The Kingdom And the Cabbage
What's newer than news at the New York Times
Suddenly, vegetables are "in." Chefs in fashionable restaurants across the country and cooks at home are featuring glowingly fresh vegetables cooked to firm but tender brightness...
--New York Times, June 22
The trip from tawdry Times Square to the tidy Upper East Side of Manhattan takes only about ten minutes in light traffic. Toward 11 most nights, a driver in a blue and white van plies that route, delivering into the arms of a uniformed doorman a single pristine early City edition of tomorrow's New York Times--still warm from the presses, still faintly redolent of ink and hot lead. The newborn newspaper is quickly whisked to an upper floor, where a horrible fate awaits it.
When he is in town, Arthur Ochs ("Punch") Sulzberger, 51, publisher of the Times, chairman and president of its parent company, usually takes the news lying down. On an orthopedic mattress, the hazel-eyed, faintly balding, perpetually smiling publisher literally tears into his custom-delivered Times.
First the front page, of course. Then Sulzberger turns to the obituaries ("Super! I'm not here today, ha ha!") and on to the financial tables ("Super! Our stock's up!"). Now backward toward the front page again, ripping out headlines, paragraphs and whole stories that either please or peeve him, depositing the clippings on his night table for future action. Exhausted, Punch the Ripper flings the eviscerated carcass to the floor. And as the clock strikes 12, he sinks into the sweet sleep of a man who knows, as his paper's motto has it, all the news that 's fit to print.
Three nights a week, however, something keeps Sulzberger awake. Visions of vegetables dance in his something sleepless head, along with recipes for pork chops fiegeoise, treatises on termite detection, shopping guides to $44 canvas bags and $1,850 "Love" pendants from Tiffany.
If it's Wednesday, this must be Living, the Times's once-weekly, 20-odd-page insert packed with ads and enthusiastic articles on food, wine and related pleasures. On Thursdays Sulzberger's diversion is Home, a similar free-standing section celebrating furniture, interior decoration and gardening Fridays it is Weekend, a guide to entertainment and the arts in the world s capital of culture. Sulzberger stays up late with each of his three night visitors, savoring the recipes, shopping tips and restaurant reviews. The Times, as a new advertising slogan boasts, is now MORE THAN JUST THE NEWS.
Since the first of the new sections, Weekend, was launched 16 months ago, the Times's average daily circulation has moved from 821,000 to 854,000. On days the new sections appear, as many as 35,000 more people buy the paper than on unsupplemented days Moreover, those new customers were not won at the expense of the Times's feature-packed Sunday edition, which has gained 11,000 new readers in the past year. In May the Times sold more advertising than in any previous month in the paper's 126 years, a coup Sulzberger credits largely to his three new offspring. Says he: "They're super."
The new sections are not all that's new at the New York Times these days. Under Sulzberger the Times has redesigned its pages, reshuffled its enormous staff, automated its neolithic production processes and spun off four new suburban editions. Sulzberger has also injected new life into the newspaper's parent New York Times Co., which embraces nine smaller dailies, four weeklies, six magazines (including Us, circ. 500,000, a four-month-old imitator of Time Inc.'s PEOPLE), two broadcast stations, three book publishers and part of three Canadian Paper mills. Once an institution more interested in public service than profit, the New York Times Co. is now on Wall Street's goodbuy lists. After several years of see-saw profits (net income was $13.6 million in 1972. $20.3 mllion in 1974, only $12.7 million in 1975), the firm last announced that earnings for the first half of 1977 rose 89% to $12 million on record revenues of $244 million. Barring unforseen trouble, the house of Sulzberger is on the way to its best year ever.*
The Dawn of Living. Home and Weekend is also a sign of new ferment throughout the newspaper business. The number of Americans who buy a newspaper every day dropped nearly3% between 1973 and 1975, despite population growth, before leveling off last year at about 61 million. As a result, nervous pubishers have been conducting readership studies to find out how to restyle their papers to keep their customers happy. The readers answer: add more information about homes, entertainment food, leisure and similar daily living concerns that New York and other city magazines have elevated to objects of intense journalistic scrutiny. Says the Los Angeles Times 's new president, Tom Johnson: "People do not want a newspaper, they want a use paper."
