President Delivers State of the Union Address

The President's State of the Union Address
The United States Capitol
Washington, D.C.

9:15 P.M. EST

President George W. Bush delivers the State of the Union address before a joint session of congress at the Capitol, Tuesday, Jan 29, 2002.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Mr. Speaker, Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished guests, fellow citizens: As we gather tonight, our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger. (Applause.)

We last met in an hour of shock and suffering. In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan's terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression. (Applause.)

The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. (Applause.) And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own. (Applause.)

America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror. We'll be partners in rebuilding that country. And this evening we welcome the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan: Chairman Hamid Karzai. (Applause.)

The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome the new Minister of Women's Affairs, Doctor Sima Samar. (Applause.) Timeline Image Map

Our progress is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military. (Applause.) When I called our troops into action, I did so with complete confidence in their courage and skill. And tonight, thanks to them, we are winning the war on terror. (Applause.) The man and women of our Armed Forces have delivered a message now clear to every enemy of the United States: Even 7,000 miles away, across oceans and continents, on mountaintops and in caves -- you will not escape the justice of this nation. (Applause.)

For many Americans, these four months have brought sorrow, and pain that will never completely go away. Every day a retired firefighter returns to Ground Zero, to feel closer to his two sons who died there. At a memorial in New York, a little boy left his football with a note for his lost father: Dear Daddy, please take this to heaven. I don't want to play football until I can play with you again some day.

Last month, at the grave of her husband, Michael, a CIA officer and Marine who died in Mazur-e-Sharif, Shannon Spann said these words of farewell: "Semper Fi, my love." Shannon is with us tonight. (Applause.)

Shannon, I assure you and all who have lost a loved one that our cause is just, and our country will never forget the debt we owe Michael and all who gave their lives for freedom.

Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and showed us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos, where they laugh about the loss of innocent life. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.

What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning. Most of the 19 men who hijacked planes on September the 11th were trained in Afghanistan's camps, and so were tens of thousands of others. Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning.

Thanks to the work of our law enforcement officials and coalition partners, hundreds of terrorists have been arrested. Yet, tens of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large. These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are. (Applause.) So long as training camps operate, so long as nations harbor terrorists, freedom is at risk. And America and our allies must not, and will not, allow it. (Applause.)

Our nation will continue to be steadfast and patient and persistent in the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world. (Applause.)

Our military has put the terror training camps of Afghanistan out of business, yet camps still exist in at least a dozen countries. A terrorist underworld -- including groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jaish-i-Mohammed -- operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities.

While the most visible military action is in Afghanistan, America is acting elsewhere. We now have troops in the Philippines, helping to train that country's armed forces to go after terrorist cells that have executed an American, and still hold hostages. Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia.

My hope is that all nations will heed our call, and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own. Many nations are acting forcefully. Pakistan is now cracking down on terror, and I admire the strong leadership of President Musharraf. (Applause.)

But some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will. (Applause.)

Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. (Applause.) And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security.

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons. (Applause.)

Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch -- yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch.

We can't stop short. If we stop now -- leaving terror camps intact and terror states unchecked -- our sense of security would be false and temporary. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight. (Applause.)

Our first priority must always be the security of our nation, and that will be reflected in the budget I send to Congress. My budget supports three great goals for America: We will win this war; we'll protect our homeland; and we will revive our economy.

September the 11th brought out the best in America, and the best in this Congress. And I join the American people in applauding your unity and resolve. (Applause.) Now Americans deserve to have this same spirit directed toward addressing problems here at home. I'm a proud member of my party -- yet as we act to win the war, protect our people, and create jobs in America, we must act, first and foremost, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans. (Applause.)

It costs a lot to fight this war. We have spent more than a billion dollars a month -- over $30 million a day -- and we must be prepared for future operations. Afghanistan proved that expensive precision weapons defeat the enemy and spare innocent lives, and we need more of them. We need to replace aging aircraft and make our military more agile, to put our troops anywhere in the world quickly and safely. Our men and women in uniform deserve the best weapons, the best equipment, the best training -- and they also deserve another pay raise. (Applause.)

My budget includes the largest increase in defense spending in two decades -- because while the price of freedom and security is high, it is never too high. Whatever it costs to defend our country, we will pay. (Applause.)

The next priority of my budget is to do everything possible to protect our citizens and strengthen our nation against the ongoing threat of another attack. Time and distance from the events of September the 11th will not make us safer unless we act on its lessons. America is no longer protected by vast oceans. We are protected from attack only by vigorous action abroad, and increased vigilance at home.

My budget nearly doubles funding for a sustained strategy of homeland security, focused on four key areas: bioterrorism, emergency response, airport and border security, and improved intelligence. We will develop vaccines to fight anthrax and other deadly diseases. We'll increase funding to help states and communities train and equip our heroic police and firefighters. (Applause.) We will improve intelligence collection and sharing, expand patrols at our borders, strengthen the security of air travel, and use technology to track the arrivals and departures of visitors to the United States. (Applause.)

Homeland security will make America not only stronger, but, in many ways, better. Knowledge gained from bioterrorism research will improve public health. Stronger police and fire departments will mean safer neighborhoods. Stricter border enforcement will help combat illegal drugs. (Applause.) And as government works to better secure our homeland, America will continue to depend on the eyes and ears of alert citizens.

A few days before Christmas, an airline flight attendant spotted a passenger lighting a match. The crew and passengers quickly subdued the man, who had been trained by al Qaeda and was armed with explosives. The people on that plane were alert and, as a result, likely saved nearly 200 lives. And tonight we welcome and thank flight attendants Hermis Moutardier and Christina Jones. (Applause.)

Once we have funded our national security and our homeland security, the final great priority of my budget is economic security for the American people. (Applause.) To achieve these great national objectives -- to win the war, protect the homeland, and revitalize our economy -- our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term, so long as Congress restrains spending and acts in a fiscally responsible manner. (Applause.) We have clear priorities and we must act at home with the same purpose and resolve we have shown overseas: We'll prevail in the war, and we will defeat this recession. (Applause.)

Americans who have lost their jobs need our help and I support extending unemployment benefits and direct assistance for health care coverage. (Applause.) Yet, American workers want more than unemployment checks -- they want a steady paycheck. (Applause.) When America works, America prospers, so my economic security plan can be summed up in one word: jobs. (Applause.)

Good jobs begin with good schools, and here we've made a fine start. (Applause.) Republicans and Democrats worked together to achieve historic education reform so that no child is left behind. I was proud to work with members of both parties: Chairman John Boehner and Congressman George Miller. (Applause.) Senator Judd Gregg. (Applause.) And I was so proud of our work, I even had nice things to say about my friend, Ted Kennedy. (Laughter and applause.) I know the folks at the Crawford coffee shop couldn't believe I'd say such a thing -- (laughter) -- but our work on this bill shows what is possible if we set aside posturing and focus on results. (Applause.)

There is more to do. We need to prepare our children to read and succeed in school with improved Head Start and early childhood development programs. (Applause.) We must upgrade our teacher colleges and teacher training and launch a major recruiting drive with a great goal for America: a quality teacher in every classroom. (Applause.)

Good jobs also depend on reliable and affordable energy. This Congress must act to encourage conservation, promote technology, build infrastructure, and it must act to increase energy production at home so America is less dependent on foreign oil. (Applause.)

Good jobs depend on expanded trade. Selling into new markets creates new jobs, so I ask Congress to finally approve trade promotion authority. (Applause.) On these two key issues, trade and energy, the House of Representatives has acted to create jobs, and I urge the Senate to pass this legislation. (Applause.)

Good jobs depend on sound tax policy. (Applause.) Last year, some in this hall thought my tax relief plan was too small; some thought it was too big. (Applause.) But when the checks arrived in the mail, most Americans thought tax relief was just about right. (Applause.) Congress listened to the people and responded by reducing tax rates, doubling the child credit, and ending the death tax. For the sake of long-term growth and to help Americans plan for the future, let's make these tax cuts permanent. (Applause.)

The way out of this recession, the way to create jobs, is to grow the economy by encouraging investment in factories and equipment, and by speeding up tax relief so people have more money to spend. For the sake of American workers, let's pass a stimulus package. (Applause.)

Good jobs must be the aim of welfare reform. As we reauthorize these important reforms, we must always remember the goal is to reduce dependency on government and offer every American the dignity of a job. (Applause.)

Americans know economic security can vanish in an instant without health security. I ask Congress to join me this year to enact a patients' bill of rights -- (applause) -- to give uninsured workers credits to help buy health coverage -- (applause) -- to approve an historic increase in the spending for veterans' health -- (applause) -- and to give seniors a sound and modern Medicare system that includes coverage for prescription drugs. (Applause.)

A good job should lead to security in retirement. I ask Congress to enact new safeguards for 401K and pension plans. (Applause.) Employees who have worked hard and saved all their lives should not have to risk losing everything if their company fails. (Applause.) Through stricter accounting standards and tougher disclosure requirements, corporate America must be made more accountable to employees and shareholders and held to the highest standards of conduct. (Applause.)

