71
public- spirited billionaires.
The Times not only found its
own way, it slashed a shaft of
light through the murk of so-
cial media—those immersive
platforms that have gummed
up the machinery of democracy by reducing citi-
zens to followers and news to content.
“I actually hate the word content,” Sulzberger
says. “It’s a word for junk ... the junk you shovel
into Facebook.
“What we do is journalism.”
Informal and Intense, Sulzberger embodies
every sort of generational change at the Times. He
turned 39 on Aug. 5, and was not yet 35 when in
2013 he found himself tasked with addressing the
organization’s digital future, as leader of the call
to arms formally known as the Innovation Report.
The situation was dire. Revenues were skidding, as
was print circulation. The home page was hemorrhaging view-
ers. Digital ads were down, and no one was sure what to do next.
“The newsroom was not always brimming with optimism,”
says Bill Keller, who presided over three rounds of staff cuts
as top editor before retiring in 2011. “It was a gloomy time.”
Yet in other ways the Times was going great guns. Even as
it trimmed its staff, it was snapping up top talent that compet-
ing newspapers were shedding. Rival reporters long put off by
the Times’ smugness and internecine culture found there was
no other place as prominent that supported their
work. During the Great Recession, which hastened
the collapse of the newspaper industry, the Times
did something extraordinary: it spent, investing
in its core mission of newsgathering —its news-
room never fell below 1,100 people—with money
no longer ready at hand.
To come up with cash, the company sold off
great chunks of itself. It sold TV stations and
radio stations. It sold the Boston Globe, its slice
of the Boston Red Sox and a chain of smaller
newspapers. It sold part of its new headquarters,
a 52-story showpiece designed by Renzo Piano,
a famous Italian architect. In 2009, the darkest
hour, the company went hat in hand to a Mexican
billionaire. Carlos Slim lent the Times $250 mil-
lion in exchange for deeply discounted stock op-
tions that eventually gave him a 17% stake in the
company. But it would never be his.
All voting shares are held by the Ochs-
Sulzberger Family Trust, established in 1997,
controlled by a handful of descendants of Adolph
Ochs’ only daughter and devoted to the propo-
sition that some things are more important than
money. SEC filings state the trust’s “primary ob-
jective” is that the Times continues “as an inde-
pendent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ul-
terior influence and unselfishly devoted to the
public welfare.” It must have been in that spirit
that the company in 2009 suspended its dividend,
the quarterly payout to stockholders that could
bring $1 million a year to a member of the trust.
“I grew up in a family that had a lot of pride in
this place and a lot of love for this place,” says Sulz-
berger, in his sixth-floor office in the Times building,
which it is buying back this year. “And some of the
bravest and most important moves made to protect
this place were actually made by folks who never
worked a day here, for whom the strength of this in-
stitution, particularly the strength of the newsroom,
was the priority that we should always put first.”
And yet, the scion of the Times grew up de-
termined to avoid the family business. His father
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger had been publisher of the
Times since A.G. was in middle school. His mother
Gail Gregg had also worked as a journalist. But the
son had an independent streak. He grew up on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side and was in a bowl-
ing league. He worked on the paper at the private
Fieldston School, but prepared for a career in something else,
maybe the environment. Matt Baldwin, who has known Sulz-
berger since West End Collegiate preschool, associates him with
a love of outdoors, including the city: “ Let’s go check out Staten
Island today.” He was a picky eater.
“My form of contrarianism is I’m going to do something dif-
ferent, you know?” Sulzberger says. Becoming a journalist “just
felt so predictable.” Unfortunately he showed talent in a feature-
writing class at Brown and admired the penetrating critiques of^
Sulzberger,
right, in the
second White
House meeting,
on Jan. 31
Adolph Ochs
1896–1935Arthur Hays
Sulzberger
1935–1961Arthur Ochs “Punch”
Sulzberger
1963–1992Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger Jr.
1992–2017Arthur Gregg
Sulzberger
2018–present