The New York Times

Based on Wikipedia: The New York Times

The Paper That Took Down a Political Machine

In 1871, a newspaper did something that seemed suicidal. The New York Times published the secret accounting books of Tammany Hall, the political machine that controlled New York City with an iron grip. William M. Tweed, the machine's boss, had stolen somewhere between twenty-five and two hundred million dollars from the city treasury. Other newspapers wouldn't touch the story. Tweed had friends everywhere.

The Times published anyway.

Two years later, Boss Tweed sat in a prison cell, sentenced to twelve years. The newspaper that had started as a modest conservative daily had announced itself as something more dangerous: an institution willing to fight power with ink.

This is the story of The New York Times, a publication that has spent over 170 years trying to live up to that early promise, sometimes succeeding brilliantly and sometimes failing spectacularly.

An Unlikely Birth

The Times began in 1851 as the New-York Daily Times, complete with a hyphen that seems charmingly antiquated today. Two journalists from the New-York Tribune, Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, founded it as a conservative alternative to the existing papers. The Tribune's own publisher, Horace Greeley, praised their effort, which tells you something about the collegiality of nineteenth-century journalism or perhaps about Greeley's confidence that no startup could threaten his position.

The paper found its audience among merchants and businesspeople who wanted serious news without the sensationalism that characterized many competitors. During the American Civil War, Times correspondents traveled into Confederate states to gather information firsthand, establishing early credentials for ambitious reporting.

When Raymond died in 1869, Jones inherited a paper he had helped create. He dropped the hyphen from "New-York" and began the aggressive coverage of Tammany Hall that would make the paper's reputation. The Tweed exposé wasn't just good journalism; it was an act of civic courage that earned the Times national recognition.

Rescued from the Brink

Success proved difficult to sustain. After Jones died in 1891, the paper fell into a peculiar limbo. His children lacked the business skills to run it, but his will prevented anyone from buying it. A trio of employees cobbled together a company to keep the Times afloat, but the Panic of 1893, a severe economic depression that swept through America, left them struggling.

Enter Adolph Ochs.

Ochs was a thirty-eight-year-old newspaper publisher from Chattanooga, Tennessee. In August 1896, he acquired control of the Times and began transforming it. He positioned the paper as essential reading for merchants and the business community. He also, finally, removed that stubborn hyphen from the city's name. No more "New-York." Just New York.

In 1905, the Times opened Times Tower, a skyscraper that would give its name to the square around it. Times Square exists because of a newspaper building.

The Science-Minded Editor

Under managing editor Carr Van Anda, the Times developed an unusual specialty: science reporting. While other papers treated scientific discoveries as curiosities or ignored them entirely, Van Anda made them front-page news. When an obscure German physicist named Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, the Times covered it seriously. When archaeologists discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt, the Times was there.

Van Anda also demonstrated the paper's growing ambition with its coverage of the Titanic disaster in 1912. Other newspapers hesitated to run the story, uncertain whether early bulletins from the Associated Press were accurate. Van Anda trusted the reports and published. The Times's comprehensive coverage of the sinking cemented its reputation for both speed and accuracy.

The Sulzberger Dynasty Begins

Adolph Ochs died in April 1935, passing control to his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger. This transfer of power established what would become an unusual arrangement in American media: a single family, the Ochs-Sulzbergers, has now controlled the Times for over 125 years and counting.

Sulzberger faced immediate challenges. The Great Depression forced cuts to operations. Meanwhile, competitors were merging and growing larger. The New York Herald Tribune and the New York World-Telegram emerged from consolidations as formidable rivals.

World War II presented both difficulties and opportunities. Conscription depleted the newsroom, but the Times still maintained the largest journalism staff of any newspaper. More importantly, the paper's international ambitions expanded dramatically. The print edition became available to American troops overseas through military exchanges. Later, international editions launched in partnership with Japanese and German newspapers.