Retirement security also depends upon keeping the commitments of Social Security, and we will. We must make Social Security financially stable and allow personal retirement accounts for younger workers who choose them. (Applause.)

Members, you and I will work together in the months ahead on other issues: productive farm policy -- (applause) -- a cleaner environment -- (applause) -- broader home ownership, especially among minorities -- (applause) -- and ways to encourage the good work of charities and faith-based groups. (Applause.) I ask you to join me on these important domestic issues in the same spirit of cooperation we've applied to our war against terrorism. (Applause.)

During these last few months, I've been humbled and privileged to see the true character of this country in a time of testing. Our enemies believed America was weak and materialistic, that we would splinter in fear and selfishness. They were as wrong as they are evil. (Applause.)

The American people have responded magnificently, with courage and compassion, strength and resolve. As I have met the heroes, hugged the families, and looked into the tired faces of rescuers, I have stood in awe of the American people.

And I hope you will join me -- I hope you will join me in expressing thanks to one American for the strength and calm and comfort she brings to our nation in crisis, our First Lady, Laura Bush. (Applause.)

None of us would ever wish the evil that was done on September the 11th. Yet after America was attacked, it was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves. We were reminded that we are citizens, with obligations to each other, to our country, and to history. We began to think less of the goods we can accumulate, and more about the good we can do.

For too long our culture has said, "If it feels good, do it." Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: "Let's roll." (Applause.) In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self. We've been offered a unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass. (Applause.)

My call tonight is for every American to commit at least two years -- 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime -- to the service of your neighbors and your nation. (Applause.) Many are already serving, and I thank you. If you aren't sure how to help, I've got a good place to start. To sustain and extend the best that has emerged in America, I invite you to join the new USA Freedom Corps. The Freedom Corps will focus on three areas of need: responding in case of crisis at home; rebuilding our communities; and extending American compassion throughout the world.

One purpose of the USA Freedom Corps will be homeland security. America needs retired doctors and nurses who can be mobilized in major emergencies; volunteers to help police and fire departments; transportation and utility workers well-trained in spotting danger.

Our country also needs citizens working to rebuild our communities. We need mentors to love children, especially children whose parents are in prison. And we need more talented teachers in troubled schools. USA Freedom Corps will expand and improve the good efforts of AmeriCorps and Senior Corps to recruit more than 200,000 new volunteers.

And America needs citizens to extend the compassion of our country to every part of the world. So we will renew the promise of the Peace Corps, double its volunteers over the next five years -- (applause) -- and ask it to join a new effort to encourage development and education and opportunity in the Islamic world. (Applause.)

This time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity -- a moment we must seize to change our culture. Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can overcome evil with greater good. (Applause.) And we have a great opportunity during this time of war to lead the world toward the values that will bring lasting peace.

All fathers and mothers, in all societies, want their children to be educated, and live free from poverty and violence. No people on Earth yearn to be oppressed, or aspire to servitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police.

If anyone doubts this, let them look to Afghanistan, where the Islamic "street" greeted the fall of tyranny with song and celebration. Let the skeptics look to Islam's own rich history, with its centuries of learning, and tolerance and progress. America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere. (Applause.)

No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. We have no intention of imposing our culture. But America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law; limits on the power of the state; respect for women; private property; free speech; equal justice; and religious tolerance. (Applause.)

America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate these values around the world, including the Islamic world, because we have a greater objective than eliminating threats and containing resentment. We seek a just and peaceful world beyond the war on terror.

In this moment of opportunity, a common danger is erasing old rivalries. America is working with Russia and China and India, in ways we have never before, to achieve peace and prosperity. In every region, free markets and free trade and free societies are proving their power to lift lives. Together with friends and allies from Europe to Asia, and Africa to Latin America, we will demonstrate that the forces of terror cannot stop the momentum of freedom. (Applause.)

The last time I spoke here, I expressed the hope that life would return to normal. In some ways, it has. In others, it never will. Those of us who have lived through these challenging times have been changed by them. We've come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed. (Applause.) Beyond all differences of race or creed, we are one country, mourning together and facing danger together. Deep in the American character, there is honor, and it is stronger than cynicism. And many have discovered again that even in tragedy -- especially in tragedy -- God is near. (Applause.)

In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we've been called to a unique role in human events. Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential.

Our enemies send other people's children on missions of suicide and murder. They embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life. (Applause.)

Steadfast in our purpose, we now press on. We have known freedom's price. We have shown freedom's power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom's victory.

Thank you all. May God bless. (Applause.)

END 10:03 P.M. EST

Gen X Dad

Boston.com THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
A group of like-minded fathers who call themselves ''Dads in the Dark'' meet monthly at Conley's in Watertown after their kids are safely tucked in for the night. Sharing a laugh are (from left) James Chung, John Bowe, David Goldberg, Gregg Fowler, Sam Zales, and John Carson. Right: Chung and Bowe banter about their day.
A group of like-minded fathers who call themselves ''Dads in the Dark'' meet monthly at Conley's in Watertown after their kids are safely tucked in for the night. Sharing a laugh are (from left) James Chung, John Bowe, David Goldberg, Gregg Fowler, Sam Zales, and John Carson. Right: Chung and Bowe banter about their day. (Globe Staff Photos / Dina Rudick)
The Boston Globe

Luxury vacations, fast-track careers, and bigger houses used to be a priority for family men, but no longer. Today's young fathers are taking paternity leaves, rejecting overtime, and rushing home after work to do all the things many of their own fathers didn't.

By Patricia Wen | January 16, 2005

As darkness falls on a drizzly autumn day, hundreds of workers spill out of elevators, past potted palm trees standing on marble floors, into the spacious lobby of One Lincoln Street, a downtown office tower. Clutching briefcases, bags, and umbrellas, they brace themselves for Boston's rush-hour traffic. It's 5 p.m. Among the exiting masses is Gregg Fowler. Tall and slender, he's a new dad with new priorities. Kudos from his boss can't compare with hugs from his kids. He arrives early to his job as a software developer so he can leave in time for dinner with his family. At 36, he says, nothing gives him more satisfaction than evenings of bubble baths, blocks, and bedtime stories.

One week earlier, I had met Fowler along with a half-dozen other fathers in their 30s and early 40s who gather monthly at a Watertown bar called Conley's. Everything about them seemed to confirm the latest research trumpeting a new breed of father. They experience, as working women have for decades, the joys and anxieties of wanting it all: the satisfying career and the time with their family. These guys dub themselves "Dads in the Dark," though they see their group as far from unenlightened. They grab paternity leaves and reject overtime even when they could use the money. They are as adept at sculpting Play-Doh as they are at drafting memos. A manager at Fidelity Investments says being home by 6 p.m. is not just a target, "it's firm."

One of the regulars, a market strategist in his late 30s, has studied these trends among fathers in his age group. He says the dads "behave, think, and are wired differently." These men met through their wives, who were in a local mothers' group. The guys liked one another so much that they kept meeting (but only after 8 p.m., when the kids were down), talking about everything from the Patriots and the Sox to the job market and office politics and home renovations. Juggling work and home demands is exhausting, they say, but they refuse to replicate the life of a traditional breadwinner - in many cases, the life their own dads led. Many of them, like Fowler, grew up with parents who followed the breadwinner-homemaker model - only to divorce in their 30s and 40s. The men at Conley's aren't looking to put their feet up at the end of the day.

"It's important for me to see my children," Fowler says as he shares beers and hamburgers with the other men. "And to find balance."

As we ride the Red Line, Fowler talks easily about the routines of his two children, Caitlin, 4, and Kyle, 3, including dinner, cleanup, and teeth brushing. He says his wife was laid off a few years ago as a consultant but is looking to return to work any day. "I don't know many Stepford wives anymore, do you?" he asks while we retrieve his car from the Alewife commuter lot. When we arrive at his home in Belmont shortly after 6 p.m., his children pounce on him, screaming, "Daddy!"

Within 10 minutes, Fowler has changed out of his work clothes, downed a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table (everyone else has eaten already), and bounded up the stairs to be the evening playmate to his children. His wife, Jules Giggie, is a warm and outgoing woman who met her husband while studying for her master's degree in social work in Austin, Texas. She says she and her husband have typical marital spats, but she describes him as always being "about fairness and respect." They work hard, she says, to break down male-female stereotypes in front of their children. Giggie, who has volunteered at a battered-women's shelter, tells her husband: "Just because I have ovaries doesn't mean I'm better at making meals."

Later in the evening, Caitlin, an exuberant preschooler with a tumble of short curls, races into the kitchen, trying to enlist more adults in her game of hide-and-seek.

Who gives you a bath at night? I ask Caitlin.

"Mommy and Daddy," she says, twirling around the kitchen table.

Who helps you brush your teeth?

"Mommy and Daddy."

Who takes care of you when you are sick?

"Mommy and Daddy!" And then she zooms off into another room.

Even at a time when men are working as hard as ever, much has been made of the emergence of the new nurturing father. Around the time that Dustin Hoffman asked in the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer, "What law is it that says a woman is a better parent simply by virtue of her sex?" sociologists were hailing a new era. Study after study shows that today's men refuse to be stick figures in their children's lives. They recoil at the thought of acting like Distant Dad. When they see celebrities like Eminem and Will Smith embrace their children or Super Bowl winners cradle their babies, they see glamorous reflections of themselves.

