It also avoids the bombast of Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who prided himself on keeping the paper “straight” and yet was blind to his own prejudices and increasingly right-leaning politics. Recently, Sulzberger decided to write a long essay for the Columbia Journalism Review called “ Journalism’s Essential Value.” The essay is hardly a fiery polemic it studiously avoids confronting critics with any personal specificity. Far more trying were his attempts to deal with internal newsroom debates during the pandemic and after, as well as prolonged (now concluded) negotiations with the NewsGuild, the union that represents members of the Times staff. ![]() Sulzberger’s defense of the Times only enhanced his reputation at the paper. Meanwhile, critics on the right saw the paper as exceedingly “woke,” in thrall to tempests on social media and in its own newsroom.Īt an off-the-record meeting in the Oval Office, in 2018, Sulzberger told Trump that the President’s anti-press rhetoric was “not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.” Sulzberger characterized his remarks for reporters only after Trump tweeted that he had lectured the Times publisher about the “vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media.” At the same time, a new generation of critics, inside and outside the newsroom, argued that the paper, despite its many investigative triumphs, was, in an era of authoritarian threat, too cautious, too reluctant to call things what they were. The rhetoric of the Trump era insured regular attacks on the Times as a supposed purveyor of “fake news” and as a left-wing propaganda outlet. Under his father’s reign, two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson, had been fired now there were challenges that were no less charged. What he might not have foreseen were the tensions that arose within his own newsroom, never a particularly placid realm in any era. After graduating from Brown University and holding reporting jobs in the newsrooms of the Providence Journal, the Oregonian, and the Times, Sulzberger, a calm, deliberative personality, was charged with accelerating the digital transformation that he had helped to initiate, and with deepening its success. Sulzberger, then in his late thirties, was named the publisher of the Times, the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. With the collapse of so many local and second-tier newspapers, with the disappearance of once promising sites like BuzzFeed News, the Times occupies a nearly singular place in American journalism, a fact that makes honest scrutiny of the paper in all its forms even more necessary than ever. Perhaps we should start.” Instead, the Times reversed its fortunes, steadily transforming itself into a thriving, highly diversified digital enterprise while remaining the most important news-gathering organization in the country, and arguably the world. The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. In 2009, Michael Hirschorn wrote in The Atlantic, “What if The New York Times goes out of business-like, this May? It’s certainly plausible. . . . What has yet to be examined in full is how the Times endured a prolonged era of financial decline, one so exigent that the Sulzberger family, which has controlled the paper since the late nineteenth century, might have been forced to sell the paper-just as the Graham family would sell the Washington Post, for just two hundred and fifty million dollars, to Jeff Bezos. There are volumes that celebrate and critique the paper and its history, ones that dissect its triumphs (the Pentagon Papers) and its low points (its derelict coverage of the Holocaust). Nevertheless, libraries are filled with books about the Times. ![]() David, who had already gone fifteen rounds with life and was not prepared to wrestle with a book that would hold little popular interest, waved off my question, saying, “Have you ever noticed at Barnes & Noble that the books about media are on the fourth floor?” Long before David Carr, the late Times media critic, published his 2008 memoir, “ The Night of the Gun,” I asked him why he never wrote a book about newspapers and the rise of digital journalism.
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