Posted on 12/14/2008 5:00:31 AM PST by abb
If Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, chairman and publisher of The New York Times, had paused in his Renzo Piano-designed headquarters this week, the art project commissioned for its lobby might have caught his eye. “Why are the Giants struggling?” read the message on one of the screens randomly flashing up lines from the newspaper and its website. “What is to be done?” blinked another in front of an atrium full of birch trees.
The giants of US journalism are more than struggling. This week, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy, crushed by $13bn (€9.7bn, £8.7bn) of debt from Sam Zell’s takeover. Gannett, owner of USA Today, closed 11 British local papers; and The Washington Post told staff at Newsweek to prepare for cuts. As Jon Stewart, the late-night comedy host, asked this week: “What’s black and white and completely over?”
The question hung over Mr Sulzberger’s Manhattan headquarters after The New York Times sought a $225m sale and leaseback deal on the $600m building he opened only last year. Other asset sales are under consideration as it faces looming deadlines on its $1.1bn debt.
As the proprietor of America’s best-selling metropolitan newspaper and the world’s largest newspaper website, Mr Sulzberger personifies his industry’s struggle as revenues from print disappear faster than can be compensated for by digital initiatives. If the future of America’s newspaper business rests on one individual, it is on the 57-year-old former reporter. Yet the fourth-generation family proprietor, who became publisher in 1992, is looking increasingly besieged. In the past five years, he has been buffeted by storms over his handling of one reporter’s fabrications and another’s coverage of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons, then assailed by dissident shareholders challenging his family’s control and his strategy.
More than 15 years after the bright-eyed Mr Sulzberger (sometimes known as “Pinch”, in a nod at his father’s nickname, “Punch”) took the job, his open-necked informality and almost flippant speaking style still strike many as at odds with the steely gravitas they expect of the publisher of “the grey lady”. Despite a routine of early-morning gym visits with Steve Rattner, the Quadrangle banker with whom he worked as a young reporter, he is not one of New York’s most imposing media moguls. His parents divorced when he was five years old and in May he announced he was separating from his wife of 33 years, Gail Gregg. As a teenager, Mr Sulzberger credited an Outward Bound course with teaching him self-reliance, and has remained a loyal supporter of an institution that friends say moulded his inclusive management approach.
Mr Sulzberger was the first of his family to work his way up through the institution. The former Tufts political science graduate took reporting jobs on the Raleigh Times in North Carolina and the Associated Press in London (and an arrest or two during anti-Vietnam war rallies), then joined the Times’ Washington bureau in 1978 before switching to a commercial position five years later. His own son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, has served a similar apprenticeship on The Oregonian. Arthur, 28, is now seen as among three candidates to succeed his father.
However, what any successor would inherit is in doubt. The advertising slump is raising fresh questions about how long his family’s grip can hold, although its dual class share structure, gives the Sulzbergers 70 per cent of the board seats. Concerns over cash forced a 74 per cent drop in the dividend last month, equivalent to asking his relatives to take an $18m-a-year pay cut.
A year after the fractured Bancroft family sold The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, outsiders question the loyalty of cash-strapped cousins, many of whom rely heavily on their dividend income. The shares have slumped to a 24-year low, prompting speculation it could fall into the hands of Mr Murdoch, Google or New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg.
Mr Murdoch has made clear his intention to make The Wall Street Journal a more direct rival. “It’s clearly hand-to-hand competition,” says Ken Doctor of Outsell, a publishing research firm.
Mr Sulzberger, who likes to talk of the company’s historic journalistic mission, has so far left The New York Times 1,200-strong newsroom relatively insulated from the group’s woes. His handling of editorial crises, however, has impressed few inside or outside the organisation. When Jayson Blair was found to have been making up stories in 2003, the institution’s response reinforced its reputation for self-absorption. At a tense meeting to discuss the affair, Mr Sulzberger baffled staff by pulling out a toy moose to make a point. A better listener would have judged the mood better, says one former senior news executive, who describes him as a private man. “I’m not sure anybody knows him extremely well, but almost everybody seems to have the same impression of him.”
Discussing a more recent controversy about a Times report of John McCain’s dealings with a female lobbyist, one person with long ties to the family and company says: “Arthur’s father [Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, now 82] would have been down in the editor’s office that morning saying ‘why are we doing this?’ His father was much more low key but ultimately there was a spine of steel there.”
