The publishers of The New York Times, from left to right: Adolph S. Ochs (who ran the newspaper from 1896 to 1935); Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1935–61); Orvil E. Dryfoos (1961–63); Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (1963–92); and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. (1992–present).
The Inheritance
With a doomsday clock ticking for newspapers as we know them, no one has more at stake than fourth-generation New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who is scrambling to keep his family’s prized asset alive. Some see him as a lightweight cheerleader, others as the last, best defender of quality journalism. Talking to company insiders, the author examines the nexus of dynasty and character that has brought the 57-year-old Sulzberger to the precipice.
by Mark Bowden May 2009
I was in a taxi on a wet winter day in Manhattan three years ago when my phone rang, displaying “111-111-1111,” the peculiar signature of an incoming call from The New York Times.
“Mark? It’s Arthur Sulzberger.”
For weeks I had been trying to talk with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of the New York Times Company. We had met once before, on friendly terms, and sometime after that I had informed him that I was hoping to write a story about him. I figured he was calling now to set something up. Instead he asked, “Have you seen the New Yorker piece?”
The article in question, just published, was bruising. It had surely been painful for him to read. Among other indignities, it featured a remark by the celebrated former Times man Gay Talese, the author of one of the most popular histories of the newspaper, The Kingdom and the Power. Speaking of Arthur, the fifth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty to preside over the paper, Talese had said, “You get a bad king every once in a while.”
I told Arthur that I had not yet fully read the story. “Well, I’m getting out of the business,” he said. Startled, I gazed through the window at the cars and people shouldering through the cold rain, the headline already forming in my mind: publishing scion resigns! “Wait, Arthur,” I said. “Is this a major scoop? Or are you just saying that you aren’t talking to writers anymore?” He laughed his high-pitched, zany laugh. “The latter,” he said.
Now, I respect people who avoid the spotlight, and a reluctance to be publicly vivisected is a sure sign of intelligence. But ducking interviews is an awkward policy for the leader of the world’s most celebrated newspaper, one that sends a small army of reporters—approximately 400 of them—into the field every day asking questions. Still, I could understand Arthur’s decision. After presiding or helping to preside over a decade of unprecedented prosperity, the publisher and chairman of the Times had recently begun to appear overmatched. Two of his star staffers were discovered to have violated basic rules of reporting practice; he had been bullied by the newsroom into firing his handpicked executive editor, Howell Raines; and he had spent much of the previous year in a confusing knot of difficulty surrounding one of his reporters and longtime friends, Judith Miller. For an earnest and well-meaning man, the hereditary publisher had begun to look dismayingly small.
He has been shrinking ever since. In 2001, The New York Times celebrated its 150th anniversary. In the years that have followed, Arthur Sulzberger has steered his inheritance into a ditch. As of this writing, Times Company stock is officially classified as junk. Arthur made a catastrophic decision in the 1990s to start aggressively buying back shares ($1.8 billion worth from 2000 to 2004 alone). This was considered a good investment at the time, and had the effect of increasing the stock’s value. Shares were going for more than $50. Now they are slipping below $4—less than the price of the Sunday Times. Arthur’s revenues are in free fall: the bottom has dropped out of both newspaper and Internet advertising. He has done more than anyone in the business to showcase newspaper journalism online. It hasn’t helped much. The content and page views of the newspaper’s Web site, nytimes.com, may be the envy of the profession, but as a recent report from Citigroup explained, “The Internet has taken away far more advertising than it has given.” Layoffs have occurred in the once sacrosanct newsroom.
Having squandered billions during the newspaper’s fat years—buying up all that stock, buying up failing newspapers, building a gleaming new headquarters—Arthur is scrambling to keep up with interest payments on hundreds of millions in debt, much of it falling due within the next year. To do so, he is peddling assets on ruinous terms. Arthur recently borrowed $250 million from Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, who owns the fourth-largest stake in the Times Company. Controlling interest is held closely by the Sulzberger family, which owns 89 percent of the company’s Class B shares. These shares, not traded publicly, are held by a family trust designed to prevent individual heirs from selling out, and ultimately to shelter editorial matters from strict concern for the bottom line. The family owns about 20 percent of the Class A shares, which is about the same percentage owned by the hedge funds Harbinger and Firebrand. The third-largest Class A shareholder is T. Rowe Price, with 10 percent. Slim comes next, with 7 percent. Given the current state of the investment and credit markets, Slim would appear to have the inside rail should the paper ever be sold, a prospect once unthinkable. It is now very thinkable. Among the other prospective buyers whose names have surfaced in the press are Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York; Google; and even, perish the thought, the press baron Rupert Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal has emerged as journalistic competition for the Times in a way it never was before. (Murdoch has publicly dismissed reports of his interest in the Times as “crap,” which has served only to heighten speculation.) This quarter, for the first time since Times Company stock went public, in 1969, the fourth- and fifth-generation Sulzbergers who hold shares (there are 40 of them in all) received no dividends. As recently as last year they divvied up $25 million.
Beyond these professional trials, Arthur has personal ones. He has separated from his wife of more than three decades, Gail Gregg, a painter, and embarrassing speculation about his sleeping partners has surfaced in the tabloid columns. His son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, is now working as a reporter at the paper, as his father and grandfather once did, but, for the first time in five generations, the heir apparent’s inheritance is in doubt.
While the crushing forces at work in the newspaper industry are certainly not Arthur’s fault, and many other newspapers have already succumbed to them, the fate of The New York Times is of special importance: it is the flagship of serious newspaper journalism in America. The Times sailed into the economic storm that began in 2001 in good financial shape, bearing the most respected brand name in the profession. It was far better equipped than most newspapers to adapt and survive. What is increasingly clear is that the wrong person may be at the helm. Arthur Sulzberger’s heart has always been in the right place, but he assumed leadership from his father uniquely ill-equipped for this crisis—not despite but because of his long apprenticeship. To their credit, the Sulzbergers have long treated the Times less as a business than as a public trust, and Arthur is steeped in that tradition, rooted in it, trained by it, captive to it. Ever the dutiful son, he has made it his life’s mission to maintain the excellence he inherited—to duplicate his father’s achievement. He is a careful steward, when what the Times needs today is some wild-eyed genius of an entrepreneur.
