Hard News: The Scandals at the New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media by Seth Mnookin

From the Publisher

On May 11, 2003, The New York Times devoted four pages of its Sunday paper to the deceptions of Jayson Blair, a mediocre former Times reporter who had made up stories, faked datelines, and plagiarized on a massive scale. The fallout from the Blair scandal rocked the Times to its core and revealed fault lines in a fractious newsroom that was already close to open revolt. Staffers were furious-about the perception that management had given Blair more leeway because he was black, about the special treatment of favored correspondents, and most of all about the shoddy reporting that was infecting the most revered newspaper in the world. Within a month, Howell Raines, the imperious executive editor who had taken office less than a week before the terrorist attacks of September 11-and garnered the paper a record six Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage-had been forced out of his job.
With unprecedented access to the reporters who conducted the Times's internal investigation, top newsroom executives, and dozens of Times editors, former Newsweek senior writer Seth Mnookin lets us read all about it-the story behind the biggest journalistic scam of our era and the profound implications of the scandal for the rapidly changing world of American journalism. It's a true tale that reads like Greek drama, with the most revered of American institutions attempting to overcome the crippling effects of a leader's blinding narcissism and a low-level reporter's sociopathic deceptions. Hard News will shape how we understand and judge the media for years to come.

The Washington Post - Michael Getler

Seth Mnookin, a former media reporter for Newsweek, has done something that's hard to do: He has written a book about journalism that is hard to put down. Hard News reads like a thriller, a fast-paced novel unfolding inside a newspaper long viewed as the gold standard of American journalism. It has a whiff of what passes for tragedy these days: a great newspaper and a talented editor seemingly at the top of his game, a brash and expansive new heir to the Sulzberger family publishing dynasty, lots of big egos and personalities, all suddenly and almost unbelievably brought to heel by the actions of a bright, engaging but seriously flawed young reporter.

Library Journal

What does the Jayson Blair scandal have to say about the New York Times-and today's journalism in general? Ask Mnookin, former media columnist for Newsweek. With a four-city author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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April 8, 2002

The third-floor newsroom of The New York Times, located about one hundred yards west of Times Square, can be a grim place. The exposed ventilation system, the humming fluorescent lights, the claustrophobic cubicles, and the standard-issue off-white paint job make the newsroom feel simultaneously retro and futuristic, as if the Times’s nerve center were designed as a contemporary interpretation of the stereotypical city room of old. For many of the hundred-plus metro, national, and business reporters whose desks are on the third floor, the newsroom is an intensely stressful place to work, a place where career-long reputations can be badly dented by one deadline-induced mistake, a place where staffers fight ruthlessly over bylines and credit. One metro reporter described the newsroom as a simulacrum of a bitterly competitive premed program, where success is strictly relative and no one can achieve without someone else failing. Reporters, especially those lower on the slippery newsroom totem pole, carry with them a jangling fear of looking dumb in front of their editors, of falling out of favor, of failing to deliver. Max Frankel, the retired executive editor of the Times, once quipped that he enjoyed the paper only when he was away from the office, reading it.

The newsroom’s uninspiring décor and its vaguely Hobbesian feel contrasts mightily with, say, the minimalist sophistication and noblesse- oblige ethos that pervade the Condé Nast building, located a block from the Times’s headquarters. Condé Nast, home to high-end magazines like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and GQ, has a FrankGehry—designed cafeteria and special guest chefs from Hong Kong and Tuscany. The Times has a commissary furnished with plastic ferns and Formica tables. Condé Nast writers get generous expense accounts, flexible deadlines, and private offices with frosted-glass doors and wood-paneled bookshelves. Times reporters get embittered copy editors and off-beige desk dividers. What’s more, Times reporters and editors are, on average, paid less and work more than their colleagues in the glossy magazine world.

