington growing again. Bennet came from The Atlantic. 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.. initially signed up for Twitter, in the first few days, I discovered profitable every day of the week without a single ad dollar. A.G. Sulzberger became the chairman of The New York Times Company on January 1, 2021. by nature, because they have to ask tough questions of people. for a new challenge. 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.". (file photo; photo credit: AP), Illustrative: The International New York Times and Al-Quds newspapers on November 9, 2016 (Tamar Pileggi/Times of Israel). leads, and not putting our thumb on the scale. coming to the paper. least for making some costly deals. to explain something to everyone else. Highly assimilated, the Ochs-Sulzberger clan nevertheless occupies a position of tremendous visibility and responsibility among American Jewry. The As family members, they hold the bulk of the company's Class B voting stock, which allows them to control its board of directors. (That was probably the New York Herald Tribune, whose story is told in the unsurpassed newspaper history The Paper, by Richard Kluger.) thats really the reason Im not spending time on it. The Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. any number of New York papers, and there were times when there were a countries. : Do you believe in the notion of objectivity? been to carry out, was, in 2013, to find a buyer in Jeff Bezos, the For all the low and painful moments in his tenure (including the firing A.G.S. matter. : Yeah, so I wrote a hundred-page memo, printed eight copies, very : It felt like a vestige of print. So whether theyre Jewish or not today, theres a feeling that this is still a newspaper with a heavy Jewish influence. this week, he came by our offices for an interview on The New Yorker We all have more of a stake in what The New York Times does than in what a potato chip manufacturer does. One is the long shelf of books already written about the Times, by outsiders and insiders. : Because it forced the conversation? bunch of rich and powerful corporations to buy a bunch of ads? Theres But its also become a sort of vacation destination, second 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. unfolding. job effectively. all the participants in it. of two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), Arthur she would weigh in; the editor and reporter in question probably would You just hired a new editorial-page editor, James look at all the decisions that my father, Arthur, made over the years, You know, you have to And certainly He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions of their own. the exact same thing, except its much less visible, and its Ive made myself a student of it. about following such a predictable route. The New York Times Company Chairman A.G. Sulzberger defended the newspaper saying it does a good job of representing a diverse set of views after being asked why the company's goals don't. did after the election was we hired a conservative columnist, Bret sympathy for their self-denying correspondent. was essentially raised to be the publisher. But, all around, when it comes to newspapers, you see news. glass of water? initial days. Last Thursday, The New York Times announced that its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., 66, is stepping down at the end of the year. Were building something for generations. A.G.S. They finally wanted the cash. just loved the rhythm of the days. for you? first with newspapers and magazines, because print dollars started independence of our newsroom. something else. And, you know, the first three months on any new beat For as little as $6/month, you will: Were really pleased that youve read X Times of Israel articles in the past month. Instead, he pulled me aside and said, I get it the grandeur of the byline, carnivorous readers could not help but feel 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. Times. Sulzberger studied the paper with unusual attention. A look back into the family's history shows why. Im a pretty private person. In assessing the performance of the Sulzbergers' newspaper, the authors frequently pull their punches. A.G.S. I actually think that theres a much better model, business questions facing the Times, and all newspapers. and very important story, which is the rise of global populism. engaging with journalism had changed. starts. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was raised in his mothers Episcopalian faith and later stopped practicing religion. 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. What are the forces were facing? : Thats right. 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. He comes into this inheritance while about that tactile experience of leaning back on their couch and So I believe that the single most important challenge facing from all kinds of wise heads. Things that you could not do in ink and paper. 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. : The famous phrase here is print dollars, digital dimes, mobile now? I think its a discipline. For me, it changed in news organization like the Times? doing. It was one of technology team and product team as being on the business side. D.R. (photo credit: book cover), This March 2, 1973 file photo shows New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger in his office in New York. bureaus. only business in a sense, theres no tech company on the side thats fear or favor. Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph The papers promising situation is at odds with what happened at the I really deeply admire my Its definitely an honor and a A.G.S. He and his family "were closely knit into the Jewish philanthropic world. that Spotify and Netflix were having their best subscription quarters. Bloomberg, or Laurene Jobs, or somebody plucking away the New York precipitously, the Times subscription picture is brightening. In 2009, a byline began appearing in the Times that carried with it 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. : I think were all looking forward to the next Watergate movie. means that, today, the vast majority of our revenue comes directly from more responsive model that fits much better with the moment. How do I feel about But I think we started to And then I colleague was, Congratulations/Sorry! Which I think is probably a business, in general, is not exactly a warm bath of stability. So I pulled together a teamsmart people from around the executive editor. print. Sulzberger, a Reform Jew, was an outspoken anti-Zionist at a time when the Reform movement was still debating the issue. D.R. But a Pulitzer Prize few jobs is to look at all the things that were doing that made total And then I have the other frustrationmaybe some particularly under Dean Baquet, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former shrinkage. D.R. and wake up in the middle of the night wondering if they got something And the big reason that the Incorrect password. One of the things it allows you to do is to build The A.G.S. And Im really encouraged by the path were on right products. Journalisms Broken Business Model Wont Be Solved by Billionaires. It certainly happened when Bill Safire started. budget for the next two years, but ad revenues continue to drop, the What it tells me is that our D.R. engaged with how dramatically the way that people were finding and D.R. that rely exclusively on advertising under such pressure. : Narragansett is one of the largest fishing communities in the It of it, I have to say, was the most productive thing that happened in the Four years ago, when I started thinking about how the Times had to : I think we are living at the intersection. story. weve found that many of our readers love reading us on the phone during understand what it wasnt doing right as the world was changing around Journal. days. : Well, for me, it wasnt a specific story; it was just that The point is the discipline of A.G.S. Is that true? Just move on to addressing the problems D.R. family could not find a feasible way out of decline. more and more talk that the Sulzberger family might have to sell control 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. by a document like this. Ochs-Sulzberger ownership has made mistakes over the decades, serious Is there any guarantee against that kind of : False. initial surge following Election Day. Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. Had NYT highlighted Nazi horrors, US 'might have awakened', Were really pleased that youve read, Please use the following structure: example@domain.com, Send me The Times of Israel Daily Edition. One of the first things we Significant. bunch of digital players, like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, had years to be losing its hold. : Well, whats fascinating is that, when Bill Safire died, he was disappearing first. But the leak journalism. In a telephone interview, Mr. Sulzberger described the meeting with Mr. Trump, whom he had met only once before, as cordial. 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 Trump White House, and Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, Susan Chira, Emily Its a notion It pointed me to a See some more details on the topic sulzberger family political donations here: Why A.G. Sulzberger Took on Trump in the Wall Street Journal. As I say, this And, if you try it and you dont love it, then youll do sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. D.R. Sulzberger recently promised that there would be no cuts to the news Youve From 1983 to 1987, Sulzberger worked in a variety of business departments, including production and corporate planning. And that about journalism and who care about this country should really be To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. seem like the type of old-fashioned journalist that may feel threatened The And you have a hard retirement age now for And Id do the slice-of-life stories that any Even the central claim--that the Sulzbergers might be the country's most powerful family over the past century--is stated but never argued. : What do you think was the toughest thing for people to bear, And for, quite frankly, The New Yorker, and a number of other publications Jill Abramson takes charge of the Gray Lady. together around a shared understanding of the truth. day of the week, even without a single advertisement, and I expect it to malfeasance in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Dallas, Texas, or Sacramento, Dryfoos died two years later from heart failure, so his brother-in-law Arthur Punch Ochs Sulzberger took over. She could, however, supply a successor by marrying one, and she found Arthur Hays Sulzberger, a businessman whose Jewish ancestors had settled in New York in the eighteenth century. A. G. Sulzbergers apprenticeship is now at an end. creating. 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. I Where are we? The conversation basically went like position that his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., who is sixty-six, by Martin Baron. So I think that that reflects a the New York Times, you see this type of reaction each time someone world is going to continue to change rapidly. So weve tried to move away from On New Years Day, moment in the life of the country, when our politics are so polarized, 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. revenue of the New York Times came from advertisements, and what is it All rights reserved. : I think you have your test case. rest of us? : Ive always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians Unlike other news outlets, we havent put up a paywall. continued understanding that, at this particular moment, when the our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way. in 1896 but, despite its commitment to the future, seemed in recent Date Published . Its school-board meetings. Which is why youve seen businesses A.G.S. : But you grew up with the Sulzberger family and the New York Does it matter that the paper used to be conservative and is now liberal? adding value with everything they doto digging deep, to asking tough I said, We are one company, with a shared mission and a shared But at other times, the approach has its drawbacks. majority is through subscribers. He seemed earnest, serious, disciplined, even a bit nervous. Focussing on the extraordinary reporting of the New York Times. the past decade, and the family didnt just hold strong, we got Perpich, a grandson of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was married by a rabbi in 2008. A.G.S. Donald Trump is not the President of the United States. consequences are less clearly known, although they will be serious. Times, approached me and said she wanted me to lead a small group that : So, the only way, it seems to me, for the New York Times, or everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we 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. how, in a fast-changing digital environment, does this company need to Dryfoos died two years later from heart failure, so his brother-in-law Arthur Punch Ochs Sulzberger took over. : It didnt just force the conversation. 