The New York Times
is an American daily newspaper founded in
1851 and published in New York City
. The largest metropolitan newspaper in the
United
States
, "The Gray Lady"—named for its staid appearance and
style—is regarded as a national newspaper of record. The Times is
owned by The New York Times Company
, which publishes eighteen other newspapers,
including the International Herald
Tribune and The Boston
Globe. The company's chairman is
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose
family has controlled the paper since 1896.
The paper's motto, as printed in the upper left-hand corner of the
front page, is "All the News That's Fit to Print." It is organized
into sections: News, Opinions, Business, Arts, Science, Sports,
Style, and Features.
The Times stayed with the
eight-column format for several years after most papers switched to
six columns, and it was one of the last newspapers to adopt
color photography.
The
Times has won
101
Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization. Its web
site was the most popular American online newspaper Web site as of
December 2008, receiving more than 18 million
unique visitors in that month.
History
The New York Times was founded on September 18, 1851, by
journalist and politician
Henry
Jarvis Raymond, the second chairman of the
Republican National Committee,
and former banker
George
Jones as the
New-York Daily Times. Sold at an original
price of one cent per copy, the inaugural edition attempted to
address the various speculations on its purpose and positions that
preceded its release:
The paper changed its name to
The New York Times in 1857.
The newspaper was originally published every day except Sunday, but
on April 21, 1861, due to the demand for daily coverage of the
Civil War the
Times,
along with other major dailies, started publishing Sunday issues.
One of the earliest public controversies in which the paper was
involved was the
Mortara Affair, an
affair that was the object of twenty editorials in the
Times alone.
The
paper's influence grew during 1870–71 when it published a series of
exposés of Boss Tweed that led to the end
of the Tweed Ring's domination of
New York's City
Hall
. In the 1880s, the
Times
transitioned from supporting
Republican candidates to
becoming politically independent; in 1884, the paper supported
Democrat Grover Cleveland in his first presidential
election. While this move 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. The
following year, he coined the paper's slogan, "All The News That's
Fit To Print"; this was a jab at competing papers such as the
New York World and the
New York Journal
American which were known for lurid
yellow journalism. Under his guidance,
The New York Times achieved international scope,
circulation, and reputation.
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. 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 reach. The
crossword began
appearing regularly in 1942, and the fashion section in 1946. The
Times began an international edition in 1946. The
international edition stopped publishing in 1967, when it joined
the owners of the
New York
Herald Tribune and
The
Washington Post to publish the
International Herald
Tribune in Paris.
The paper bought a classical radio station
(WQXR
) in 1946. In addition to owning WQXR, the newspaper
also formerly owned its AM sister, WQEW
(1560
AM). The classical music format was simulcast on
both frequencies until the early 1990s, when the big-band and
standards music 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 was leasing WQEW to
ABC
Radio for its
Radio Disney format,
which continues on 1560 AM.
Disney became the
owner of WQEW in 2007.
On July 14, 2009 it was announced that WQXR
was to be sold to WNYC
, who on
October 8, 2009 moved the station to 105.9 FM and began to operate
the station as a non-commercial.
The New York Times is third in national circulation, after
USA Today and
The Wall Street Journal.
The
newspaper is owned by The New York Times Company, in which descendants of Adolph Ochs, principally
the Sulzberger family, maintain a
dominant role. In March 2009, the paper reported a
circulation of 1,039,031 copies on weekdays and 1,451,233 copies on
Sundays. According to a 2009 New York Times article circulation has
dropped 7.3 percent to about 928,000; this is the first time since
the 1980s since it has fallen under one million.
In the New York
City metropolitan area
, the paper costs $2 Monday through Saturday and $5
on Sunday. The
Times has won 101
Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other
newspaper.
In addition to its New York City headquarters, the
Times
has 16 news bureaus in New York State, 11 national news bureaus and
26 foreign news bureaus.
The New York Times reduced its
page width to from on August 6, 2007, adopting the width that has
become the US newspaper industry standard.
Because of its steadily declining sales in recent decades, 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.
The
newspaper's first building was located at 113 Nassau
Street
in New York City. In 1854, it moved to
138 Nassau Street, and in 1858 it moved to 41 Park Row
, making it the first newspaper in New York City
housed in a building built specifically for its use.
The paper
moved its headquarters to 1475 Broadway
in 1904, in an area called Long Acre Square, which
was renamed to Times Square. The
top of the building is the site of the
New Year's Eve tradition of lowering a
lighted ball, which was started by
the paper. The building is also notable for its electronic
news ticker, where headlines crawled around the
outside of the building. It is still in use, but is not operated by
the
Times. After nine years in Times Square, an Annex was
built at 229 West 43rd Street. After several expansions, it became
the company's headquarters in 1913, and the building on Broadway
was sold in 1961. Until June 2007, the
Times, from which
Times Square gets its name, was published at offices at West 43rd
Street. It stopped printing papers there on June 15, 1997.