The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: Journalism sells. Arthur says as much at every opportunity, and clearly believes this to his core. It encapsulates his understanding of his inheritance and of himself. But as a general principle, it simply isn’t true. Rather: Advertising sells, journalism costs. Good journalism costs more today than ever, while ads have plummeted, particularly in print media. This is killing the Times, and every other decent newspaper in America. Arthur has manfully tied himself to the wheel, doggedly investing in quality reporting and editing even as his company loses more and more money. Few investors or analysts consider this to be sound business practice.
Many people are rooting for Arthur Sulzberger, and many people like him. It can be hard to persuade those who know him to talk candidly on the record. For this story, Arthur stuck by his decision to get out of the business of being interviewed, and he also declined to permit his employees to talk to me. Nevertheless, many did. I interviewed dozens of current and former Times reporters, editors, and business managers, as well as industry analysts, academics, and editors and publishers at rival newspapers. Nearly every one of them hopes that Arthur will succeed. Few expect that he can.
Only two years ago the New York Times Company moved into a new skyscraper on Eighth Avenue designed by Renzo Piano. Its façade rises into the clouds like an Olympian column of gray type. Whether owing to hubris or sheer distraction, the erection of a new headquarters often seems to spell trouble for corporations, and many had questioned the wisdom of this investment. The new Times building has now been sold, one more measure to relieve the company’s mounting debt. Eyeing the handsome grove of birch trees planted in its soaring atrium, one reporter told me, “We used to joke about how many trees died for a story. Now we ask, How many stories died for those trees?”
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The New York Times, leaves a contentious shareholders’ meeting in New York City in 2007. Times Company stock had fallen by nearly 50 percent in three years, to about $24 a share. It’s now about $4. By Mark Lennihan/A.P. Images.
The Sword and the Stone
America is not kind to the heir. He is a stereotypical figure in our literature, and not an appealing one at that. He tends to be depicted as weak, pampered, flawed, a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock. America celebrates the self-made. Unless an heir veers sharply from his father’s path, he is not taken seriously. Even in middle age he seems costumed, a pretender draped in oversize clothes, a boy who has raided his father’s closet. The depiction may be unfair, but it is what it is.
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is fair-skinned with small, deep-set light-brown eyes. He has a high forehead with a steepening widow’s peak, his crown topped with a buoyant crop of wavy hair, now turning to gray. He is a slight man who keeps himself fit, working out early in the morning most days of the week. He has a wide mouth that curls up at the edges, and when he grins he is slightly buck-toothed, which adds to an impression, unfortunate for a man in his position, of puerility. He is a lifelong New Yorker, but there is no trace whatsoever of region or ethnicity in his speech. When he chooses to be, Arthur is a fluent, eager, even urgent talker, someone who listens impatiently and who impulsively interrupts, often with a stab at humor. He has delicate hands with long fingers, which he uses freely and expressively in conversation. He is long-winded and, in keeping with a tendency toward affectation, is fussily articulate, like a bright freshman eager to impress, speaking in complex, carefully enunciated sentences sprinkled with expressions ordinarily found only on the page, such as “that is” and “i.e.” and “in large measure,” or archaisms like “to a fare-thee-well.” He exaggerates. He works hard, endearingly, to put others at ease, even with those who in his presence are not even slightly intimidated or uncomfortable.
His witticisms are hit-and-miss, and can be awkward and inadvertently revealing. “Some character traits are too deep in the mold to alter,” says one longtime associate. Arthur has the clever adolescent’s habit of hiding behind a barb, a stinging comment hastily disavowed as a joke. Some find him genuinely funny. Others, particularly those outside his immediate circle, read arrogance—the witty king, after all, knows that his audience feels compelled to laugh. His humor can also be clubby. He will adopt, for instance, a pet expression that becomes an in-joke, which he will then deploy repeatedly. One of these is “W.S.L.,” which stands for “We Suck Less,” a self-deprecatory boast, which Arthur will use in discussions of the industry’s woes as a reminder to those in the know that, for all its travails and failings, his newspaper remains, after all, The New York Times.
While clearly smart, Arthur is not especially intellectual. For what it’s worth, he is a Star Trek fan. His mind wanders, particularly when pressed to concentrate on complicated business matters. Diane Baker, a blunt former investment banker who served for a time as the chief financial officer of the New York Times Company, has described him as having the personality of “a twenty-four-year-old geek.” She did not long survive Arthur’s ascension to the chairman’s office. His 30-year marriage has reportedly foundered over a relationship Arthur had with a woman named Helen Ward, from Aspen, Colorado, whom he met on a group excursion to Peru. Since separating from Gail, he has been living alone and has not been involved with Ward or anyone else. Perturbations on the home front are also a family tradition. (Arthur’s grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger was always, as the saying goes, a tough hound to keep on the porch. His father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, paid child support for 16 years to a newspaper-staff member who bore a child she claimed was his—this according to Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones in The Trust, a history of the Times.) Arthur is provincial. Asked once if he had seen a story on the front page of that day’s Post, he looked confused until it was explained that the item had appeared in The Washington Post. He said, “I only read the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post.” He sometimes takes the bus or subway to work, and for many years jogged in Central Park. Recently his knees have started to bother him, so he now prefers exercising on an elliptical trainer. He also takes Pilates classes and can be evangelical about them, telling friends the practice wards off arthritis, which has begun to worry him. But he is not a complete health nut. He still enjoys unwinding with a cigar and a martini. He still goes on motorcycle treks with his cousin Dan Cohen and other friends. He is drawn to feats of personal daring, and is an avid rock climber, a vestige of his enthusiasm for Outward Bound. He has little interest in sports, particularly team sports, and dismissed as silly the effort to lure the Olympic Games to New York City, which included plans for a sports stadium in Manhattan. In a presentation at the Times building, Arthur greeted the scheme’s promoters with cutting sarcasm, even though the paper’s editorial board supported it.
He has been publisher for 17 years now, and chairman of the board for 12, yet no weight seems to adhere to him. What Arthur’s manner does suggest is a hyper-self-awareness: he is one of those people who seem condemned to stand apart from themselves, watching. Arthur is theatrical. It shows in his public speeches, which can be impressive. He has a nice sense of comic timing, and enjoys attention and applause. This is a man who, after spending a few months living in London in his youth, returned home wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a cane. He long ago abandoned the Carnaby Street affectations, but the basic impulse for showmanship is still there, manifested in a very calculated ease. He prowls the Times building in his stocking feet, and will pounce on colleagues as they happen by his 16th-floor office, urging them to step in and visit, saying conspiratorially, “Let me show you something cool.” His corner office in the new building is spare and sunny and much smaller and less imposing than his old one, the one his father had. The old office was musty and formal, with rich wooden bookcases and heavily sculpted furniture upholstered in leather. It was the Citizen Kane version of the publisher’s lair. The new office has windows that stretch from floor to ceiling. On his desk is a Steuben crystal sculpture of a gold-handled Excalibur embedded in stone, a gift from his sisters when he was named publisher—the third Arthur in the line.