But Timesmen, of course, get an immeasurable level of prestige and an inexorable sense of purpose. They get the recurring adrenaline rush of knowing that they have the power to move markets, to influence elections, to shape world affairs. They get their fingerprints (and their bylines) on the first rough drafts of history. In this regard, at least, not much has changed since the 1960s. In his fascinating 1969 bestseller, The Kingdom and the Power, author and former Times reporter Gay Talese described how the political and cultural elite looked to the paper he worked at for more than a decade as “necessary proof of the world’s existence, a barometer of its pressure, an assessor of its sanity.”

On most days, this power is barely acknowledged. Reporters push their way in through the Times’s revolving doors on the north side of West Forty-third Street around ten in the morning. Soon after, section editors begin working the floor, checking for scoops or updates or new angles on old stories. By noon, reporters write up “sked lines,” one- or two-sentence summaries that their editors can use at the daily page-one meeting to pitch their stories. A couple of hours later, if a reporter has picked up a breaking news story, as opposed to a feature or an off-news color piece, there’s the familiar ritual of canceled dinner plans, apologetic phone calls to frustrated spouses, thrice-postponed drinks dates postponed one more time. By 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., after circling back to this or that source for a juicier quote or a flashier anecdote, when it’s finally time to stumble out into Times Square’s neon-lit frenzy, there’s still an hour or two of cellphone queries from copy editors to look forward to. Isn’t there anyone who’d go on the record about the mayor’s new parking initiative? Would you mind if we changed your lead around?

Such a schedule leaves very little time for self-congratulation, but the afternoon of April 8, 2002, was a break from the numbing daily slog, a time to pause and celebrate The New York Times’s unique role in American society. The seven months since the September 11 terrorist attacks had been defined by balls-out reporting, seven months in which countless staffers worked without a single day off, seven months in which reporters were relocated from local government beats to war zones throughout the Middle East and in Afghanistan.

As the day stretched toward 3:00 p.m., a space was cleared in front of the spiral staircase that connects the third and fourth floors of the Times’s newsroom. The New York Times was about to win seven Pulitzer Prizes, half of all the Pulitzers awarded for journalism and four more than the previous one-year record the Times shared with two other newspapers.* Six of the awards that year recognized the paper’s coverage of the September 11 attacks on America. It was as if the Pulitzer board were affirming the Times’s place as the center of the journalistic universe.

*In 2004, the Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzer Prizes.

After Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, made the official announcement from Columbia University, Raines, a short, bow-legged Alabamian with brushy gray hair and a bulbous nose, strode up to a small wooden platform underneath the staircase. Reporters and editors snaked up the stairs and jammed the hallways. For the first time in The New York Times’s storied and celebrated history, all of the paper’s living executive editors had gathered in one room. A.M. Rosenthal, who hadn't been inside the Times's West Forty-Third Street building since his rambling Op-Ed page column had been canceled two and a half years earlier, was there. Rosenthal’s successor, Max Frankel, one of the few men who inspired fear in Raines (and who was said to have resigned early to block the possibility of Raines’s ascension in the early 1990s), was there. Joe Lelyveld, Raines’s immediate predecessor, was there, along with the man Lelyveld had openly campaigned for as his successor, former managing editor Bill Keller, now a biweekly Op-Ed page columnist and Times Magazine writer. Assembling these five men in one room was a major undertaking of its own. Rosenthal’s and Frankel’s mutual disdain was legendary. Frankel had been particularly insulting to Rosenthal in his memoir, in which he referred to himself approvingly as “the not-Abe.” And Lelyveld, who since leaving the Times had been working on lengthy pieces for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, made no secret of how happy he was to have moved on to the next phase of his life.

Off to the side of the wooden platform, a stooped and frail old man overshadowed even this summit of journalistic lions. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known both inside and outside the paper simply as “Punch,” was making one of his increasingly rare trips to the newsroom. Punch had handed over the publisher’s title to his son in 1992 and had given Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.–or “Young Arthur,” as he was sometimes known–the title of chairman of the New York Times Company in 1997. (Behind his back, Sulzberger Jr. was occasionally referred to as “Pinch,” a moniker he found demeaning. “A man deserves his own nickname,” he once said.) Punch leaned in to speak quietly with Lelyveld, two legends of American journalism watching a new generation eclipse their accomplishments.

