The New York Times (sometimes abbreviated as The NYT or The Times) is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won 122 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper.
As of September 2016, it had the largest combined print-and-digital circulation of any daily newspaper in the United States. The New York Times is ranked 18th in the world by circulation.
The paper is owned by The New York Times Company, which is publicly traded but primarily controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a dual-class share structure. It has been owned by the family since 1896; Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fourth generation of the family to helm the paper.
Nicknamed "The Gray Lady", The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record". The paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print", appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page.
Since the mid-1970s, The New York Times has greatly expanded its layout and organization, adding special weekly sections on various topics supplementing the regular news, editorials, sports, and features. Since 2008, The New York Times has been organized into the following sections: News, Editorials/Opinions-Columns/Op-Ed, New York (metropolitan), Business, Sports of The Times, Arts, Science, Styles, Home, Travel, and other features. On Sunday, The New York Times is supplemented by the Sunday Review (formerly the Week in Review), The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine (T is published 13 times a year). The New York Times stayed with the broadsheet full page set-up (as some others have changed into a tabloid lay-out) and an eight-column format for several years, after most papers switched to six, and was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, especially on the front page.
History
Origins
The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851, published by Raymond, Jones & Company (raising about $70,000); by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond (1820â€"69), then a Whig Party member and later second chairman of the newly organized Republican Party National Committee, and former banker George Jones. Other early investors of the company were Edwin B. Morgan, Christopher Morgan, and Edward B. Wesley. Sold for a penny (equivalent to 29 cents today), the inaugural edition attempted to address various speculations on its purpose and positions that preceded its release:
We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good;â€"and we shall be Radical in everything which may seem to us to require radical treatment and radical reform. We do not believe that everything in Society is either exactly right or exactly wrong;â€"what is good we desire to preserve and improve;â€"what is evil, to exterminate, or reform.
In 1852, the newspaper started a western division, The Times of California that arrived whenever a mail boat got to California. However, when local California newspapers came into prominence, the effort failed.
The newspaper shortened its name to The New-York Times on September 14, 1857. It dropped the hyphen in the city name on December 1, 1896. On April 21, 1861, The New York Times departed from its original Mondayâ€"Saturday publishing schedule and joined other major dailies in adding a Sunday edition to offer daily coverage of the Civil War. One of the earliest public controversies it was involved with was the Mortara Affair, the subject of twenty editorials it published alone.
The main office of The New York Times was attacked during the New York Draft Riots sparked by the beginning of military conscription for the Northern Union Army now instituted in the midst of the Civil War on July 13, 1863. At "Newspaper Row", across from City Hall, Henry Raymond, owner and editor of The New York Times, averted the rioters with "Gatling" (early machine, rapid-firing) guns, one of which he manned himself. The mob now diverted, instead attacked the headquarters of abolitionist publisher Horace Greeley's New York Tribune until forced to flee by the Brooklyn City Police, who had crossed the East River to help the Manhattan authorities.
In 1869, Raymond died, and George Jones took over as publisher.
The newspaper's influence grew during 1870â€"1 when it published a series of exposés on William Magear ("Boss") Tweed, leader of the city's Democratic Partyâ€"popularly known as "Tammany Hall" (from its early 19th Century meeting headquarters)â€"that led to the end of the "Tweed Ring's" domination of New York's City Hall. Tweed offered The New York Times five million dollars (equivalent to more than 100 million dollars today) to not publish the story. In the 1880s, The New York Times transitioned gradually from editorially supporting Republican Party candidates to becoming more politically independent and analytical. In 1884, the paper supported Democrat Grover Cleveland (former Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York State) in his first presidential campaign. While this move cost The New York Times a portion of its readership among its more progressive and Republican readers (the revenue went down from $188,000 to $56,000 from 1883-4; however, some part of this was due to the price going down to two cents, in order to compete with the World and Sun), the paper eventually regained most of its lost ground within a few years.
Ochs era
After George Jones died in 1891, Charles Ransom Miller raised $1Â million dollars to buy the Times, along with other fellow editors at the newspaper, printing it under the New York Times Publishing Company. However, the newspaper was financially crippled by the Panic of 1893. By 1896, The New York Times had a circulation of less than 9,000, and was losing $1,000 a day when controlling interest in it was gained by Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Chattanooga Times for $75,000.
Shortly after assuming control of the paper, Ochs coined the paper's slogan, "All The News That's Fit To Print". The slogan has appeared in the paper since September 1896, and has been printed in a box in the upper left hand corner of the front page since early 1897. This was a jab at competing papers such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal which were now being known for a lurid, sensationalist and often inaccurate reporting of facts and opinions known by the end of the century as "yellow journalism". Under Ochs' guidance, continuing and expanding upon the Henry Raymond tradition, (which were from the era of James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald which predated Pulitzer and Hearst's arrival in New York), The New York Times achieved international scope, circulation, and reputation (the Sunday circulation went from 9,000 in 1896 to 780,000 in 1934). In 1904, The New York Times, along with The Times received the first on-the-spot wireless telegraph transmission from a naval battle, a report of the destruction of the Imperial Russian Navy's Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Port Arthur in the Straits of Tsushima off the eastern coast of Korea in the Yellow Sea in the western Pacific Ocean after just sailing across the globe from Europe from the press-boat Haimun during the Russo-Japanese War. In 1910, the first air delivery of The New York Times to Philadelphia began. The New York Times' first trans-Atlantic delivery by air to London occurred in 1919 by dirigible. In 1920, a "4 A.M. Airplane Edition" was sent by plane to Chicago so it could be in the hands of Republican convention delegates by evening.