The plainer office is an expression of Arthur’s desire to lessen the distance between himself and those he employs. He deliberately placed his office in the center of the floors inhabited by the TimesTimes in the language of family. In an hour-long interview with Charlie Rose in 2001, to mark the newspaper’s anniversary, he talked about how fortunate his own family was to have been “adopted” by the extraordinary talents who create the newspaper. He frets when people on his staff are unhappy, and he looks out for his friends, or tries to. When one of his old reporter pals was transferred and asked the Times to cover the loss on the sale of a residence, Arthur wanted to do it. When his business managers balked, complaining about the precedent it would set, he backed down, annoyed, and sent them to inform the reporter—“You handle it,” he said. To a degree some of his top staff consider unwise, he tends to promote people based not on a cold-eyed assessment of their talent but on how comfortable he feels around them—on how much fun they are. As Arthur was deciding between Howell Raines and Bill Keller for the executive-editorship of the newspaper, in 2001, the reserved Keller kept a professional distance. The gregarious Raines sought to sweep Arthur off his feet. “I remember seeing them at the 2000 Democratic convention, in Los Angeles,” said an editor at another newspaper. “Joe Lelyveld [then the Times’s executive editor] was there. He was running the paper. But what everyone noticed most was how Howell Raines seemed glued to Arthur. It was evident that Howell was seducing Arthur, insinuating himself. Howell is a brilliant journalist, and he exudes confidence. You could watch him making this big impression on Arthur.” Raines became the executive editor. in the new building. At his most romantically self-effacing, he speaks of the
“Dad, Can I Come See You?”
The defining fact of Arthur Sulzberger’s life is his birth. His father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (known as “Punch”); his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger; his uncle Orvil Dryfoos; and his great-grandfather Adolph Ochs were publishers and chairmen of the Times. Arthur was the firstborn male heir in a line that stretches back to 1896, when Adolph Ochs acquired the newspaper. In an era when merit generally counts for more than genes, Arthur is ill at ease about his medieval path to power, so he handles it the way he handles many things that make him uncomfortable. He jokes about it.
Near the end of his interview with Arthur, Charlie Rose scanned the long history of family ownership and success, and asked, “Does this make you believe in nepotism?” “To hell with nepotism!” said Arthur, smiling. “I’m a believer in primogeniture!” He was kidding … and he wasn’t. He does in fact have two sisters with exactly the same genetic link to old Adolph, and while there is much discussion of Arthur’s son eventually succeeding him, there is no such speculation about his daughter. On a stage before a big audience at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002, Arthur was asked a question on the subject by his host, Orville Schell, then the dean of Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Earlier, Arthur had joked with Schell about how he had achieved his position in the same way as Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, who had succeeded his dictator father, Kim Il Sung.
Schell: “You said the difference was that they [the Kim dynasty] were only two generations, and your family was four.”
“I don’t like where this is going one damn bit!,” Arthur protested comically, to much laughter. “And if you don’t be a little more careful, I may nuke you!”
“My question is,” Schell persisted, “really, I mean, The New York Times is governed and held in a very unique way in corporate America. It is a family company, and the family, I assume, decides who the successor is in a way that isn’t either particularly corporate or democratic. Tell us a little bit about that, and what effect you think it has on how this great paper can comport itself in the world.”
Arthur sighed.
“There’s a lot behind that question,” he said. “First of all, just to get it on the record, the family did go for talent.” More laughter.
But Arthur wasn’t just born to his position—the story is more complicated. He may have been the firstborn son in the line of succession, but he also staked his claim to the crown deliberately and dramatically, when he was only 14 years old. His mother, Barbara Grant, and Punch Sulzberger divorced when Arthur was just five. He lived throughout his early childhood on the Upper East Side with his mother and her new husband, David Christy, a warm and supportive stepfather. Punch is nominally Jewish, although not at all religious, while his son was raised Episcopalian. Arthur senior and Arthur junior were not close: Punch was generally aloof, even when Arthur was around. Yet, understanding what his famous name meant, and who his distant father actually was in the world, he packed up his things and moved himself the half-mile to his father’s home on Fifth Avenue, to live with Punch and his stepmother and their daughters. He was not pulled by any strong emotional connection. It seemed more like a career move. His biological father and his stepmother were wealthy, socially connected, and powerful; his biological mother and his stepfather were not. Arthur opted for privilege and opportunity. That his stepmother, Carol Sulzberger, despised Arthur—she would stick out her tongue at pictures of him—did not seem to matter. He was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and showing up on his father’s doorstep was a way of asserting, consciously or not, that when Punch changed wives he had not washed his hands of an obligation to his son. While the inheritance was his by birth, it was also very much Arthur’s choice.
Some heirs flee the burdens and expectations of family, determined to make their own way. Arthur chose to be defined by his name, and his father. When he went off to summer camp in 1966, the year he moved in with Punch, Arthur took his father’s old portable-typewriter case with him. It was stamped, “A. O. Sulzberger, The New York Times.” This at a moment when many members of Arthur’s generation were questioning received wisdom in all its forms, turning their backs on conventional careers, disdaining not just their parents but the entire Establishment. Arthur, too, would grow his bushy hair long, try drugs, demonstrate against the Vietnam War, and embrace the style and rhetoric of the 60s. He has said that he worked on his high-school newspaper but not his college paper, at Tufts, because “we had a war to stop.” But even then Arthur, draped in Punch’s old (and newly fashionable) Marine Corps fatigue jacket, was just acting out the editorial policy of the newspaper he planned someday to run. Appearances to the contrary, he was the exact opposite of a rebel.
Arthur has spent a lifetime faithfully placing his feet in his father’s footsteps. Like Punch, he served a long apprenticeship on his inevitable rise. Perhaps “inevitable” is too strong a word. He began as a reporter for The Raleigh Times, then moved on to the London bureau of the Associated Press. He was a hard worker and a cheerful colleague, and he produced competent if unspectacular work. His friend Steve Weisman, a former Times reporter (and now the editorial director for the Peterson Institute for International Economics), asked him once—when they were both in their late 20s and working as reporters in the Times’s Washington bureau, where Arthur landed after the A.P.—if he was going to be publisher one day. “Well, there’s always the fuckup factor,” said Arthur, which Weisman took to mean that, barring a serious misstep, Arthur’s path was assured.