Like the New York Times, would-be use papers from the nighty New York News (circ. 2 million, the nation's largest) to the Albuquerque Journal (circ. 75,000) are launching how-to-do-it, where-to-get-it supplements. Papers that have had such news print service stations for years are allowing them more space and promoting them more heavily.
In a sense, newspapers are simply giving their readers what magazines, particularly women's magazines, have been providing for a long time. But this can be wrenching for serious newspapermen, of whom there are a good many at the limes. There some reporters and editors Complain that important news is playing second artichoke to investigative reports on vegetables and hot scoops on wicker furniture Newsroom cynics jest that it is difficult to get a story into the paper without a recipe attached. Others suggest that the Times augment Living with a weekly section called Dying, filled with obituaries and funeral-parlor ads, and launch a new insert called News. A hapless reporter, so one routine goes, was sent to cover a flower show for Living, missed the crucial unveiling of a new strain of begonia and, as punishment, was made a foreign correspondent.
The Times, of course, is not just another home-town daily, a genre that has long understood its local service-- magazine functions. Though pressed by the Washington Post, the Times remains the best newspaper in the U.S. It is the platinum bar by which editors across the country measure their own papers. Except for the heavily financial Wall Street Journal (circ 1,465,000), the Times is the closest approximation in the U.S. to a national newspaper. Fully one-quarter of its readers live more than 100 miles from New York City. (One such subscriber is Jimmy Carter, who carefully combs one of the 86 copies delivered every morning to the White House.) The Times is also the nearest to a newspaper of record in the U.S. Although it has cut down on the full texts of speeches and documents, it still finds room for the transcripts of most presidential press conferences. The Times's average "news hole," the total amount of space devoted to editorial words, is not especially large (160 columns a day, v. 185 for the Washington Star, 218 for the Chicago Tribune). But the Times avoids wire-service copy and other canned material, and nearly all the 152,000 words packed into a typical Times are staff written. And that is a lot to absorb. Says Sulzberger: "Anybody who claims to read the entire paper every day is either the world s fastest reader or the world's biggest liar "
The Sunday Times (circ. 1.4 million) is without quarrel Americas most dangerous newspaper-a back-wrenching, 4-Ib. 400-page package that could paper over Manhattan to a depth of two pages. Indeed, the city once estimated that it cost $6 million annually just to dispose of the papers as waste. Years ago, it was reported that a small plane carrying a load of Sunday Timeses over a rural area in the West dropped a copy, killing an ox. The Sunday sections include a newly renovated Book Review that has 25,000 mail subscribers of its own and is distributed separately in 1,000 bookstores and libraries. There is also a redesigned New York Times Magazine; even though its editorial quality at the moment is uneven and its direction uncertain, the magazine still carries more advertising pages than any other American weekly except Business Week.
The Times maintains the world's largest full-time news staff: 550 journalists in New York, 32 outside the U.S., 40 in Washington and 19 more scattered around the country. The paper spends more than $35 million a year to support them, an editorial budget far larger than that of any other newspaper, including the Washington Post ($19 million). That is not all the Times spends: each year some 6 million trees are chopped down in the service of completeness.
The Times still knows how to be both good and gray. The shift from an eight-column-a-page format to an airier six columns has improved its fussy makeup, though often the choice and play of pictures leave much to be desired. Overall, the paper not only looks better, but reads better. Much of its news writing is stilted, wordy and dull. But many Times feature writers and some of its reporters write with refreshing elan: Richard Shepard, heir to the late Meyer Berger's old daily "About New York" column; Israel Shenker, a utility feature writer and house punster and semanticist; John Leonard, who writes an erudite, harrowingly personal Living column; Reporter Molly Ivins, former co-editor of the upstart Texas Observer; and two former New Yorkers, Home Reporter Joan Kron, and Food and Restaurant Critic Mimi Sheraton, who sometimes shares the Times's ninth-floor test kitchen with Veteran Epicure Craig Claiborne, and writes about food with an exuberance that would be medium rare at any paper.
