The New York Times Totally Explained

The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed internationally. It is owned by The New York Times Company, which publishes 15 other newspapers, including the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe. It is the largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States. Nicknamed the "Gray Lady" for its staid appearance and style, it's often regarded as a national newspaper of record, meaning that it's frequently relied upon as the official and authoritative reference for modern events. Founded in 1851, the newspaper has won 95 Pulitzer Prizes, far more than any other newspaper. The newspaper's name is often abbreviated to The Times, but shouldn't be confused with The Times, which is published in London, or the many other publications that also use the shorter designation, including the Los Angeles Times.
Its famous motto, always printed in the upper left-hand corner of the front page, is "All the News That's Fit to Print."
The current publisher is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., a member of the family that has controlled the paper since 1896.

History

The New York Times was founded on September 18, 1851 by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones as the New-York Daily Times. The paper switched its name to The New York Times in 1857. The newspaper was originally published every day but Sunday, but during the Civil War the Times (along with other major dailies) started publishing Sunday issues.
   The paper's growing influence was seen when, in 1870 and 1871, a series of Times exposés targeting Boss Tweed ended the Tweed Ring's domination of New York's city hall.
   In the 1880s, the Times transitioned from supporting Republican candidates to becoming a politically independent paper; in 1884, the paper supported Grover Cleveland in his first presidential election. While this move initially hurt the Times's readership, the paper regained most of its lost ground within a few years.
   The Times was acquired by Adolph Ochs, publisher of The Chattanooga Times, in 1896. In 1897, he coined the paper's celebrated slogan, "All The News That's Fit To Print," widely interpreted as a jab at competing papers in New York City (the New York World and the New York Journal American) that were known for lurid yellow journalism. Under his guidance, The New York Times achieved an international scope, circulation, and reputation. The paper moved its headquarters to 42nd Street in 1904, giving its name to Times Square. It was here that the New Year's Eve tradition of lowering a lighted ball from the Times building was started by the paper. After only nine years in Times Square, the paper relocated to 229 West 43rd Street. It remained there until the spring of 2007, and is now three blocks south, at 620 Eighth Avenue. (The original Times Square building, now known as One Times Square, was sold in 1961.)
   During the next two decades, the Times made use of new technology to obtain news and deliver it to readers. In 1904, the Times received the first on-the-spot wireless transmission from a naval battle, a report of the destruction of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Port Arthur in the Yellow Sea from the press-boat Haimun during the Russo-Japanese war. In 1910, the first air delivery of the Times to Philadelphia began. The Times' first trans-Atlantic delivery to London occurred in 1919. Finally, in 1920, a "4 A.M. Airplane Edition" was sent by plane to Chicago so it could be in the hands of Republican convention delegates by evening.
   In the 1940s, the paper extended its breadth and its reach. The crossword began appearing regularly in 1942, and the fashion section started in 1946. The Times also began an international edition in 1946. (It stopped publishing it in 1967, when it joined with the owners of the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post to publish the International Herald Tribune in Paris.) The paper even bought a classical radio station (WQXR) in 1946.
   The New York Times reduced page width to 12 inches from 13.5 inches on August 6, 2007, adopting the width that has become the newspaper industry standard.

Times v. Sullivan

The paper's involvement in a 1964 libel case helped bring about one of the key United States Supreme Court decisions supporting the freedom of the press, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In the case, the United States Supreme Court established the actual malice standard for press reports to be considered defamatory or libelous. It is one of the key decisions supporting the freedom of the press. The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the extremely high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and the difficulty in proving essentially what is inside a person's head, such cases — when they involve public figures — rarely, if ever prevail.