In The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese described the similar path taken by Arthur senior. He and Punch were roughly contemporaries. (Punch was six years older.) They both started working at the newspaper at about the same time, Punch having gone to college only after serving in the Marines. Talese, the son of a tailor, considered himself fortunate when he landed a job as copyboy at the Times, after distinguishing himself as a college journalist and a columnist for his hometown Ocean City (New Jersey) Sentinel-Ledger. He went on, one finely crafted story after another, to earn distinction as the best writer at the Times. What he wrote about Punch’s apprenticeship could have been written about Arthur’s:
He would learn a good deal during the next few years, but he would never become a top reporter, lacking qualities that are essential and rarely cultivated by such men as himself, the properly reared sons of the rich. Prying into other people’s affairs, chasing after information, waiting outside the doors of private meetings for official statements is no life for the scion of a newspaper-owning family. It is undignified, too alien to a refined upbringing. The son of a newspaper owner may indulge in reporting for a while, regarding it as part of his management training, a brief fling with romanticism, but he is not naturally drawn to it.
There is one other essential trait shared by ambitious reporters that the Sulzbergers, father and son, would never know: desperation. Reporting is a highly competitive craft where one’s work is on display, sometimes on a daily basis. There is no faking it—not for long, anyway. When Arthur started working in Raleigh, the young men and women competing furiously for plum beats and a front-page showcase could only dream of someday working at The New York Times. For the ambitious, those early years at small newspapers were a scramble to get noticed, to shine brightly enough to catch the eye first of the local editors, then of those at bigger papers, and then on up the ladder to editors at the top newsrooms across the country. It was a fierce winnowing. Little wonder that his co-workers in those years found Arthur a man without an edge. He was charming, eager, cheerful, and ever willing to take on the most mundane assignments. He wore a leather jacket and roared to work on a motorcycle. He was having a ball. And why not? He wasn’t competing; he was paying his dues. He didn’t need front-page stories. He didn’t need sources, a scoop, or any particular narrative flair to get ahead. It was easy to be Arthur. And it was smart to befriend Arthur.
His career progressed in prodigious and unearned leaps. He went from the Washington bureau, where he was close friends with Steve Rattner, Judith Miller, and a 
handful of other reporters, to New York, where he worked briefly as a very young assistant editor on the Metro desk, before moving on to stints in the advertising-and-production side of the paper, becoming deputy publisher in 1987. People liked Arthur everywhere he went, and he worked at being liked. But he was not deeply respected. Just as Arthur would never pass as an authentic reporter to those who have spent their lives in newsrooms, his brief apprenticeships in advertising, production, and various other departments were seen for exactly what they were: way stations on the road to publisher. The Times’s business managers do not enjoy the same status in their fields as the paper’s top reporters and editors do among journalists. Newspapers do not attract top-tier business and financial talent, because it would be unseemly to pay those on the business side disproportionately more than the most senior editors, and the salary scale for even the highest-paid editors is a fraction of that for high-level C.E.O.’s and bankers. Yet even the mid-level talent around Arthur does not regard him as a peer, much less a suitable leader. He is accepted, of course. The family does own the newspaper, and there appears to be a consensus that—as one veteran Times man, no longer at the newspaper, told me—if a family member has to run the newspaper, Arthur is “the Sulzberger you would want.”
There was an attempt by the business side of the Times Company to thwart his final ascent. On January 22, 1996, a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal by Patrick M. Reilly suggested that Arthur, then the Times’s publisher, might not succeed his father as the company’s chairman, and that the company was considering looking outside the family for the next generation of leadership. One or another Sulzberger patriarch had held both jobs for a century, but Reilly’s story indicated that the tradition could very well come to an end. It portrayed Arthur as someone who “sees himself as both a journalist and a businessman,” but who in fact was fully neither. The story was based on highly placed but anonymous sources inside the building, and it quoted Judith Sulzberger, Arthur’s aunt and a member of the board of directors, as saying that the job “might go to anyone.”
Penny Muse Abernathy, who worked closely with Arthur on the business side of the Times before leaving for Harvard, The Wall Street Journal, and now a professorship at the University of North Carolina, remembers walking into Arthur’s office at around 7:30 a.m. the day the article came out. He was crestfallen. “What are you going to do about that story?” she asked him. “I don’t know,” he said, and then made an attempt at gallows humor, suggesting that he might need to try an entirely new line of work. As they were speaking, Punch called. “Dad, can I come see you?,” Arthur asked. It was the first time Abernathy had ever heard Arthur call his father “Dad.” Around the office, he always referred to him as “the chairman.”
The effort to end-run the dynasty proved to be short-lived. Many at the paper speculated that the company president, Lance Primis, was behind the Journal story. It had identified Primis as “a top prospect” for the chairmanship, and the article was interpreted as the opening salvo in a putsch—a play by the company’s professional managers to wrest control of the business side from the amateurs. Family won. Arthur formed an alliance with Russ Lewis, then president of the newspaper, who would be named company C.E.O. when Punch retired and handed the top post to his son. Primis was invited to leave.
The Moose in the Room
Here, in a nutshell, in the words of a veteran Times staffer, is what is supposedly wrong with Arthur: “He has no rays”—rays, as in the lines cartoonists draw around a character to suggest radiance, or power. In the comics trade these lines are called “emanata.” The emanata deficit is a standard insider lament about Arthur, although most Times people need a few more words to make the point.