The paper's 52-member cultural staff has make-or-break power far beyond New York over theater, dance, music, cinema and architecture. Goaded by the example of the Wall Street Journal, a major and partly successful effort has been made to improve the financial pages by expanding the staff and adding regular reports on careers, management, technology and other subjects. The once sternly liberal and generally predictable editorial page has brightened since its editor--and Sulzberger's cousin--John Oakes, 64, was made a senior editor last January. The new oracle-in-chief, Max Frankel, 47, a former Washington bureau chief, has moved editorial policy a little closer to Sulzberger's own middle-of-the-road pragmatism and initiated a number of features, including "Topics," a collection of short and sometimes snappy commentaries. Frankel (who reports directly to Publisher Sulzberger) has also expanded the range of subject matter and sharpened the bite of opinion on the page, though the point of view is sometimes difficult to track through the vivid prose.
The Times's foreign reporting remains unrivaled among newspapers. Timesman Sydney Schanberg's files from Cambodia won a Pulitzer in 1976, and James Markham's dispatches last year from war-torn Beirut should have. But the Washington bureau, the fief of Arthur Krock in the 1940s and '50s, then James Reston in the '50s and '60s, was overshadowed during Watergate by the Washington Post, now its chief rival on the national scene. The New York paper has recovered somewhat, beating the Post to major Washington scoops about CIA domestic spying and drug experimentation on unwitting civilians. The Post has been giving extravagant display to its newsbeats on the Koreagate scandal--in fact, to any stories with the merest hint of wrongdoing. On balance, the Post probably does a more thorough job of covering Washington's politics and government administration, but the Times still carries more weight on the national scene.
On its home turf, the Times is often accused of a preoccupation with Manhattan at the expense of the city's four other boroughs. Justly. Although it quickly mobilized a journalistic SWAT team for last month's blackout, the Times has only one full-time reporter stationed in all of Queens (pop. 2 million) and none in The Bronx (pop. 1.4 million). When a ten-alarm fire consumed all the buildings in seven square blocks of Brooklyn five days after the blackout, the Times ran the story on page 26.
A few Times editors rationalize such benign neglect by noting that the largely blue-collar--and indigent no-collar--multitudes of Brooklyn and The Bronx are not Times readers (a defense the paper does not offer in covering other parts of the world). But Times people also claim that local coverage has improved since Sydney Schanberg became metropolitan editor in May, replacing Mitchel Levitas, who was moved sideways to edit the Sunday Week in Review section. Schanberg straightaway told his 100 or so metropolitan reporters that he wanted everybody "to have fun." Productivity has increased among reporters who were previously alienated, bored or overlooked; Times local coverage is growing more aggressive. The paper last month, for example, printed the names and pictures of prominent citizens who rent space to sex shops.
As for complaints that the new supplements, plus the suburban editions, court the suburbs at the expense of urbanites, Times editors insist that the paper has not reduced the amount of money, staff or space it lavishes on New York City news. They also assert that the total space devoted to editorial matter has actually increased slightly since the switch from eight narrow columns a page to six wide ones. Says Executive Editor A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal: "Other papers have added water to the soup, but we've added vegetables."
Some reporters, however, complain that the addition of Living, Home and Weekend has stretched the news-gathering staff, for all its size, somewhat thin. Others note that the sections themselves are rather thin, and that Editors Annette Grant of Living, Nancy Newhouse of Home and Marvin Siegel of Weekend are reaching rather desperately for ever more trivial articles to fill them (last week's Living devoted an entire page to dill pickles). Still, one close reader agrees that the paper is not going soft. "People who run down the Times ought to have to compete with it every day," says Michael O'Neill, editor of the excellent rival News. "They wouldn't be so quick to criticize."