Post-war expansion
In the 1940s, the paper extended its breadth and reach. The crossword began appearing regularly in 1942, and the fashion section in 1946. The New York Times began an international edition in 1946. The international edition stopped publishing in 1967, when The New York Times joined the owners of the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post to publish the International Herald Tribune in Paris.
New York Times v. Sullivan
The paper's involvement in a 1964 libel case helped bring one of the key United States Supreme Court decisions supporting freedom of the press, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. In it, the United States Supreme Court established the "actual malice" standard for press reports about public officials or public figures to be considered defamatory or libelous. The malice standard requires the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove the publisher of the statement knew the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity. Because of the high burden of proof on the plaintiff, and difficulty in proving malicious intent, such cases by public figures rarely succeed.
The Pentagon Papers
In 1971, the Pentagon Papers, a secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967, were given ("leaked") to Neil Sheehan of The New York Times by former State Department official Daniel Ellsberg, with his friend Anthony Russo assisting in copying them. The New York Times began publishing excerpts as a series of articles on June 13. Controversy and lawsuits followed. The papers revealed, among other things, that the government had deliberately expanded its role in the war by conducting air strikes over Laos, raids along the coast of North Vietnam, and offensive actions taken by U.S. Marines well before the public was told about the actions, all while President Lyndon B. Johnson had been promising not to expand the war. The document increased the credibility gap for the U.S. government, and hurt efforts by the Nixon administration to fight the ongoing war.
When The New York Times began publishing its series, President Richard Nixon became incensed. His words to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger included "People have gotta be put to the torch for this sort of thing..." and "Let's get the son-of-a-bitch in jail." After failing to get The New York Times to stop publishing, Attorney General John Mitchell and President Nixon obtained a federal court injunction that The New York Times cease publication of excerpts. The newspaper appealed and the case began working through the court system. On June 18, 1971, The Washington Post began publishing its own series. Ben Bagdikian, a Post editor, had obtained portions of the papers from Ellsberg. That day the Post received a call from the Assistant Attorney General, William Rehnquist, asking them to stop publishing. When the Post refused, the U.S. Justice Department sought another injunction. The U.S. District court judge refused, and the government appealed. On June 26, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take both cases, merging them into New York Times Co. v. United States 403 US 713. On June 30, 1971, the Supreme Court held in a 6â€"3 decision that the injunctions were unconstitutional prior restraints and that the government had not met the burden of proof required. The justices wrote nine separate opinions, disagreeing on significant substantive issues. While it was generally seen as a victory for those who claim the First Amendment enshrines an absolute right to free speech, many felt it a lukewarm victory, offering little protection for future publishers when claims of national security were at stake.
1970s and 1980s
In the 1970s, the paper introduced a number of new lifestyle sections including Weekend and Home, with the aim of attracting more advertisers and readers. Many criticized the move for betraying the paper's mission.
On September 7, 1976, the paper switched from an eight-column format to a six-column format. The overall page width stayed the same, with each column becoming wider.
On September 14, 1987, the Times printed the heaviest ever newspaper, at over 12 pounds (5.4Â kg) and 1,612 pages.
1990s and 2000s
The Times was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, with the first color photograph on the front page appearing on October 16, 1997.
Digital era
In September 2008, The New York Times announced that it would be combining certain sections effective October 6, 2008, in editions printed in the New York metropolitan area. The changes folded the Metro Section into the main International / National news section and combined Sports and Business (except Saturday through Monday, when Sports is still printed as a standalone section). This change also included having the name of the Metro section be called New York outside of the Tri-State Area. The presses used by The New York Times allow four sections to be printed simultaneously; as the paper had included more than four sections all days except Saturday, the sections had to be printed separately in an early press run and collated together. The changes will allow The New York Times to print in four sections Monday through Wednesday, in addition to Saturday. The New York Times' announcement stated that the number of news pages and employee positions will remain unchanged, with the paper realizing cost savings by cutting overtime expenses.
In 2009, the newspaper began production of local inserts in regions outside of the New York area. Beginning October 16, 2009, a two-page "Bay Area" insert was added to copies of the Northern California edition on Fridays and Sundays. The newspaper commenced production of a similar Friday and Sunday insert to the Chicago edition on November 20, 2009. The inserts consist of local news, policy, sports, and culture pieces, usually supported by local advertisements.
Following industry trends, its weekday circulation had fallen in 2009 to fewer than one million.
In August 2007, the paper reduced the physical size of its print edition, cutting the page width from 13.5 inches (0.34Â m) to a 12 inches (0.30Â m). This followed similar moves by a roster of other newspapers in the previous ten years, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. The move resulted in a 5% reduction in news space, but (in an era of dwindling circulation and significant advertising revenue losses) also saved about $12Â million a year.