No generation is more influenced by this vision of fatherhood than today's men between 26 and 40 - commonly called Generation X - and no male age group has been more scrutinized for its paternal behaviors. As research targets, men of this generation have been asked to keep daily diaries of time spent at work and home, to distinguish between reading bedtime stories (child care) and washing dishes (housework), and to know that being a "domestic manager" is not the same as being a "compliant helper."

These fathers are not the first to show signs of change. Researchers say baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) began to break the traditional mold, but it is only among today's fathers of young children that they see a broad generational shift. New paternal behavior is measured down to fractions of hours. According to research from the Families and Work Institute in New York, a nonprofit that tracks trends in family life, fathers in 2002 spent 2.7 hours each workday caring for children, almost an hour more than fathers in 1977. That reflects a 50 percent increase in male participation. During the same 25-year period, working mothers' hours spent caring for children stayed roughly the same - 3.3 hours a day. Researchers see today's dads, like the men at Conley's, as a distinct group, exposed to such dramatic social shifts that new attitudes toward family life were inevitable.

"The biggest change is in this generation. . . . It's their aspirations to be involved and their actual level of involvement," says James Levine, director of the Fatherhood Project at the New York institute, who has studied family life for more than 30 years. "They're not just talking, they're actually walking the walk."

Levine and others say these men are far more cynical than previous generations about the rewards of the work world, even as they typically clock 45-hour-plus workweeks. They have seen lifetime company employment vanish and the dot-com bubble burst. And these men also grew up as the nation's divorce rate nearly doubled, prompting them to pause longer and perhaps think harder than any earlier generation before marrying and having children. In 1960, US men married at an average age of 22.8 years old; in 2003, it was 27.1 years. They were the first generation in which half of all men and women attended one or more years of college. They dated women who weren't racing to trade their diplomas for diapers. Men and women entered marriage with years of earning power behind them and an established pattern of equal partnership. Today's fathers, says Brad Harrington, head of the Boston College Center for Work & Family, approach family life wanting and expecting to be more involved in day-to-day life. And they are discovering what many of their wives could have told them from across the dining room table: This juggling act is hard work.

But even as they fear being marginalized if they cut back their work hours, more and more young fathers today still refuse to miss those precious years when their children are growing up. It is, Harrington says, a sort of "feminism for men."

Some men knew early on that they would rip up their father's script on parenting. Dressed in a business suit on his way into work one morning, Eric Steinert, 37, a regular at the Conley's gathering, describes his own father as a man who "chased the brass ring" in a banking career without realizing "there's a price to pay." Steinert says his father was the kind of man who would "work 60 percent more for 60 percent more pay." He says he spent his early childhood in Paris and that his parents divorced when he was 3. Although his mother remarried, he feels he grew up without any close paternal connections and, to this day, is in touch only sporadically with his father, usually by e-mail.

A father of two working as a fund-raiser for Babson College in Wellesley, Steinert has vowed since boyhood not to repeat his father's life, pouring endless hours into a job. "We're less naively idealistic about the rewards of sticking to a company," he says. Steinert still works nine or 10 hours a day, including some weekends and evenings, but he makes it to his Belmont home by 6:30 almost every night, and he takes a calculated approach to the distribution of his work and family hours at this stage of his life. His children are 5 and 2, young enough, he says, to benefit especially from some extra hours with their dad; meanwhile, he is a man in his late 30s whose career isn't going to soar or sink based on some extra office hours spread over the week. "The return on the extra time isn't high," he says.

But not all men are so internally driven to become this new nurturer; some admit that if today's fathering icon were Ward Cleaver, they might behave like him. "Men fall into the spirit of the times," says Alex de Frondeville, a 37-year-old father of twins, while sitting in his living room one weekend a few months ago. "It wasn't this huge emotional shift in me that said, 'I need to do this.' . . . It's what's done now. I can't tell if I'm doing it because of society or because I want to do it."

Inside his white Dutch Colonial on a street in Arlington bursting with young families, he admits he might have repeated his father's lifestyle if it weren't for the expectations of his wife and his sense that men who don't change diapers are ridiculed as oppressive ogres. He wonders if other men aren't like him, just floating on the crest of the new wave; after all, he says, "there's no way we've evolved that much in 30 years."

De Frondeville, who manages software development projects for Verizon Communications in Boston, fondly recalls the years after he met Georgia Critsley at a 1993 Christmas party in Charlestown. He instantly fell for the striking blonde with a vibrant personality. Critsley was tough, a prosecutor by profession, but he loved the way she challenged him. They were a handsome couple who traveled to Europe each year, without such distractions as putting up safety gates or paying baby sitters. They married in 1999 with every intention of living a life of equal partnership. Two years later, Critsley gave birth to twins, Catherine and Christian. She planned to take a six-month maternity leave and return to her job as an assistant DA for Suffolk County. But after the six months had passed, she decided she couldn't bear being away from her twins. She stayed home for the next two years. But then Critsley, who is now 37, began missing the courtroom, the law, and she decided she wanted back in. A year ago, she took a full-time job, but with predictable hours, at a law firm.

Now she and her husband share equally all of the household chores and child care involved in raising their 3-year-olds. De Frondeville tends to focus on laundry and cleanup, while his wife cooks most meals. They try to give each other time off - he plays in Ultimate Frisbee tournaments, she sings in a choir. Beyond that, the two of them "survive" each day through a 50-50 distribution of work. Sitting in his living room next to his wife, de Frondeville fiddles with a puzzle piece left on the floor by his children. I ask if life was easier when his wife was home every day with the kids. "It was harder," he says, shaking his head.

His wife adds some insight. "I was meaner," she says with a laugh.

De Frondeville says family life operates more smoothly now that his wife is back at work. They take turns dropping off and picking up at the Arlington Children's Center. He concedes that he sometimes thinks "it would be nice if it was like the old days," when his father, the breadwinner, wasn't expected to do much, if any, household work. But now, he says, such a traditional division of labor almost seems "unnatural."

It's impossible, of course, to generalize about the behavior of an entire generation of fathers. Among today's fathers are men who neglect and even abandon their families, as well as a small but growing number of stay-at-home dads. Other men don't have the option of managing just one job but must juggle two or more, leaving little time for trips to the playground. And some men and women still proudly adhere to the Father Knows Best model of child-rearing and family life. But researchers say the new attitudes among today's fathers are widespread across this generation, articulated most passionately by college-educated men with similarly educated wives. Levine, author of Working Fathers: New Strategies for Balancing Work and Family, travels the country giving talks at company-sponsored events to hundreds of employees. He says there is a vast cross section of men from different socioeconomic levels who want "a different relationship with their own kids" than their fathers had with them. He says that even single men ask questions at his events, anticipating the day their balancing act begins.

But Levine also perceives a rise in discontent among men trying to balance work and family demands. According to the latest study from the Families and Work Institute, women experienced about the same amount of conflict in meeting work and family demands from 1977 to 2002, but men's sense of frustration rose sharply. In 1977, about one-third of men reported tension about the juggling act; in 2002, more than half said they did.

Studies over the past few years reveal some of the reasons for this frustration. One 2000 study, by the Radcliffe Public Policy Center, found that the job characteristic most often ranked as very important by men between the ages of 21 and 39 was "having a work schedule which allows me to spend time with my family." At a time when people are being asked to work increasingly long hours, that same study found that some 70 percent of these men wanted to spend more time with their families and were willing to sacrifice pay to do so.

James Chung, a 38-year-old father of two from Belmont, is the market strategist who is among the Conley's group, and his findings show that men of his generation think differently. Chung, who runs a Boston-based company called Reach Advisors, advises companies on how to market their products to various demographic groups. He urges clients to shake the image of ambitious couples trying to earn enough to install Jacuzzis and book their next Caribbean vacation. In his national survey of 3,000 parents between their mid-20s and late 50s, he finds Generation X couples are far more willing to sacrifice money for family time. But like Levine, he also finds today's new fathers struggling far more than previous generations with how to carve out that time. "Fathers are a lot more conflicted as mothers have always been," Chung says.

Perceptions at work are not far from the minds of many fathers. That was evident as I hunted down fathers for this story. A number of men I interviewed declined to have their full names used, fearful they would be perceived by their bosses as weak in their commitment to work if they were quoted about their devotion to family.

Some researchers are skeptical about the extent of the "new fatherhood." Andrew Singleton, a sociologist at Monash University in Australia, believes many of the reported changes are overblown. He says he doesn't trust studies that rely on men to report how much they do around the house. That kind of self-reporting, Singleton thinks, is suspect irrespective of gender. Singleton launched a study of Australian parents in which researchers talked with couples from their mid-20s to their mid-30s inside their homes; only male questioners interviewed men, and female questioners interviewed women. He concluded that today's fathers participate more on the domestic front, but they are mostly "a picture of continuity rather than change with respect to young men's domestic roles, identities, and obligations."