No one can plumb another’s depths. Arthur certainly seems clever enough, but try as he might, he fails to impress. He comes off as a lightweight, as someone slightly out of his depth, whose dogged sincerity elicits not admiration so much as pity. While no one blames him for what is clearly a crisis afflicting all newspapers, he has made a series of poor business moves that now follow him like the tail of a kite. He has doubled-down on print over the last two decades, most notably with his own newspaper but also spending more than a billion dollars to buy The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune. These purchases appear to have been historically mis-timed, rather like sinking your life savings into hot-air balloons long after the first excited reports from Kitty Hawk. Back when he had the money to do it, Arthur failed to adequately diversify the Times Company’s holdings, stranding it in an ocean of debt with no flotation device—unlike, say, The Washington Post, which is being buoyed through this industry-wide depression by the highly profitable Kaplan Inc., an education-services company that provides test-preparation classes and online instruction. (The Post’s diverse investments were made under a board that included Warren Buffett and like-minded business gurus.) Except for his admirable Web site, Arthur has failed to expand the Times effectively into other media. Back in 2000 he announced that television was “our next great frontier,” but his one timid step in that direction, a partnership with the Discovery Channel to produce news-related documentaries, was halfhearted (and abbreviated). The Times still lacks a presence in television. Arthur has not missed the boat entirely with digital start-ups—his decision to buy the online information site About.com, which provides assisted Internet searching, has paid dividends—but he passed up (along with a lot of other people) early opportunities to invest in the great search engines, such as Google, which today is sucking ad revenue from the paper while at the same time giving away its content. Arthur’s oft repeated assertion that he is “platform agnostic”—that is, doesn’t care what medium delivers the Times, and is open to all of them—is both misguided and revealing. It sounds fancy and daring and forward-thinking but betrays a deep misunderstanding of the forces at play.
There are other knocks on his leadership. His choice for executive editor, Howell Raines, played favorites in the newsroom, overlooked shoddy journalism, and so alienated his reporters and editors that they forced Arthur to dump him. So goes one version of the story. Not everyone thinks jettisoning Raines was the right thing to do. Raines was shaking things up, presumably with Arthur’s blessing, and when you shake things up you upset the rank and file. As one former Times man puts it, “If the sheriff of Nottingham gets mugged on his way through Sherwood Forest, and can’t do anything about it, then the thieves are running the forest.” Whichever take on Raines you prefer, Arthur’s reversal looks bad. It suggests either poor judgment or a lack of conviction.
He is, or was, big on managerial gimmickry. There is the now infamous moment, at the height of the in-house furor over the serial fabulist Jayson Blair, when Arthur tried to break the ice before a large audience of restive reporters and editors by pulling a toy stuffed moose out of a bag, a favorite device of his meant to facilitate candid discussion—the moose was supposed to represent the core issues that no one dared address. Newsmen, it should be noted, are rarely shy about expressing their opinions, and on this occasion the crowd was about as reserved as a lynch mob. The moose was so silly and so unnecessary, and reflected something so tone-deaf, that Arthur has yet to live it down. One reason he hasn’t is that it was of a piece with other behavior. Times veterans remember with pained expressions the “bonding games” Arthur forced them to play at company retreats in the late 1990s, and the time and effort he demanded they lavish on crafting “mission statements” for the newspaper and the company. “We have it written down and we carry it with us,” Arthur told Charlie Rose in 2001. He handed over the mission statements on-camera with a flourish, and when asked later about his proudest achievement came back to this “defining vision of what we are and where we have to go.” The mission statements are now, in the words of one former editor, “stuffed in desk drawers throughout the building.”
In his eagerness to champion First Amendment rights he blundered into a losing and ultimately embarrassing fight over his old friend Judith Miller, who went to jail to protect a source, former Cheney chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, before striking a deal with prosecutors. The fight was widely regarded as a poor one to make into a First Amendment test case, but that didn’t stop Arthur from charging to Miller’s defense. The “Free Judy” buttons he distributed made for a ludicrous contrast to his father’s storied battle over the Pentagon Papers. An explanatory mea culpa about the Miller case, written by the executive editor, Bill Keller, suggested that Miller had had an “entanglement” with Libby, which some read as a suggestion that she was sleeping with him. Keller, who had succeeded Raines in the wake of the Jayson Blair affair, quickly retreated from his retreat. The episode illustrated a broader perception: no adult was in charge. Where Arthur senior had been seen as stolid and serious, Arthur junior appeared callow. One of those involved in the Miller episode describes Arthur’s behavior throughout as “childish.” Another word you hear is “goofy.”
The conventional wisdom about Arthur can be turned on its head. His goofiness might more kindly be interpreted as a winning informality, a healthy antidote to the stuffy, hidebound ways during executive editor Abe Rosenthal’s long reign. So, too, his efforts to unbend and humanize the newsroom’s tyrants, and get them to see the company’s business managers not as enemies but as partners. No wonder they grumbled! Arthur’s fixation on newsprint evidences a devotion to quality journalism amid the growing din of propaganda and digital frivolity; after all, most of the real reporting done in America is still done by newspapers. His eagerness to defend reporters’ freedoms stems from noble instincts, and demonstrates that, for Arthur, the paper’s mission takes priority over its profits. His enthusiastic defense of Judith Miller may have backfired, but the same impulse led Arthur to defy a strongly worded request from the Bush administration—delivered in person at the White House—not to print stories that revealed legally dubious domestic spying, stories that would win a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Arthur’s “political correctness” shows an admirable sensitivity to the rights of women and minorities in an institution where both were long held down or shut out. And might his willingness to back down and fire Raines be seen as a sign not of pusillanimity but of humility and flexibility?
“Sure, Arthur has made his share of mistakes. But they get recycled all the time, and he rarely gets the credit he deserves for what he’s done right,” says his longtime friend Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter and the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs. “You can’t judge him solely on the basis of success, because no one in the business can claim success in the current situation. You do have to give him credit for good judgment in anticipating the role of the Internet and his deep commitment to the values of the institution. Arthur was talking about the impact of the Internet on newspapers earlier than anyone else in our industry, and the records show that. So you have this strange kind of thing where you have the vision and you have insight, but you don’t get the business side of it right—but literally, without exception, no one has. Arthur has, however, re-invented the newspaper on several levels and positioned it for the future.”
Nine years ago, in an entirely different economic climate, the industry magazine Editor & PublisherTimes to unprecedented success, “achieving a 20 percent advertising revenue growth … largely due to national and help-wanted business going gangbusters.” The mistakes he has made with investments and in adapting to new technology are the same mistakes made by every newspaper in America. Most journalists consider Sam Zell, the billionaire who bought the Tribune Company, to be a Neanderthal for his wholesale trashing of the once proud Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and regard Gary Pruitt, chairman of the McClatchy chain, as a well-mannered and passionate defender of journalistic excellence. Yet both are staring at bankruptcy. “Who has gotten it right?” asks one industry analyst. “Arthur has made some bad decisions, but so has everyone else in the business. Nobody has figured out what to do.” named Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Publisher of the Year, and he was hailed as “brilliant” and “visionary.” His investments in satellite printing had pushed the national edition of the
In short, you can choose whichever take on Arthur you prefer. As an old football coach once told me, “Write whatever you want: if I win, you can’t hurt me, and if I lose, you can’t help me.” The publisher’s reputation shifts with the wind, and today journalism is leaning into an exceedingly ill wind.