Because of its steadily declining sales attributed to the rise of online alternative media and social media, the newspaper has been going through a downsizing for several years, offering buyouts to workers and cutting expenses, in common with a general trend among print news media.
In December 2012, the Times published "Snow Fall", a six-part article about the 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche which integrated videos, photos, and interactive graphics and was hailed as a watershed moment for online journalism.
In 2016, reporters for the newspaper were reportedly the target of cyber security breaches. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was reportedly investigating the attacks. The cyber security breaches have been described as possibly being related to cyberattacks that targeted other institutions, such as the Democratic National Committee.
Headquarters building
The newspaper's first building was located at 113 Nassau Street in New York City. In 1854, it moved to 138 Nassau Street, and in 1858 to 41 Park Row, making it the first newspaper in New York City housed in a building built specifically for its use.
The newspaper moved its headquarters to the Times Tower, located at 1475 Broadway in 1904, in an area called Longacre Square, that was later renamed Times Square in honor of the newspaper. The top of the building â€" now known as One Times Square â€" is the site of the New Year's Eve tradition of lowering a lighted ball, which was started by the paper. The building is also notable for its electronic news ticker â€" popularly known as "The Zipper" â€" where headlines crawl around the outside of the building. It is still in use, but has been operated by Dow Jones & Company since 1995. After nine years in its Times Square tower the newspaper had an annex built at 229 West 43rd Street. After several expansions, the 43rd Street building became the newspaper's main headquarters in 1960 and the Times Tower on Broadway was sold the following year. It served as the newspaper's main printing plant until 1997, when the newspaper opened a state-of-the-art printing plant in the College Point section of the borough of Queens.
A decade later, The New York Times moved its newsroom and businesses headquarters from West 43rd Street to a new tower at 620 Eighth Avenue between West 40th and 41st Streets, in Manhattan â€" directly across Eighth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The new headquarters for the newspaper, known officially as The New York Times Building but unofficially called the new "Times Tower" by many New Yorkers, is a skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano.
Discrimination in employment
Discriminatory practices restricting women in editorial positions were previously employed by the paper. The newspaper's first general woman reporter was Jane Grant, who described her experience afterwards. She wrote, "In the beginning I was charged not to reveal the fact that a female had been hired". Other reporters nicknamed her Fluff and she was subjected to considerable hazing. Because of her gender, promotions were out of the question, according to the then-managing editor. She was there for fifteen years, interrupted by World War I.
In 1935, Anne McCormick wrote to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, "I hope you won't expect me to revert to 'woman's-point-of-view' stuff." Later, she interviewed major political leaders and appears to have had easier access than her colleagues did. Even those who witnessed her in action were unable to explain how she got the interviews she did. Clifton Daniel said, "[After World War II,] I'm sure Adenauer called her up and invited her to lunch. She never had to grovel for an appointment." Covering world leaders' speeches after World War II at the National Press Club was limited to men by a Club rule. When women were eventually allowed in to hear the speeches, they still were not allowed to ask the speakers questions, although men were allowed and did ask, even though some of the women had won Pulitzer Prizes for prior work. Times reporter Maggie Hunter refused to return to the Club after covering one speech on assignment. Nan Robertson's article on the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, was read aloud as anonymous by a professor, who then said, "'It will come as a surprise to you, perhaps, that the reporter is a girl,' he began... [G]asps; amazement in the ranks. 'She had used all her senses, not just her eyes, to convey the smell and feel of the stockyards. She chose a difficult subject, an offensive subject. Her imagery was strong enough to revolt you.'" The New York Times hired Kathleen McLaughlin after ten years at the Chicago Tribune, where "[s]he did a series on maids, going out herself to apply for housekeeping jobs."
Organization
News staff
In addition to its New York City headquarters, the paper has newsrooms in London and Hong Kong. Its Paris newsroom, which had been the headquarters of the paper's international edition, was closed in 2016, although the city remains home to a news bureau and an advertising office. The paper also has an editing and wire service center in Gainesville, Florida.
As of 2013, the newspaper had 6 news bureaus in the New York region, 14 elsewhere in the United States, and 24 in other countries.
According to Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times, a competitor, the newsroom of The New York Times is twice the size of the Los Angeles Times, which has a newsroom of 600.
Ochs-Sulzberger family
In 1896, Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times, a money-losing newspaper, and formed the New York Times Company. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, one of the United States' newspaper dynasties, has owned The New York Times ever since. The publisher went public on January 14, 1969, trading at $42 a share on the American Stock Exchange. After this, the family continued to exert control through its ownership of the vast majority of Class B voting shares. Class A shareholders are permitted restrictive voting rights while Class B shareholders are allowed open voting rights.
The Ochs-Sulzberger family trust controls roughly 88 percent of the company's class B shares. Any alteration to the dual-class structure must be ratified by six of eight directors who sit on the board of the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust. The Trust board members are Daniel H. Cohen, James M. Cohen, Lynn G. Dolnick, Susan W. Dryfoos, Michael Golden, Eric M. A. Lax, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. and Cathy J. Sulzberger.
