The Four

The media also enjoyed beating up on the Times’ publisher and
chairman, Arthur Sulzberger. One Reuters reporter, who was working
on a story about the dynamics of the Sulzberger family, called me on
my cell one night at eleven. He told me he would be fired the next day
unless I gave him something, anything, for a story about our battle
with the Times.
He had assembled, with art supplies, an elaborate family tree—
cousins, second cousins—with a level of detail that was downright
creepy. It became clear that the world’s media couldn’t wrap its head
around how it felt about the people who owned the media.
Arthur Sulzberger and I took an immediate, almost visceral,
disliking to one another. We saw the world differently and approached
it from entirely different angles. My whole life has been a quest to gain
relevance and fear of never achieving it, whereas Arthur’s biggest fear
(I believe) was losing it. And to be clear, he was the CEO. He gave
Janet Robinson the title just so he wouldn’t have to do the shit-work of
a CEO—firing people, earnings calls, etc. However, he made the big
decisions and collected CEO-level compensation.
The Sulzbergers, like many media families, employ a dual-class
shareholder structure to keep them in control. The thinking is that
media plays a special role in our society and should not be subject to
the short-term thinking of shareholders. Most use this (Google,
Facebook, Cablevision) as a ruse for the families to maintain control of
the company while diversifying their stake (that is, selling shares).
The Times is not one of these companies. The family is deeply
committed to journalism. And it was clear, after getting to know
Arthur, that the financial health of the Times was meaningful, but only
in the pursuit of the profound—the Times’ form of journalism. I
imagine Arthur wakes up in a cold sweat frequently, fearing he could
be the cousin that loses the New York Times.
So, the Sulzbergers, like many newspaper families, owned a
minority of the equity, 18 percent, but controlled ten of fifteen seats on
the board. That meant that agitators like me had to swing a whole
bunch of family friends and members to the wild side. After sharing
our ideas about digital and capital allocation, we continued to meet
with shareholders to gauge support. Annual meetings are like
elections, and shareholders—in this case the Class A shareholders—get