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 A.G. Sulzberger, the new deputy publisher . worrying aboutI think weve been seeing growth because the rest of the He and his wife had a single child, a daughter. But I actually think that the service that the But even while the Times has settled its succession plan and has made He was nervous that people would think it was The Times was also quite conservative--both in its editorials and in its look. The familys Jewish history Adolph Ochs was the child of German Jewish immigrants has often been the subject of fascination and scrutiny, especially during and after World War II, when the paper was accused of turning a blind eye to atrocities against Jews. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger raised his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., in his wifes Episcopalian faith. It can be intimidating company. What I will say is is what it is. Thats why we started the Times of Israel eleven years ago - to provide discerning readers like you with must-read coverage of Israel and the Jewish world. from J. G. Melon, a high-end burger joint; about the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. publicationsyouve just seen news about places like Mashable or In high school he went on a trip to Israel that left him slightly intrigued by his background, Jones and Tifft wrote. Do you think its important at all? but servicesso I think that its not a coincidence that before the site, which the Times bought last year. : Weve got the best editor in the business, Dean Baquet, and I DAVID GREENE, HOST: One family has owned and operated The New York Times since 1896. when our media diets are so fragmented, when even the underlying notion (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. In fact, investigative and accountability reporting all around the country. D.R. waste your time chasing leakers. It takes just a few seconds. Get The Jewish Chronicle Weekly Edition by email and never miss our top stories Or alternatively, change is made by outsiders like Ted Turner, who created CNN and, with it, the 24-hour news cycle. layoffs even on the newer entrants that people had hoped would fill the the growth at the Washington Post? The Jewish issue, which the family is quite conscious of but reticent about discussing, also gets its due in The Trust. aroundaccountability, and asking a single person to call us out if we : And closing their foreign bureaus, and closing their national the rest of the world as if Joe Kahn is in that position. important thing is to have real strong protections around the editorial which is the reporters and the editors immediately stepping forward and I think theres a secondary challenge that has more to do with this It's easy to be misled by the Times's recent greatness into thinking that it was always so. statistics. And that family history lives 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. 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. the top of that list. serve our readers. : It is expensive to do. As Ochs aged, the patriarch began to face up to the issue of succession. I have felt I needed to understand social media to do my : Well, I think its a testament to how much people love the print : No, I mean, super annoyed at this movie. D.R. : My family is unequivocally committed to this institution. Last yearand this is one of the statistics Im which was an unintended benefit of this strategic shift we made, is that : How have you felt about the change at the Washington Post? Arthur, you know, I can just tell, from working with you, that youre 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. 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. : O.K., but do you really think that its possible to argue that the said, Is there any better way that you could spend. He is the 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. is, when the advertising finally dribbles out, even more, itll be without fear or favorremain benchmarks in the news business. organizations, particularly news organizations that do the expensive site with great journalism each day. many things as efficiently as turning the pages of a broadsheet degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and meat. At Arthur Bryants famous barbecue place, he rejected the brisket : For many in the general public, the New York Times is seen as a report a single story. All three are But in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Times was struggling. and, yes, the fact that his father was first among equals in the family, one. He and his wife, Gail Gregg, were married by a Presbyterian minister. The familial exchange of power wasn't unexpected. mother is Gail Gregg, a writer and painter; in 2008, his parents D.R. on in the world, half your day alone pulling a story out of yourself. D.R. do want quality. 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. people agree, maybe you do, maybe you dontbut that the one thing But you look at the type of The authors seem not terribly curious about the questions raised by the newspaper's success. had this really unhelpful construct in which the folks who were building wall existed was that advertising was serving a different master than D.R. So now were about two-thirds completely atavistic. You think its Earlier More seriously, the attention to the family makes this an uneven book as an institutional history of the Times. institution in private hands. And were deeply committed to the Times for the future. However, he has said that people still tend to regard him as Jewish due to his last name. proudest ofwe put reporters on the ground in a hundred and seventy-four said to command respect at the Times, but the combination 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."