Turner Catledge, the top editor at The New York Times from 1952 to 1968, wanted to hide the ownership influence. Arthur Sulzberger routinely wrote memos to his editor, each containing suggestions, instructions, complaints, and orders. When Catledge would receive these memos he would erase the publisher's identity before passing them to his subordinates. Catledge thought that if he removed the publisher's name from the memos it would protect reporters from feeling pressured by the owner.
Public editors
The position of public editor was established in 2003 to "investigate matters of journalistic integrity"; each public editor was to serve a two-year term. The post "was established to receive reader complaints and question Times journalists on how they make decisions." The impetus for the creation of the public editor position was the Jayson Blair affair. Public editors were: Daniel Okrent (2003â€"2005), Byron Calame (2005â€"2007), Clark Hoyt (2007â€"2010) (served an extra year), Arthur S. Brisbane (2010â€"2012), Margaret Sullivan (2012â€"2016) (served a four-year term), and Elizabeth Spayd (2016â€"2017). In 2017, the Times eliminated the position of public editor.
Content
Style
When referring to people, The New York Times generally uses honorifics, rather than unadorned last names (except in the sports pages, Book Review and Magazine).
The New York Times printed a display advertisement on its first page on January 6, 2009, breaking tradition at the paper. The advertisement, for CBS, was in color and ran the entire width of the page. The newspaper promised it would place first-page advertisements on only the lower half of the page.
In August 2014, The Times decided to use the word "torture" to describe incidents in which interrogators "inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information." This was a shift from the paper's previous practice of describe such practices as "harsh" or "brutal" interrogations.
The paper maintains a strict profanity policy. A 2007 review of a concert by punk band Fucked Up, for example, completely avoided mention of the group's name. However, the Times has on occasion published unfiltered video content that includes profanity and slurs where it has determined that such video has news value. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, the Times did print the words "fuck" and "pussy," among others, when reporting on the vulgar statements made by Donald Trump in a 2005 recording. Times politics editor Carolyn Ryan said: "It's a rare thing for us to use this language in our stories, even in quotes, and we discussed it at length," ultimately deciding to publish it because of its news value and because "[t]o leave it out or simply describe it seemed awkward and less than forthright to us, especially given that we would be running a video that showed our readers exactly what was said."
Products
Print newspaper
In the absence of a major headline, the day's most important story generally appears in the top-right column, on the main page. The typefaces used for the headlines are custom variations of Cheltenham. The running text is set at 8.7 point Imperial.
The newspaper is organized in three sections, including the magazine.
- News: Includes International, National, Washington, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, The Metro Section, Education, Weather, and Obituaries.
- Opinion: Includes Editorials, Op-eds and Letters to the Editor.
- Features: Includes Arts, Movies, Theater, Travel, NYC Guide, Food, Home & Garden, Fashion & Style, Crossword, The New York Times Book Review, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Sunday Review.
Some sections, such as Metro, are only found in the editions of the paper distributed in the New Yorkâ€"New Jerseyâ€"Connecticut Tri-state area and not in the national or Washington, D.C. editions. Aside from a weekly roundup of reprints of editorial cartoons from other newspapers, The New York Times does not have its own staff editorial cartoonist, nor does it feature a comics page or Sunday comics section.
International print edition
The New York Times International Edition is a print version of the paper tailored for readers outside the United States. Formerly a joint venture with The Washington Post named The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times took full ownership of the paper in 2002 and has gradually integrated it more closely into its domestic operations.
Website
The New York Times began publishing daily on the World Wide Web on January 22, 1996, "offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper's contents." Since its online launch, the newspaper has consistently been ranked one of the top websites. Accessing some articles requires registration, though this could be bypassed in some cases through Times RSS feeds. The website had 555Â million pageviews in March 2005. The domain nytimes.com attracted at least 146Â million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study. The New York Times Web site ranks 59th by number of unique visitors, with over 20Â million unique visitors in March 2009 making it the most visited newspaper site with more than twice the number of unique visitors as the next most popular site. as of May 2009, nytimes.com produced 22 of the 50 most popular newspaper blogs. NYTimes.com is ranked 118 in the world, and 32 in the U.S. by Alexa (as of June 4, 2017).
In September 2005, the paper decided to begin subscription-based service for daily columns in a program known as TimesSelect, which encompassed many previously free columns. Until being discontinued two years later, TimesSelect cost $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year, though it was free for print copy subscribers and university students and faculty. To avoid this charge, bloggers often reposted TimesSelect material, and at least one site once compiled links of reprinted material. On September 17, 2007, The New York Times announced that it would stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight the following day, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site. In addition to opening almost the entire site to all readers, The New York Times news archives from 1987 to the present are available at no charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. Access to the Premium Crosswords section continues to require either home delivery or a subscription for $6.95 per month or $39.95 per year. Times columnists including Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman had criticized TimesSelect, with Friedman going so far as to say "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it's cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience."
The New York Times was made available on the iPhone and iPod Touch in 2008, and on the iPad mobile devices in 2010. It was also the first newspaper to offer a video game as part of its editorial content, Food Import Folly by Persuasive Games. In 2010, The New York Times editors collaborated with students and faculty from New York University's Studio 20 Journalism Masters program to launch and produce "The Local East Village", a hyperlocal blog designed to offer news "by, for and about the residents of the East Village". That same year, reCAPTCHA helped to digitize old editions of The New York Times.