To a round of applause, Raines stepped onto the platform. “I was reminded today of the words of Mississippi’s greatest moral philosopher, Dizzy Dean,” Raines, a proud southerner leading the most elite of northern institutions, told the throng of journalists. “ ‘It ain’t bragging if you really done it.’ Ladies and gentlemen of The New York Times, you’ve really done it.” On that day, Raines was eloquent and forceful, humble and proud. “We are ever mindful of the shattering events it was our task to record in our city, nation, and world community,” he said. It was also important to realize, he added, that the Times’s Septem- ber 11 journalism “will be studied and taught as long as journalism is studied and practiced. . . . We have a right to celebrate these days of legend at The New York Times.” Raines made a point of acknowledging and thanking Lelyveld and Keller–it was, after all, the staff they had assembled and trained that won all those Pulitzers–before handing over the microphone to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whom he called “a great publisher.”

Punch, a shy and private man, was probably just as happy that Raines hadn’t singled him out. Raines later told Ken Auletta, the New Yorker media writer whom he had invited into the newsroom to record the scene, that he intentionally didn’t mention the elder Sulzberger so that his son would have a chance to pay homage to the family patriarch. But to some in the newsroom, it was a noticeable and telling slight, a sign that Raines’s humility and graciousness were nothing but lip service. “Howell mentioned a lot of folks on whose shoulders we stand, but he forgot one,” Arthur Sulzberger told the crowd. “And I’m grateful that he did, and that is my father.” THE SULZBERGER FAMILY Every company likes to refer to itself–at least publicly–as a family. Most of the time, that’s a specious metaphor. But in the case of The New York Times, the analogy is nearly accurate. It’s true that The New York Times existed before Adolph Ochs came on the scene–it was founded in 1851 as a daily broadsheet. But the modern incarnation of the Times was born in 1896, when a virtually bankrupt thirty-eight-year-old first-generation American named Adolph Ochs (his parents were German-Jewish immigrants) was able to acquire notes worth $75,000 of credit to gain control of the financially struggling daily known then as The New-York Times. Today, the New York Times Company has a book value of some $1.4 billion, and its market capitalization is $6.9 billion. (Annual revenues in 2003 were $3.23 billion.)

Ochs was intensely dedicated to two things in his life: his family and The New York Times. He passed on those values to three successive generations, and since 1896, the paper has had only five publishers, all of them family members. After Ochs retired in 1935, the husband of his only child, Iphigene, inherited the position. Arthur Hays Sulzberger led the paper from 1935 until 1961, when Orvil Dryfoos, the husband of Arthur and Iphigene Sulzberger’s oldest daughter, Marian, was named publisher. When Dryfoos died unexpectedly in 1963, Arthur “Punch” Ochs Sulzberger, the thirty-seven-year-old only son of Arthur and Iphigene Sulzberger, rose to the top of the Times’s masthead. And in 1992, Punch’s son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., took over. “They’re a monarchy,” Max Frankel said in 1994. “I thank God for that monarchy because every other newspaper that has lost its family control has gone to seed.”

Understanding the Times means, to some extent, understanding the Sulzberger clan. For most of the Times’s existence, the family has run the paper more or less the same way: by pouring money back into the paper’s editorial operation and then getting out of the way. And the family has remained remarkably united–the Times, it has always agreed, outweighs any individual agendas or concerns. In 1996, on the occasion of the Sulzbergers’ one hundredth anniversary of owning the Times, Harold Evans, the former editor of London’s Sunday Times, wrote in The New Yorker, “Great newspapers and great families rise (and fall) together–for a family, unlike a standard corporation, can take editorial and financial risks without incurring the wrath of stockholders bent upon maximizing return. Under the Sulzbergers, the Times has evolved into something more than a newspaper; it has become, over its century, nothing less than an ontological authority.”