Pentagon Papers

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971, were given ("leaked") to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times by former State Department official Daniel Ellsberg, with his friend Anthony Russo assisting in copying them. The Times began publishing excerpts as a series of articles on June 13. Controversy and lawsuits followed.
   The Papers revealed, among other things, that the government had deliberately expanded its role in the war by conducting air strikes over Laos, raids along the coast of North Vietnam, and offensive actions taken by U.S. Marines well before the American public was told about the actions, and while President Lyndon Johnson had been promising not to expand the war. The document increased the credibility gap for the U.S. government, and was seen as hurting the efforts by the Nixon administration to fight the war.
   When The Times began publishing its series, President Nixon became incensed. His words to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger that day included "people have gotta be put to the torch for this sort of thing..." and "let's get the son-of-a-bitch in jail." After failing to get The Times to voluntarily stop publishing, Attorney General John Mitchell and President Nixon requested and obtained a federal court injunction that The Times cease the publication of excerpts. The Times appealed the injunction that was issued, and the case began working its way through the court system.
   On June 18, 1971 the Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles. Ben Bagdikian, a Post editor, had obtained portions of the Papers from Ellsberg. That day the Post received a call from the Assistant Attorney General, William Rehnquist, asking them to stop publishing the documents. When the Post refused, the U.S. Justice Department sought another injunction. The U.S. District court judge refused, and the government appealed.
   On June 26, 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take both cases, merging them into the case New York Times Co. v. United States 403 U.S. 713. On June 30, 1971 the Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that the injunctions were unconstitutional prior restraints and that the government hadn't met the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint. The justices wrote nine separate opinions, disagreeing on significant substantive issues. While it was generally seen as a victory for those who claim the First Amendment enshrines an absolute right to free speech, many felt it was a lukewarm victory at best, offering little protection for future publishers when claims of national security are at stake.

Pulitzer Prizes

The Times has won 95 Pulitzer Prizes, far more than any other newspaper.

Historical controversies

The paper, like many news organizations, has often been accused of giving too little or too much coverage to various events for reasons not related to objective journalism.
   One of these allegations is that before and during World War II, the newspaper downplayed accusations that the Third Reich had targeted Jews for expulsion and genocide, at least in part because the publisher, who was Jewish, feared the taint of taking on any "Jewish cause."
   Another serious charge is the accusation that The Times, through its coverage of the Soviet Union by correspondent Walter Duranty helped to cover up the Ukrainian genocide perpetrated by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.
   In 1965, The Times published a story about a Jewish man turned Neo-Nazi, Dan Burros. Burros killed himself only minutes after the paper came out with the story. The Times has been accused by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting of giving partial coverage of events in the 1980s in Central America, in particular by insisting on human rights violations committed in Nicaragua, to the detriment of others abuses during the Salvadoran Civil War, the Guatemalan Civil War or under the dictatorship in Honduras.
   Until 2004 The Times had a policy of not using the term Armenian Genocide. Despite publishing dozens of articles about the Armenian Genocide, The Times for a period shied away from using the term in its articles as part of its editorial policy. The Turkish Government still denies genocide occurred, and the United States hasn't officially recognized it, though many states have done so. Times columnist and former reporter Nicholas D. Kristof, who is of Armenian descent, has criticized in his Times column the ongoing denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government.

Urban myth

During 2006, a chain e-mail was widely-distributed containing a supposed Times front page from May 10, 1943. The supposed front page had the headline 'Warsaw Ghetto Uprising An Over-Reaction', the other leading stories all presenting a broadly anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, pro-Nazi, pacifist point of view. The urban myth website Snopes.com investigated the veracity of this front page and found that the actual Times front page from that day was completely different and contained no reference to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Given the nature of the fabricated front page, it's likely to have been created either as propaganda or satire of a perceived modern anti-Israel stance on the part of the Times.

