The New York Times Company

The New York Times Company

229 West 43rd Street
New York, New York 10036
U.S.A.
(212) 556-1234
Fax: (212) 556-4607

Public Company
Incorporated: 1851 as Raymond, Jones & Company
Employees: 10,400
Sales: $1.78 billion
Stock Exchange: American

The New York Times Company (NYTC) is a large diversified media and communications business engaged in newspaper and magazine publishing, broadcasting and information services, and, to a lesser extent, forest products. Its principal property is one of the world’s great newspapers, The New York Times, founded in 1851. During its history of nearly 140 years, the company has grown to include along with The New York Times, 32 regional newspapers and 17 magazines, including such popular journals as Family Circle, McCall’s, Golf Digest, and Tennis. The company also operates five television stations, two radio stations, a news service, and a features syndicate, and licenses databases and copyrights. In addition it has equity interests in three Canadian newsprint mills and a partnership interest in a Maine paper mill.

The principal founders of The New York Times were Henry Jarvis Raymond, a sometime politician, reporter, and editor who learned his trade working for Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune, and George Jones, an Albany, New York, banker who had also once worked for Greeley as a business manager on the Tribune. Raymond proposed a newspaper that would present the news in a conservative and objective fashion, in contrast to the yellow journalism of the day, which emphasized crime, scandal, and radical politics. They raised $70,000 to establish Raymond, Jones & Company, largely by selling stock to wealthy upstate New York investors, and set up their editorial offices in a dilapidated six-story brownstone on Nassau Street in downtown New York City. The first issue of The New York Daily Times— the word “Daily” was dropped from the title in 1857—was dated September 18, 1851, and announced an editorial policy that would emphasize accurate reporting and moderation of opinion and expression.

Jones handled the company’s business affairs, and Raymond, as editor, provided journalistic leadership. Under their management, helped by booming population growth in New York City, the Times grew rapidly, reaching 10,000 circulation within ten days and 24,000 by the end of its first year. In 1858 the paper moved into a new five-story building containing the most modern printing equipment. As the Times prospered, Raymond established and continually encouraged the high standards of journalism that prevail to this day. It also became a newspaper of record. For example, it carried the entire text of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” on the front page on November 20, 1863. Among other journalistic successes, the Times provided outstanding coverage of the U.S. Civil War, with Raymond himself reporting on the Battle of Bull Run.

Raymond was active in Republican politics throughout the war. He was present at the creation of the party in Pittsburgh in 1856 and wrote its first statement of principles. He wrote most of the party platform in 1864. Between political activity and journalism, Raymond was chronically overworked for years, and his health suffered. On June 19, 1869, at the age of 49, he died. George Jones assumed the editorial leadership of the Times.

By the time of Raymond’s death, each of the 100 shares of stock in the company had increased in value from the original $1,000 to about $11,000, with 34 shares held by Raymond and 30 by Jones. In 1871 after a series of Times articles on the misdeeds of corrupt New York City politicians headed by William Marcy (Boss) Tweed, an attempt was made by Tweed interests to buy Raymond’s 34 shares from his widow. Jones quickly arranged to have the shares purchased by one of his associates, thus establishing his control of the newspaper. In 1884 Jones chose to oppose the nomination by the Republican Party of James G. Blaine for president, thus losing the much-needed support of Republican readers and advertisers. The paper’s profits fell steadily until Jones’s death in 1891. His heirs had little aptitude for the newspaper business, and the panic and depression of 1893 brought the Times close to failure.

In 1893 the Times’s editor-in-chief Charles Ransom Miller, bought control of the paper from Jones’s heirs with $1 million raised from Wall Street interests. Miller, a fine editor, had no business aptitude and was unable to maintain the newspaper’s capital requirements. Staff reductions and declining journalistic quality brought the Times to its historic low point, and by 1896 it was on the verge of bankruptcy and dissolution. During this critical year salvation came in a dramatic fashion. A group of Wall Street investors in what was then called the New York Times Publishing Company arranged to save the firm— and their investments—by placing it in receivership and recapitalizing it as a new company, The New York Times Company. The new capitalization was 10,000 shares with 2,000 being paid out in exchange for the original Times stock. A large stock position with contractual assurance of eventual majority stock ownership was purchased with borrowed money by a then-little-known but respected newspaper editor and publisher from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Adolph Simon Ochs.