In order to recognize just how unique the Times’s situation is, it’s useful to remember that most family-owned newspaper dynasties, like those of the Binghams in Kentucky, the Chandlers in Los Angeles, and the Taylors in Boston, have been either driven apart by internal squabbles or sold to corporate entities.* Once-great papers like The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer have been bought by conglomerates like Knight Ridder and bled mercilessly in search of ever higher profit margins. But the Sulzbergers have remained resolutely committed to maintaining the Times’s excellence and its unique position in American Society.

* The Taylors sold The Boston Globe to the New York Times Company in 1993.

American society. Indeed, for some people, the Sulzbergers are the Times. Nearly forty years after leaving the paper, Gay Talese is still awed by the Sulzberger clan. “We don’t have trust in government,” Talese said. “The Wall Street world? Forget it. Where can people [go] who have values and a sense of right and wrong, of standards? . . . I think today the Sulzberger family and The New York Times [are] our only hope. And if they weren’t there, I don’t know where you would look.”*

More than a decade after stepping down as publisher, Punch Sulzberger remains the current embodiment of this legacy. The last of four children, he was born in 1926, following Judith (1923), Ruth (1921), and Marian (1918).† Since Iphigene was the only child of Adolph Ochs and Effie Wise, her children provided the only direct blood ties to the family’s patriarch, and Punch, as the only male child, faced no real competition from his sisters when it came time for someone from his generation to lead the paper.

Along with Punch’s ascension came the birth of the modern-day New York Times. The paper, since Ochs’s purchase more than half a century earlier, had been run as if “profit be considered desirable but somewhat beside the point,” as Susan Tifft and Alex Jones wrote in The Trust, the definitive history of the Sulzbergers and the Times. But in the mid-1960s, crippling labor strikes and union unrest convinced Punch that for the paper to survive, it had to be more mindful of the bottom line. He began a path of haphazard diversification that would have been anathema to his father or grandfather, for the culture of the Times had always been predicated on focusing all of its attention on its core product. But the world had changed since 1896, and Punch wasn’t able to carry out the sleight-of-hand machinations Adolph Ochs had performed to get the mysterious line of credit he used to gain control of the Times. If he wanted to diversify, he needed capital, and if he wanted capital, the only real option was to take his family's company public. So on January 14, 1969, New York Times Class A stock was made available on the American Stock Exchange for $42 a share.

* Perhaps not coincidentally, two of the country’s other three great newspapers, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, are also family owned.

† Punch’s lifelong nickname originated from a picture book his father made for him when Punch was an infant. Riffing on the fact that he followed three girls, the last one named Judy, his father wrote that, like the seventeenth-century English puppet, he was destined to “play the Punch to Judy’s endless show.”

Most public companies are governed by a board of directors that is answerable to shareholders. The directors, in turn, sign off on the major executive appointments–in the Times Company’s case, the chairman of the board, the chief executive officer, and the publisher of the Times. The chairman’s main responsibility is running the board meetings, the CEO oversees the actual day-to-day operations of the company, and the publisher dictates the budget and manages the newspaper. In 1969, Punch Sulzberger held all three roles. By taking the company public, he could have risked family control of the Times: If the shareholders elected directors who had plans for the company that differed from his, those directors could, in theory, oust Sulzberger from his role at the top of the company. Sulzberger may have wanted to modernize the paper, but not at the risk of losing family control.