In 2012, The New York Times introduced a Chinese-language news site, cn.nytimes.com, with content created by staff based in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong, though the server was placed outside of China to avoid censorship issues. In March 2013, The New York Times and National Film Board of Canada announced a partnership titled A Short History of the Highrise, which will create four short documentaries for the Internet about life in highrise buildings as part of the NFB's Highrise project, utilizing images from the newspaper's photo archives for the first three films, and user-submitted images for the final film. The third project in the series, "A Short History of the Highrise", won a Peabody Award in 2013.
Falling print advertising revenue and projections of continued decline resulted in a paywall being instituted in 2011, regarded as modestly successful after garnering several hundred thousand subscriptions and about $100 million in revenue as of March 2012. The paywall was announced on March 17, 2011, that starting on March 28, 2011 (March 17, 2011, for Canada), it would charge frequent readers for access to its online content. Readers would be able to access up to 20 articles each month without charge. (Although beginning in April 2012, the number of free-access articles was halved to just ten articles per month.) Any reader who wanted to access more would have to pay for a digital subscription. This plan would allow free access for occasional readers, but produce revenue from "heavy" readers. Digital subscriptions rates for four weeks range from $15 to $35 depending on the package selected, with periodic new subscriber promotions offering four-week all-digital access for as low as 99¢. Subscribers to the paper's print edition get full access without any additional fee. Some content, such as the front page and section fronts will remain free, as well as the Top News page on mobile apps. In January 2013, The New York Times' Public Editor Margaret M. Sullivan announced that for the first time in many decades, the paper generated more revenue through subscriptions than through advertising.
The newspaper's website was hacked on August 29, 2013, by the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacking group that supports the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The SEA managed to penetrate the paper's domain name registrar, Melbourne IT, and alter DNS records for The New York Times, putting some of its websites out of service for hours.
The food section is supplemented on the web by properties for home cooks and for out-of-home dining. New York Times Cooking (cooking.nytimes.com; also available via iOS app) provides access to more than 17,000 recipes on file as of November 2016, and availability of saving recipes from other sites around the web. The newspaper's restaurant search (nytimes.com/reviews/dining) allows online readers to search NYC area restaurants by cuisine, neighborhood, price, and reviewer rating. The New York Times has also published several cookbooks, including The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century, published in late 2010.
Mobile presence
The Times Reader is a digital version of The New York Times. It was created via a collaboration between the newspaper and Microsoft. Times Reader takes the principles of print journalism and applies them to the technique of online reporting. Times Reader uses a series of technologies developed by Microsoft and their Windows Presentation Foundation team. It was announced in Seattle in April 2006, by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Bill Gates, and Tom Bodkin. In 2009, the Times Reader 2.0 was rewritten in Adobe AIR. In December 2013, the newspaper announced that the Times Reader app would be discontinued on January 6, 2014, urging readers of the app to instead begin using the subscription-only "Today's Paper" app.
In 2008, The New York Times created an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which allowed users to download articles to their mobile device enabling them to read the paper even when they were unable to receive a signal. In April 2010, The New York Times announced it would begin publishing daily content through an iPad app. As of October 2010, The New York Times iPad app is ad-supported and available for free without a paid subscription, but translated into a subscription-based model in 2011.
In 2010, the newspaper also launched an app for Android smartphones, followed later by an app for Windows Phones.
Podcasts
The New York Times began producing podcasts in 2006. Among the early podcasts were Inside The Times and Inside The New York Times Book Review. Several of the Times podcasts were cancelled in 2012. The Times returned to launching new podcasts in 2016, including Modern Love with WBUR. On January 30, 2017, The New York Times launched a news podcast, The Daily.
Chinese-language version
In June 2012, The New York Times launched its first official foreign-language variant, cn.nytimes.com, in Chinese, viewable in both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. The project was led by Craig S. Smith on the business side and Philip P. Pan on the editorial side.
The site's initial success was interrupted in October that year following the publication of an investigative article by David Barboza about the finances of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's family. In retaliation for the article, the Chinese government blocked access to both nytimes.com and cn.nytimes.com inside the People's Republic of China (PRC).
Despite Chinese government interference, however, the Chinese-language operations have continued to develop, adding a second site, cn.nytstyle.com, iOS and Android apps and newsletters, all of which are accessible inside the PRC. The China operations also produce three print publications in Chinese. Traffic to cn.nytimes.com, meanwhile, has risen due to the widespread use of VPN technology in the PRC and to a growing Chinese audience outside mainland China. New York Times articles are also available to users in China via the use of mirror websites, apps, domestic newspapers, and social media. The Chinese platforms now represent one of The New York Times' top five digital markets globally. The editor-in-chief of the Chinese platforms is Ching-Ching Ni.
TimesMachine
The TimesMachine is a web-based archive of scanned issues of The New York Times from 1851 through 2002.
Unlike The New York Times online archive, the TimesMachine presents scanned images of the actual newspaper. All non-advertising content can be displayed on a per-story basis in a separate PDF display page and saved for future reference. The archive is available to New York Times subscribers, home delivery and/or digital.
Interruptions
Because of holidays, no editions were printed on November 23, 1851; January 2, 1852; July 4, 1852; January 2, 1853; and January 1, 1854.