The Times today

The New York Times is trailing in circulation only to USA Today (which is distributed to thousands of hotel rooms nationwide) and The Wall Street Journal. It has traditionally printed full transcripts of major speeches and debates. The newspaper is currently owned by The New York Times Company, in which descendants of Ochs, principally the Sulzberger family, maintain a dominant role.
   In 1971 The Times broke the Pentagon Papers story, publishing leaked documents revealing that the U.S. government had been painting an unrealistically rosy picture of the progress of the Vietnam War. This led to New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), which declared the government's prior restraint of the classified documents was unconstitutional. More recently, in 2004 The Times won a Pulitzer for a series written by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman on employers and workplace safety issues. The Times has been going through a downsizing for several years, offering buyouts to workers and cutting expenses, in common with a general trend among print newsmedia. At the end of 2005 it had over 350 full time reporters and about 40 photographers, in addition to hundreds of free-lance contributors who work for the paper more occasionally.
   In addition to its New York City headquarters, The Times has 16 news bureaus in the New York State region, 11 national news bureaus and 26 foreign news bureaus. In recent years, it has sought to strengthen its status as a national newspaper by increasing its number of printing locations to twenty, allowing early morning distribution in many additional markets.
   In March 2007, the paper reported a circulation of roughly 1,120,420 copies on weekdays and 1,627,062 copies on Sundays. In the New York City metropolitan area, the paper costs $1.25 Monday through Saturday and $4.00 on Sunday. Elsewhere the Sunday edition costs $5.00. New home delivery subscribers may receive a discount.
   The newspaper continues to own classical WQXR (96.3 FM) and formerly owned its AM sister, WQEW (1560 AM). The classical format was simulcast on both frequencies until the early 1990s, when the big-band and standards format of WNEW-AM (now WBBR) moved from 1130 AM to 1560. The AM station changed its call letters from WQXR to WQEW. By the beginning of the 21st century, The Times had begun leasing WQEW to ABC Radio for its Radio Disney format, which continues on 1560 AM to this day. Disney became the owner of WQEW in 2007. The Times had a separate television guide from March 1988 to April 2006. It was the last major newspaper to not outsource its television guide's editorial content to a syndication service such as Tribune Media Services, though the latter company compiled the data for the guide's TV grids. Blurbs (short, haiku-like summaries) for the listings of theatrical and television movies were based on the opinions of Times critics but edited to a succinct form by the former film critic Howard Thompson from the section's inception in 1988 until a year before his death in 2002, then by Lawrence Van Gelder, Gene Rondinaro, Tim Sastrowardoyo, Neil Genzlinger, and Anita Gates.
   A new headquarters for the newspaper, a skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano, was occupied in June 2007 at 620 Eighth Avenue, between West 40th and 41st Streets, in Manhattan.

Web presence

The Times has had a strong presence on the Web since 1995, and has been ranked one of the top Web sites. Accessing some articles requires registration, though this restriction can be bypassed by using a link generator or in some cases through Times RSS feeds. The website had 555 million pageviews in March 2005.
   As of September 2007, NYTimes.com had 13 million unique visitors per month; it continues to rank as the number one newspaper site. NYT Company consolidation (which includes About.com) is the 12th most-visited parent company, with 37.7 million unique visitors as of March, 2006.
   In September 2005, the paper decided to begin subscription-based service for daily columns in a program known as TimesSelect, which encompassed many previously free columns. Until being discontinued two years later, TimesSelect cost $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year, though it was free for print copy subscribers and university students and faculty. To work around this, bloggers often reposted TimesSelect material, and at least one site once compiled links of reprinted material.
   On September 17, 2007, The Times announced that it would stop charging for access to parts of its web site, effective at midnight the following day, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees can't outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site. In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, Times news archives from 1987 to the present are available at no charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. Times columnists including Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman had criticized TimesSelect, with Friedman going so far as to say "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I've a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience." The Times is also the first newspaper to offer a video game as part of their editorial content, Food Import Folly by Persuasive Games.

Major sections

The newspaper is organized in three sections including the magazine:

1. News : Includes International, National, Washington, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, New York Region, Education, Weather, and Obituaries. ;2. Opinion : Includes Editorials, Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor.

3. Features : Includes Arts, Movies, Theater, Travel, NYC Guide, Dining & Wine, Home & Garden, Fashion & Style, Crossword, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Week in Review

Style

When referring to people, The Times generally uses honorifics, rather than unadorned last names (except in the sports pages, where last names stand alone). Its headlines tend to be verbose, and, for major stories, come with subheadings giving further details, although it's moving away from this style. It stayed with an eight column format years after other papers had switched to six, and it was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, with the first color photograph on the front page appearing on October 16, 1997. In the absence of a major headline, the day's most important story generally appears in the top-righthand column, on the main page.
The typefaces used for the headlines include Cheltenham. The text is set in Imperial.