Ochs, the son of German immigrants, had received little formal schooling, but had learned the newspaper business from the ground up as newsboy, printer’s devil, journeyman printer, business manager, and reporter. He was hard-working and ambitious. In 1878, at the age of 20, he borrowed $250 to buy the controlling interest in a failing Tennessee newspaper, the Chattanooga Times, thus beginning his career as a newspaper publisher before he was old enough to vote. He promoted high standards of journalism in the Chattanooga paper and soon brought it back to financial health. It 1896 looking for new challenges, he heard about The New York Times’s troubles. Ochs offered to take over as publisher in return for a contract that would give him a majority of the paper’s stock if he succeeded in making it profitable for three consecutive years. One of his early acts after becoming publisher of the Times on August 18, 1896, was to add the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” thus serving notice that the Times would continue to avoid sensationalism and follow high editorial standards.

Ochs’s first two years with the Times were a continual struggle to carry on operations and improve the paper with inadequate capital. The expenses of covering the Spanish-American War in 1898 came close to ruining the paper which sold then for 3C a copy. Some Times executives advised raising the price, but Ochs made the brilliant and daring decision to reduce the price to 1C. Within a year paid circulation trebled from 26,000 to 76,000. Advertising linage increased by nearly 40%, and the paper was profitable. Despite subsequent price increases, this was the beginning of a long upward trend in circulation and profitability. On August 14, 1900, Ochs received the NYTC stock certificates that established his control over the paper and the company, a controlling interest that was still held by his descendants in 1991.

The Times’s success under Ochs was due to much more than price cutting. He improved financial and Wall Street coverage, added a Sunday magazine supplement, and a Saturday book review section, which was later moved to Sunday. With a brilliant managing editor, Carr Van Anda, the Times carried out numerous journalistic coups. It scooped the world on the Japanese-Russian naval battle in 1904 by sending the first wireless dispatches from a war area. It again scooped the world on the Titanic shipwreck in 1912 and outdid all competition in reporting the events of World War I. The paper warned of the excesses of the 1920s, but was well equipped financially to survive the Great Depression thanks to Ochs’s Conservative policy of plowing back into the paper a major portion of its profits.

Under Ochs, the NYTC followed a general policy of avoiding diversification, although Ochs himself continued as the personal owner and publisher of the Chattanooga Times and had a private investment in a Philadelphia paper between 1901 and 1913. In 1926, however the NYTC did take part ownership, along with the Kimberly & Clark Company in a Canadian paper mill, the Spruce Falls Power and Paper Company, in order to assure its supplies of newsprint.

The Times did relatively well during the Great Depression, with daily circulation holding in the 450,000 to 500,000 range. Ochs’s health declined during the early 1930s, and he died on April 8, 1935. On May 7, 1935, the company’s directors elected as president and publisher Ochs’s son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger who had married Ochs’s daughter Iphigene in 1917 and subsequently worked his way up through the executive ranks of the newspaper.

Under Sulzberger the Times improved steadily in news coverage, financial strength, and technical progress. In a diversification move in 1944 the NYTC purchased New York City radio stations WQXR and WQXR-FM. Sulzberger opposed without success the unionization of Times employees. The company’s first published financial statement in 1958 showed 60 consecutive years of increasing profits. In 1957 a recapitalization split the common stock into A and B common stock, with the B shares, mostly held by the Ochs trust, having voting control over the company. Sulzberger’s health began to fail in the late 1950s. He retired in 1961. His successor as president and publisher was his son-in-law, Orvil E. Dryfoos. Dryfoos died in 1963. On June 20, 1963, he was succeeded in turn as president and publisher by Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger who continued in 1991 to lead the NYTC as chairman and chief executive officer.