Singleton and other researchers suggest there may also be a limit to the degree men - and women - truly embrace an egalitarian model of parenting. Some fathers complain that their best efforts to load the dishwasher or dress their children are met with "corrections" from their wives, who insist their methods are better. Some women don't want their husbands to arrange all the car pools. Does this mean that women don't want to surrender primary control of home life? And how far do men really want to go in relinquishing their time-honored role as primary breadwinner?

Nicholas Townsend, a Brown University anthropology professor who wrote The Package Deal: Marriage, Work, and Fatherhood in Men's Lives, says men, raised for generations to care for families through earning money, can't be fundamentally changed in a few decades. In the book, he followed the lives of several dozen high school seniors who graduated from the same San Francisco-area school in the 1970s. Most of these men are in their 40s today, though Townsend believes the same trends hold for younger fathers as well. The men, like their fathers before them, took great pride in earning money as a way of caring for the family, and society still sees this as the dominant contribution of fathers.

"We still measure men by their paychecks and occupational success," Townsend says. "Attitudes don't turn on a dime."

Townsend did find that many men wanted to spend more time at home but could not because of job or logistical constraints. He found men were frustrated by the difficulty of putting together the "package deal" a good job, a wife, children, and home ownership. And a chief frustration was that today's economy forces so many working fathers to buy homes far from their workplaces, imposing long commutes. Many of these men wanted more time with their children, but traveling between work and home cut into those hours.

"The time to be emotionally close to their children just isn't there," Townsend says.

Still, many researchers insist that today's fathers reflect a significant break from the past, though many repeat that "it's an evolution, not a revolution." Some, more ardent social analysts go beyond documenting the time fathers spend folding laundry and elaborately categorize dads into types. In Britain, researchers interviewed dozens of fathers in 2002, finding the traditional role has been replaced by a collection of new father personalities. The Enforcer Dad, a dying breed, is the strict disciplinarian; the Entertainer Dad is the family clown who distracts his kids while the mother attends to household tasks; the Useful Dad pitches in, though rarely takes the initiative; and the Fully Involved Dad jumps into domestic matters equally with his wife.

Beyond these labels, there is another: Exhausted Dad.

John Carson of Belmont is another member of the Dads in the Dark crowd who is among the chronically fatigued. On a November evening after work, the 35-year-old vice president of sales at Fidelity Investments in Boston raced home to greet his three children, a 4-year-old son and twin 2-year-old daughters. He is almost always there by 6 p.m.

As his wife loads food into the microwave, he cuts up chicken and slaps rice on plates for his children. Carson talks about how his own father was a successful juggler of work and family - though it came after a painful divorce. His father was forced to cook, clean, and iron for the first time after the split-up. Carson and his siblings, who lived with their father, also pitched in with an array of chores.

"I know what it takes to run a house," Carson says before racing upstairs to help start the kids' baths.

Just as he reaches the second-floor landing, there is a loud thud in the foyer. One of his girls, having made it up one step, has fallen backward onto the floor. Before the toddler can let out a single cry, Carson flees down the stairs, wraps her in his arms, and showers her with kisses. Within minutes, she is shrieking with delight in the bathtub.

After the children are asleep, Carson and his wife, Kathryn, have some time for relaxing. His wife is at home for now, though she plans to return to work. Carson says it isn't always easy being home by 6, but his bosses have respected his departure time in return for his efficiency during the day. He sees it as the only way he can achieve the life he wants.

"If it means I'm one or two rungs lower on the corporate ladder," he says, "it's worth it."
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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JANUARY 17, 2005

COVER STORY

The Future Of The New York Times
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has his hands full: Weaker earnings. A changing media world. A scandal's aftermath. He also has an ambitious business plan

Since 1896, four generations of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have guided The New York Times through wars, recessions, strikes, and innumerable family crises. In 2003, though, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the current proprietor, faced what seemed to be a publisher's ultimate test after a loosely supervised young reporter named Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated dozens of stories. The revelations sparked a newsroom rebellion that humiliated Sulzberger into firing Executive Editor Howell Raines. "My heart is breaking," Sulzberger admitted to his staff on the day he showed Raines the door.

It turns out, though, that fate was not finished with Arthur Sulzberger, who also is chairman of the newspaper's corporate parent, New York Times Co. (NYT ). The strife that convulsed The New York Times's newsroom under the tyrannical Raines has faded under the measured leadership of his successor, Bill Keller, but now its financial performance is lagging. NYT Co.'s stock is trading at about 40, down 25% from its high of 53.80 in mid-2002 and has trailed the shares of many other newspaper companies for a good year and a half. "Their numbers in this recovery are bordering on the abysmal," says Douglas Arthur, Morgan Stanley's (MWD ) senior publishing analyst.

Meanwhile, the once-Olympian authority of the Times is being eroded not only by its own journalistic screw-ups -- from the Blair scandal to erroneous reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- but also by profound changes in communications technology and in the U.S. political climate. There are those who contend that the paper has been permanently diminished, along with the rest of what now is dismissively known in some circles as "MSM," mainstream media. "The Roman Empire that was mass media is breaking up, and we are entering an almost-feudal period where there will be many more centers of power and influence," says Orville Schell, dean of the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school. "It's a kind of disaggregation of the molecular structure of the media."

THE PRIDE THAT SULZBERGER takes in his journalistic legacy is palpable, his knowledge of the Times's august history encyclopedic. Yet "Young Arthur," as he is still known to some at age 53, exudes a wisecracking, live-wire vitality more typical of a founding entrepreneur than of an heir. He began an interview for this article by picking up a big hunk of metal from a conference room table and brandishing it menacingly. "Ask any question you'd like," he growled and then deposited the object in a less obtrusive spot. "It's an award," he added softly.

Sulzberger, who succeeded his father as publisher in 1992 and as chairman in 1997, already rescued The New York Times from decline once. With the help of then-CEO Russell T. Lewis, he reinvented the "Gray Lady" by devising a radical solution to the threat of eroding circulation that had imperiled the Times and other big-city dailies for years. Sulzberger changed the paper itself by spending big money to add new sections and a profusion of color illustration. At the same time, he made the Times the first -- and still the only -- metro newspaper in America to broaden its distribution beyond its home city to encompass the entire country. Today, nearly 50% of all subscribers to the weekday Times live somewhere other than Gotham.

The Sulzbergers who preceded him were newspapermen; Arthur Jr., by his own description, is a "platform-agnostic" multimedia man. In the mid-1990s, NYT Co. became one of the first Old Media companies to move into cyberspace. Times reporters also began experimenting with adapting their newspaper stories to another medium new to them -- television. Today, NYTimes.com consistently ranks among the 10 most popular Internet news sites, and New York Times Television is one of the largest independent producers of documentary programming in the U. S. "Within our lifetimes, the distribution of news and information is going to shift to broadband," Sulzberger says. "We must enter the broadband world having mastered the three key skill sets -- print, Internet, and video -- because that's what's going to ensure the future of this news organization in the years ahead."

Sulzberger acknowledges that he and his company are embattled in the present. "These are tough times, and they've been tough times for a while." But he and new CEO Janet L. Robinson (Lewis retired at the end of 2004) are sticking with the long-term plan set nearly a decade ago: enhancing the content of the Times and extending its reach into virgin territories west of the Hudson while also building its multimedia capacity. In 2002, NYT Co. added a global dimension to its growth strategy by acquiring full control of the International Herald Tribune, which is now being upgraded and expanded.

In essence, Sulzberger is doing what his forebears have always done: sink money into the Times in the belief that quality journalism pays in the long run. "The challenge is to remember that our history is to invest during tough times," he says. "And when those times turn -- and they do, inevitably -- we will be well-positioned for recovery."

Will it work this time? Will toughing it out Sulzberger-style revitalize the Times or consign it to creeping irrelevance? "Despite all that has happened, I still think that The New York Times has a stature and a position of journalistic authority that is greater than any news organization in the world. Could that be destroyed? I believe that it could be," says Alex S. Jones, a former Times media critic who is co-author of The Trust, a history of the Sulzbergers and their newspaper. Jones, who now runs the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard University, hastens to add that he hopes that the paper will thrive again. "I tell you, I hate to think of it not succeeding," he says.

THE CONSTANCY OF THEIR COMMITMENT to high-cost journalism has put the Sulzbergers in an increasingly contrarian position. Many of the country's surviving big-city dailies once were owned by similarly high-minded dynastic families that long ago surrendered control to big public corporations that prize earnings per share above all else. Editorial budgets at most newspapers, as well as TV and radio stations, have been squeezed so hard for so long that asphyxiation is a mounting risk. The proliferation of Web sites and cable-TV stations has produced an abundance of commentary and analysis, but the kind of thorough, original reporting in which the Times specializes is, if anything, increasingly scarce.

In effect, the Sulzbergers have subsidized the Times in valuing good journalism and the prestige it confers over profits and the wealth it creates. In fact, for much of its history, the Times barely broke even. Recasting the paper into a publicly held corporation capable of pursuing profit as determinedly as Times editors chase Pulitzers was the signal achievement of Arthur Jr.'s father, Arthur O. "Punch" Sulzberger Sr. Still, NYT Co. consistently fails to post the 25% profit margins of such big newspaper combines as Gannett Co. (GCI ) and Knight-Ridder Inc. (KRI ) mainly because of the Times's outsize editorial spending, which the paper does not disclose but which is thought to exceed $300 million a year.

