Free Republic

So much for closing ranks. Perhaps Arthur Sulzberger thought that his newspaper’s rant about conservatives doing to his reporters what they do to conservatives would generate some sympathy from colleagues in the media. Instead, media critics at the Washington Post and Politico delivered the same message to the New York Times’ publisher — stop whining.The Post’s Erik Wemple wrote that Sulzberger can’t have it both ways. These are public statements of the same kind — and on the same platform — as the media likes to resurface when it suits their purposes. Despite the breathless description used by the...

Oh, what fun to watch the contretemps going on in the shop of New York’s failed print model of what used to be journalism! “Fired for being a bitch,” is a Drudge headline that just won’t quit. The Pinches and Punches of the world of cutthroat print are just getting a pinch of their own punch as they feel the pushback from a female wanting to win in their falsely contrived War on Women. Oh, how payback is hell! How delicious to watch the Old Grey Lady impaled on a modern Lady’s sword. Arty (Sulzberger) is in the painful position...

“Our journalism advantage is shrinking,” a committee led by the publisher’s son warned. A call to get rid of the metaphor of “Church and State.” A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture. The Times report was finalized March 24 by a committee of digitally oriented staffers led by reporter A.G. Sulzberger....

New York Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on Thursday reiterated the company's support for its incoming chief executive, who has been under scrutiny in England over the BBC's decision to cancel a news story about one of its hosts being accused of sexually abusing children. In a letter to the staff Thursday about the company's financial performance, Sulzberger said he was satisfied that Mark Thompson, who was the BBC's director general until last month, had no role in canceling a planned investigative segment about children's television presenter Jimmy Savile.

They called him Punch, and he earned the sobriquet. A Marine, he came home from serving in the Pacific theater, then in the Korean Conflict, to help run the family business, which in the case of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was the New York Times. Imagine that -- somebody with a military background running the Times. Even harder to imagine these days, when the good gray New York Times has become as pretentious as it is ideological, is that it once had a publisher with a sense of humor. Punch Sulzberger used to say his family never worried about him when...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

Some New York Times Co... staffers are boiling about their top executives' huge $12 million payouts in 2009. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s compensation more than doubled in 2009, to nearly $6 million. President and CEO Janet Robinson also boosted her earnings by 32%, to $6.3 million. During the same year, the New York newsroom lost 100 staffers to buyouts and layoffs, along with pay and benefit cuts at sister publications. "We watched our colleagues pack their boxes and he is making $6 million? It's a joke."

SULZBERGERS' FIRM-BASED INCOME SLIPS TO $4.5M The Ochs-Sulzberger family since 1896 has run the venerable NY Times empire has now lost more than 86% of its fortune and may have to sell their controlling stake to get out of debt......about two dozen descendants had comfortable lifestyles, living on wealth valued as high as $425M....down to a paltry $4.5M, which could shrink even more. Soaring losses amid a devastating media slump have drained corporate cash, pushed the company deeper into $1.3B debt and beckoned a stock vulture -- Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who bailed out the Times with a high-interest $250M...

IN 1972, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, was looking for a conservative columnist for his left-leaning Op-Ed page. At a charity dinner, he wound up sitting next to William Safire, the Nixon White House speechwriter who coined Spiro Agnew’s famous denunciation of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” They soon had a deal. But, as described in “The Trust,” the authoritative history of the family that has controlled The Times for more than a century, Sulzberger neglected to involve John Oakes, his cousin and the editor of the editorial page, in the decision. Oakes...

New York Times Co. (NYT) Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and other members of the family that controls the newspaper publisher held talks with a trusted financial adviser about taking the company private, according to a report on the Web site of BusinessWeek magazine.

N.Y. Times Shares Decline on Downgrade Friday June 9, 5:05 pm ET New York Times Shares Fall 1.6 Percent Following Analyst Downgrade NEW YORK (AP) -- Shares of The New York Times Co. fell Friday after an analyst at Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock to "underperform." Shares of the company, which also owns The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune, fell 38 cents, or 1.6 percent, to close at $23.66 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, after falling to a 52-week low of $23.13 earlier in the session. Peter Appert, a newspaper industry analyst at Goldman Sachs, downgraded...