The Times has been the newspaper for competitors to reckon with ever since Adolph Ochs bought it in 1896, 45 years after the paper was founded by a Republican politician and a few months before it would have died of terminal mismanagement. Ochs (which he pronounced ox, its meaning in German), the Cincinnati-born son of German-Jewish immigrants, had at the age of 20 acquired the flagging Chattanooga Times and revived it. He set out to work a similar miracle on Park Row, the Times's home until he moved it north in 1904 to Longacre Square (which city fathers then renamed Times Square). Ochs banished fiction from the newspaper and declared that comic strips, gossip columns and other frippery would have no place there. He introduced book reviews and a serious Sunday magazine, and started printing news about the city's growing financial community. Not just any news, but useful news, like the arrival times of mail ships and the names of visiting out-of-town buyers.
Ochs' chosen instrument in his quest for excellence was Carr Van Anda, the icily intellectual managing editor who once spotted a mathematical error in an Albert Einstein lecture that the Times was about to print. Einstein gratefully acknowledged the mistake. Van Anda also had an eye for circulation-building stunts, such as the Times's sponsorship of polar expeditions by Commodore Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen.
Together, Ochs and Van Anda made the Times a Victorian paradigm of probity and thoroughness, emphasizing diplomatic and national political reporting and eschewing titillating ac counts of crime and scandal. But not all crime and scandal.
When now retired Sunday Editor Lester Markel once com plained to Ochs about a steamy double murder the Times was re porting closely, the patriarch explained: "When a tabloid prints it, that's smut. When the Times prints it, that's sociology."
Ochs died in 1935 and was succeeded by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer who had mar ried Ochs' only child, Iphigene. Under Sulzberger, changes in the Times were subtle. He put more pictures on Page One, hired the paper's first female foreign correspondent (Anne McCormick) and quietly expanded the cultural departments. But A. Aitchess, as Sulzberger whimsically signed the light verse he sometimes wrote, kept the Times essentially Ochsian. In 1954 he sacked as picture editor a man who allowed the paper to pub lish a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio French-kissing on their wedding day.
Sulzberger retired in 1961 and was succeeded by his son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos, the son of a hosiery manufacturer. A hand some and capable Wall Street broker, Dryfoos had been drafted into the paper shortly after his marriage to Sulzberger's oldest daughter, Marian. Like Sulzberger, Dryfoos carried on the Ochs legacy, but he faced new challenges. In 1962 he launched a separate West Coast edition, basically a condensation of the East Coast Times, but the venture got off to a bad start. The next year Dryfoos had to weather a 114-day strike of printing unions that left him and the entire staff seriously demoralized.
While Dryfoos grappled with these problems, Arthur Sulzberger's only son was marking time in a succession of minor posts in Times Co. management. Punch Sulzberger was an amiable presence around the building, though when he attended an occasional story conference he sometimes seemed more interested in examining the air-conditioning ducts on the ceiling. "The old man had this scenario," Sulzberger says of his father. "Orvil would go along for a while as publisher and then I was going to take over." But Dry foos died of a heart ailment at 50 after only two years on the job, and the family turned to Punch. "I was dumbfounded," says Punch. Then 37 and assistant treasurer, he was also quite unprepared to take control.
He learned fast. The Times was still reeling from the printers' strike, and the paper's management techniques were so relaxed that there had never been a budget. One of Sulzberger's first, and gutsiest, moves was to shut down the hemorrhaging West Coast edition. More important, he started diversifying the Times by buying Cowles Communications, with its lucrative magazines (Family Circle, Golf Digest) and small newspapers. Diversification, according to Columnist James Reston, has been Sulzberger's shrewdest move to date. "With more of the company's earnings coming from outside the paper," says Reston, "Punch could confront the unions with the fact that we could take a strike if necessary."
They eventually got that bulletin. In 1974 Sulzberger extracted an agreement from his printers to allow gradual automation in return for lifetime job security for those then working. A born tinkerer, Sulzberger threw himself into the task of replacing the Times's clacking linotypes and other antiquated production contraptions with computerized equipment. "You just wouldn't believe it," says Sulzberger of the pre-electronic days. "The composing-room staff used to measure the amount of classified ads with a string."