For a time, Arthur Jr. enthralled Wall Street by adding double-digit growth to the Sulzbergian formula. The value of NYT Co. shares soared 295% from their 1996 low to their 2002 high, boosting the value of the family's 19% holding to $1.5 billion. Like other Old Media families, the Sulzbergers have been able to maintain unquestioned control of their company by creating a new class of voting stock and reserving most of it for themselves. Among them, the various branches of the Sulzberger family control 91% of the Class B voting shares.

The Bancrofts of Dow Jones & Co. (DJ ) and the Grahams of Washington Post Co. (WPO ) share the Sulzbergers' journalism-first philosophy. However the Washington Post has moved beyond newspapering to a greater extent than has NYT Co., which in addition to the Herald Tribune owns The Boston Globe, 15 small daily newspapers, and eight television stations. Actually, Arthur Jr. has increased his company's financial reliance on the Times by selling off magazines and other peripheral properties acquired under his father. In short, NYT Co. is quality journalism's purest traditional play.

In 2004, the company clearly failed to parlay quality into the growth it will need to continue supporting the Times franchise. The Wall Street consensus is that the company will report net income of $290 million for 2004, down 4% from the preceding year and a good 35% below the $445 million it netted in the media industry boom year of 2001. Revenues have plateaued at $3 billion, give or take a few hundred million, for five years running.

It wasn't that long ago -- Apr. 8, 2002, to be precise -- that all seemed right in Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s rarified world. On that day, most of the Times's 1,200 reporters and editors gathered in its newsroom just off Times Square to celebrate the paper's record haul of Pulitzer Prizes. No newspaper had ever before won more than four Pulitzers in a year; the Times won seven in 2002 -- six of which recognized its Herculean coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. Sulzberger was ecstatic, not realizing that he already had made the biggest blunder of his tenure as publisher: naming Howell Raines as executive editor.

RAINES, WHO HAD JOINED THE PAPER IN 1978 as a national correspondent, had deeply impressed Sulzberger by shaking the stodginess out of the editorial page as its editor during the Clinton years. Raines campaigned hard for the promotion in 2001, vowing to root out complacency and do whatever was needed to raise the staff's "competitive metabolism." By most accounts, Sulzberger saw Raines, then 58, as his journalistic alter ego and collaborator in transforming the Times into a fully national, multimedia franchise.

Just 18 months after self-proclaimed "change agent" Raines had taken charge, the Times ran a devastatingly self-critical article recounting how Jayson Blair had plagiarized or made up at least 36 stories. Sulzberger, who has often been accused of lacking gravitas, will be a long time living down his flip initial reaction to Blair's transgressions: "It sucks." Worse, Sulzberger had no feel for how Raines was perceived in the newsroom, where resentment of his arbitrary, self-aggrandizing ways had reached the flash point. Three weeks after Sulzberger had unequivocally affirmed his support for Raines, the publisher fired him and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

The Blair-Raines fiasco devastated Sulzberger. But after a long period of introspection, he appears to have regained his confidence if not quite his swagger. "There's no question that the experience changed him," says Steven L. Rattner, a prominent private equity investor who has been one of Sulzberger's closest confidants ever since they worked together as young Times reporters in the late 1970s. "It's made him more open to other views and more careful to have a better sense of what's going on," he says. "I think it has been an eye-opening experience for Arthur, and that's never bad for any of us."

Sulzberger swallowed a heaping helping of humble pie in replacing Raines with Keller, a former managing editor whom he had passed over in promoting Raines. Appointed in July, 2003, Keller, 54, has been editor for only as long as Raines was but already has made a number of changes as fundamental as those that his predecessor promulgated yet never implemented. "I cringed every time I read that people thought my job was to come in and calm the place down because it made me sound like the official dispenser of Zoloft," says Keller, whose gracious manner has often been mistaken for passivity. "I saw myself instead as being, in some sense, a change agent without having to wave a revolutionary banner."

Keller has made so many high-level personnel changes that two-thirds of all newsroom workers now report to a new boss. He has also put into practice a string of reforms suggested by several internal committees formed in the wake of the Blair affair. These include the appointment of a standards editor and a public editor, or ombudsman. By most accounts, the Times now is much more responsive to outside complaints and criticism than it was.

AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE, THE PAPER also has redesigned a half-dozen of its sections and upgraded its global culture coverage with the addition of 20 writing and editing jobs. "In the last year, there has been more change in a packed period of time than I've seen at this paper ever," says Sulzberger, who also credits Keller with "steadying our culture and lowering the temperature here." It is no mean feat to simultaneously improve morale and shake things up, but Keller is going to have to make certain that a happier newsroom does not again make for a more complacent newsroom. What Raines derided as "the Times's defining myth of effortless superiority" might now be in remission -- but has it been eradicated?

While the Times appears to be regaining its stride journalistically, it has not been rewarded with circulation gains. In 2004, the paper posted an infinitesimal 0.2% increase in the circulation of both the daily edition, which now stands at about 1.1 million, and the Sunday paper, which is just under 1.7 million. Since the national expansion began in 1998, the Times has added 150,000 daily subscribers outside New York but is thought to have lost about 96,000 subscribers in its home market. The net increase of 54,000 represents a 5.1% uptick, which compares with the 3.5% decline in U.S. daily newspaper circulation over this period. What's more, the Times posted its gains despite boosting the price of a subscription by more than 25% on average.

New subscribers are increasingly hard to come by for all newspapers as advances in digital communications spur the proliferation of alternative sources of news and information. For the under-30 set in particular, digital accessibility and interactivity tend to trump the familiarity of long-established names like The New York Times, CBS, or CNN.

The growing polarization of the body politic along ideological lines also is hurting the Times and its big-media brethren. One of the few things on which Bush and Kerry supporters agreed during the Presidential campaign was that the press was unfair in its coverage of their candidate. Keller says the Times was deluged with "ferocious letters berating us for either being stooges of the Bush Administration or agents of Michael Moore." Complaints from the Right were far more numerous, even before the newspaper painted a bull's-eye on itself in running a column by public editor Daniel Okrent headlined "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" Okrent's short answer: "Of course it is."

What a growing, or at least increasingly strident, segment of the population seems to want is not journalism untainted by the personal views of journalists but coverage that affirms their partisan beliefs -- in the way that many Fox News (FOX ) shows cater to a conservative constituency. For years, major news organizations have been accused of falling short of the ideal of impartiality that they espouse. Now, the very notion of impartiality is under assault, blurring the line between journalism and propaganda.

For its part, the Bush White House has succeeded to a degree in marginalizing the national or "elite" press by walling off public access to much of the workings of the government and by treating the Fourth Estate as merely another special interest group that can be safely ignored when it isn't being exploited. The Bushies particularly dislike the Times, which, in their view, epitomizes the Eastern liberal Establishment. In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, George W. Bush mocked the Times for what he considered its overly pessimistic coverage of post-World War II Germany. "Maybe that same person is still around, writing editorials," he joked.

The Times also is under attack from another branch of the federal government -- the judiciary. The paper figures centrally in most of a half-dozen pending court cases that collectively pose a dire threat to the traditional journalistic practice of assuring confidentiality to whistle-blowers and other informants. In October, a federal judge ordered Judith Miller of the Times imprisoned for up to 18 months for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Miller, who researched the Plame affair but never wrote about it, remains free pending a review by the federal Court of Appeals in Washington.

Sulzberger, who spent six years as a reporter, is outraged that journalists are being slapped with contempt charges for refusing to yield confidential sources to prosecutors. "Reporters are going to jail for doing their jobs, and that's just wrong," he says. The publisher has been less outspoken in responding to the paper's political assailants. In an interview with BusinessWeek, though, he denied his paper is biased in its coverage of national politics or the war in Iraq or even that it is liberal. The term he prefers is "urban," says Sulzberger. "What we saw play out in this election was urban vs. suburban-rural, not red state vs. blue state," he says. "We are from an urban environment; it comes with the territory. We recognize that, and we can't walk away from it, but neither can we play it politically. I don't think we do."

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HE became publisher 12 years ago, Sulzberger must carry on without Russ Lewis at his side. Lewis, a loquacious lawyer who got his start as a Times copy boy in 1966, stepped down on Dec. 26 after seven years as president and CEO of NYT Co. His replacement is the 54-year-old Janet Robinson, a former schoolteacher who joined the company in 1983 and worked her way up through advertising sales. She played an important role in the national expansion of the Times as its president and general manager from 1996 into 2004. On the Street, Robinson is known as a formidable manager who relentlessly puts NYT Co.'s best foot forward. "She's never met a number she couldn't spin positively," one analyst says.

The most pressing business problem the new CEO faces is a paucity of advertising. Through November, the Times's ad revenues were just 2.3% ahead of the previous year -- a surprisingly weak performance, considering that the newspaper industry as a whole reported a 9.7% gain in national advertising revenues during the first nine months, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. Expenditures on local newspaper advertising in the industry rose 6.6%.