Yet the
newspaper remained at that location until June 2007, when it moved
three blocks south to 620 Eighth Avenue
between West 40th and 41st Streets, in Manhattan
. The new headquarters for the newspaper,
The New York
Times Building
, is a skyscraper designed
by Renzo Piano.
Times v. Sullivan
The
paper's involvement in a 1964 libel case helped bring one of the
key United
States Supreme Court
decisions supporting freedom of the press, New York Times Co.
v. Sullivan.
In it, the United
States Supreme Court established the "actual
malice" standard for press reports about public officials or
public figures to be considered
defamatory or libelous. The malice standard requires the
plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove the publisher of the
statement knew the statement was false or acted in
reckless disregard of its truth or
falsity. Because of the high
burden of
proof on the plaintiff, and difficulty in proving what is
inside a person's head, such cases by public figures rarely
succeed.
The Pentagon Papers
In 1971,
the Pentagon Papers, a 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 public was told
about the actions, and while President
Lyndon B. Johnson had been promising not to expand
the war. The document increased the credibility gap for the U.S.
government, and hurt efforts by the
Nixon administration to fight the
on-going war.
When the
Times began publishing its series, President
Richard Nixon became incensed. His
words to National Security Advisor
Henry
Kissinger 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 stop publishing,
Attorney General
John Mitchell and President Nixon
obtained a federal court injunction that the
Times cease
publication of excerpts. The newspaper appealed and the case began
working through the court system. On June 18, 1971,
The Washington Post began
publishing its own series.
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.
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
New York Times
Co. v. United States 403
US 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 had not met the burden of proof required. 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 a
lukewarm victory, offering little protection for future publishers
when claims of
national security
were at stake.
Ownership
The Ochs-Sulzberger family, one of the United States' newspaper
dynasties, has owned the
Times since 1896. After the
publisher
went public in the
1960s, the family continued to exert control through its ownership
of the vast majority of Class B
voting
shares. Class A shareholders cannot vote on many important
matters relating to the company, while Class B shareholders can
vote on all matters. Dual-class structures caught on in the
mid-20th century as families such as the Grahams of
the Washington Post Company sought
to gain access to public capital without losing control.
Dow Jones & Co., publisher of
The Wall Street
Journal, had a similar structure and was controlled by the
Bancroft family; the company was later bought by the
News Corporation in 2007.
Turner Catledge, the top editor at the New York Times for almost
two decades, wanted to hide the ownership influence.Sulzberger
routinely wrote memos to his editor, each containing suggestions,
instructions, complaints, and orders. When Catledge would receive
these memos he would erase the publisher’s identity and give them
to the people his subordinates. Catledge thought that if he removed
the publisher’s name from the memos it would protect reporters from
feeling pressured by the owner.
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.
Missed print dates
Due to strikes, the regular edition of
The New York Times
was not printed during the following periods:
- December 9, 1962 to March 31, 1963. Only a western edition was
printed.
- September 17, 1965 to October 10, 1965. An international
edition was printed, and a weekend edition replaced the Saturday
and Sunday papers.
- August 10, 1978 to November 5, 1978. A multi-union strike shut
down the three major New York City newspapers. No editions of the
Times were printed. Two months into the strike, a parody
of the Times called "Not The New York Times" was given out
in New York, with contributors such as Carl Bernstein, Christopher Cerf, Tony Hendra and George Plimpton.
No editions were printed on January 2 of 1852–1853 and of
1862–1867. No editions were printed on July 5 of 1861–1865.
Content
Sections
This newspaper is organized in three sections, including the
magazine.
- News:
Includes International, National, Washington
, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports,
The Metro
Section
, Education, Weather, and Obituaries.
- Opinion: Includes Editorials, Op-Eds and Letters to
the Editor.
- Features: Includes Arts, Movies, Theatre, 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
Some
sections, such as Metro, are only found in the editions of the
paper distributed in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Tri-State Area and not in the national or
Washington,
D.C. editions. Aside from a weekly roundup of
reprints of
editorial cartoons
from other newspapers, the
Times does not have its own
staff
editorial cartoonist, nor
does it feature a
comics page or Sunday
comics section. In September 2008, the
Times announced that it will be combining certain sections
effective October 6, 2008, in editions printed in the New York
metropolitan area. The changes will fold the Metro Section into the
main International / National news section and combine Sports and
Business (except Saturday through Monday, when Sports will still be
printed as a standalone section). This change also included having
the name of the Metro section be called New York outside of the
Tri-State Area. The presses used by the
Times allow four
sections to be printed simultaneously; as the paper had included
more than four sections all days except Saturday, the sections had
to be printed separately in an early press run and collated
together. The changes will allow the
Times to print in
four sections Monday through Wednesday, in addition to Saturday.