One Times journalist, William L. Laurence, had an experience during the war that remains unprecedented in journalism. Laurence had been writing about the theoretical race between the United States and Germany to develop atomic weapons. His reporting was so accurate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized copies of the paper.

Then the government did something unexpected. Instead of prosecuting Laurence, they recruited him.

In April 1945, Laurence became the only journalist granted access to the Manhattan Project. He witnessed the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico and flew aboard the observation plane during the bombing of Nagasaki. His colleagues at the Times had no idea where he had gone until the bomb fell on Hiroshima and Laurence finally emerged to tell the story.

Cold War Pressures

The postwar years brought a new kind of threat to the Times: McCarthyism. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, one of several congressional bodies hunting for supposed communist infiltration, turned its attention to newspapers. Investigators wanted to know if communists had penetrated the American press.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger made a decision that divided his newsroom. When a copyreader pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer questions about communist affiliations, Sulzberger dismissed him. Some employees and outside observers criticized this as capitulation to a witch hunt. Others saw it as necessary protection for the paper's credibility. The episode illustrated a tension that would recur throughout the Times's history: how does a news organization balance its role as independent watchdog against the political pressures of the moment?

Sulzberger resigned in April 1961, handing the publisher's role to his son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos. Under Dryfoos, the Times launched a Los Angeles edition, attempting to establish a national footprint. But labor troubles intervened. In December 1962, the New York Typographical Union struck over fears that new automated printing presses would eliminate jobs. The strike lasted until March 1963, and when it ended, New York had only three surviving daily newspapers: the Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post.

Two months later, Dryfoos died of a heart ailment. After weeks of uncertainty about succession, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known as Punch, became publisher. He was Arthur Hays Sulzberger's son and would lead the paper for the next three decades.

The First Amendment Cases

Two Supreme Court cases in the 1960s and 1970s would establish the Times as a central figure in American press freedom law.

The first arose from the civil rights movement. In 1960, the Times published a full-page advertisement titled "Heed Their Rising Voices," paid for by supporters of Martin Luther King Jr. The ad criticized police in Montgomery, Alabama, for their violent response to civil rights protests. L. B. Sullivan, Montgomery's Public Safety commissioner, sued for defamation, claiming the ad contained minor factual errors that damaged his reputation.

He won in Alabama courts.

But in 1964, the Supreme Court reversed the verdict in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The court established what lawyers call the "actual malice" standard: public officials cannot win defamation suits unless they prove the publication knew its statements were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. Minor errors aren't enough. This decision fundamentally reshaped American media law, making it much harder for politicians to silence critical coverage through lawsuits.

The second case came in 1971 and proved even more dramatic.

The Pentagon Papers

Daniel Ellsberg was a military analyst who had worked on a classified Department of Defense study documenting American involvement in Vietnam. The study revealed that multiple administrations had systematically misled the public about the war's progress and prospects. Ellsberg, disillusioned by what he had read, leaked the documents to the Times.

The paper began publishing excerpts on June 13, 1971. President Richard Nixon, though the papers mostly covered events before his administration, was furious. His Justice Department obtained a federal court injunction ordering the Times to stop publishing.

This was extraordinary. The government had never before obtained a prior restraint, a court order preventing publication, against a major American newspaper on national security grounds.

The case rocketed to the Supreme Court, which ruled just seventeen days after the first articles appeared. In New York Times Co. v. United States, the court sided with the newspaper six to three. The government, the majority held, had not met the heavy burden required to justify prior restraint under the First Amendment.

The Pentagon Papers case established that the press has broad latitude to publish classified information, even over government objections. It remains one of the most important press freedom decisions in American history.

Watergate and Decline

Ironically, the Times was cautious about the scandal that would define 1970s investigative journalism. When the Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972, the paper covered it but let The Washington Post take the lead. As congressional investigations revealed the extent of Nixon's involvement, the Times caught up, publishing details about related scandals including the Huston Plan for domestic surveillance and testimony from conspirators about hush money payments.