A strengthening U. S. economy would help the Times in 2005 but wouldn't necessarily restore it to competitive parity. The huge runup in advertising rates over the last decade is forcing more U.S. companies to economize, either by shifting into lower-cost media or by homing in more precisely on their target markets. Neither trend bodes well for the Times, whose unique status as America's only metro daily with national reach appears to be putting it at a tactical disadvantage in some ways.

THE TIMES HAS MANY FEWER READERS outside of New York City than do the two largest national newspapers -- USA Today and The Wall Street Journal -- both of which have circulations far in excess of 2 million. "Those two papers tend to be a more cost-effective buy than the Times just because their circulation across the country is so much larger," says Jeff Piper, vice-president and general manager of Carat Press, a big media buyer. Even in the New York region, where the Times reaches only 14% of all adult readers, the paper's circulation is too diffuse to allow for effective targeting by ZIP Code -- a technique that has enriched many other metro dailies with revenue from inserts.

Robinson maintains that there is nothing wrong with the Times' market position that a growing national and New York economy can't fix. Underscoring her confidence, the paper just imposed what is now an annual Jan. 1 ad rate increase, layering a 5% hike atop a cumulative 38% increase since 2000. "We feel that premium quality equals premium price," Robinson says.

At the same time, the Times continues to move out from the 312 markets in which the paper is available into adjacent precincts. In October, it began printing the national edition in Dayton, Ohio, in a plant owned by the local daily. That enabled it to sell papers in 100 new ZIP Codes while raising its presence in existing markets as far afield as Louisville. It plans to add seven new contract sites to its network of 20 printing plants by the end of 2006.

The reinvention of the Times as a national paper has been accompanied by a steady loss of subscribers in the New York metro area. Its dwindling presence at home has been caused in part by forces beyond its control, including a big influx of non-English-speaking immigrants. However, taking the paper further upscale in pursuit of an elite nationwide readership priced it out of some New Yorkers' reach (a seven-day subscription goes for about $480 a year) and constrained its spending on local marketing and promotion. In addition, the Times has declined to join in the trend of introducing foreign-language editions or free editions for young adult readers. (It may be rethinking its free-paper aversion, as evidenced by The Boston Globe's recent purchase of a 49% stake in Metro Boston, a giveaway tabloid.)

The substitution of national for local subscribers benefited the Times financially even beyond the sizable premium it earns on national advertising. On average it costs the Times about one-third more to produce and deliver a newspaper in its home market (the only place where it owns its printing plants) than in the rest of America. But Sulzberger bristles at the notion that the Times is writing off its hometown readers or that a declining New York circulation is the inevitable result of national expansion. "We are not walking away from New York," he says. "But we are growing elsewhere."

The sphere of NYT Co's ambitions widened to encompass the globe when it muscled Washington Post Co. aside to gain full control of the International Herald Tribune, America's broadsheet voice abroad since 1887. The Post reluctantly agreed to relinquish its 50% interest for $65 million after NYT Co. threatened to start a new paper to drive the IHT out of business. "The thing was going sideways and sooner or later was going to die," says Sulzberger, who was harshly criticized by some for lacking the gentlemanliness of his father.

The company considered making the Tribune over into a foreign edition of the Times, but decided in the end to maintain IHT's separate, international identity. "This needs to be a European paper for Europeans," says Michael Golden, a NYT Co. vice-chairman who was named publisher of IHT in 2003. Actually, the Trib's 240,000 subscribers are concentrated in Europe but spread among 180 countries.

Under Golden, a slightly older first cousin of Sulzberger's, the Trib has adopted the Times's playbook, if not its name. The transatlantic flow of copy from the Times has increased, but the Trib has enlarged its own news staff, too. It has also added pages, color photos, and new printing sites in Sydney, São Paulo, and Kuwait City. The Trib scored impressively in recent reader surveys in Europe and Asia and ad sales are rising, but they still amount to less than $100 million a year. Golden and his cousin yearn to turn the Trib's operating losses into profits, but the general track record of English-language newspapers and magazines abroad is discouraging. Even if the IHT flourishes, it will be a long time before it contributes significantly to its parent company's top or bottom lines.

The same is true of NYT Co.'s investment in television news. The Times has built a cadre of television professionals who, in collaboration with a revolving cast of print reporters, have produced much fine work for Frontline, Nova, and other programs. In 2003, the Times moved beyond production into distribution, laying out $100 million for half-ownership of a digital cable channel, Discovery Times, operated in partnership with Discovery Communications Inc. Discovery Times reaches 35 million homes -- an impressive total for a fledgling channel -- but its ratings are minuscule: In October, just 27,000 people tuned in during prime time, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

ONLINE, THE TIMES ALREADY is making serious money. New York Times Digital (which includes Boston.com as well as NYTimes.com) netted an enviable $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004, the last period for which its financials have been disclosed. All indications are that the digital unit is continuing to grow at 30% to 40% a year, making it NYT Co.'s fastest-revving growth engine.

Advertising accounts for almost all of the digital operation's revenues, but disagreement rages within the company over whether NYTimes.com should emulate The Wall Street Journal and begin charging a subscription fee. Undoubtedly, many of the site's 18 million unique monthly visitors would flee if hit with a $39.95 or even a $9.95 monthly charge. One camp within the NYT Co. argues that such a massive loss of Web traffic would cost the Times dearly in the long run, both by shrinking the audience for its journalism and by depriving it of untold millions in ad revenue. The counterargument is that the Times would more than make up for lost ad dollars by boosting circulation revenue -- both from online fees and new print subscriptions paid for by people who now read for free on the Web.

Sulzberger declines to take a side in this debate, but sounds as if he is leaning toward a pay site. "It gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free," he says. "That is troubling."

What's a platform agnostic to do? The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. "The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn't growing, and the one that is growing -- the Internet -- isn't producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality," says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.

Today, Sulzberger faces an even bigger challenge than when he took charge of the Times in the mid-1990s. Can he find a way to rekindle growth while preserving the primacy of the Times's journalism? The answer will go a long way toward determining not only the fate of America's most important newspaper but also whether traditional, reporting-intensive journalism has a central place in the Digital Age.


By Anthony Bianco with John Rossant in Paris and Lauren Gard in New York


Copyright 2000-2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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JANUARY 17, 2005

COVER STORY

The Future Of The New York Times
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. has his hands full: Weaker earnings. A changing media world. A scandal's aftermath. He also has an ambitious business plan

Since 1896, four generations of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have guided The New York Times through wars, recessions, strikes, and innumerable family crises. In 2003, though, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the current proprietor, faced what seemed to be a publisher's ultimate test after a loosely supervised young reporter named Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated dozens of stories. The revelations sparked a newsroom rebellion that humiliated Sulzberger into firing Executive Editor Howell Raines. "My heart is breaking," Sulzberger admitted to his staff on the day he showed Raines the door.

It turns out, though, that fate was not finished with Arthur Sulzberger, who also is chairman of the newspaper's corporate parent, New York Times Co. (NYT ). The strife that convulsed The New York Times's newsroom under the tyrannical Raines has faded under the measured leadership of his successor, Bill Keller, but now its financial performance is lagging. NYT Co.'s stock is trading at about 40, down 25% from its high of 53.80 in mid-2002 and has trailed the shares of many other newspaper companies for a good year and a half. "Their numbers in this recovery are bordering on the abysmal," says Douglas Arthur, Morgan Stanley's (MWD ) senior publishing analyst.

Meanwhile, the once-Olympian authority of the Times is being eroded not only by its own journalistic screw-ups -- from the Blair scandal to erroneous reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- but also by profound changes in communications technology and in the U.S. political climate. There are those who contend that the paper has been permanently diminished, along with the rest of what now is dismissively known in some circles as "MSM," mainstream media. "The Roman Empire that was mass media is breaking up, and we are entering an almost-feudal period where there will be many more centers of power and influence," says Orville Schell, dean of the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school. "It's a kind of disaggregation of the molecular structure of the media."

THE PRIDE THAT SULZBERGER takes in his journalistic legacy is palpable, his knowledge of the Times's august history encyclopedic. Yet "Young Arthur," as he is still known to some at age 53, exudes a wisecracking, live-wire vitality more typical of a founding entrepreneur than of an heir. He began an interview for this article by picking up a big hunk of metal from a conference room table and brandishing it menacingly. "Ask any question you'd like," he growled and then deposited the object in a less obtrusive spot. "It's an award," he added softly.

Sulzberger, who succeeded his father as publisher in 1992 and as chairman in 1997, already rescued The New York Times from decline once. With the help of then-CEO Russell T. Lewis, he reinvented the "Gray Lady" by devising a radical solution to the threat of eroding circulation that had imperiled the Times and other big-city dailies for years. Sulzberger changed the paper itself by spending big money to add new sections and a profusion of color illustration. At the same time, he made the Times the first -- and still the only -- metro newspaper in America to broaden its distribution beyond its home city to encompass the entire country. Today, nearly 50% of all subscribers to the weekday Times live somewhere other than Gotham.