Kincaid: "Mr. Chairman. My name is Cliff Kincaid with Accuracy in Media. I will wait before getting into the praise and criticism I have of the paper's journalistic and editorial processes. But on the matter of business operations, this is a shareholders meeting, and I think it's about time that the company level with the shareholders about how much money was paid to Judith Miller in her controversial severance package. What is that figure?" Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger: "Mr. Kincaid, we actually don't discuss the specifics of any employee's salary or compensation or severance. But I do believe in the...

If you want to understand the disastrous decline of the New York Times in recent years, a good place to start is this National Review Online "Media Blog" post on a commencement speech given by Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Stephen Spruiell of "Media Blog" links to the text of Sulzberger's speech, so you can read the whole thing if you want. What struck me about the quoted excerpts was their stupidity. This does not seem to be a very smart man. Example: "It wasn't supposed to be this way," Sulzberger said. "You weren't supposed to be graduating in...

New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s wild left-wing rant at a graduation ceremony in New York... Sulzberger “apologized” to graduates at the State University ...for the failure of his generation to stop the Iraq War and to sufficiently promote “fundamental human rights” like abortion, immigration, and gay marriage... He begins with a facetious “apology” to the class for being part of the generation that let them down due to insufficient liberal activism. “When I graduated in 1974, my fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon. OK. OK. That’s not quite true. Maybe there were larger...

N.Y. Times Publisher Apologizes for Boomers New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told a college graduating class that he was ”sorry” for his generation’s failure to achieve the goals it had set back when he was a college student. "When I graduated in 1974, my fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon,” he told about 900 graduates of the State University of New York at New Paltz on Sunday. "Okay, that’s not quite true. Maybe there were larger forces at play. "Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better,...

Newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in the six-month period ending in March, according to data released Monday, as the industry continued to struggle with competition from other media outlets and the Internet. The decline in average paid weekday circulation was about the same as the previous time newspapers reported six-month circulation figures for the period ending last September, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group. The NAA reported that average paid circulation at Sunday newspapers fell 3.1 percent versus the same period a year ago, also a comparable decline with the last time circulation figures were reported....

Facing shareholder dissent and getting flak for bloated executive pay deals, The New York Times is frantically searching for crisis p.r. experts as the company gears up for a public battle over the future of the newspaper giant. Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. and other top management have been criticized for putting off the concerns of Morgan Stanley portfolio manager Hassan Elmasry and for a share price that's plummeted 50 percent since 2002. Soon after Morgan's attack last week on The Times, the publisher's spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, was phoning Knight Ridder spokesman Polk Laffoon seeking advice, sources familiar with the...

An article in Business Day on Wednesday about investors in The New York Times Company who withheld their votes for directors misspelled the name of the family that has controlled the company since 1896. It is Ochs-Sulzberger, not Ochs-Sulzburger.

Opinion: The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week 4. Penny Ante The New York Times Co. (NYT:NYSE - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) is feeling the pinch of aggrieved shareholders. Big investors took a shot across management's bow this week by withholding 28% of votes from the company's board slate. A 5.6% holder, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, wants to eliminate the Class B stock that gives the Sulzberger family control of the board despite its tiny financial stake. "MSIM believes that the dual-class voting at The New York Times Company, which is an exception to the general...

Arthur Ochs “Pinch” Sulzberger, Jr., the scion of a family dynasty founded by his great grandfather, is well into the process of destroying the patrimony handed to him on a silver platter. Even worse, the whole world is starting to notice, something which will make other family members distinctly unhappy. And because the family controls the election of a majority of the board of directors of the New York Times Company, despite owning a tiny fraction of the actual equity (thanks to a two class system of shares), this unhappiness could affect Pinch’s tenure in office. No less an authority...