Because of strikes, the regular edition of The New York Times was not printed during the following periods:
- December 9, 1962, to March 31, 1963. Only a western edition was printed because of the 1962â€"63 New York City newspaper strike.
- September 17, 1965, to October 10, 1965. An international edition was printed, and a weekend edition replaced the Saturday and Sunday papers.
- August 10, 1978, to November 5, 1978. A multi-union strike shut down the three major New York City newspapers. No editions of The New York Times were printed. Two months into the strike, a parody of The New York Times called Not The New York Times was distributed in the city, with contributors such as Carl Bernstein, Christopher Cerf, Tony Hendra and George Plimpton.
Editorial stance
The New York Times editorial page is often regarded as liberal. In mid-2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote that "the Op-Ed page editors do an evenhanded job of representing a range of views in the essays from outsiders they publish â€" but you need an awfully heavy counterweight to balance a page that also bears the work of seven opinionated columnists, only two of whom could be classified as conservative (and, even then, of the conservative subspecies that supports legalization of gay unions and, in the case of William Safire, opposes some central provisions of the Patriot Act."
The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican Party member for president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956; since 1960, it has endorsed the Democratic Party nominee in every presidential election (see New York Times presidential endorsements). However, the Times did endorse incumbent Republican mayors of New York City Rudy Giuliani in 1997 and Michael Bloomberg in 2005 and 2009. The Times also endorsed Republican New York state governor George Pataki for re-election in 2002.
Criticism and controversies
Failure to report famine in Ukraine
The New York Times was criticized for the work of reporter Walter Duranty, who served as its Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936. Duranty wrote a series of stories in 1931 on the Soviet Union and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at that time; however, he has been criticized for his denial of widespread famine, most particularly the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."
World War II
On November 14, 2001, in The New York Times' 150th anniversary issue, former executive editor Max Frankel wrote that before and during World War II, the NY Times had maintained a consistent policy to minimize reports on the Holocaust in their news pages. Laurel Leff, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, concluded that the newspaper had downplayed the Third Reich targeting of Jews for genocide. Her 2005 book Buried by the Times documents the paper's tendency before, during and after World War II to place deep inside its daily editions the news stories about the ongoing persecution and extermination of Jews, while obscuring in those stories the special impact of the Nazis' crimes on Jews in particular. Leff attributes this dearth in part to the complex personal and political views of the newspaper's Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, concerning Jewishness, antisemitism, and Zionism.
During the war, The New York Times journalist William L. Laurence was "on the payroll of the War Department".
Fashion news articles promoting advertisers
In the mid to late 1950s, "fashion writer[s]... were required to come up every month with articles whose total column-inches reflected the relative advertising strength of every ["department" or "specialty"] store ["assigned" to a writer]... The monitor of all this was... the advertising director [of the NYT]... " However, within this requirement, story ideas may have been the reporters' and editors' own.
Iraq War
The New York Times supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On May 26, 2004, a year after the war started, the newspaper asserted that some of its articles had not been as rigorous as they should have been, and were insufficiently qualified, frequently overly dependent upon information from Iraqi exiles desiring regime change. Reporter Judith Miller retired after criticisms that her reporting of the lead-up to the Iraq War was factually inaccurate and overly favorable to the Bush administration's position, for which The New York Times later apologized. One of Miller's prime sources was Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate who returned to Iraq after the U.S. invasion and held a number of governmental positions culminating in acting oil minister and deputy prime minister from May 2005 until May 2006.
Jayson Blair plagiarism
In May 2003, The New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign from the newspaper after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories. Some critics contended that African-American Blair's race was a major factor in his hiring and in The New York Times' initial reluctance to fire him.
Duke University lacrosse case
The newspaper was criticized for largely reporting the prosecutors' version of events in the 2006 Duke lacrosse case. Suzanne Smalley of Newsweek criticized the newspaper for its "credulous" coverage of the charges of rape against Duke University lacrosse players. Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson, in their book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, write: "at the head of the guilt-presuming pack, The New York Times vied in a race to the journalistic bottom with trash-TV talk shows."
Israeliâ€"Palestinian conflict
A 2003 study in The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics concluded that The New York Times reporting was more favorable to Israelis than to Palestinians. A 2002 study published in the journal Journalism examined Middle East coverage of the Second Intifada over a one-month period in the Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune. The study authors said that the Times was "the most slanted in a pro-Israeli direction" with a bias "reflected ... in its use of headlines, photographs, graphics, sourcing practices and lead paragraphs."
For its coverage of the Israeliâ€"Palestinian conflict, some (such as Ed Koch) have claimed that the paper is pro-Palestinian, while others (such as As'ad AbuKhalil) have insisted that it is pro-Israel. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by political science professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, alleges that The New York Times sometimes criticizes Israeli policies but is not even-handed and is generally pro-Israel. On the other hand, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has criticized The New York Times for printing cartoons regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that were claimed to be anti-Semitic.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a proposal to write an article for the paper on grounds of lack of objectivity. A piece in which Thomas Friedman commented that praise awarded to Netanyahu during a speech at congress was "paid for by the Israel lobby" elicited an apology and clarification from its writer.