The Sulzbergers who preceded him were newspapermen; Arthur Jr., by his own description, is a "platform-agnostic" multimedia man. In the mid-1990s, NYT Co. became one of the first Old Media companies to move into cyberspace. Times reporters also began experimenting with adapting their newspaper stories to another medium new to them -- television. Today, NYTimes.com consistently ranks among the 10 most popular Internet news sites, and New York Times Television is one of the largest independent producers of documentary programming in the U. S. "Within our lifetimes, the distribution of news and information is going to shift to broadband," Sulzberger says. "We must enter the broadband world having mastered the three key skill sets -- print, Internet, and video -- because that's what's going to ensure the future of this news organization in the years ahead."

Sulzberger acknowledges that he and his company are embattled in the present. "These are tough times, and they've been tough times for a while." But he and new CEO Janet L. Robinson (Lewis retired at the end of 2004) are sticking with the long-term plan set nearly a decade ago: enhancing the content of the Times and extending its reach into virgin territories west of the Hudson while also building its multimedia capacity. In 2002, NYT Co. added a global dimension to its growth strategy by acquiring full control of the International Herald Tribune, which is now being upgraded and expanded.

In essence, Sulzberger is doing what his forebears have always done: sink money into the Times in the belief that quality journalism pays in the long run. "The challenge is to remember that our history is to invest during tough times," he says. "And when those times turn -- and they do, inevitably -- we will be well-positioned for recovery."

Will it work this time? Will toughing it out Sulzberger-style revitalize the Times or consign it to creeping irrelevance? "Despite all that has happened, I still think that The New York Times has a stature and a position of journalistic authority that is greater than any news organization in the world. Could that be destroyed? I believe that it could be," says Alex S. Jones, a former Times media critic who is co-author of The Trust, a history of the Sulzbergers and their newspaper. Jones, who now runs the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy at Harvard University, hastens to add that he hopes that the paper will thrive again. "I tell you, I hate to think of it not succeeding," he says.

THE CONSTANCY OF THEIR COMMITMENT to high-cost journalism has put the Sulzbergers in an increasingly contrarian position. Many of the country's surviving big-city dailies once were owned by similarly high-minded dynastic families that long ago surrendered control to big public corporations that prize earnings per share above all else. Editorial budgets at most newspapers, as well as TV and radio stations, have been squeezed so hard for so long that asphyxiation is a mounting risk. The proliferation of Web sites and cable-TV stations has produced an abundance of commentary and analysis, but the kind of thorough, original reporting in which the Times specializes is, if anything, increasingly scarce.

In effect, the Sulzbergers have subsidized the Times in valuing good journalism and the prestige it confers over profits and the wealth it creates. In fact, for much of its history, the Times barely broke even. Recasting the paper into a publicly held corporation capable of pursuing profit as determinedly as Times editors chase Pulitzers was the signal achievement of Arthur Jr.'s father, Arthur O. "Punch" Sulzberger Sr. Still, NYT Co. consistently fails to post the 25% profit margins of such big newspaper combines as Gannett Co. (GCI ) and Knight-Ridder Inc. (KRI ) mainly because of the Times's outsize editorial spending, which the paper does not disclose but which is thought to exceed $300 million a year.

For a time, Arthur Jr. enthralled Wall Street by adding double-digit growth to the Sulzbergian formula. The value of NYT Co. shares soared 295% from their 1996 low to their 2002 high, boosting the value of the family's 19% holding to $1.5 billion. Like other Old Media families, the Sulzbergers have been able to maintain unquestioned control of their company by creating a new class of voting stock and reserving most of it for themselves. Among them, the various branches of the Sulzberger family control 91% of the Class B voting shares.

The Bancrofts of Dow Jones & Co. (DJ ) and the Grahams of Washington Post Co. (WPO ) share the Sulzbergers' journalism-first philosophy. However the Washington Post has moved beyond newspapering to a greater extent than has NYT Co., which in addition to the Herald Tribune owns The Boston Globe, 15 small daily newspapers, and eight television stations. Actually, Arthur Jr. has increased his company's financial reliance on the Times by selling off magazines and other peripheral properties acquired under his father. In short, NYT Co. is quality journalism's purest traditional play.

In 2004, the company clearly failed to parlay quality into the growth it will need to continue supporting the Times franchise. The Wall Street consensus is that the company will report net income of $290 million for 2004, down 4% from the preceding year and a good 35% below the $445 million it netted in the media industry boom year of 2001. Revenues have plateaued at $3 billion, give or take a few hundred million, for five years running.

It wasn't that long ago -- Apr. 8, 2002, to be precise -- that all seemed right in Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s rarified world. On that day, most of the Times's 1,200 reporters and editors gathered in its newsroom just off Times Square to celebrate the paper's record haul of Pulitzer Prizes. No newspaper had ever before won more than four Pulitzers in a year; the Times won seven in 2002 -- six of which recognized its Herculean coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. Sulzberger was ecstatic, not realizing that he already had made the biggest blunder of his tenure as publisher: naming Howell Raines as executive editor.

RAINES, WHO HAD JOINED THE PAPER IN 1978 as a national correspondent, had deeply impressed Sulzberger by shaking the stodginess out of the editorial page as its editor during the Clinton years. Raines campaigned hard for the promotion in 2001, vowing to root out complacency and do whatever was needed to raise the staff's "competitive metabolism." By most accounts, Sulzberger saw Raines, then 58, as his journalistic alter ego and collaborator in transforming the Times into a fully national, multimedia franchise.

Just 18 months after self-proclaimed "change agent" Raines had taken charge, the Times ran a devastatingly self-critical article recounting how Jayson Blair had plagiarized or made up at least 36 stories. Sulzberger, who has often been accused of lacking gravitas, will be a long time living down his flip initial reaction to Blair's transgressions: "It sucks." Worse, Sulzberger had no feel for how Raines was perceived in the newsroom, where resentment of his arbitrary, self-aggrandizing ways had reached the flash point. Three weeks after Sulzberger had unequivocally affirmed his support for Raines, the publisher fired him and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

The Blair-Raines fiasco devastated Sulzberger. But after a long period of introspection, he appears to have regained his confidence if not quite his swagger. "There's no question that the experience changed him," says Steven L. Rattner, a prominent private equity investor who has been one of Sulzberger's closest confidants ever since they worked together as young Times reporters in the late 1970s. "It's made him more open to other views and more careful to have a better sense of what's going on," he says. "I think it has been an eye-opening experience for Arthur, and that's never bad for any of us."

Sulzberger swallowed a heaping helping of humble pie in replacing Raines with Keller, a former managing editor whom he had passed over in promoting Raines. Appointed in July, 2003, Keller, 54, has been editor for only as long as Raines was but already has made a number of changes as fundamental as those that his predecessor promulgated yet never implemented. "I cringed every time I read that people thought my job was to come in and calm the place down because it made me sound like the official dispenser of Zoloft," says Keller, whose gracious manner has often been mistaken for passivity. "I saw myself instead as being, in some sense, a change agent without having to wave a revolutionary banner."

Keller has made so many high-level personnel changes that two-thirds of all newsroom workers now report to a new boss. He has also put into practice a string of reforms suggested by several internal committees formed in the wake of the Blair affair. These include the appointment of a standards editor and a public editor, or ombudsman. By most accounts, the Times now is much more responsive to outside complaints and criticism than it was.

AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE, THE PAPER also has redesigned a half-dozen of its sections and upgraded its global culture coverage with the addition of 20 writing and editing jobs. "In the last year, there has been more change in a packed period of time than I've seen at this paper ever," says Sulzberger, who also credits Keller with "steadying our culture and lowering the temperature here." It is no mean feat to simultaneously improve morale and shake things up, but Keller is going to have to make certain that a happier newsroom does not again make for a more complacent newsroom. What Raines derided as "the Times's defining myth of effortless superiority" might now be in remission -- but has it been eradicated?

While the Times appears to be regaining its stride journalistically, it has not been rewarded with circulation gains. In 2004, the paper posted an infinitesimal 0.2% increase in the circulation of both the daily edition, which now stands at about 1.1 million, and the Sunday paper, which is just under 1.7 million. Since the national expansion began in 1998, the Times has added 150,000 daily subscribers outside New York but is thought to have lost about 96,000 subscribers in its home market. The net increase of 54,000 represents a 5.1% uptick, which compares with the 3.5% decline in U.S. daily newspaper circulation over this period. What's more, the Times posted its gains despite boosting the price of a subscription by more than 25% on average.

New subscribers are increasingly hard to come by for all newspapers as advances in digital communications spur the proliferation of alternative sources of news and information. For the under-30 set in particular, digital accessibility and interactivity tend to trump the familiarity of long-established names like The New York Times, CBS, or CNN.

The growing polarization of the body politic along ideological lines also is hurting the Times and its big-media brethren. One of the few things on which Bush and Kerry supporters agreed during the Presidential campaign was that the press was unfair in its coverage of their candidate. Keller says the Times was deluged with "ferocious letters berating us for either being stooges of the Bush Administration or agents of Michael Moore." Complaints from the Right were far more numerous, even before the newspaper painted a bull's-eye on itself in running a column by public editor Daniel Okrent headlined "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" Okrent's short answer: "Of course it is."