Such qualms play into fears about the family’s commitment, this person says. “What happens if they start to ask, why am I making all these financial sacrifices for an institution that isn’t delivering what it promises?”
Insiders see no such risk. Janet Robinson, chief executive, spoke this week about the benefits to the Times from “a flight to quality”. Mr Sulzberger, who launched NYTimes.com in 1996, is credited with lifting digital revenues to an industry-leading 12 per cent of total sales and with injecting expertise with the $410m acquisition of About.com, an online information business. Even so, he has been timid about further changes.
Now, Mr Sulzberger faces the possibility of having to dismantle much of the family empire if the core is to survive. Prized assets such as The Boston Globe may have to be sold. The company’s share structure may buy him some time to restructure. For now, at least, there are few signs that the family nerve is cracking in their support for him. When the Times’ public editor asked last year in print how united his family was, Mr Sulzberger replied: “People rightly want to know, will the centre hold. It will.”
ping
http://bristolnews.blogspot.com/
JRC slams the doors on three Philly area papers without any warning at all
http://www.latimes.com/business/careers/work/la-na-onthemedia14-2008dec14,0,1971963.story
Courage in the face of danger — and bankruptcy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/14/zell-craig-brown-bbc-four-chrismases-murdoch
It’s owners, not papers, that are the problem
This sentence unwittingly conveys the germ of the NYT's problem, highlighted here for your convenience.
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/cnn/more_onair_talent_out_at_cnn_103313.asp
More On-Air Talent Out at CNN
“I’m not sure anybody knows him extremely well, but almost everybody seems to have the same impression of him.”
This sentence unwittingly conveys the germ of the NYT's problem, highlighted here for your convenience.
When Pinch came aboard, he slammed the NYT's editorial rudder over hard left.
Before Pinch, for example, the Times played homosexual-agenda political and cultural stories right up the middle without the Soho slant. After he arrived, Sulzberger turned the NYT into a broadsheet version of a gay Village "alternative" weekly, a TriBeCa birdcage liner. Objectivity went out the window and the NYT went hardline.
A couple of years ago a Timesman who edits the front page opined in print that something like 3/4's of their front-page editors are openly or not-very-closetedly gay or bisexual. That tells you something right there.
Hope He’s having a miserable day. Is that a photo shopped black eye or the real deal? & who did it?
It is the famous legitimate NY Post photo of Pinch with a black eye, the origin of which Pinch never clearly explained.
Bad night at the gar bars? Irate NY Times stockholder? Widow of a dead serviceman as a result of his endless leaks of national security?
since it's on his right eye, i guess we're looking for a lefty...
But doesn’t the Times receive millions from the Teamsters, just like the rest of the democratic party?
Pinch Sulzberger is a reporter like I'm Batman. He's the guy who got the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Times to refer to the main office as "the Taliban" and himself as "Mullah Omar." This is from an obviously left slanted bureau referring to the left wing edicts of management. It's kind of sad to watch a respected American company in its death throes, but they've been sucking up to the left for decades, and openly worshipping at the democrat altar since Kennedy. Now it's finally coming back to haunt them. Nobody listens to them anymore. The conservatives can't stand them and the liberals prefer their propaganda without the snobbery.
Yeah, the NYT has been moose bit, hard. Not a cheesy bite either. Word to your sister.
If the media collapses, how will the DNC get out its message??
Pray for W, America and Our Troops
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-sun-phil-rosenthal-14dec14,0,6871291.column
Could this model be Detroit’s new Edsel?
A bit of topic but was listening to ESPN Friday and someone mentioned fans of Tony Romo are “romosexuals”. I thought it was funny as did the radio host.
Dude, that's just uncanny.
Ms. Robinson
http://cancelthebee.blogspot.com/2008/12/editor-of-anchorage-daily-news-were.html
Editor of Anchorage Daily News: “We’re shrinking!”
You're right.
http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/news7455.html
A ‘Free Press’ Is Free Of State Handouts
Left-wing TV news will try to fill the void.
Last year the Times Company sold off its nine television stations for almost $600 million. This broadcast division had a net profit three times greater than the rest of the company.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/01/new_york_times_company_dumps_b.html
They have frittered away the core asset that any news organization must have, which is credibility. Without credibility, they are nothing.
Is "credibility" actually the word?? If you are claiming objectivity and authority, you need more than credibility - you need respect.The irony is, of course, that people who argue from the assumption of their own virtue are the most arrogant, and the least objective, people.
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