The Wrong Lesson
Arthur is still often referred to as “Young Arthur,” even though he is old enough to be a grandfather, or by the despised nickname that puns on his father’s, “Pinch.” Even as his locks gray and he nears almost two decades as publisher, he remains the prince-in-waiting who once haunted the newsroom in his socks, his trousers held up by colorful suspenders, peering in a harmless but nevertheless insufferably proprietary way over the shoulders of hard-boiled reporters on deadline. “I have heard him many times refer back to ‘when I was a reporter,’” says one former Times executive, theatrically cringing. “He’ll just do it as a throwaway—‘When I was a reporter.’ I will say this to him one day: Don’t say that. You know what? You don’t have to say that. Do you think it’s giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less.” On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”
But Arthur has one big thing going for him, particularly with the reporters and editors who are the real stars in the Times building. Arthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value.Times’s reputation and influence drive him. He is not just a newspaper publisher and a chairman of the board. He is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and the pride he feels in that name doesn’t have anything to do with how much is in his bank account. No matter what moves he makes, no matter what errors he commits, Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: Journalism sells. He believes, to be sure, that wealth follows from value, but you can see, even as he says it, that the wealth part is not what drives him. Journalism drives him. The
“This is ridiculous,” says a former business-side executive at the Times. “It flies in the face of logic and reason, this belief that if your news product is so good and so comprehensive the normal rules of business are suspended. Think about it. Think about the inanity of saying that you survived by putting in more news and cutting ads.”
Arthur repeated this belief proudly in his interview with Rose, describing how Adolph Ochs responded to the lean years after he purchased the paper by expanding its news hole—“We’re going to give our readers more! That’s gutsy!”—and how his grandfather Arthur Hays Sulzberger did something similar during World War II, when newsprint was being rationed: “Major decision, major gutsy decision from him there. Perhaps the critical decision of his time … whether to continue to print ads—revenue, money, profit—or to say, No, we’re going to add more news. He went to news, the Herald Tribune went to ads, and the rest was just a matter of time. By the time the war ended the Times had taken such a huge leadership that it was just a matter of time before the Herald Tribune was to fold.”
This story is false. It is dismissed even in The Trust, a mostly glowing account of the newspaper and the family written with the full cooperation of the Sulzbergers, including Arthur, and published more than a year before he spoke those words to Rose. The authors, Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, thoroughly debunked the legend.
“One of the enduring myths about The New York Times is that it nobly sacrificed profits from revenue-generating ads during World War II in order to print more news,” wrote Tifft and Jones. “But the truth is somewhat more complicated.” It seems that the Times actually slashed its news hole in this period “far more severely than it cut the space devoted to ads.” With newsprint rationed, and with more ads and news than he could fit, Sulzberger increased space for ads and decreased space for news. In fact, he devoted the majority of the newspaper’s space to ads, and earned more revenue than he had since 1931. Ad revenue “had actually increased during the period, from $13 million to $15 million, while the amount of money spent on news had slumped slightly from $3.9 million to $3.7 million,” Tifft and Jones wrote.
Arthur’s grandfather did make one important change during this period, but it was more of a shrewd business move than a principled stand for journalism. While the rival Herald Tribune sat on its swollen profits during the war, Sulzberger used his profits to print not more news but more newspapers, greatly expanding the Times’s reach. That strategy left the Times with a larger circulation than the Herald Tribune after the war. The Times was better positioned to survive. The lesson of the story is not that investing in news pays but that a clever business strategy adapts to a changing market.
Arthur likes his own version of the story better. He once told interviewers that the Times was his “religion”: “That’s what I believe in, and it’s a hell of a thing to hold on to.” Reason has no purchase on belief. Nor does basic business theory.
Algorithms as Editors
American journalism is in a period of terror. The invention of the Internet has caused a fundamental shift not just in the platform for information—screen as opposed to paper—but in the way people seek information. In evolutionary terms, it’s a sudden drastic change of climate. One age passes and a new one begins. Species that survive the transition are generally not the kings of the old era. The world they fit so perfectly is no more. They are big and slow, wedded to the old ways, ripe for extinction.
When Arthur became chairman of the Times Company, in 1997, he dragged his top people to retreats in leafy locations, there to learn better cooperation and to think big thoughts. He was less worried about adapting the Times to a new era than about making his company and newsroom a happier place to work. The underlying assumption was that there was nothing ahead but smooth seas. Many of the newsroom’s hard-bitten veterans found these events revealing.
“We were having a retreat,” David Jones, a former assistant managing editor, recalls. “It was a wonderful old inn, business-meeting place, in upstate New York. They were doing games as bonding experiences. One of the games they did was fly casting. And they put three big loops out on the lawn. One was close, one was farther out, and one was farthest. And the idea was to cast your lure and hit inside the loop. The farther away you cast, the more points you got.” The risky way to play was to cast for the big scores; the safest way was to steadily accrue points by hitting the nearest loop.
“So we played this game,” says Jones, “and when it was all over, I talked to the guy who worked there, who ran the game, and I said, What was your impression of us from the way we played? How do we compare with other groups? And he said—and they have business groups that come—he said, ‘This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.’”
Arthur himself, despite his leftist politics and social liberalism, despite the lip service he pays to the need for change, is deeply conservative where the family business is concerned. This is not to say that he resists change. His nytimes.com is the most successful newspaper Web site in the country. It can claim an ever rising number of hits and, until the general economic slump of 2008–9, recorded steady growth in ad revenue. But none of this will save him, because at the core Arthur and the Times remain wedded to an archaic model of journalism.
For 10 years or more, Arthur’s signature phrase about this seismic change in the news business, the one he repeats to show that he gets it, has been platform agnostic. “I am platform agnostic,” he proclaims proudly, meaning that it matters nothing to him where his customers go for New York Times content: the newspaper’s print version, television, radio, computer, cell phone, Kindle—whatever. The phrase itself reveals limited understanding. When the motion-picture camera was invented, many early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its audience. To be sure, this alone was a significant change. But the true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater. Audiences could be transported anywhere. To tell stories with pictures, and then with sound, directors developed a whole new language, using lighting and camera angles, close-ups and panoramas, to heighten drama and suspense. They could make an audience laugh by speeding up the action, or make it cry or quake by slowing it down. In short, the motion-picture camera was an entirely new tool for storytelling. To be platform agnostic is the equivalent of recording stage plays.
