Since its founding in 1851 as the “New-York Daily Times”, the New York Times or simply the “Times” has weathered two world wars, cut-throat competition, technological disruption, and fickle public opinion, retaining over 10 million paying subscribers as of 2023. It is a newspaper of record and the 2nd-largest newspaper in the United States by print circulation, behind only The Wall Street Journal. Its holding company, the New York Times Company, made $154 million in profit in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The Times’s enduring success can be credited, at least partially, to the stable control exercised by the Ochs-Sulzberger Trust, which has effectively owned almost all voting shares in the New York Times Company to this day.
When the Times was acquired by Adolph Ochs in 1896, it had fallen on bad times. Over the next decades, Adolph led a stunning turnaround of the business, growing circulation 55 times from 9,000 a day in 1896 to 500,000 a day in 1930, thus laying the foundation for his family, the Ochs-Sulzbergers, to steward the Times into the next century.
What sets this succession saga apart from others such as that of The Coca-Cola Company, was Adolph’s sense of public purpose. When Adolph passed in 1935, his will entrusted his executors and trustees to “perpetuate The New York Times as an institution charged with a high public duty”. The Times was to remain “an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare without regard to individual advantage or ambition, the claims of party politics, or the voice of religious or personal prejudice or predilection”. This was no mere deathbed wish. It was matched by Adolph’s very first statement of aims published in 1896: “that The New York Times give the news... impartially, without fear or favour, regardless of any party, sect or interest involved” as well as numerous other actions throughout his tenure as publisher.
For example, soon after Adolph took over the Times, the Times denounced local politicians’ handouts of city advertising budgets to friendly publishers. The ads were practically illegible and the law only required publication in one newspaper, not five. When exposed, the politicians – the “Tammany Hall” portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York - simply dangled the entire city advertising budget to silence Adolph. Despite the Times’ dire financial straits, Adolph rejected the offer.
Why was this public mission so important to Adolph?
On the one hand, it simply made business sense. The first newspapers were often published by politicians or political parties. Almost all had an overt political bias. When they were not mouthpieces of political demagoguery, they peddled in sensationalist tabloid content about scandal and violence, full of exaggerated headlines and unverified claims. In contrast, the Times printed “All the News That’s Fit to Print” - and only that. In that age of “yellow journalism”, there was a market opportunity for the Times to be “The Gray Lady”, as it is known today.
In fact, Adolph had already succeeded once with this business model. The Chattanooga Times was Adolph’s first newspaper, acquired eight months short of his twenty-first birthday. The Chattanooga Times’ slogan instituted by Adolph and affixed to the paper’s mast to this day is “To give the news impartially, without fear or favour.” Adolph made enough of a fortune at the Chattanooga Times that he lost a substantial part of it in real estate speculation as a young rich man. His losses drove him to seek another newspaper to acquire. Of course, if the Times model worked in Chattanooga with a population of approximately 12,000 at the time, New York with a population of up to five million must seemed a tantalising prospect for Adolph.
A deeper reason for Adolph’s commitment to media independence could lie in his family & background. His early childhood was not just marked by mere political polarisation - the nation was at civil war. His father, Julius Ochs, was a Captain in the Union Army, trusted enough to be appointed drillmaster for new recruits. His mother, Bertha, was devoted to the Confederate cause, once smuggling quinine to malaria-stricken soldiers in her baby buggy and barely escaping arrest. While his parents were undoubtedly a loving couple to the last, Adolph grew up in a home where open discussion and debate of moral and political issues was allowed and indeed prized.
To be sure, the Times was not the first newspaper and the Ochs the first family to adopt this model of serious reporting. There were the “eccentric” Herald and the “literary” Sun, for example. Joseph Pulitzer, of Pulitzer Prize fame, had transformed The New York World, from its early days as a paragon of yellow journalism competing bare-knuckle with William Hearst’s New York Journal for circulation, into responsible daily. But, these never lasted beyond a generation or two. Joseph Pulitzer’s son, Herbert, never had his father’s passion for newspapers and sought to sell the World for profit, despite his father’s dying wishes. Adolph Ochs was so committed to the ideal of a strong & independent press that he tried to support a management buyout by the World’s editorial team to honour Joseph Pulitzer. This was despite the World being at the time the key competitor to the Times. In fact, Joseph Pulitzer, once trying to stymie the Times in its early development, had vetoed its access to the Associated Press’s wire service for foreign news.
Declining Adolph’s overtures, Herbert eventually sold the World to Roy Howard, who owned the competing Evening Telegram and soon closed the World and laid off all 3,000 staff. Unlike Joseph Pulitzer and other newspaper titans of his day, Adolph was far more adroit in planning for succession and securing his legacy. He quietly retired to his estate Hillandale, leaving day-to-day management of the Times in the hands of family men such as his nephew Julius Ochs Adler and son-in-law Arthur Sulzberger as well as legendary editors such as Carr Van Anda, a polymath who famously corrected a mathematical error by Albert Einstein.
While Adolph did once interrogate Arthur Sulzberger on “his plan of action after I die”, this is no comparison to Joseph Pulitzer, who despite severe nerve damage, dictated memo after memo from his yacht to his editorial team at the World, ultimately leaving no credible successor. The failures of succession at other newspapers at the time must have influenced Adolph when preparing his will, which set out the terms of what became the Ochs Trust. While it certainly named Adolph’s grandchildren as beneficiaries (thereby avoiding legal prohibitions against non-charitable trusts in perpetuity), trustees were nevertheless bound to the public purpose by the trust. There would not be a repudiation like that of Herbert Pulitzer of his father’s wishes.
Other legal mechanisms to separate ownership from control such as dual-class shares were not available or frowned upon at the time. While new purpose-driven legal structures, such as B Corporations in the United States, have proliferated today, the trust remains a remarkably flexible tool for wealth & succession planning. Unlike a corporate entity where the interests of shareholders or of the company itself may conflict with its purposes, a trust offers ultimate fidelity to a business founder’s intentions, even over multiple generations. Unlike other newspaper families like the Binghams, the Ochs Trust has kept remarkably intact since its inception, undergirded by a continuous sense of purpose strongly felt by Adolph’s descendants. Despite termination of the original Ochs Trust upon the death of Adolph’s only daughter, Ipghigene, and thereby the vesting of the stock in his grandchildren, his grandchildren covenanted in 1986 never to sell voting stock outside the family, thus forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars of potential profits if instead the stock were sold on the open market. In 1996, the family trust was reconstituted as the Ochs-Sulzberger Trust by common agreement among Adolph’s great-grandchildren.
The New York Times remains to this day, an exemplar of generations-long family stewardship over a purpose-driven but financially successful business.
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