Comics

Aside from a weekly roundup of reprints of editorial cartoons from other newspapers and Doonesbury on weekdays, The Times doesn't have its own staff editorial cartoonist, nor does it feature a comics page or Sunday comics section.

Modern controversies

The Times is often accused of liberal bias. In summer 2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece on the Times' liberal bias. He concluded that The Times did have a liberal bias in coverage of certain social issues, gay marriage being the example he used. He claimed that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City.
Okrent didn't comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news," such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties. Okrent noted that the paper's coverage of the Iraq war was, among other things, insufficiently critical of the George W. Bush administration (main article). In May 2005 Okrent was succeeded by Byron Calame.
Additionally in a post-Jayson Blair report to Bill Keller, a committee of Times employees noted:
On Monday, September 10, 2007, The Times ran a full-page advertisement for MoveOn.org questioning the integrity of General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, entitled “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” The Times charged MoveOn.org, $65,000 for the advertisement. Detractors initially accused the Times of giving a so-called “family discount” as the standard rate for a full-page ad is $181,692. However, the Times noted that $65,000 is the normal rate for an advocacy ad from a non-profit group. Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis denied the rate charged indicated a political bias and said it was the paper's policy not to disclose the rate paid by any advertiser. "We don't distinguish the advertising rates based on the political content of the ad," Mathis told Reuters. "The advertising folks didn't see the content of the ad before the rate was quoted," she said, adding that there were over 30 different categories of ads with varying rates. Mathis confirmed the open rate for an ad of that size and type was around $181,000. Among reasons for lower rates are advertisers buying in bulk or taking a standby rate, she said. "There are many instances when we've published opinion advertisements that run counter to the stance we take on our own editorial pages," she said.

The New York Times is printed at the following sites:
Ann Arbor, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Billerica, Massachusetts; Canton, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; Columbia, Missouri; College Point, New York; Concord, California; Dayton, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Gastonia, North Carolina; Edison, New Jersey; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Lakeland, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Springfield, Virginia; Kent, Washington; Torrance, California; and Toronto, Canada.
The Ochs-Sulzberger family trust controls roughly 88 percent of the company's class B shares. Any alteration to the dual-class structure must be ratified by six of eight directors who sit on the board of the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust. The Trust board members are Daniel H. Cohen, James M. Cohen, Lynn G. Dolnick, Susan W. Dryfoos, Michael Golden, Eric M. A. Lax, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and Cathy J. Sulzberger.

Current management and employees

Publisher

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. (1992- )

Masthead

The News Sections

Bill Keller, Executive Editor (2003- )

Jill Abramson, Managing Editor (News)

John M. Geddes, Managing Editor (Production)

Jonathan Landman, Deputy Managing Editor

Dean Baquet, Assistant Managing Editor

Richard L. Berke, Assistant Managing Editor

Tom Bodkin, Assistant Managing Editor

Susan Edgerley, Assistant Managing Editor

Glenn Kramon, Assistant Managing Editor

Gerald Marzorati, Assistant Managing Editor

Michele McNally, Assistant Managing Editor

William E. Schmidt, Assistant Managing Editor

Craig R. Whitney, Assistant Managing Editor

Business Management

Janet L. Robinson, Chief Executive Officer, The New York Times Company

Scott H. Heekin-Canedy, President, General Manager

Dennis L. Stern, Senior V.P., Deputy General Manager

Denise F. Warren, Senior V.P., Chief Advertising Officer

Alexis Buryk, Senior V.P., Advertising

Thomas K. Carley, Senior V.P., Planning

Yasmin Namini, Senior V.P., Circulation and Marketing

David A. Thurm, Senior V.P., Chief Information Officer

Roland A. Caputo, V.P., Chief Financial Officer

Terry L. Hayes, V.P., Labor Relations

Thomas P. Lombardo, V.P., Production

Muriel Watkins, V.P., Human Resources

Christian L. Edwards, President, News Services

Vivian Schiller, Senior V.P., General Manager, Nytimes.Com

Michael Oreskes, Editor, International Herald Tribune

Department heads

Laura Chang, science news editor

Susan Chira, foreign news editor

Suzanne Daley, national news editor

Trip Gabriel, style editor

Lawrence Ingrassia, financial news editor

Tom Jolly, Sports editor

Scott Veale, Arts and Leisure editor

William McDonald, obituaries editor

Alison Mitchell, education editor

Katherine J. Roberts, editor, The Week in Review

Joseph Sexton, metropolitan news editor

Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor

Samuel Sifton, cultural news editor

Pete Wells, dining editor

Robert Woletz, society news editor

house and home editor (TK)