“When I first heard Arthur talk about being platform agnostic, I knew he was trying to suggest that he was not stuck in a newspaper mind-set,” says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “But I thought there were two problems with that language. One is, agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure what they believe in. That’s the first problem. And the second problem is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You actually have to choose which platform you work on first, which one comes first. At the time that he was talking about this, what he really meant was: Everything we put in the newspaper, we’ll put online. If you really want to move to the Internet in a serious way, you need to change the culture of a news organization and decide that the Internet is the primary new thing. Platform agnostic means that all the online companies are going to zoom past you, because they’re going to exploit that technology while you’re sitting there thinking, Well, we don’t care which platform we put it on. You need to exploit the technology of each platform. You need to be, in fact, not platform agnostic but platform orthodox. So that expression, platform agnostic, always struck me as something he heard someplace, rather than something that he really grasps and understands.”
Arthur’s idea is to continue producing The New York Times the way it has always been produced, and then to offer a digital edition of the product, with video, images, interactive graphics, blogs, and so on. That’s what nytimes.com does superbly. According to Nielsen, it attracts more than 20 million unique visitors a month. Imagine a newspaper that was picked up by 20 million readers every month! If only a tiny fraction of that number came back and became subscribers, circulation would explode. But those users are not “picking up” the newspaper; many of them are just picking up individual stories. Nearly half of those who access nytimes.com to read a story come in, as it were, through a side door. They begin by plugging search terms into an engine such as Google, which spits out a long list of links to related sites. And in any case, they’re not spending a lot of time with the newspaper: the average amount, says Nielsen, is 35 minutes per month. (The news is worse for other sites—only about 16 minutes per month for washingtonpost.com.) One of Arthur’s hopes is that, once on the site, readers will linger, sampling the Times’s other superb offerings, but usage patterns suggest that this isn’t happening.
Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It’s not that they have short attention spans. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly by professional journalists, they search out only the information they want, and are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news. It eliminates the middleman—that is, it eliminates editors. At a newspaper, top editors meet several times a day to review the stories and photographs gathered from their own staff and wire services. They decide which are the most important or compelling, and then they prioritize and package them. When you buy a newspaper you are buying a carefully prepared meal. Inevitably stories and artwork are left off the plate for a great variety of reasons, all of them subjective—they are deemed less significant, less credible, less tasteful, less useful. Or maybe there just isn’t enough room. The Internet replaces editors with an algorithm. Google is a search engine. It makes no value judgment about information unless you instruct it to. All of the stories and photos in the world are there, including billions of items that the reader never imagined wanting to see. It is unmediated. There is no adult supervision. And the kicker is: it’s free.
Much more is at work here than a change of platform. Whether you think more is lost or gained depends upon which side of this evolutionary divide you fall on. For me, someone who spent most of his adult life working in a newsroom, someone who reads three newspapers every day, including the Times, the loss will be far greater. Newspapers enable serious journalism. They provide for the care and feeding of career reporters and editors. They strive to be fair, accurate, and objective. They are independent sources of credible, well-researched information. They are watchdogs for the public interest, an important part of the communal mind and memory of the nation. When an editor is replaced by an algorithm, all information is equal. Propaganda shares the platform with honest reporting, and the slickest, most attractive Web sites and blogs will be those sponsored by corporations, the government, or special interests, which can afford to pay for professional work.
Arthur’s argument, or his hope, is that the quality of the Times’s brand will prevail, that quality independent journalism is so obviously valuable that serious readers will continue to seek it out. He has been offering the Times content for free because experience has shown that subscriber-only stories leak—they are copied and e-mailed and rapidly proliferate for free anyway—and because Internet users, accustomed to getting information for free, are loath to pay for it. Do you remove yourself from the global conversation if you wall yourself off? Can you make enough money on subscriptions to survive? The Wall Street Journal has gone in this direction online, while offering some free content. The jury is still out. Arthur has continued to provide Times content for free, but is considering reversing direction. His brand remains the best in the business, but that hasn’t solved his revenue problems. Journalism costs. The revenue from Internet advertising is still only about a tenth of total revenue. Even if those millions of brief hits on nytimes.com continue to swell, the Times itself may be in bankruptcy court long before the Web site generates enough revenue to replace what Arthur has lost.
In fairness, no one has the answer for newspapers. Some, such as former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaperman and Silicon Valley C.E.O., and Peter Osnos, of PublicAffairs, all of whom have experience as executives, are pushing some form of micro-payment. If the Times, in partnership with the big search-engine companies, got paid a few pennies for every person who clicks on a link to its content, it might replace the old business model for advertising. The price of accessing a single item would be so small that it would hardly be worth the trouble to hunt up a pirated version. Some have suggested that all of the major news providers should band together and withhold their content from the Internet until such a pricing agreement can be put in place. It seems clear that drastic action is required. One top editor at another newspaper put it this way: “Ask yourself this—if the Internet existed and newspapers didn’t, would there be any reason to invent newspapers? No. That tells you all you need to know.”
Some at the Times anticipated this tectonic shift years ago, but Arthur wasn’t listening. Despite lip service about change, he presides over a slow-moving beast. Diane Baker, who was regarded as an energetic and forceful outsider, ran up against this in her years as C.F.O. When she took the job, in 1995, she was shocked to discover that the company was still doing all its accounting by hand. “They literally did not have the ability to produce spreadsheets,” she says. “They had not invested in the software you need to analyze data. It is a company run by journalists. The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not businessmen.”
Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”
Toward the end of his tenure as executive editor, Max Frankel was asked to think about the impact of computers on the news business. This was back in the mid-1990s, when the Times’s national edition was taking off and most Americans were embarking on their first hesitant drives on the “information superhighway.” For the Times there was money to maneuver with, and to invest, and a chance to adapt to the new age. Frankel wrote two memos, which he no longer has, but whose content he remembers clearly. In the first memo he argued that, because computers were so good at generating lists, and cross-referencing them, classified ads in newspapers were doomed. He suggested that the Times set up a computer system to allow buyers and sellers to deal with each other directly online—“It was essentially Craigslist,” Frankel jokes. “I should have started it up!” Craigslist was created in 1995 and today averages billions of page hits per month, with reported annual revenues in excess of $80 million. It is a major factor in the decline of newspaper ad revenue.