The company solved this problem by creating a structure whereby the Sulzbergers would always retain ultimate authority. Class A stockholders would get to appoint three out of nine directors. The owners of the Class B stock–which was exclusively in the hands of the Sulzberger family–would appoint the remaining six members of the board. (Over time, that calculus became proportional, with Class A stockholders electing 30 percent of the board.) And Punch Sulzberger would remain publisher, chairman, and CEO.*

Ensuring family control, however, did not mean the Times could continue to rely on anachronistic business practices. The joke within the Times was that “God [was] our personnel manager” because people were never fired and positions were never left unfilled. The business side of the paper was sadly disorganized. “We didn’t have a planning process, we didn’t have any goals, we didn’t have any of the things public companies usually [have]," James Goodale, a former Times in-house counsel and executive vice president, told Tifft and Jones. Amazingly, until 1964, the paper had never even been required to workd within a predetermined budget.

* In 1986, the Sulzbergers drafted a covenant that ensured the Times would remain in family control virtually until the end of the twenty-first century. Under the agreement, Iphigene’s four children and thirteen grandchildren agreed not to sell their Class B stock to anyone outside the family; if they wanted to convert their Class B shares to cash, they could sell them only within the family or to the New York Times Company. This agreement is binding until twenty-one years after the death of the longest-living descendant of Iphigene’s who was alive in 1986. Pamela Dryfoos, Marian Sulzberger Dryfoos’s granddaughter, was born in 1984.

Wall Street quickly became aware of the company’s woefully out-of-date business practices. Between January 1969 and early 1971, Times stock dropped from $42 to $16 a share. The fortuitously timed 1971 acquisition of Cowles Communication, which owned Family Circle magazine, some newspapers in Florida, a CBS station in Memphis, and Cambridge Books, helped the earnings situation, but it would be years before the Times Company instituted anything close to the rigor and accountability financial analysts looked for when rating companies worthy of investment. But while the progress toward modernization might have been slow, it was successful, and under Punch’s stewardship the Times not only survived what might have been crippling financial downturns, it emerged stronger than ever.

Punch also dramatically changed the scope of the newspaper during his time as publisher. When he took over, the Times was a two-section daily, short on pictures and long on tedious official pronouncements and rote coverage of press conferences. In a move typical of his tenure, Punch decided during the financial crises of the 1970s that he would bulk up the paper instead of paring it back. “My father, Walter Mattson, Abe Rosenthal–that was the generation that said, ‘One, our readers are leaving the city. They’re moving to the suburbs. And two, our paper needs to be rejuvenated,’ ” says Arthur Sulzberger. The Times responded to its financial difficulties by adding the Living and Home sections and later by transforming itself to a four-section daily. Purists roundly criticized the new sections, but they increased both the newspaper’s reach and ad revenues while also boosting circulation. “Instead of putting more water in the soup,” A. M. Rosenthal said of the decision to add heft to the paper during a difficult period, “we put in more tomatoes.” Also in the 1970s, the Times invented something called the Op-Ed page,* a section in the paper in which Times columnists and outside writers would have a venue to make their voices heard. Today, daily newspapers around the country almost universally include both those specialty sections and an Op-Ed page.

* Op-Ed stands for “opposite the editorial page,” not “opinions and editorials,” as many people think.

Punch made another lasting contribution to the culture of the Times by creating the post of executive editor. It was a job his father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had liked to perform himself, but Punch had neither the inclination nor the temperament to resolve editorial disputes or make snap news judgments. Like Orvil Dryfoos before him, Punch wanted to find a way to unite the Sunday and daily papers, thereby replacing the existing system in which news decisions on Mondays through Saturdays were made by the Times’s managing editor but on the seventh day by Lester Markel, the increasingly intractable Sunday editor. In 1964, Punch appointed managing editor Turner Catledge to the newly created executive-editor position. In 1967, when Catledge retired, James “Scotty” Reston, the paper’s longtime Washington bureau chief and columnist, took over on a temporary basis. From 1969 to 1976, the post remained unfilled: A. M. Rosenthal was the paper’s managing editor* but was deemed unready to rise to the top spot. In 1976, Rosenthal finally assumed the role and served until 1986, when Max Frankel was installed; he in turn remained until Joe Lelyveld took over in 1994.