Sulzberger also pensioned off whole lumberyards of executive deadwood on the paper's 14th-floor management corridor and hired younger men. Then he spirited his biz kids off to secluded conference centers for endless sessions devoted to planning, budgeting, lectures from management experts and other exercises that Timesmen had never endured before "The editors would say, 'How can we have a budget when we never know what the news is going to be tomorrow?' "
Sulzberger's most important gift to the news side was not a budget. It was Abe Rosenthal, who has done more to reshape the paper than any editor since Van Anda. Canadian-born and Bronx-bred, Abraham Michael Rosenthal joined the Times in 1944 as a $12-a-week stringer at New York's City College. He spent nine years as a foreign correspondent and reluctantly hung up his trench coat in 1963 to become metropolitan editor.
After Sulzberger became publisher and recognized the new editor's relentless energy and near fanatical dedication to the Times, Rosenthal was elevated to managing editor in 1969 executive editor last year. While Sulzberger was bending the paper's independent advertising, circulation and other business operations to his will, Rosenthal was pacifying the feudal out posts and attempting to reduce the internecine combat that animated Gay Talese's bestselling book of 1969 on the Times titled with only slight hyperbole The Kingdom and the Power. In the bad old days, haughty Sunday Editor Lester Markel reigned over a separate staff, dispatching his own reporters to cover events alongside daily Timesmen. House Grammarian Theodore Bernstein crusaded for correct and pithy prose but his powerful copydesk often took the life out of stories or so many reporters felt, and also exercised almost unchecked influence on how prominently pieces were displayed Rebellious Washington correspondents in 1968 frustrated an attempt by the New York office to give them a bureau chief they disliked. Intensely jealous Times bureaus often froze out visiting reporters when a running story brought them to town.
Under Rosenthal, Markel's old Sunday department was merged last year with the daily staff. Rosenthal has loosened the iron grip of the copydesk, and Theodore Bernstein went off to edit Times book-publishing ventures in 1969 before retiring in 1972. With Sulzberger's blessing, Rosenthal last November finally subjugated the rebellious Washington bureau by installing as bureau chief his own man, Hedrick Smith. So docile has the capital crew become that Managing Editor Seymour Topping early this year had to gently upbraid Smith for not filing enough protests to get better front-page display for stories. After the journalism review More in its June issue recounted the epidemic of reassignments and resignations that followed Smith's arrival in Washington, Rosenthal spied a copy of the magazine on a Times desk and, with mock fury, ripped it to ribbons. "Kay Graham [Washington Post publisher] can fire two vice presidents and nobody notices," he complained. "I try to move a man and it inspires 15 stories, two operas and a one-act play."
In the newsroom Rosenthal, 55, has been installing his own band of energetic and loyal editors: Topping, 55, fellow Deputy Managing Editor Arthur Gelb, 53, and Assistant Managing Editor James Greenfield, 53. A younger generation of lieutenants, the group from which the executive editor's successor is likely to be picked when he reaches retirement age in a decade or so, are also resolute Rosenthal men: Hedrick Smith, 44, Sydney Schanberg, 43, Foreign Editor Robert Semple, 41, newly named News Editor Allan Siegal, 37, Assistant Foreign Editor Terence Smith, 38. Says one disgruntled reporter: "It's not that Abe doesn't tolerate dissent, it's that he rarely hears any."
In his quest for newer faces, Rosenthal has also ended the newsroom seniority system. The result of that free-form personnel policy is a brigade of generally younger, more aggressive reporters who turn out far more copy than the paper has space for--an imbalance that creates an air of perpetual tension in the newsroom. He rarely fires anyone; instead, sluggards are given little to do until they drift on, and fireballs are favored with desirable assignments and prominent display in the paper. Rosenthal readily admits that during his tenure the Times has become a "less happy" place to work and one where tension is greater than it used to be--fun-loving Sydney Schanberg to the contrary notwithstanding. Rosenthal justifies the change in ambience by saying the paper cannot afford to be leisurely any more. "There was a time when the Times had little competition," says he. "TV didn't exist, the newsweeklies weren't much, the Washington Post was a non-paper."