Stuart Emmrich, travel editor

Gerald Marzorati, editor, The New York Times Magazine

Sam Tanenhaus, editor, The New York Times Book Review

Bureau chiefs

Domestic bureaus

Dean Baquet, Washington

Pamela J. Belluck, Boston

Monica Davey, Chicago

Jennifer Steinhauer, Los Angeles

Abby Goodnough, Miami

Jesse McKinley, San Francisco

William Yardley, Seattle

Foreign bureaus

Warren Hoge. United Nations

James C. McKinley, Jr., Mexico City

Simon Romero, Caracas

Alexei Barrionuevo, Rio de Janeiro

John F. Burns, London

Elaine Sciolino, Paris

Nicholas Kulish, Berlin

Mark Landler, Frankfurt

Ian Fisher, Rome

Steven Erlanger, Jerusalem

Michael Slackman, Cairo

Foreign bureaus (cont.)

James Glanz, Baghdad

Sabrina Tavernise, Istanbul

Somini Sengupta, South Asia, based in New Delhi, India

Lydia Polgreen, West Africa, based in Dakar, Senegal

Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa, based in Nairobi

Michael Wines, Johannesburg, South Africa

C. J. Chivers, Moscow

Joe Kahn, Beijing, China

Howard French, Shanghai, China

Norimitsu Onishi, Tokyo, Japan

Keith Bradsher, Hong Kong

Columnists

Op-Ed Columnists

David Brooks, Thursday, Sunday

Gail Collins, Thursday, Saturday

Maureen Dowd, Wednesday, Sunday

Thomas L. Friedman, Wednesday, Sunday

Bob Herbert, Monday, Thursday

Nicholas D. Kristof, Tuesday, Sunday

Paul Krugman, Monday, Friday

Frank Rich, Sunday Business Columnists

Floyd Norris, Friday

Gretchen Morgenson, Sunday

Joseph Nocera, Saturday

News Columnists

Dave Anderson, Weekly

Peter Applebome Wednesday, Sunday

Harvey Araton, Weekly

Dan Barry, Wednesday, Saturday

Roger Cohen, Wednesday, Saturday

Clyde Haberman, Tuesday, Friday

William C. Rhoden, Weekly

Selena Roberts, Weekly

George Vecsey, Weekly

John Vinocur, Tuesday Science Columnists

Henry Fountain, Tuesday

John Tierney, Tuesday

Other notable personnel

Linda Greenhouse - Pulitzer Prize winning U.S. Supreme Court correspondent

Sia Michel, pop music editor

Jon Pareles, pop music critic

Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly, authors of The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage.

Neil Strauss, freelance music writer

Philip Taubman, national security correspondent

David E. Sanger - current White House correspondent

Don Van Natta, Jr. - investigative correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner

Sheryl WuDunn, industry and international business editor and Pulitzer Prize winner

Eric Asimov - chief wine critic

Former management and employees

Publishers

Adolph Ochs (1896-1935)

Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1935-1961)

Orvil Dryfoos (1961-1963)

Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger (1963-1992)

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. (1992-present)

Executive editors

Turner Catledge (1964-1968)

James Reston (1968-1969)

position vacant (1969-1976)

A.M. Rosenthal (1977-1986)

Max Frankel (1986-1994)

Joseph Lelyveld (1994-2001)

Howell Raines (2001-2003)

Op-Ed columnists

Flora Lewis

Tom Wicker

Other personnel

Kurt Eichenwald - former business reporter

John Bertram Oakes - former editor of the editorial page (1961-1976), credited with creating the modern op-ed page

Howard Thompson - former film critic

Adam Clymer, former correspondent in Washington, D.C.

External results

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