Catledge, Rosenthal, and Frankel all had close personal relationships with Punch, and all three men were careful to court the publisher’s affections. They were given great authority but always were expected to remember that it was the Sulzbergers, and not any individual editor, who made The New York Times special. In turn, the executive editors were treated as more than simply the editorial stewards of the newspaper: Punch consulted with them about strategic decisions involving the Times’s future and relied upon them to help steer the company.

While Punch was a forceful leader, he was not an overbearing one.

* When Rosenthal was named managing editor in 1969, it marked the first time a Jew had sat atop the Times’s editorial hierarchy. The Sulzbergers, and Adolph Ochs before them, had always been concerned that if a Jew was running a Jewish-owned paper, readers would wonder about the religious influence on the news pages.

He preferred to operate behind the scenes and only rarely exercised his prerogative to overrule the paper’s editorial-page editor.* (More commonly, he voiced disagreement by writing letters to the paper, which he signed A. Sock, a play on his nickname.)† “Unpretentiousness is his greatest gift,” said Max Frankel, who served as editorial-page editor and was the executive editor when Punch stepped down as publisher. “He was remarkably serene about letting his subordinates do their work. His interventions were extremely polite.”

In 1971, in what would become one of the defining moments of his career–and a defining moment for American journalism–Punch authorized the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War. After the paper’s outside law firm, Lord, Day & Lord, said it wouldn’t defend the Times if it published the report, Punch retained new lawyers. The Times’s decision to publish, and the Nixon administration’s efforts to halt that publication, led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of a newspaper to publish free of government’s “prior restraint.”

By the early 1990s, Punch, who would turn seventy in 1996, began preparations to cede his title to the next generation of the family. His only son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., was the obvious leading candidate, although Michael Golden, the second son of Punch’s sister Ruth,
was also ambitious and active in the company. Arthur Sulzberger had undergone an apprenticeship that went far beyond that of any of the previous publishers at the paper–he had served as a reporter and editor, worked in the paper’s ad department, done nights in the production department, and helped his father as the assistant and deputy publisher. Punch had known he wanted his son to succeed him since the mid-1980s, and in 1986, when he appointed Max Frankel executive editor, Punch told Frankel he had three requests. As Frankel recounted in his 1999 memoir, The Times of My Life and My Life at the Times, Punch told him: "Make a great paper even greater. Help to break in my son Arthur as the next publisher. Make the newsrom a happy place again." Also in the mid-1980s, Punch had formed what was termed the Futures Committee, a group that Arthur Sulzberger sat on with Frankel and Lance Primis, the paper's new general manager. "It was...a vehicle to force Arthur Jr. to confront the competing demands of news and business from a management point of view," wrote Tifft and Jones.

* One of Punch’s interventions was credited with helping to change the course of modern American political life: In 1976, he insisted that the Times endorse Daniel Patrick Moynihan over Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary for U.S. senator. In a close race, that endorsement was seen as being a deciding factor, and Moynihan went on to serve as senator from New York until his retirement in 2000.

† With some rare exceptions, Punch ended that practice in 1979, when Gail Gregg, his daughter-in-law, wrote a rebuttal to one of his letters that concluded, “Mr. Sock deserves a punch.” Sulzberger was convinced his cover had been blown.

In late 1991, Punch floated the idea of naming Arthur publisher. The company’s board of directors was surprisingly tepid to the idea and asked for more time to learn about the younger Sulzberger. One of the board’s concerns, they told Punch, was that Arthur Sulzberger’s appointment would be seen as a de facto coronation and that it would only be a matter of time before he became the company’s CEO as well.

