On September 18, 1851,Speaker of the New York State Assembly Henry J. Raymond and Albany banker George Jones beganpublishing The New York Daily Times, whose name they permanently changed to The New York Times on September 14, 1857. The founders’ original intent was to publish the paper every morning except on Sundays, but during the Civil War they, like their competitors in the industry, began printing Sunday issues as well.
In a bold move in 1884, the Times decided to become a politically independent paper -- discontinuing its tradition of supporting only Republican candidates for elected office (and backing Democrat Grover Cleveland in that year's presidential election). As a result of this shift in policy, the Times initially experienced a decline in both income and circulation, but within a few years the paper had regained most of its lost readership.
In 1896, Chattanooga Times publisher Adolph Ochs acquired The New York Times and the following year he coined the paper's well-known slogan, "All The News That's Fit To Print." This motto was designed to distinguish the Times from such competing publications as the New York World and the New York Journal American, which were known for their sensationalist, scandal-mongering reporting, or yellow journalism. Under Ochs’ leadership, The New York Times grew both in stature and circulation, establishing itself as a publication of international reach.
In 1904 the newspaper moved its headquarters to the Longacre Square section of 42nd Street in Manhattan, renaming the area "Times Square"; this location would become famous for its New Year’s Eve tradition (begun in 1907) of lowering a lighted ball from the top of the Times building at the stroke of midnight. In 1913 the Times relocated to its current headquarters at 229 West 43rd Street. A new skyscraper that will serve as the paper’s future base of operations is currently under construction at West 41st Street and 8th Avenue.
Today The New York Times is America’s largest metropolitan newspaper and one of the most widely read dailies in the world, with a circulation (as of 2006) of approximately 1,142,464 copies on weekdays and 1,683,855 copies on Sundays. Owned by The New York Times Company, which also owns the Boston Globe and 14 other newspapers, the Times is published in New York City by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. and is distributed internationally. It has 16 news bureaus in the New York region, 11 national news bureaus, and 26 foreign news bureaus. As of December 2005, the Times staff consisted of more than 350 full-time reporters and approximately 40 photographers, in addition to hundreds of free-lance contributors.
During the course of its history the Times has won 94 Pulitzer Prizes (including a record seven in 2002), far more than any other newspaper. These awards have sometimes been fraught with controversy, however. For example, Walter Duranty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Moscow correspondent in the 1930s who concealed his knowledge of Joseph Stalin's mass murders and other atrocities in the Soviet Union. In 1933, at the height of the Russian famine during which millions starved to death, Duranty wrote that "village makets [were] flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter. … A child can see this is not famine but abundance." According to historians, reports such as these were crucial factors influencing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933. Writes historian Ronald Radosh, "Duranty was a propagandist for Stalin and everything he wrote was a lie."
Controversy also surrounded a December 16, 2005 Times article revealing leaked information that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps of certain international telephone conversations between suspected terrorists in the U.S. and others abroad without first obtaining court warrants for the surveillance. Critics of the policy charged that such wiretapping was unconstitutional and in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Supporters of the measure held that it was both a crucial and legally permissible counter-intelligence tool, and that the Times’ disclosure of the secret program amounted to treason. The reporters who brought the story to light, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were awarded Pulitzer Prizes in 2006.
Another controversy of recent times involved Jayson Blair, who was fired from his job as a New York Times reporter in May 2003 when it was learned that he had committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud. Blair had concocted, in part or whole, many of the 600-plus stories he had worked on at the Times -- fabricating quotes and events, and lifting material from other newspapers and wire services. The paper's top two editors -- Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald M. Boyd -- resigned their posts following the revelations about Blair.
On August 25, 2012, Arthur Brisbane, who was stepping down from his post as the Times' public editor, wrote a final column in which he acknowledged the paper's leftwing bias:
"[The Times] is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within. 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 — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times. As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.... [A] kind of Times Nation has formed around the paper’s political-cultural worldview, an audience unbound by geography (as distinct from the old days of print) and one that self-selects in digital space. It’s a huge success story — it is hard to argue with the enormous size of Times Nation — but one that carries risk as well. A just-released Pew Research Center survey found that The Times’s 'believability rating' had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating. Can that be good?"
The New York Times’ current Executive Editor is Bill Keller, who succeeded Howell Raines. The paper’s op-ed columnists includeDavid Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas D. Kristof, Paul Krugman, and Frank Rich.
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