The New York Times

The New York Times (NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18, 1851, by the New York Times Company. It has won 114 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization.

The paper's print version has the largest circulation of any metropolitan newspaper in the United States, and the second-largest circulation overall, behind The Wall Street Journal. It is ranked 39th in the world by circulation. Following industry trends, its weekday circulation has fallen to fewer than one million daily since 1990. Nicknamed for years as "The Gray Lady", The New York Times is long regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record". It is owned by The New York Times Company. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., (whose family (Ochs-Sulzberger) has controlled the paper for five generations, since 1896), is both the paper's publisher and the company's chairman. Its international version, formerly the International Herald Tribune, is now called the International New York Times.

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, it has greatly expanded its lay-out and organization, adding special weekly sections on various topics supplementing the regular news, editorials, sports and features. Recently it has been organized into sections: News, Editorials/Opinions-Columns/Op-Ed, New York (metropolitan), Business, Sports of The Times, Arts, Science, Styles, Home, and other features. On Sunday, it is supplemented by sections of The Week in Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine and recently T: The New York Times Style Magazine. 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

The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851, by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond, (1820â€"1869), then a Whig Party member and later second chairman of the newly organized Republican Party National Committee, and former banker George Jones. Sold for a penny (equivalent to 28¢ 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.

The newspaper shortened its name to The New-York Times in 1857. It dropped the hyphen in the city name in the 1890s. 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.

The newspaper's influence grew during 1870-71 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. 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 '​ readership among its more conservative, business-oriented, upper-class readers, the paper eventually regained most of its lost ground within a few years and slowly acquired a reputation for even-handedness and accurate modern reporting, especially by the 1890s under its new later owner/publisher's philosophies, Adolph Ochs of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The New York Times was acquired by Adolph Ochs, publisher of the Chattanooga Times, in 1896. The following year, he coined the paper's slogan, "All The News That's Fit To Print", which has since been printed in a box in the upper right hand corner of the front page; 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. In 1904, The New York 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 (one of the most important and history-changing naval battles in history). 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.

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. The paper bought a classical radio station (WQXR) in 1946. In addition to owning WQXR, the newspaper also formerly owned its AM sister, WQEW (1560 AM). The classical music radio format was simulcast on both frequencies until the early 1990s, when the big-band and standards music format of WNEW-AM (now WBBR) moved from 1130 AM to 1560. The AM radio station changed its call letters from WQXR to WQEW. By the beginning of the 21st century, The New York Times was leasing WQEW to ABC Radio for its Radio Disney format, which continues on 1560 AM. Disney became the owner of WQEW in 2007. On July 14, 2009, it was announced that WQXR was to be sold to WNYC, who on October 8, 2009, moved the station to 105.9 FM and began to operate the station as a non-commercial.

The New York Times is third in national circulation, after USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper is owned by The New York Times Company, in which descendants of Adolph Ochs, principally the Sulzberger family, maintain a dominant role. In 2009, article circulation dropped 7.3 percent to about 928,000; this is the first time since the 1980s that it has fallen under one million.As of December 26, 2010, the paper reported a circulation of 906,100 copies on weekdays and 1,356,800 copies on Sundays. In the New York City metropolitan area, the paper costs $2.50 Monday through Saturday and $5 on Sunday. The New York Times has won 114 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper.

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.

In addition to its New York City headquarters, the newspaper has 10 news bureaus in the New York region, 11 national news bureaus and 26 foreign news bureaus. The New York Times reduced its page width to 12 inches (300 mm) from 13.5 inches (340 mm) on August 6, 2007, adopting the width that has become the U.S. newspaper industry standard.

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.

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, it moved to 41 Park Row, making it the first newspaper in New York City housed in a building built specifically for its use.

The paper 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, that was started by the paper. The building is also notable for its electronic news ticker â€" popularly known as "The Zipper" â€" where headlines crawled around the outside of the building. It is still in use, but is now operated by the Reuters news agency. 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 gleaming 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.