Rosenthal spends much of his day with various editors in planning the paper; much solemn thought is given to which stories should get the biggest play. He is not exactly chummy with the troops. But his authority fills the 1.3-acre newsroom, where editors used to keep track of reporters with binoculars and still occasionally summon them via loudspeaker. A Times reporter's status was once linked closely to where he sat. Principalities and powers were clustered close to the news desk, with mere dominations, thrones, archangels and angels arrayed in descending order toward a far wall--even if that meant that reporters on the same beat were barely within hailing distance of each other. Rosenthal ended that nonsense. A major renovation of the newsroom has begun, and plans call for carpeting, waist-high partitions between reporters and enough fake-wood Formica for a coffee shop. Many reporters regret that the room --now a slum of battered steel desks, cigarette ashes, coffee stains and week-old newspapers--will lose its crummy charm.
Rosenthal is at once his reporters' father figure and resident ogre. He sends congratulatory notes to reporters about deftly written stories, angry notes to their editors about failures. One of his more popular moves: he has broken down the unspoken barriers that once prevented, say, a metropolitan reporter from writing an occasional culture piece. "If you're halfway talented, we practically kiss your feet," he says. "You can do anything you want."
The executive editor himself has been doing what he wants with Sulzberger's paper. He has over the years shifted emphasis from conventional fast-breaking news stories to more thoughtful and descriptive articles on social and demographic trends, ideas, literary controversies and, lately, white-collar crime.
Of dissimilar backgrounds and personalities, Sulzberger and Rosenthal seem to think alike. "They are both focused on where they are going, and people who are no longer important with Rosenthal are no longer important with Sulzberger," says Gay Talese, who still monitors his old employer through friends at the Times. "Sulzberger is just like Rosenthal except that he's rich."* One mild exception to that unanimity is the Times's new MORE THAN JUST THE NEWS advertising campaign. "I think it's an awfully clever slogan," chuckles Sulzberger. "Abe took exception to it."
The publisher approves major bureau assignments and dispenses $1,700 a month in Publisher's Awards to the writers of stories deemed exceptional. In both instances he often accepts Rosenthal's recommendations. Sulzberger does suggest occasional news stories and editorials (he was actively involved in last week's endorsement of Mayoral Candidate Mario Cuomo) and chooses all columnists. One discovery: former Nixon Speechwriter William Safire, whom he hired in 1973 after meeting him at a dinner party. The publisher often attends Rosenthal's 3:45 p.m. front-page conference but rarely speaks up. He skips the once-weekly "Bust Their Ass" meeting, where editors discuss investigative stories that will, Rosenthal hopes, inspire envy in other papers. Sulzberger reads some potentially controversial stories before they are printed but almost never orders them softened. Over the vigorous objection of some Times lawyers, he ordered publication of the Pentagon papers in 1971, for which the paper received a Pulitzer Prize, one of 42 won by the Times and its staff since the paper was awarded the very first Pulitzer Gold Medal in 1918.
Tending the news and editorial pages takes far less of Sulzberger's office energies than preserving the paper's financial health. His surprisingly modest office on the Times building's 14th floor--part of a suite that includes a bedroom, bath, conference room and study--is dominated by a massive walnut desk that he commandeered from the Times archivist. Sulzberger is at that desk by 8 a.m. (many Times editors drift in around 11 a.m.; Sulzberger used to be known around the office as "the farm boy"), and spends an hour reading and answering mail. Following the lead of his wife, acquaintances of recent years call him Arthur instead of Punch, and he often has to ask his secretary how long he has known someone so he can decide which signature to use.