But the paper faced deeper problems. Readers were fleeing to suburban newspapers like Newsday. In response, the Times introduced new lifestyle sections targeting middle-class interests. Critics savaged these changes. Time magazine devoted a cover to attacking the strategy. New York magazine accused the paper of "middle-class self-absorption."

A 1978 strike by newspaper unions halted publication and allowed upstart competitors to grab readers. When the Times returned, it had lost ground it would never fully recover.

The AIDS Blind Spot

One of the paper's most criticized failures came in its early coverage of the AIDS epidemic. The Times deliberately minimized reporting on the disease, which was decimating gay communities in New York and San Francisco. The paper didn't run a front-page story about AIDS until May 1983, years after the epidemic had become a public health emergency.

The reasons were complicated. Executive editor A. M. Rosenthal took what colleagues called a "puritan approach," avoiding descriptions of gay venues and sexual practices. Editorial writer Max Frankel pushed for more thorough coverage, including frank discussions of transmission, but faced internal resistance. Gay activists and journalism critics would cite the Times's AIDS coverage for decades as an example of how establishment media could fail vulnerable communities.

The Digital Revolution

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger stepped down in January 1992. His son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., became the fifth publisher from the Ochs-Sulzberger family. He arrived just as the Internet was about to transform everything.

The generational divide at the Times was stark. The elder Sulzberger had negotiated the company's 1993 acquisition of The Boston Globe and dismissed the Internet as a passing fad. His son saw it differently. The question was whether a 140-year-old newspaper could adapt.

The Times's first online venture, @times, launched on America Online in May 1994. It offered news articles, film reviews, and sports coverage to AOL's growing subscriber base. Many Times employees resisted, viewing the Internet as a threat rather than an opportunity. But younger staffers were already logging on, and the success of competitors like Yahoo and CNN demonstrated that online news was viable.

On January 19, 1996, nytimes.com went live. The website would eventually become the most successful digital newspaper in America, though the path there would be neither smooth nor profitable for many years.

An Unexpected Role in Catching a Terrorist

In September 1995, the Times played an unlikely role in ending one of America's longest-running domestic terrorism cases. The Unabomber, who had killed three people and injured twenty-three others with mail bombs over seventeen years, sent his manifesto to the Times and The Washington Post with an ultimatum: publish it, or he would continue killing.

After agonizing deliberation, both papers published "Industrial Society and Its Future," a 35,000-word screed against modern technology. It was, in effect, negotiating with a terrorist.

But it worked, though not as the Unabomber intended. David Kaczynski, reading the manifesto, recognized his brother Ted's writing style and ideas. He contacted the FBI. In April 1996, agents arrested Ted Kaczynski at his Montana cabin. The publication that seemed like capitulation had actually cracked the case.

The September 11 Moment

On September 12, 2001, the Times published sixty-six articles about the terrorist attacks that had occurred the previous day. More than three hundred reporters had been dispatched across the city and beyond. The coverage was comprehensive, harrowing, and definitive.

But the aftermath would prove problematic.

In September 2002, reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon published an article claiming that Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. The story, based largely on anonymous government sources, was cited by the Bush administration to build the case for war. President George W. Bush and other officials pointed to the Times's reporting as independent confirmation of Iraq's weapons programs.

It was wrong. The aluminum tubes had a conventional purpose. Iraq had no active nuclear program. When the United States invaded in March 2003, it found no weapons of mass destruction. The Times had helped make the case for a war fought on false premises.

Miller continued reporting from Iraq as an embedded journalist. When she was later revealed to have been a recipient of leaks from the Bush administration in the Valerie Plame affair, a scandal involving the exposure of a CIA officer's identity, her credibility collapsed. She resigned in 2005.

The Jayson Blair Scandal

While Miller's problems were rooted in being too close to powerful sources, another Times reporter faced a simpler problem: he was making things up.

