Great journalism takes courage. It takes a sense of public mission. It takes independence. It takes time. Perhaps most of all, it takes money.
For decades, America’s great newspaper families had all of these. They shielded their editors and reporters from the pressures of advertisers and the short-term interests of public shareholders and Wall Street analysts. Subscribers were attracted to great journalism, advertisers followed, and big profits flowed to the family members and shareholders.
This week’s announcement that the Graham family had decided to sell The Washington Post and most of its publishing assets to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey Bezos, surely quashed any lingering doubts that the old model is all but dead.
The sale of The Post leaves The New York Times as one of the last major family-run newspapers, and it is certainly the biggest, which inevitably puts it in the spotlight: will the Sulzbergers succumb to the forces that led most every other major newspaper family to sell?
“It’s absolutely true that the family did not want to be out there all by themselves,” Alex Jones, author of “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind The New York Times,” and the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, told me this week. “They’re now the only iconic newspaper family, and it’s a lonely place to be.” Mr. Jones said he spoke to several family members after the Post announcement, and said they were shocked by the news. Nonetheless, “They’re absolutely committed to the stewardship of The New York Times,” he said.
The chairman and publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his cousin, Michael Golden, the vice chairman, confirmed that this week. In a statement, they said, “The Times is not for sale” and stressed that the company was “profitable and generates very strong cash flow, which we believe makes us perfectly able to fund our future growth.” They added, “The Times has both the ideas and the money to pursue innovation.”
That The Times and its controlling family would be among the last survivors should come as no surprise, since it is the strongest of the great newspapers journalistically, and it is profitable. The Times has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes since 1918, including four this year, more than any other newspaper. A week ago, The Times reported quarterly operating earnings of $77.8 million, up 13 percent from a year earlier.
By contrast, The Washington Post’s newspaper division had losses of $53.7 million last year, with no end in sight.
Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, who spoke to Mr. Sulzberger shortly after the sale was announced, told me this week: “I don’t think our deal has any implications whatever for The New York Times Company. The Post and The Times are completely different businesses, as different as, say, The Post and The Wall Street Journal. The Times is quite profitable and should be for a long time.”
But Mr. Graham also said the Post sale was not just about profits or money. As he put it in his letter this week to Post employees, “The point of our ownership has always been that it was supposed to be good for The Post.” He added, “The newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which we have no answers,” and concluded, “We were certain the paper would survive under our ownership, but we wanted it to do more than that. We wanted it to succeed.”
In the wake of the announcement, the Sulzberger family held two meetings, one with the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust, which owns a controlling stake in the company, and the other with the broader family, to discuss the Post sale and the decision to issue a statement from Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Golden. The family surely has much to discuss, because it faces the same question the Graham family did: Would The Times be better off both journalistically and financially under different ownership?
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/business/after-post-sale-spotlight-shines-more-intensely-on-the-times.html?partner=rss&emc=rss