The
Times' announcement stated that the number of news
pages and employee positions will remain unchanged, with the paper
realizing cost savings by cutting overtime expenses. According to
Russ Stanton, editor of the
Los
Angeles Times, a competitor, the newsroom of the New York
Times is twice the size of the Los Angeles Times, which currently
has a newsroom of 600.
Style
When referring to people, the
Times generally uses
honorifics, rather than unadorned last
names (except in the sports pages, Book Review and Magazine). The
newspaper's headlines tend to be verbose, and, for major stories,
come with subheadings giving further details, although it is moving
away from this style. It stayed with an eight-column format until
September 1976, 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-right hand column, on
the main page. The
typefaces used for the
headlines are custom variations of
Cheltenham. The
running text is set at 8.7
point Imperial.
Joining a roster of other major American newspapers in recent
years, including
USA Today, The Wall Street
Journal and
The Washington Post, The New York
Times announced on July 18, 2006, that it would be narrowing
the size of its paper by one and a half inches. In an era of
dwindling circulation and significant advertising revenue losses
for most print versions of American newspapers, the move, which was
also announced would result in a five percent reduction in news
coverage, would have a target savings of $12 million a year for the
paper. The change from the traditional 54-inches broadsheet style
to a more compact 48-inch web width was addressed by both Executive
Editor Bill Keller and
The New York Times President Scott
Heekin-Canedy in memos to the staff. Keller defended the "more
reader-friendly" move indicating that in cutting out the "flabby or
redundant prose in longer pieces" the reduction would make for a
better paper. Similarly, Keller confronted the challenges of
covering news with "less room" by proposing more "rigorous editing"
and promised an ongoing commitment to "hard-hitting,
ground-breaking journalism". The official change went in to effect
on August 6, 2007.
The New York Times printed an advertisement on its first
page on January 6, 2009, breaking tradition at the paper. The
advertisement for CBS was in color and was the entire width of the
page. The newspaper promised it would only place first-page
advertisements on the lower half of the page.
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 can be bypassed some cases through
Times RSS feeds. The
website had 555 million pageviews in March 2005. The domain
nytimes.com attracted at least 146 million visitors
annually by 2008 according to a
Compete.com study. The
Times website
ranks 59th by number of unique visitors, with over 20 million
unique visitors in March 2009 making it the most visited newspaper
site with more that twice the number of unique visitors as the next
most popular site. Also, as of May 2009, nytimes.com produced 22 of
the 50 most popular newspaper blogs.
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 cannot outweigh
the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site. In
addition to opening almost 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.
Access to the
Premium Crosswords section continues to
require either home delivery or a subscription for $6.95 per month
or $39.95 per year.
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 have 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 its editorial content,
Food Import Folly by
Persuasive Games.
reCAPTCHA is currently helping to digitize
old editions of
The New York Times.
Mobile presence
The
Times Reader is a digital version of the
Times. It was created via a collaboration between the
newspaper and
Microsoft.
Times
Reader takes the principles of print journalism and applies
them to the technique of online reporting.
Times Reader
uses a series of technologies developed by Microsoft and their
Windows Presentation
Foundation team.
It was announced in Seattle
in April 2006 by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.,
Bill Gates, and Tom
Bodkin.
In 2008, the
Times created an app for the
iPhone and
iPod touch which
allowed users to download articles to their mobile device enabling
them to read the paper even when they were unable to receive a
signal.
The New York Times in Moscow
Communication with its Russian readers is a special project of
The New York Times launched at February 2008, guided by
Clifford J. Levy. Some
Times articles covering
the broad spectrum of political and social topics in Russia are
being translated into Russian and offered for attention of Russia's
bloggers in the
Times community blog. After that, selected
responses of Russian bloggers are being translated into English and
published at
The New York Times site among comments from
English readers.
Controversy
The paper has often been accused of giving too little or too much
coverage to events for reasons not related to objective journalism.
Before and during
World War II, the
newspaper downplayed the
Third Reich
targeting of
Jews for
genocide, in part because the publisher, who was
Jewish, feared the taint of taking on any "Jewish cause". During
the war,
Times journalist
William L. Laurence was "on the payroll of the
War Department."
Another
serious charge is the accusation that the Times, through
its coverage of the Soviet
Union
by correspondent Walter
Duranty, failed to expose the Ukrainian
famine of the 1930s.
