“We’ve really worked hard not to ever have a pivot at The New York Times”: A.G. Sulzberger on AI, local news, and that Trump bump
Men named Arthur Sulzberger have tended to take over The New York Times at points of transition.
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger became publisher in June 1963, just after the conclusion of 114-day printers’ strike that had kept all seven of New York’s daily newspapers from publishing. The strike had been directly responsible for Sulzberger’s ascent, at age 37, to the position; the Times’ previous publisher had been his brother-in-law, Orvil Dryfoos, but the stress of the job led him to be hospitalized just days after the strike’s conclusion. He died of heart failure at age 50.
Those months without newspapers had changed the media landscape like few before it, spawning new competitors and strengthening news rivals in television and radio. It accelerated a host of changes already underway.
Increased labor costs led the Times to double its newsstand price when it started up the presses again, but it came out of the strike relatively well positioned. The same could not be said for its rivals: The New York Daily Mirror shut down in October, and the New York Journal-American, New York World-Telegram, and New York Herald Tribune each struggled on until merging in 1966 and shutting down a few months later. A seven-newspaper city was suddenly left with just three — and the Times had, not for the last time, somehow navigated an industry disruption and come out stronger.
Arthur’s son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., took over as publisher in January 1992. At the time, he had no way of knowing that, five months earlier, a man in Switzerland had posted the first public description of his new project, which he called WorldWideWeb.
The Times, like other newspapers, spent several years underestimating the whole internet thing. (Here’s Sulzberger, incredulous, talking about the internet at a Nieman event in 1995: “Are you making the assumption that we’re going to put all of our reporters online? Is that the assumption built into the question, that every day, all of our reporters will have hundreds and hundreds of emails that they’ve got to respond to?…I’m not sure how that’s going to define what a newspaper of the future is, or how much different that’s going to be.”) But over time, the newspaper became less about the paper, moving online, figuring out a paywall (on its second try), and somehow becoming more dominant, in many ways, than it was in the print old days.
By the time Arthur Jr. stepped aside at the end of 2017, handing the publisher title to his 37-year-old son Arthur Gregg (A.G.) Sulzberger, the Times’ digital transition was already pointed firmly in the right direction, with a then-record 3.5 million total subscribers, an expanding newsroom, and a growing gap between it and its local-news peers. Under A.G. — and, it must be said, under CEOs Mark Thompson and Meredith Kopit Levien — those trend lines have continued (to the tune of 10 million subscribers), with additional emphasis on bundling the core news report with other products ranging from sports news to word games to audio. Other than a slight pandemic-driven dip in 2020, Times revenue has climbed healthily every year since 2016.
The past five years have been more about execution and growth than strategic change. While the A.G. Sulzberger era has overlapped with that global pandemic and rising authoritarianism, it hadn’t yet seen its signature disruption. (Generative AI would get my vote as the most likely disruptor.) But as the primary author of the Times’ famous 2014 Innovation Report, he should be well positioned to help point the Times in whatever direction it needs next.
Next month, Sulzberger, now 43, will give the Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford University, and in the lead-up, he’s given a thoughtful hour-long interview to RISJ’s Eduardo Suárez. I want to highlight a few of his comments; the whole thing is worth a read, both for Eduardo’s infusion of Times history and for a few topics I won’t get to here.
And…fair enough. It’s a company, not a charity. But I’ve argued before (and will argue again!) that if the Times is going to be truly mission-driven — if it believes in its “core journalistic mission of helping people understand the world” — it should be using its position of relative financial security to work harder on the biggest and most intractable part of the problem. And that’s local news, huge swaths of which has been left to the Huns. I’d be more enthusiastic about buying a bundle that supported local news than one with a really good recipe app.
On the role of Opinion at The New York Times
Here Sulzberger is responding to: “We both know reporting is what matters the most. What’s the point of having an opinion section in 2024?”
As for opinions, we are labelling them much more aggressively. Even if fewer people click on them as a result, we want to make it clear that opinion journalism is something different. But why does it still have value? Because it’s so useful to be able to sit in a deep way, not just a quote in a story, and hear the fullest, most carefully considered argument from someone who doesn’t think like you. It’s also useful with someone who does think like you because sometimes it sharpens your own thinking.
I don’t doubt Sulzberger’s dedication to reporting a bit, but I’m not sure how to square the idea of de-emphasizing Opinion — he’s elsewhere said he’s kept the section “intentionally small” — with the fact that Times Opinion certainly looks bigger than ever before? As in: “The New York Times opinion section employs some 150 people, triple its size in 2017.” (Or is it only double?) Either way, the Times’ Opinion section alone employs more journalists than all but a dozen or so print/digital newsrooms.
(Personally, I have no quarrel with a big Opinion section. It isn’t siphoning resources from news; the Times’ newsroom is bigger than ever. It draws lots of readers and produces plenty of excellent work alongside the occasional duds that light up Twitter. But it hardly seems “intentionally small.”)
On generative AI
Our industry would do well to remember that, in an era in which AI worsens the sort of crisis of trust in digital environments, our advantage is that we are human expert-led enterprises, where journalists are backed by the best editors, and editors are backed by the highest standards. We need to make sure that these tools are always working for us, and that we put our names behind them, rather than, as we’ve seen some places do, setting them free…
You started this interview asking about the Innovation Report. And one of my main lessons is: never get comfortable; always assume that the world is conspiring to take down the industry and that we will have to move heaven and earth to overcome those forces to blaze a path forward for quality journalism.
I absolutely worry about those things because it is only by worrying about them that you can prevent them from happening.
- Baquet, to his credit, now leads the Times’ valuable Local Investigation Fellowships, which currently supports seven reporters.