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 what is inside a person's head, 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.

Discrimination in employment

Discriminatory practices restricting women in editorial positions were part of the history, correlating with effects on the journalism published at the time. 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."

End of tenure track

In February 2013, the paper stopped offering lifelong positions for its journalists and editors.

Ownership

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. After the publisher went public in the 1960s, 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.

Carlos Slim loan and investment

On January 20, 2009, the New York Times reported that Carlos Slim, Mexican telecommunications magnate and the world's second richest person, lent it $250 million "to help the newspaper company finance its businesses". Since then, Slim has made additional investments in Times stock;

As of October 6, 2011, according to Reuters, his position was estimated at over 8.1% of Class A shares.

Dual-class shares

Dual-class structures caught on in the mid-20th century as families such as the Grahams of The Washington Post Company sought to gain access to public capital without losing control. Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, had a similar structure and was controlled by the Bancroft family but was later bought by News Corporation in 2007, which itself is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and his family through a similar dual-class structure.

Content

Sections

The newspaper is organized in three sections, including the magazine.

1. News: Includes International, National, Washington, Business, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, The Metro Section, Education, Weather, and Obituaries.
2. Opinion: Includes Editorials, Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor.
3. Features: Includes Arts, Movies, Theater, Travel, NYC Guide, Dining & Wine, 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. 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. 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 currently has a newsroom of 600. In March 2014, Vanessa Friedman was named the "fashion director and chief fashion critic" of the New York Times.

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). It stayed with an eight-column format until September 1976, years after other papers had switched to six, and it was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, with the first color photograph on the front page appearing on October 16, 1997. 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.

Joining a roster of other major American newspapers in the last ten years, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, The New York Times announced on July 18, 2006, that it would be narrowing the width of its paper by six inches. In an era of dwindling circulation and significant advertising revenue losses for most print versions of American newspapers, the move, which would result in a 5 percent reduction in news coverage, would have a target savings of $12 million a year for the paper. The change from the traditional 54 inches (1.4 m) broadsheet style to a more compact 48-inch web width (12-inch page width) was addressed by both Executive Editor Bill Keller and The New York Times President Scott Heekin-Canedy in memos to the staff. Keller defended the "more reader-friendly" move indicating that in cutting out the "flabby or redundant prose in longer pieces" the reduction would make for a better paper. Similarly, Keller confronted the challenges of covering news with "less room" by proposing more "rigorous editing" and promised an ongoing commitment to "hard-hitting, ground-breaking journalism". The official change went into effect on August 6, 2007.

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 was 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 New York Times decided to increase their use of the term "torture" in stories about harsh interrogations, shifting from their previous description of the interrogations as "harsh" or "brutal".

The paper maintains a strict profanity policy; e.g. a 2007 review of a concert by punk band Fucked Up completely avoided mention of the group's name.

Reputation and awards

The New York Times has established links regionally with 16 bureaus in the New York region, nationally, with 11 bureaus within the US, and globally, with 26 foreign news bureaus.

The New York Times has won 114 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. The prize is awarded for excellence in journalism in a range of categories.

It has also won four Peabody Awards, including a personal one for Jack Gould in 1956.

Web presence

The New York Times has had a presence on the Web since 1996, and has 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 555 million pageviews in March 2005. The domain nytimes.com attracted at least 146 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 20 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. Also, as of May 2009, nytimes.com produced 22 of the 50 most popular newspaper blogs.

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. On October 15, The New York Times announced that it was adding a Portuguese-language news site next year. In March 2013, The New York Times and National Film Board of Canada announced a partnership entitled 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 10 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 Times‍ '​ public editor Margaret Sullivan announced that for the first time in many decades, the paper generated more revenue through subscriptions than through advertising.

Online content is available through a metered paywall begun in 2011. The first ten articles per month are free to read, while additional articles require a subscription. The paper'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 Times, putting some of its websites out of service for hours.

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 will 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.

