investigations of the best marinara in town). If AHS tolerated the separate fiefdoms of strong-willed editors, the son didn’t exactly crack heads; but he got everyone’s attention, consolidating the daily and Sunday papers and ending the autonomy of the Washington bureau.
Above all, the son was credited with transforming the
Times
into a public corporation. The “historic”
Times
had been content to earn a modest profit for the family; the modern
Times
made no apologies about wanting returns of 18 to 20 percent earnings on revenues (the media industry “standard” for well-run corporations). The needs of
Times
readers had to be served, but so did the needs of the newer Wall Street audience of stockholders and security analysts. The
Times’
firstobligation, Punch Sulzberger told
Times
economics writer Leonard Silk in 1980, “is to be profitable.” Sulzberger quickly added, as if in deference to Dad, “Isn’t that a terrible way to put it? But if we’re not profitable, we can’t have any other mission.” (The second mission was “to cover the news—to call the shots as we see them.”)
The too-neat contrast between then and now, father and son, requires scrutiny, and qualification. AHS’s
Times
held facsimile technology in its hands, and let it get away, but Punch Sulzberger’s
Times
was a leader in data-base publishing, and in its turn walked away from that lucrative field. Sulzberger’s
Times
also abandoned its interests in cable television and made no significant investments in the new technologies that began to change the media business in the 1980s. Instead it opted for small Sunbelt newspapers and special-interest magazines—with marginal success.
True, in the summer of 1993, in his sixty-seventh year and nearing the end of his formal career, Punch Sulzberger made a climactic Big Picture acquisition, presiding over the agreement to bring the
Boston Globe
under the control of the Times Company. The agreement was described as a $1.1 billion deal; actually, little cash was involved: the
Times
offered to pay by issuing millions of new shares of its common stock, thereby diluting their earnings per share (the deal carefully left untouched the class of stocks held by the Sulzberger family). A
Times
news story in the editions of June 13, 1993, gave a—predictably—upbeat analysis of the agreement linking “two newspaper giants.” Outsiders, however, were puzzled by the acquisition. While the
Globe
was the dominant paper in its corner of the Northeast, Boston, like New York, had been slow to recover from the early 1990s recession. In 1992 the net income of the
Globe
’s parent company, Affiliated Publications, totaled a respectable $14.1 million. Of course, the
Globe
was not a glamorous business acquisition when measured against all the brave new tomorrowland talk about 500-channel cable TV systems and interactive media services. But it fit the Sulzberger temperament: an economically centrist move, progressive but not radical, with grand ego satisfactions to be derived from his fellow newspaper publishers. Some Wall Street analysts reacted sourly; they had no appreciation of how the
Globe
purchase played among the peers of the Sulzbergers.
For the rest, Punch Sulzberger’s custodial record when he passed control of the
Times
on to his son was mixed, particularly as it affected the content of the paper. The consolidation of editorial power in one man, the volcanic Abe Rosenthal, created the predictable Actonian corruption, while the celebration of consumption in the new upscale sections inevitably weakened coverage of the unbeautiful city. The strategy of moving the
Times
out of the New York market also produced equivocal results. Punch Sulzberger’s 1990s version of a national-satellite edition of the
Times
may not work any better than the
Times’
effort in the early 1960s. By the time the national
Times
reached the markets beyond the Hudson, the
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
were there, in
Above all, the son was credited with transforming the
Times
into a public corporation. The “historic”
Times
had been content to earn a modest profit for the family; the modern
Times
made no apologies about wanting returns of 18 to 20 percent earnings on revenues (the media industry “standard” for well-run corporations). The needs of
Times
readers had to be served, but so did the needs of the newer Wall Street audience of stockholders and security analysts. The
Times’
firstobligation, Punch Sulzberger told
Times
economics writer Leonard Silk in 1980, “is to be profitable.” Sulzberger quickly added, as if in deference to Dad, “Isn’t that a terrible way to put it? But if we’re not profitable, we can’t have any other mission.” (The second mission was “to cover the news—to call the shots as we see them.”)
The too-neat contrast between then and now, father and son, requires scrutiny, and qualification. AHS’s
Times
held facsimile technology in its hands, and let it get away, but Punch Sulzberger’s
Times
was a leader in data-base publishing, and in its turn walked away from that lucrative field. Sulzberger’s
Times
also abandoned its interests in cable television and made no significant investments in the new technologies that began to change the media business in the 1980s. Instead it opted for small Sunbelt newspapers and special-interest magazines—with marginal success.
True, in the summer of 1993, in his sixty-seventh year and nearing the end of his formal career, Punch Sulzberger made a climactic Big Picture acquisition, presiding over the agreement to bring the
Boston Globe
under the control of the Times Company. The agreement was described as a $1.1 billion deal; actually, little cash was involved: the
Times
offered to pay by issuing millions of new shares of its common stock, thereby diluting their earnings per share (the deal carefully left untouched the class of stocks held by the Sulzberger family). A
Times
news story in the editions of June 13, 1993, gave a—predictably—upbeat analysis of the agreement linking “two newspaper giants.” Outsiders, however, were puzzled by the acquisition. While the
Globe
was the dominant paper in its corner of the Northeast, Boston, like New York, had been slow to recover from the early 1990s recession. In 1992 the net income of the
Globe
’s parent company, Affiliated Publications, totaled a respectable $14.1 million. Of course, the
Globe
was not a glamorous business acquisition when measured against all the brave new tomorrowland talk about 500-channel cable TV systems and interactive media services. But it fit the Sulzberger temperament: an economically centrist move, progressive but not radical, with grand ego satisfactions to be derived from his fellow newspaper publishers. Some Wall Street analysts reacted sourly; they had no appreciation of how the
Globe
purchase played among the peers of the Sulzbergers.
For the rest, Punch Sulzberger’s custodial record when he passed control of the
Times
on to his son was mixed, particularly as it affected the content of the paper. The consolidation of editorial power in one man, the volcanic Abe Rosenthal, created the predictable Actonian corruption, while the celebration of consumption in the new upscale sections inevitably weakened coverage of the unbeautiful city. The strategy of moving the
Times
out of the New York market also produced equivocal results. Punch Sulzberger’s 1990s version of a national-satellite edition of the
Times
may not work any better than the
Times’
effort in the early 1960s. By the time the national
Times
reached the markets beyond the Hudson, the
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
were there, in
Similar Books