“The second idea was much more important, and came a little later,” Frankel says. “I wrote that one big coming threat posed by the computer was disaggregation: the Internet disaggregates the hunt for information. The need for information would survive the advent of the digital era, but the package offered by The New York Times might not. So how do you protect the package? What was so great about The New York Times was not that we offered the best coverage in any particular field but that we were very good in so many. It was the totality of the newspaper that was a marvel, not any of its particulars. The Web threatened to break that up. One way to weather this, which I suggested, was that we needed to pick the fields in which to be pre-eminent. If you want to have the best sports package, then start hiring the staff and make yourself the best go-to place for sports information. If it is business, or politics—whatever—pick one and make yourself the best, or make a strategic alliance.” This is the approach taken by ESPN.com, by Bloomberg.com, IMDB.com, Weather.com, and a multitude of others. Any one of dozens of sites specializing in, say, politics or the arts could have been taken over and built up around the Times’s expert staff. It could still happen. The Washington Post is increasingly staking out the national government as its field, but an even more immediate threat to the Times is coming from downtown. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal already has a larger national circulation than the Times, and its rapacious new owner is vigorously competing on new fronts. Both newspapers are losing revenue in the current downturn, but the Journal may be in a better position for the long term. It has a smaller staff, and a clearly specialized arena with deep importance and broad appeal—business and finance. It has clearly dominated coverage of the ongoing economic crisis, with perceptive stories that are more knowingly reported, more analytical, and consistently better written. Online, the Journal’s editorial matter is largely password-protected, which means its readers are already paying for content, and it has been steadily improving its coverage of culture, sports, and lifestyle, and in its weekend edition featuring original essays by acclaimed writers and thinkers. And while the Times is busy throwing assets overboard to stay afloat, the Journal is attached to Murdoch’s international empire, News Corp. Arthur aspires to be the patron saint of journalism, but the smart money may be on the pirate. The kind of specialization Frankel forecast is also driving most smaller newspapers, which are aggressively focusing coverage on their own communities, where they have exclusive content. Many see this as the only strategy that will enable them to survive.
The retired executive editor says that he sent both of his memos up the chain of command—as he puts it, “off into the ether.” He did not hear a word from Arthur or anyone else about them.
“Never Give Up”
Arthur Sulzberger can be a loyal and thoughtful friend, someone who will surprise a distant or old acquaintance with a small note of congratulation or commiseration, a gesture out of the blue that is felt and remembered. He is sincere and determined. He is, by all accounts, a doting and involved father. He did not have to work at all, yet he has always worked hard. “He is kind, decent, and good,” says his longtime friend Steve Rattner. “In everything he does, he means well.” His convictions about journalism are above reproach, and he cultivates his journalistic values in the ever expanding Sulzberger clan. In speaking with many who know him well, I discovered a near-universal desire to protect Arthur. “It’s funny. There’s something about him that makes you want to—it’s almost like this maternal instinct kicks in,” says Vivian Schiller, who was an executive at the Times before becoming president of NPR. Part of the desire to protect Arthur stems from his role at the head of a great newspaper in hard times. Part of it is loyalty to the Sulzberger family. But beyond all of this is fear—not just that Arthur will be hurt but that he will fail.
It is sometimes true that a man’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. Soon after Robert J. Rosenthal was named managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, in 2002, he ran into Arthur at a conference on the West Coast. Arthur congratulated Rosenthal, who had started his career as a copyboy at the Times, and when they shared a car ride Arthur talked about how different their challenges were. “Yours is to turn the ship around,” he said. “Mine is to keep the Times on course.”
He still might—though in fact staying on course means turning the ship around. If he makes the right moves in the next few years, he may yet be able to ride his inheritance into the digital age. If he pulls that off, the achievement will outstrip those of his revered ancestors. It would be something more akin to the feats attributed to the original Arthur, the one who pulled Excalibur from the stone. But precisely because he is who he is, Arthur may be the last person in the world with the answers. The more likely outcome is that he will lose the Times to someone with deep enough pockets to carry the enterprise at a loss until circumstances sort themselves out—a rich individual, or a rich corporation, or some rich philanthropic institution. In recent years there have been persistent reports of Rupert Murdoch’s interest in the Times, if only because he has historically lusted after prestige broadsheets. Michael Wolff, who wrote a biography of the Australian billionaire, reported in these pages last year that Murdoch had entertained the idea of a merger with his Wall Street Journal’s backroom operations and “fantasize[d] about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple.” (Given the recent layoffs at the Journal, and reports of the newspaper unit’s drag on News Corp.’s bottom line, the acquisition of another sagging national newspaper might seem to be an irrational act—but that may be beside the point.) A business model to sustain a professional staff of reporters and editors could yet emerge in this new era, most likely a model devised by entrepreneurs with everything to gain and little to lose. This is a course that would save the institution, but would mean the end of the Sulzberger dynasty.
Arthur keeps a framed quotation by Winston Churchill in his office, a passage from a speech Churchill delivered during Britain’s darkest hours: “Never never never give up.” What Churchill actually said was “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in,” and he added an important qualifier: “—except to convictions of honour and good sense.” The bulldog approach worked for Churchill. But, for Arthur, as the prospect of success dims, good sense may dictate the very terms he resists. Serving the institution at some point may require selling it. Many of the newspaper’s superb journalists have already left. Many others are actively eyeing second careers. It is hard to imagine what a second career would be for Arthur.
The inheritance has shaped Arthur Sulzberger’s life, but as he turns 58, this year, the age of the newspaper may be ending. For The New York Times, the greatest of them, it would mean the collapse of a dynasty and a national treasure. No one would feel the loss more than Arthur. For him, more than anyone, everything is at stake.
“What would he do?” asks Penny Abernathy. “What would he do? That’s who he is.”
Mark Bowden is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. This is his first article for Vanity Fair.
These days, everywhere you look it seems that some newspaper is closing its doors, stopping its presses, or maybe just going online-only. This sea of change is being heralded by some as the "death of journalism," a transformation that has been brought about thanks to the web. But is the web really killing journalism? Or, is it allowing an entirely new type of journalism to emerge? 
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its final copies on March 17, after 146 years. (Elaine Thompson/Associated Press) 