On one recent typical day in his office, reports TIME'S Regina Cahill, Sulzberger spent nearly a half-hour, part of it punching his pocket calculator, trying to figure out the proper severance for an employee who complained about the terms of his departure. Times Co. vice presidents filed in, and they talked acquisitions, new ventures, pending tax rulings and other financial concerns. After lunch with a local department-store executive in the company dining room (where no liquor is served, lest some guest complain that drink overloosened his tongue), Sulzberger received a delegation of Sarah Lawrence College officials angry at a Times article about lesbianism at the school. Sulzberger promised that he would look into the matter. Except in the summer, when he leaves early, the publisher often wanders through the 14th-floor executive offices late in the day and invites colleagues to "buy me a drink" in his study.
Despite that easy office camaraderie, many of Sulzberger's executives stay on a wary alert. "There is no way of knowing what he is thinking," says Executive Vice President Sydney Gruson, Sulzberger's closest friend at the firm. Others describe the publisher's management style as resembling an artichoke: multilayered, and far different at heart from what it is on the surface. "This place is never free of tension. We play rough games with each other," says one 14th-floor strategist.
While admirers and subordinates try to second-guess him, Sulzberger goes on tinkering with the wondrous machine he has inherited. He is considering two more special sections to round out the week: a Monday sports supplement and a Tuesday fashion insert, no firm start-up dates set. Those additions are expected to be followed by a nickel increase in the Times price, to 25-c- Sulzberger also intends to add two new magazines this year, on fishing and one other outdoor pursuit, and will try to buy more broadcast stations. Altogether, the Times is weighing some 40 possible acquisitions. The publisher is also laying plans to make the Times a truly national newspaper. By transmitting facsimiles of Times pages via satellite to presses borrowed for a few hours from papers around the country, the Times could be widely distributed each day. That move could come as soon as 1979.
Sulzberger is also watching the progress of a few family members who may be destined for top jobs at the paper: Arthur Jr., 25, his son and an Associated Press correspondent in London; and a number of nephews, including Stephen Golden, 30, a junior executive in the Times production department; and Stuart Greenspon, 37, who manages Times circulation operations. Sulzberger does not promise that these--or any--family members will succeed him, but his loyalties are clear: "This is a family newspaper, and I intend to keep it that way."
That intention implies also a special sense of responsibility. People may grouse that the world's greatest daily is becoming more interested in pate de campagne than poverty in the South Bronx--or in making money more than in printing news. Punch, of course, like any publishing executive, could well reply that it does after all require money to be able to present the news. But even his detractors concede that Arthur Sulzberger does not yet subscribe to an ethic that seems to be spreading in the newspaper business, the ethic of Lord Thomson of Fleet. "I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make more money," he said before his death last year. "As for editorial content, that's the stuff you separate the ads with."
No. The high Victorian seriousness of Adolph Ochs hangs over the Times to this day. His ALL THE NEWS credo still appears at the top of Page One every day, and his marble bust rests on the ground floor of the Times building, gazing sternly toward a vending machine of newly printed Timeses. The Times still refers even to convicted felons as "Mr.," "Mrs." or "Miss" (but never "Ms."), and last month banned display ads for pornographic movies, a decision that will cost the paper $750,000 a year.
But it was Ochs who declared that even smut could sometimes be sociology and that such useful minutiae as the arrival of out-of-town buyers could be news. As Punch Sulzberger curls up with his Times each night, he knows that his ever watchful grandfather would probably agree: vegetables, even if not always served to readers "glowingly fresh with firm but tender brightness," can be part of the news fit to print.
*The firm, which went public in 1969, is controlled through a trust by Sulzberger, his mother Iphigene, 84, and his three sisters: Marian 58,who is maried to Times Inc., Chairman Andrew Heiskell; Ruth, 56 , publisher of the Chattanooga Times; and Judith, 53, a nonpracticing physician married to a retired Manhattan textile executive. Together, the family owns 71.3% of Class B stock and 36.3% of Class A stock, which has narrower voting power than class B and is traded on the American Stock Exchange. *Well, richer, Rosenthal is said to earn $120,000; Sulzberger got $210,000, Sulzberger got $210,000 last year, plus a $75,000 bonus. The family trust, part of which he inherits when his mother dies, received $2.7 million in Times common stock dividends last year.
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