Although Sulzberger made some administrative changes and broadened the scope of the Times news coverage, the company continued to earn a relatively low profit margin on revenues, partly due to his policy of spending freely for thorough reporting, even to the extent of throwing out advertisements to make room for news. A second bitter strike against the paper in 1965 unsettled the management, and a decision was made to undertake a significant program of diversification. In 1967 the company’s book and educational division was enlarged, and in 1968 the Times purchased a 51% interest in Arno Press. In 1969 the A common stock was given the vote for three members of the nine-member board. This action together with a public offering qualified the A stock for listing on the American Stock Exchange. The B stock, which controlled the company, continued to be held mostly by the Ochs family trust. In 1971 the NYTC paid Cowles Communications Company 2.6 million shares of class A stock to purchase substantial newspaper, magazine, television, and book properties including Family Circle and other magazines; a Florida newspaper chain; a Memphis, Tennessee, TV station; and a textbook publisher.

During the 1970s the newspaper’s profit margins continued to be under pressure because of competition, especially in New York City suburban areas. The former Cowles properties helped buoy earnings despite the 1976 sale of some medical magazines acquired from Cowles. In 1980 the NYTC paid about $100 million for a southern New Jersey cable television operation, its largest acquisition since the Cowles deal. In 1984 the book publishing operation was sold to Random House, but in 1985 the NYTC, flush with record profits, spent about $400 million on the purchase of five regional newspapers and two TV stations. In 1986 yet another recapitalization converted every ten shares of B stock into nine shares of A and one share of B, with the B stock still controlling the company. Since more than 80% of the B stock was held by the Ochs trust, this move gave the trustees more liquidity without sacrificing control of the company.

The years 1989 and 1990 continued to be profitable. In 1989 the NYTC, admitting it was not making progress with cable, sold all of its cable TV properties to a consortium of Pennsylvania cable companies for $420 million. Also in 1989 the company acquired McCall’s magazine, which, together with the acquisitions in 1988 of Golf World and Sailing World, substantially strengthened the NYTC’s magazine group. The company’s large new automated printing and distribution facility in Edison, New Jersey, that had been under construction for several years was scheduled to become operational in late 1990.

The New York Times Company has come a long way from the small brownstone on Nassau Street where Henry Raymond published the first issue of The New York Times in 1851. Company success has resulted not only from strong business leadership during much of its history but also from a series of capable publishers, editors, and reporters who built and continue to operate one of the world’s great newspapers.

Principal Subsidiaries

Cruising World Publications, Inc; Donohue Malbaie Inc. (Canada, 49%); Wilmington Star-News, Inc.; Times Leasing, Inc.; NYT 1896T, Inc.; NYTRNG, Inc.; The Houma Courier Newspaper Corporation; Fernandina Beach News-Leader, Inc.; Gainesville Sun Publishing Company; Gaspesia Pulp and Paper Company Ltd. (Canada, 49%); Hendersonville Newspaper Corporation; International Herald Tribune S.A. (France, 50%); Lake City Reporter, Inc.; Lakeland Ledger Publishing Corporation; Golf Digest/Tennis, Inc.; Crossroads Holding Corporation; Gwin-nett Publishing Company and Jones Communications Incorporated; Retail Magazines Marketing Company, Inc.; Sarasota Herald-Tribune Co.; The Family Circle, Inc.; The New York Times Broadcasting Service, Inc.; The New York Times Sales, Inc.; The Leesburg Daily Commercial, Inc.; London Bureau Ltd.; (U.K.) Northern SC Paper Corporation (80%); Ocala Star-Banner Corporation; The Palatka Daily News, Inc.; Se-bring News-Sun, Inc.; Spruce Falls Power and Paper Company, Limited (Canada, 49.5%); The Dispatch Publishing Company, Inc.; Comet-Press Newspapers, Inc.; Golf World Limited (U.K.); The New York Times Distribution Corporation; Times On-Line Services, Inc.; TSP Newspapers, Inc.; The New York Times Syndication Sales Corporation; Rome Bureau S.r.l. (Italy).

Further Reading

Berger, Meyer, The Story of the New York Times, 1851-1951, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1951; Talese, Gay, The Kingdom and the Power, New York, World Publishing Company, 1969; Salisbury, Harrison E., Without Fear or Favor, New York, Times Books, 1980; Goulden, Joseph C., Fit to Print, Secaucus, New Jersey, Lyle Stuart Inc., 1988.

—Bernard A. Block