Jayson Blair was a young reporter whose work seemed impressive until colleagues began noticing that his articles contained fabrications and passages plagiarized from other publications. An investigation found that thirty-six of his articles were problematic. He had invented quotes, fabricated scenes, and stolen other journalists' work.

The scandal consumed the newsroom. At a town hall meeting, a deputy editor publicly criticized executive editor Howell Raines for failing to question Blair's sourcing. In June 2003, both Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd resigned. It was one of the most dramatic leadership upheavals in the paper's history.

Surviving the Great Recession

The 2008 financial crisis nearly destroyed the Times.

The subprime mortgage crisis devastated the economy, and newspapers suffered disproportionately. Classified advertising, once a reliable profit center, had been gutted by Craigslist and other online services. Display advertising collapsed along with retail. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch had purchased Dow Jones, owner of The Wall Street Journal, and was investing heavily in competition with the Times.

The New York Times Company was forced to borrow $250 million from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim just to stay solvent. By 2010, over one hundred employees had been laid off.

But the company also made a crucial decision: it would build a digital subscription business. In 2011, nytimes.com introduced a paywall, limiting how many articles non-subscribers could read. Critics predicted disaster. Readers would simply go elsewhere for free news.

They were wrong.

The Subscription Success Story

As of August 2025, The New York Times has 11.88 million total subscribers. Of these, 11.3 million are digital subscribers. Both figures are, by significant margins, the highest for any newspaper in the United States. Only about 580,000 subscribers still receive the print edition.

The company that nearly went bankrupt in 2009 has become one of the few newspaper success stories of the digital age. It accomplished this partly through journalism, partly through diversification. The Times now publishes games, including a version of the viral hit Wordle, which it acquired in 2022. It produces podcasts, most notably The Daily, which attracts millions of listeners. It has expanded lifestyle coverage through acquisitions like Wirecutter, a product review site, and The Athletic, a sports publication.

The newspaper that Boss Tweed couldn't silence and Richard Nixon couldn't stop has outlasted most of its competitors. Of the dozens of daily newspapers that once served New York City, only a handful survive. The Times remains the largest.

What the Times Represents

The New York Times has won 135 Pulitzer Prizes since 1918, more than any other publication. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that it has the highest proportion of college-educated readers among major daily newspapers, with 56 percent holding at least a bachelor's degree.

These statistics suggest something about what the Times has become: a publication for a specific, educated audience rather than the mass-market newspaper it once aspired to be. Whether this represents success or retreat depends on your perspective.

The paper remains headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, in a building opened in 2007. It maintains bureaus staffed with journalists across six continents. It publishes The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and an international edition. Its journalism still drives national conversations.

The Ochs-Sulzberger family still controls it. A. G. Sulzberger, great-great-grandson of Adolph Ochs, is the current publisher and chairman. The family's continued ownership represents one of the longest runs of family control in American media, exceeded only by a few regional papers.

Is the Times the "newspaper of record" it claims to be? The phrase suggests a neutral authority, a definitive source for what happened. The paper's history suggests something more complicated: an institution that has sometimes displayed extraordinary courage and sometimes failed dramatically, that has both challenged power and been co-opted by it, that has survived not by being perfect but by being resilient.

The Times took down Boss Tweed. It also botched the Iraq war. It published the Pentagon Papers at great risk. It also ignored AIDS while gay men were dying. It pioneered digital subscriptions. It also almost went bankrupt trying.

What the Times represents, ultimately, is the difficulty of practicing journalism at scale over time. No institution can maintain consistent excellence for 174 years. The question is whether, when the crucial moments arrive, an organization has the courage and judgment to get them right.

On that count, the record is mixed. But the paper is still publishing. Most of its competitors are not. In an industry where survival has become an achievement, the Times has done more than survive. It has, against considerable odds, found a path forward.

Whether that path leads somewhere worth going remains to be seen.