What a growing, or at least increasingly strident, segment of the population seems to want is not journalism untainted by the personal views of journalists but coverage that affirms their partisan beliefs -- in the way that many Fox News (FOX ) shows cater to a conservative constituency. For years, major news organizations have been accused of falling short of the ideal of impartiality that they espouse. Now, the very notion of impartiality is under assault, blurring the line between journalism and propaganda.

For its part, the Bush White House has succeeded to a degree in marginalizing the national or "elite" press by walling off public access to much of the workings of the government and by treating the Fourth Estate as merely another special interest group that can be safely ignored when it isn't being exploited. The Bushies particularly dislike the Times, which, in their view, epitomizes the Eastern liberal Establishment. In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, George W. Bush mocked the Times for what he considered its overly pessimistic coverage of post-World War II Germany. "Maybe that same person is still around, writing editorials," he joked.

The Times also is under attack from another branch of the federal government -- the judiciary. The paper figures centrally in most of a half-dozen pending court cases that collectively pose a dire threat to the traditional journalistic practice of assuring confidentiality to whistle-blowers and other informants. In October, a federal judge ordered Judith Miller of the Times imprisoned for up to 18 months for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame to conservative columnist Robert Novak. Miller, who researched the Plame affair but never wrote about it, remains free pending a review by the federal Court of Appeals in Washington.

Sulzberger, who spent six years as a reporter, is outraged that journalists are being slapped with contempt charges for refusing to yield confidential sources to prosecutors. "Reporters are going to jail for doing their jobs, and that's just wrong," he says. The publisher has been less outspoken in responding to the paper's political assailants. In an interview with BusinessWeek, though, he denied his paper is biased in its coverage of national politics or the war in Iraq or even that it is liberal. The term he prefers is "urban," says Sulzberger. "What we saw play out in this election was urban vs. suburban-rural, not red state vs. blue state," he says. "We are from an urban environment; it comes with the territory. We recognize that, and we can't walk away from it, but neither can we play it politically. I don't think we do."

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HE became publisher 12 years ago, Sulzberger must carry on without Russ Lewis at his side. Lewis, a loquacious lawyer who got his start as a Times copy boy in 1966, stepped down on Dec. 26 after seven years as president and CEO of NYT Co. His replacement is the 54-year-old Janet Robinson, a former schoolteacher who joined the company in 1983 and worked her way up through advertising sales. She played an important role in the national expansion of the Times as its president and general manager from 1996 into 2004. On the Street, Robinson is known as a formidable manager who relentlessly puts NYT Co.'s best foot forward. "She's never met a number she couldn't spin positively," one analyst says.

The most pressing business problem the new CEO faces is a paucity of advertising. Through November, the Times's ad revenues were just 2.3% ahead of the previous year -- a surprisingly weak performance, considering that the newspaper industry as a whole reported a 9.7% gain in national advertising revenues during the first nine months, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. Expenditures on local newspaper advertising in the industry rose 6.6%.

A strengthening U. S. economy would help the Times in 2005 but wouldn't necessarily restore it to competitive parity. The huge runup in advertising rates over the last decade is forcing more U.S. companies to economize, either by shifting into lower-cost media or by homing in more precisely on their target markets. Neither trend bodes well for the Times, whose unique status as America's only metro daily with national reach appears to be putting it at a tactical disadvantage in some ways.

THE TIMES HAS MANY FEWER READERS outside of New York City than do the two largest national newspapers -- USA Today and The Wall Street Journal -- both of which have circulations far in excess of 2 million. "Those two papers tend to be a more cost-effective buy than the Times just because their circulation across the country is so much larger," says Jeff Piper, vice-president and general manager of Carat Press, a big media buyer. Even in the New York region, where the Times reaches only 14% of all adult readers, the paper's circulation is too diffuse to allow for effective targeting by ZIP Code -- a technique that has enriched many other metro dailies with revenue from inserts.

Robinson maintains that there is nothing wrong with the Times' market position that a growing national and New York economy can't fix. Underscoring her confidence, the paper just imposed what is now an annual Jan. 1 ad rate increase, layering a 5% hike atop a cumulative 38% increase since 2000. "We feel that premium quality equals premium price," Robinson says.

At the same time, the Times continues to move out from the 312 markets in which the paper is available into adjacent precincts. In October, it began printing the national edition in Dayton, Ohio, in a plant owned by the local daily. That enabled it to sell papers in 100 new ZIP Codes while raising its presence in existing markets as far afield as Louisville. It plans to add seven new contract sites to its network of 20 printing plants by the end of 2006.

The reinvention of the Times as a national paper has been accompanied by a steady loss of subscribers in the New York metro area. Its dwindling presence at home has been caused in part by forces beyond its control, including a big influx of non-English-speaking immigrants. However, taking the paper further upscale in pursuit of an elite nationwide readership priced it out of some New Yorkers' reach (a seven-day subscription goes for about $480 a year) and constrained its spending on local marketing and promotion. In addition, the Times has declined to join in the trend of introducing foreign-language editions or free editions for young adult readers. (It may be rethinking its free-paper aversion, as evidenced by The Boston Globe's recent purchase of a 49% stake in Metro Boston, a giveaway tabloid.)

The substitution of national for local subscribers benefited the Times financially even beyond the sizable premium it earns on national advertising. On average it costs the Times about one-third more to produce and deliver a newspaper in its home market (the only place where it owns its printing plants) than in the rest of America. But Sulzberger bristles at the notion that the Times is writing off its hometown readers or that a declining New York circulation is the inevitable result of national expansion. "We are not walking away from New York," he says. "But we are growing elsewhere."

The sphere of NYT Co's ambitions widened to encompass the globe when it muscled Washington Post Co. aside to gain full control of the International Herald Tribune, America's broadsheet voice abroad since 1887. The Post reluctantly agreed to relinquish its 50% interest for $65 million after NYT Co. threatened to start a new paper to drive the IHT out of business. "The thing was going sideways and sooner or later was going to die," says Sulzberger, who was harshly criticized by some for lacking the gentlemanliness of his father.

The company considered making the Tribune over into a foreign edition of the Times, but decided in the end to maintain IHT's separate, international identity. "This needs to be a European paper for Europeans," says Michael Golden, a NYT Co. vice-chairman who was named publisher of IHT in 2003. Actually, the Trib's 240,000 subscribers are concentrated in Europe but spread among 180 countries.

Under Golden, a slightly older first cousin of Sulzberger's, the Trib has adopted the Times's playbook, if not its name. The transatlantic flow of copy from the Times has increased, but the Trib has enlarged its own news staff, too. It has also added pages, color photos, and new printing sites in Sydney, São Paulo, and Kuwait City. The Trib scored impressively in recent reader surveys in Europe and Asia and ad sales are rising, but they still amount to less than $100 million a year. Golden and his cousin yearn to turn the Trib's operating losses into profits, but the general track record of English-language newspapers and magazines abroad is discouraging. Even if the IHT flourishes, it will be a long time before it contributes significantly to its parent company's top or bottom lines.

The same is true of NYT Co.'s investment in television news. The Times has built a cadre of television professionals who, in collaboration with a revolving cast of print reporters, have produced much fine work for Frontline, Nova, and other programs. In 2003, the Times moved beyond production into distribution, laying out $100 million for half-ownership of a digital cable channel, Discovery Times, operated in partnership with Discovery Communications Inc. Discovery Times reaches 35 million homes -- an impressive total for a fledgling channel -- but its ratings are minuscule: In October, just 27,000 people tuned in during prime time, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

ONLINE, THE TIMES ALREADY is making serious money. New York Times Digital (which includes Boston.com as well as NYTimes.com) netted an enviable $17.3 million on revenues of $53.1 million during the first half of 2004, the last period for which its financials have been disclosed. All indications are that the digital unit is continuing to grow at 30% to 40% a year, making it NYT Co.'s fastest-revving growth engine.

Advertising accounts for almost all of the digital operation's revenues, but disagreement rages within the company over whether NYTimes.com should emulate The Wall Street Journal and begin charging a subscription fee. Undoubtedly, many of the site's 18 million unique monthly visitors would flee if hit with a $39.95 or even a $9.95 monthly charge. One camp within the NYT Co. argues that such a massive loss of Web traffic would cost the Times dearly in the long run, both by shrinking the audience for its journalism and by depriving it of untold millions in ad revenue. The counterargument is that the Times would more than make up for lost ad dollars by boosting circulation revenue -- both from online fees and new print subscriptions paid for by people who now read for free on the Web.

Sulzberger declines to take a side in this debate, but sounds as if he is leaning toward a pay site. "It gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free," he says. "That is troubling."

What's a platform agnostic to do? The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. "The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn't growing, and the one that is growing -- the Internet -- isn't producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality," says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.

Today, Sulzberger faces an even bigger challenge than when he took charge of the Times in the mid-1990s. Can he find a way to rekindle growth while preserving the primacy of the Times's journalism? The answer will go a long way toward determining not only the fate of America's most important newspaper but also whether traditional, reporting-intensive journalism has a central place in the Digital Age.


By Anthony Bianco with John Rossant in Paris and Lauren Gard in New York


Copyright 2000-2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
Terms of Use Privacy Notice