By January 1992, after more face time with Arthur–and after being assured by Punch that just because Arthur was taking one of his titles didn’t mean he’d eventually get all three–the board was placated, and the forty-year-old Sulzberger became the fifth member of his family to run the newspaper. But Arthur Sulzberger’s ascension was far more complicated than his father’s had been. At the same time that he was charting his rise within the Times, the twelve other sons and daughters (known as the cousins) of the four children of Arthur Hays Sulzberger and Iphigene Ochs (known as the siblings) were struggling with their own roles in the future of the Times Company. The same year Arthur Sulzberger Jr. became publisher, the cousins, five of whom were actively involved in the Times’s operations in one way or another, invited the siblings to dinner and said they wanted to formalize how the company, and the family, would be run in the future. When the four children of Iphigene Sulzberger passed on, there would be a much larger group of family members who could claim the Times as part of their inheritance. The family hired Craig Aronoff, the head of Kennesaw State University’s Family Enterprise Center, to serve as a moderator and facilitator. The result of Aronoff’s work with the cousins was a fifty-page bound volume titled Proposals for the Future: To the Third Generation of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family from the Fourth and Fifth Generations. The preamble stated two goals: to maintain stewardship of the Times and to preserve the unity of the family. These were precisely the goals that had made the Sulzbergers such strong owners, and in the report, Adolph Ochs’s great-grandchildren made it clear that they were just as intent on nurturing that philosophy as Ochs himself had been a hundred years earlier.

By the end of the 1990s, Arthur Sulzberger had solidified his position on the top of the Times’s hierarchy. In early 1997, he withstood a challenge from Lance Primis, the company president, who sought to become CEO, and on October 16 of that year, Sulzberger was elected to the Times’s board of directors and named chairman of the company. After the Times Company directors approved his new post, he was invited into the company’s boardroom on the fourteenth floor of the Times’s headquarters. Punch got out of the chair at the head of the table and invited his son to take the seat.

“If you think I’m sitting in that chair, you’re nuts,” Sulzberger said. He made his first brief remarks as chairman while standing.

Sulzberger would not inherit his father’s third title, that of chief executive officer. Instead, he and Punch worked to install a governing structure whereby the Times Company would hire a nonfamily member as CEO, but that person would report to the company’s chairman instead of to the board. This was a reflection of how the company had actually been run when Punch had held all three titles; first Walter Mattson and then Primis had essentially served as CEOs, which had helped assuage the business community’s fears about Punch’s managerial bona fides. Sulzberger hired Russ Lewis, who had started his career at the Times as a copyboy before working in the legal department, as head of the circulation and production departments and as the president of the Times.

On the afternoon Punch passed the torch to his son, he was feted in an impromptu newsroom ceremony. Joseph Lelyveld, the paper’s executive editor, noted that three things made that day, October 16, 1997, a landmark one. For the first time in its history, the Times had run color photos on its front page. Second, at 138 pages, that edition of the paper was the largest daily Times in history. And third, the paper had its first chairman emeritus.

Punch, from the sidelines, chimed in. “There are four things,” he said. “The stock is at an all-time high.” It was intended as a lighthearted comment, but it also hinted at the intense pressure on the company to prove to the business world that continued family ownership would result not only in a superior product but in sizable profits as well. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. made it clear that he too understood those pressures. “The most important partnership in this institution is the relationship between the family and the non-family management,” he said in an interview that day. His ascension, he said, and the promotion of Russ Lewis to the chief executive’s office, “continue on a corporate level the partnership that allows this institution to survive.”

“This place doesn’t run like a family fiefdom,” says Lewis. “It’s got the best of both worlds: the constancy of purpose that Arthur and the family have given it for over a hundred years, and the accountability of a public company.”

The day after Punch stepped down, the Times’s two-thousand-word, front-page account of the passing of the generational torch made note of Sulzberger’s unique place in American journalism. “His action,” Times reporter Clyde Haberman wrote of Punch’s decision to name his son chairman of the Times Company, “affirmed that in a troubled age for American newspapers, when many of them worry about their future and are increasingly governed by distant corporate boards, control of The Times would remain with the Sulzberger family, the paper’s guiding force for 101 years.”