The New York Times' public editor Clark Hoyt concluded in his January 10, 2009, column, "Though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The New York Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job â€" and has largely succeeded."
M.I.A. quotes out of context
In February 2009, a Village Voice music blogger accused the newspaper of using "chintzy, ad-hominem allegations" in an article on British Tamil music artist M.I.A. concerning her activism against the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. M.I.A. criticized the paper in January 2010 after a travel piece rated post-conflict Sri Lanka the "#1 place to go in 2010". In June 2010, The New York Times Magazine published a correction on its cover article of M.I.A., acknowledging that the interview conducted by current W editor and then-Times Magazine contributor Lynn Hirschberg contained a recontextualization of two quotes. In response to the piece, M.I.A. broadcast Hirschberg's phone number and secret audio recordings from the interview via her Twitter and website.
Delayed publication of 2005 NSA warrantless surveillance story
The New York Times was criticized for the 13-month delay of the December 2005 story revealing the U.S. National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program. Ex-NSA officials blew the whistle on the program to journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who presented an investigative article to the newspaper in November 2004, weeks before America's presidential election. Contact with former agency officials began the previous summer.
Former The New York Times executive editor Bill Keller decided not to report the piece after being pressured by the Bush administration and being advised not to do so by New York Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman. Keller explained the silence's rationale in an interview with the newspaper in 2013, stating "Three years after 9/11, we, as a country, were still under the influence of that trauma, and we, as a newspaper, were not immune".
In 2014, PBS Frontline interviewed Risen and Lichtblau, who said that the newspaper's plan was to not publish the story at all. "The editors were furious at me", Risen said to the program. "They thought I was being insubordinate." Risen wrote a book about the mass surveillance revelations after The New York Times declined the piece's publication, and only released it after Risen told them that he would publish the book. Another reporter told NPR that the newspaper "avoided disaster" by ultimately publishing the story.
Irish student controversy
On June 16, 2015, The New York Times published an article reporting the deaths of six Irish students staying in Berkeley, California when the balcony they were standing on collapsed, the paper's story insinuating that they were to blame for the collapse. The paper stated that the behavior of Irish students coming to the US on J1 visas was an "embarrassment to Ireland". The Irish Taoiseach and former President of Ireland criticized the newspaper for "being insensitive and inaccurate" in its handling of the story.
Nail salon series
In May 2015, a New York Times exposé by Sarah Maslin Nir on the working conditions of manicurists in New York City and elsewhere and the health hazards to which they are exposed attracted wide attention, resulting in emergency workplace enforcement actions by New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo. In July 2015, the story's claims of widespread illegally low wages were challenged by former New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, in the New York Review of Books. Bernstein, whose wife owns two nail salons, asserted that such illegally low wages were inconsistent with his personal experience, and were not evidenced by ads in the Chinese-language papers cited by the story. The New York Times editorial staff subsequently answered Bernstein's criticisms with examples of several published ads and stating that his response was industry advocacy. The independent NYT Public Editor also reported that she had previously corresponded with Bernstein and looked into his complaints, and expressed her belief that the story's reporting was sound.
In September and October 2015, nail salon owners and workers protested at The New York Times offices several times, in response to the story and the ensuing New York State crackdown. In October 2015, Reason magazine published a three part re-reporting of the story by Jim Epstein, charging that the series was filled with misquotes and factual errors respecting both its claims of illegally low wages and health hazards. Epstein additionally argued that The New York Times had mistranslated the ads cited in its answer to Bernstein, and that those ads actually validated Bernstein's argument. In November 2015, The New York Times' public editor concluded that the exposé's "findings, and the language used to express them, should have been dialed back â€" in some instances substantially" and recommended that "The Times write further follow-up stories, including some that re-examine its original findings and that take on the criticism from salon owners and others â€" not defensively but with an open mind."
Iran
A 2015 study found that The New York Times fed into an overarching tendency towards national bias. During the Iranian nuclear crisis the newspaper minimized the "negative processes" of the United States while overemphasizing similar processes of Iran. This tendency was shared by other papers such as The Guardian, Tehran Times, and the Fars News Agency, while Xinhua News Agency was found to be more neutral while at the same time mimicking the foreign policy of the Peoples' Republic of China.
Hiring practices
In April 2016, two black female employees in their sixties filed a federal class action lawsuit against The New York Times Company CEO Mark Thompson and chief revenue officer Meredith Levien, claiming age, gender, and racial discrimination. The plaintiffs claim that the Times advertising department favored younger white employees over older black employees in making firing and promotion decisions. The Times said that the suit was "entirely without merit" and was "a series of recycled, scurrilous and unjustified attacks."
Accusations of bias
New York Times public editor (ombudsman) Elizabeth Spayd wrote in 2016 that "Conservatives and even many moderates, see in The Times a blue-state worldview" and accuse it of harboring a liberal bias. Spayd did not analyze the substance of the claim, but did opine that the Times is "part of a fracturing media environment that reflects a fractured country. That in turn leads liberals and conservatives toward separate news sources." Times executive editor Dean Baquet stated that he does not believe coverage has a liberal bias, but that: "We have to be really careful that people feel like they can see themselves in The New York Times. I want us to be perceived as fair and honest to the world, not just a segment of it. It's a really difficult goal. Do we pull it off all the time? No."
Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wrote in 2012: "When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper's many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism â€" for lack of a better term â€" that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times."
In mid-2004, the newspaper's then-public editor Daniel Okrent, wrote an opinion piece in which he said that The New York Times did have a liberal bias in news coverage of certain social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. He stated that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City. He wrote, "if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world." Okrent wrote that the Time's Arts & Leisure; the Sunday Times Magazine, and Culture coverage trend to the left.
In December 2004, a University of California, Los Angeles study by former fellows of a conservative think tank gave The New York Times a score of 73.7 on a 100-point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal, making it the second-most liberal major newspaper in the study after The Wall Street Journal (85.1). The validity of the study has been questioned, however. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America pointed out potential conflicts of interest with the author's funding, and political scientists, such as Brendan Nyhan, cited flaws in the study's methodology.
Donald Trump has frequently criticized The New York Times on his Twitter account before and during his presidency; since November 2015, Trump has referred to the Times as "the failing New York Times" in a series of tweets. Despite Trump's criticism, New York Times editor Mark Thompson noted that the paper had enjoyed soaring digital readership, with the fourth quarter of 2016 seeing the highest number of new digital subscribers to the newspaper since 2011.
Critic Matt Taibbi accused The New York Times of favoring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the paper's news coverage of the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Responding to the complaints of many readers, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote that "The Times has not ignored Mr. Sanders's campaign, but it hasn't always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused on the candidate's age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to say." Times senior editor Carolyn Ryan defended both the volume of New York Times coverage (noting that Sanders had received about the same amount of article coverage as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio) and its tone.
Reputation
The Times has developed a national and international "reputation for thoroughness" over time. Among journalists, the paper is held in high regard; a 1999 survey of newspaper editors conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review found that the Times was the "best" American paper, ahead of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. The Times also was ranked #1 in a 2011 "quality" ranking of U.S. newspapers by Daniel de Vise of The Washington Post; the objective ranking took into account the number of recent Pulitzer Prizes won, circulation, and perceived Web site quality. A 2012 report in WNYC called the Times "the most respected newspaper in the world."
Nevertheless, like many other U.S. media sources, the Times had suffered from a decline in public perceptions of credibility in the U.S. from 2004 to 2012. A Pew Research Center survey in 2012 asked respondents about their views on credibility of various news organizations. Among respondents who gave a rating, 49% said that they believed "all or most" of the Times's reporting, while 50% disagreed. A large percentage (19%) of respondents were unable to rate believability. The Times's score was comparable to that of USA Today. Media analyst Brooke Gladstone of WNYC's On the Media, writing for The New York Times, says that the decline in U.S. public trust of the mass media can be explained (1) by the rise of the polarized Internet-driven news; (2) by a decline in trust in U.S. institutions more generally; and (3) by the fact that "Americans say they want accuracy and impartiality, but the polls suggest that, actually, most of us are seeking affirmation."
Awards
The New York Times has won 122 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. The prize is awarded for excellence in journalism in a range of categories.
It has also won three Peabody Awards (and jointly received two).
See also
- List of New York City newspapers and magazines
- List of newspapers in the United States
- List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times
- List of The New York Times employees
- New York Times Building (disambiguation)
- New York Times Index
- The New York Times Best Seller list
References
Notes
Citations
Further reading
- Davis, Elmer Holmes (1921). History of the New York Times, 1851â€"1921. The New York Times.Â
- Durham, Meenakshi G. (February 2013). "Vicious assault shakes Texas town: the politics of gender violence in The New York Times' coverage of a schoolgirl's gang rape". Journalism Studies. Taylor & Francis Online. 14 (1): 1â€"12. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2012.657907.Â
- Knox, Edward C. (2002). "The "New York Times" Looks at France". The French Review. 75 (6): 1172â€"1180. doi:10.2307/3132941 (inactive 2017-11-21). JSTOR 3132941.Â
- Leff, Laurel (2000-03-01). "A Tragic "Fight in the Family": The New York Times, Reform Judaism and the Holocaust". American Jewish History. 88 (1): 3â€"51. doi:10.1353/ajh.2000.0016. ISSN 1086-3141.Â
- Schwarz, Daniel R. (2012). Endtimes? : crises and turmoil at the New York times, 1999-2009. Albany: Excelsior Editions. ISBN 1438438966. OCLC 802059662.Â
- Salisbury, Harrison E. (1980). Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (First ed.). New York: Times Books. ASIN 0812908856. ISBN 9780812908855. CS1 maint: ASIN uses ISBN (link)
- Taylor, S. J. (1990-03-29). Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow (1st ed.). New York u.a: Oxford University Press. ASIN 0195057007. ISBN 9780195057003. CS1 maint: ASIN uses ISBN (link)
External links
Official NYT websites
- Official website (Mobile)
- International New York Times
- New York Times articles about The New York Times
- The New York Times Company
Unofficial NYT-related websites
- Curated collection of most pre-1923 issues at Online Books Page
- The New York Times Company records (1836â€"2000) â€" The New York Public Library
- Works by or about The New York Times at Internet Archive (archives)
- Works by The New York Times at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)