Moscow

Communication with its Russian readers is a special project of The New York Times launched in February 2008, guided by Clifford J. Levy. Some Times articles covering the broad spectrum of political and social topics in Russia are being translated into Russian and offered for the attention of Russia's bloggers in The New York Times community blog. After that, selected responses of Russian bloggers are being translated into English and published at The New York Times site among comments from English readers.

Reporter resources

The website's "Newsroom Navigator" collects online resources for use by reporters and editors. It is maintained by Rich Meislin. Further specific collections are available to cover the subjects of business, politics and health. In 1998, Meislin was editor-in-chief of electronic media at the newspaper.

Interruptions

Due to holidays, no editions were printed on November 23, 1851; January 2, 1852; July 4, 1852; January 2, 1853; January 1, 1854.

Due to 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 due to 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 given out in New York, with contributors such as Carl Bernstein, Christopher Cerf, Tony Hendra and George Plimpton.

Coverage issues

Political persuasion overall

According to a 2007 survey by conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports of public perceptions of major media outlets, 40% saw the paper as having a liberal slant, 20% no political slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant. 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 63.5 on a 100-point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal. Special Report, an evening program on Fox News, comparatively, received 39.7. The validity of the study has been questioned by organizations, including the liberal media "watchdog" group Media Matters for America. In mid-2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), 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 permitting gay 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. Okrent did not comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of other "hard news", such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956; since that year it has endorsed every Democratic nominee; although it did endorse incumbent Republican Mayors of New York City Rudy Giuliani in 1997 and Michael Bloomberg in 2005 and 2009, respectively.

In a December 19, 2012, column published in the Huffington Post, economics professor and former bank regulator William K. Black characterized the Times as being "far right ... on financial issues" while criticizing the paper for its profiles of foreign leaders. Black contrasted a report on Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti that he described as "hagiographic praise" with a more negative report on Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, stating that the two men have similar backgrounds in getting PhDs in economics from U.S. schools.

Iraq War

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.

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.

For its coverage of the Israeliâ€"Palestinian conflict, some have claimed that the paper is pro-Palestinian, others 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 has 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."

The controversy was brought to the forefront in 2014 when the New York Times was forced to admit factual errors included in an Op-Ed piece criticizing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Balkan and anti-Serbian bias

Former New York Times journalist Daniel Simpson has criticized the newspaper's bias in representing wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was especially critical of the anti-Serbian bias of the paper, and has published a book A Rough Guide to the Dark Side: or Why I quit my job at the New York Times, to get myself mixed up with Balkan gangsters in which he explained the relevant issues. He also claimed that he was asked to report about the alleged WMD trade of Serbs with Iraq, which turned out to be false, while his attempts at more neutral reporting were rejected.

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 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 NYT'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, New York Times journalist William L. Laurence was "on the payroll of the War Department".

Ethics incidents

Failure to report famine in Ukraine

The Times has been 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."

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 Times]... " However, within this requirement, story ideas may have been the reporters' and editors' own.

Plagiarism

In May 2003, 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 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."

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 has been 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 NYT 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 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 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.

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
• Periodical literature
• The New York Times Best Seller list

References

Notes

Further reading

• Davis, Elmer Holmes (1921). History of the New York Times, 1851â€"1921. The New York Times. 
• 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. 
• Knox, Edward C. "The" New York Times" Looks at France." The French Review (2002): 1172-1180. in JSTOR
• Leff, Laurel. "A Tragic" Fight in the Family": The New York Times, Reform Judaism and the Holocaust." American Jewish History 88.1 (2000): 3-51. online
• Schwartz, Daniel R., Endtimes? Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times (SUNY Press, 2014).
• Salisbury, Harrison, Without fear or favor: The New York Times and its times (Times Books, 1980), by a longtime editor
• Taylor, Sally J. Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow. (Oxford University Press, 1990)

External links

Official New York Times web sites

• Official website (Mobile)
• International New York Times
• Articles about The New York Times
• The New York Times Company

Unofficial New York Times related web sites

• The New York Times Company records (1836-2000) - The New York Public Library