76 Time October 21–28, 2019
Business
The fourth generation of the Ochs-
Sulzbergers, led by A.G.’s father, took
pains to ensure that other branches of
the family were involved in choosing the
new publisher, even hiring a psycholo-
gist specializing in dynastic succession in
family- owned firms. When the competi-
tion formally opened sometime in 2015,
all three cousins— Dolnick, Perpich and
A.G.—raised their hands. And all remain
with the company, where they are viewed
with respect and some wonder.
“The three of them, it’s like they were
grown in a lab,” says James Bennet, who
edits the Times editorial page. “They’re
young, but they kind of came of age as
all this disruption was happening, and
they must have been conscious that
on their watch, whether the New York
Times is going to survive is going to be
a real question.”
the exIstentIal challenges keep
on coming. With murder surpassing
combat as the leading cause of on-the-job
fatality for journalists, Sulzberger no lon-
ger waits for a White House invitation to
confront a U.S. President who demonizes
independent reporters and cossets despots who jail and even
kill them. The publisher noted in a Sept. 23 op-ed that the State
Department has ceased warning U.S. journalists who face arrest
abroad. When the Times’ Cairo bureau chief was threatened, he
had to be spirited to the airport by the Irish embassy.
Yet the primary destroyer of journalists remains the Inter-
net, especially at the community level, where 1,800 local pa-
pers have been shuttered since 2004 and hedge funds joust to
wring those that remain. To turn that around, hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars are being spent by charities, think tanks, and
even Google and Facebook, which have a business interest in
quality content: when Facebook set up a news feed highlight-
ing local stories, it discovered a third of Americans lived where
it could not find the five stories per day needed for “Today In.”
The responsible rich are also helping, investing in papers in
Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and more. Should a proven
template for subscriptions emerge, it’s not impossible to imag-
ine someone of extravagant means seeding it in communities
across the country the way public libraries were by Andrew
Carnegie a century ago.
Is the Times that model? “If we can do 5 million, I do sort
of wonder whether other American newspapers shouldn’t be
aiming a bit higher,” says Thompson, the Times CEO. “I don’t
think our advantages are so unique that others couldn’t do it.
Journalism which can’t be paid for isn’t going to exist.”
It may be a question of scale. “The Internet, tradition-
ally, is winner take most,” notes Rich Greenfield, a media-
technology analyst. And Jodi Rudoren left her job as a senior
Times strategist to edit the Forward to try to discover a way
for smaller media like the Jewish news outlet to survive. “The
Times model may work for a couple of
places,” she says, “but it absolutely will
not work for the many journalistic enter-
prises we need for a vibrant democracy.”
One challenge of a “subscriber-led”
approach is all too evident in the age of
Trump: people take sides. The Times’
marketing slogan—“The truth is worth
it”—itself walks the line between fearless
reporting and confrontation. On Twitter
there were calls to cancel subscriptions in
early August over a stenographic headline
(TRUmP URgeS UniTy vS. RaciSm) that
was changed for the next edition. “They
are completely reader- focused now,” says
Shafer. “And I think that’s why Dean
Baquet went on his groveling tour to ex-
plain what was just a sh-tty headline.”
In many ways, the fevered atten-
tion signals the stakes—for the leader
of a free press, in a fraught world. So
for the Times, perhaps the trickiest part
may be signing subscribers who do not
fret about the Republic but are keen on
movies, science, books—the world the
Times has always offered. A parenting
app is being weighed. Among the op-
portunities of the digital world is leav-
ing behind baggage, including the long-held reputation as
an “elite” read. “There’s a percentage of people who will lis-
ten to The Daily every day who don’t know it’s from the New
York Times,” Sulzberger says. And each can become a sub-
scriber for $15 a month—less, with promotions. That’s why
Facebook, Instagram and the rest still feature in the Times’
strategy. Those first 10 free stories have to appear some-
where, and the Times gathers page views on the scale of Fox
News and CNN. The idea is to cast the net as widely as pos-
sible for subscribers and then, with each scroll, tap and alert,
become as much a part of daily life through the phone as the
newspaper once was.
That means treating the reader with a certain deference. If
your data is mined, it’s done relatively lightly. The Times in-
vites advertisers to buy ads in stories based not on who’s read-
ing them but on the emotional response a story evokes, like
“happy” or “inspiration.” In May, a Times rep informed an au-
ditorium of advertising buyers, “We now have more than 18
emotions available.” What advertisers are really buying is some-
thing rare on the Internet: a committed relationship.
Only subscribers, for instance, get access to “Times Insider,”
featuring interviews with reporters and behind-the-scenes ac-
counts of major stories. It’s a daily, online version of something
older, the annual Family Assembly, when members of the Sulz-
berger family gather at the Times headquarters for a day.
“We invite a foreign correspondent every year to talk about
what they do,” says Sulzberger, explaining how it works. “And
the reporters are always asking me, like, ‘What should I ex-
pect? What’s the crowd going to be like?’ And I would say, ‘Like,
they’re just the biggest fans of the New York Times.’ ” •2010 2017
$60B
$40
$20
$16.5B
advertising$11.2B
ciculation