Jayson Blair was a
Times
reporter who was forced to resign from the newspaper in May 2003,
after he was caught
plagiarizing and
fabricating elements of his stories. Some critics contended that
Blair's race was a major factor in the Times' initial reluctance to
fire him. Reporter
Judith
Miller retired after criticisms that her reporting of the
lead-up to the Iraq war was factually inaccurate and overtly
favorable to the Bush administration's position, for which the
Times was forced to apologize. One of Miller's prime
sources was
Ahmed Chalabi, who after
US occupation became the interim oil minister of Iraq and is now
head of the Iraqi services committee. However, reporter
Michael R. Gordon, who shared byline credit with
Miller on some of the early Iraq stories, continues to report on
military affairs for the
Times.
The
Times has been variously described as having a liberal
bias or described as being a liberal newspaper, or of having a
conservative bias on certain issues or by some writers.
Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting, a progressive media
criticism organization, has accused The New York Times of
following the "Reagan
administration's PR strategy" in the 1980s by "emphasizing
liberal repressive measures in Nicaragua
[by the leftist Sandinista government] and downplaying or
ignoring more serious human rights abuses elsewhere in Central
America" (namely in El
Salvador, Guatemala and
Honduras
, countries with governments backed by the Reagan
administration).
According to a 2007 survey by
Rasmussen Reports of public perceptions of
major media outlets, 40% believe the
Times has a liberal
slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant.
In December 2004 a
University of California, Los
Angeles
study gave the Times a score of 73.7 on a
100 point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most
liberal. The validity of the study has been questioned by
various organizations, including the liberal media watchdog group
Media Matters for America.
In mid-2004, the newspaper's then
public
editor (
ombudsman),
Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece in which he
concluded that the
Times did have a liberal bias in
coverage of certain social issues such as
gay marriage. 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 did not
comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news,"
such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties, but did
state that the paper's coverage of the
Iraq
war was insufficiently critical of the
George W. Bush administration.
For its coverage of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
Israelis have claimed that the paper is pro-Palestinian;
Palestinians have claimed that it is pro-Israel. However, as public
editor
Clark Hoyt concluded in his
January 10, 2009 column, "Though the most vociferous supporters of
Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times,
largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of
war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job —
and has largely succeeded."
Reprints of film reviews
These are the only English-language periodicals with 10,000 or more
film reviews reprinted in book form:
- The Times as New York Times Film
Reviews (1913-2000) in 22 volumes.
- Variety as
Variety Film Reviews (1907-1996) in 24
volumes.
- Harrison's Reports
as Harrison’s Reports and Film Reviews
(1919-1962) in 15 volumes.
Film reviews in
The Times continued after the last
reprints.
Prices
The Times prices are: $2.00 Daily, for Metro and National edition,
$5.00 for the Metro edition and $6.00 or $7.00 for the national
edition on Sunday.
See also
References
- Cornwell, 2004, p. 151.
-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/media/27audit.html?hp
- Dunlap, David W. "150th Anniversary: 1851-2001; Six Buildings That
Share One Story", The New York Times, November 14,
2001. Accessed October 10, 2008. "Surely the most remarkable of
these survivors is 113 Nassau Street, where the New-York Daily
Times was born in 1851.... After three years at 113 Nassau Street
and four years at 138 Nassau Street, The Times moved to a
five-story Romanesque headquarters at 41 Park Row, designed by
Thomas R. Jackson. For the first time, a New York newspaper
occupied a structure built for its own use."
- Dunlap, David W. "Copy!’", The New York Times, June 10,
2007. Accessed October 10, 2008. "The sound is muffled by
wall-to-wall carpet tiles and fabric-lined cubicles. But it’s still
there, embedded in the concrete and steel sinews of the old factory
at 229 West 43rd Street, where The New York Times was
written and edited yesterday for the last time."
- Chomsky, Daniel(2006)'“An Interested Reader”: Measuring
Ownership Control at the New York Times',Critical Studies in Media
Communication,23:1,1 — 18
- http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
- New York Times in Moscow community
- List of links to NYT comments in English (the
list is in Russian)
- On the Web, a Year of Dialogue With Russian
Readers, by Clifford J. Levy, December 24, 2008
- Leslie
R. Groves. "Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan
Project". Da
Capo Press, 1983, p. 326. "it seemed desirable for security
reasons, as well as easier for the employer, to have Laurence
continue on the payroll of the New York Times, but with his
expenses covered by the MED"
- Amy Goodman and David Goodman, "The Hiroshima Cover-Up". Baltimore Sun,
August 5, 2005
- A New Low for the New York Times: Ethan Bronner on
Gaza
- Fazl, M. Abdul (January 11, 2009). To Tell the Truth. Dawn.
- The New York Times' Anti-Israel Bias
- Hoyt, Clark (January 10, 2009). Standing Between Enemies. The New York
Times.
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