The New York Times
Sulzberger began writing for The New York Times as a metro reporter in February 2009, [9] which published his first article on March 2. [10] He became a national correspondent, [11] heading the Kansas City bureau and covering the Midwest region. [12] [13] The 2017 film Kodachrome , directed by Mark Raso, is based on his 2010 article about a rural community that became the last place to develop Kodachrome film. [14]
In 2013, he was tapped by then-executive editor Jill Abramson to lead the team that produced the Times' Innovation Report, [15] an internal assessment of the challenges facing the Times in the digital age. [16] [17] [18] He was the lead author of the 97-page report, [12] [16] which documented in "clinical detail" how the Times was losing ground to "nimbler competitors" and "called for revolutionary changes". [19] The Innovation Report was leaked to BuzzFeed News in March 2014. [20]
Sulzberger was named associate editor for newsroom strategy in August 2015. [17] [21] In that role, he was part of the group that outlined the Times' plan to double the news outlet's digital revenue by 2020 and increase collaboration between departments, [3] [22] dubbed "Our Path Forward". [23] [24] In October 2016, he was named deputy publisher, putting him in line to succeed his father as publisher. [25] [26] [27] His cousins Sam Dolnick, now a deputy managing editor of the Times, [28] and David Perpich, now head of standalone products and a member of the New York Times Company board, [29] were also considered for the role. [3] [30]
On December 14, 2017, it was announced that Sulzberger would take over as publisher on January 1, 2018. He is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family in the role. [3] [31] Though The New York Times Company is public, all voting shares are controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger Family Trust. SEC filings state the trust's "primary objective" is that the Times continues "as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare". [17] On his first day as publisher, Sulzberger wrote an essay noting that he was taking over in a "period of exciting innovation and growth", but also a "period of profound challenge". He committed to holding the Times "to the highest standards of independence, rigor, and fairness". [32]
As publisher, he oversees the news outlet's journalism and business operations. [33] Sulzberger has been the principal architect of the news outlet's digital transformation and has led its efforts to become a subscriber-first business. [34] He became publisher on January 1, 2018, [35] succeeding his father Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., [26] although the elder Sulzberger remained chairman of The New York Times Company until the end of 2020. [36] A.G. Sulzberger became the chairman of The New York Times Company on January 1, 2021.
Sulzberger met with President Donald Trump at the White House on July 20, 2018. The meeting was off-the-record, but after President Trump tweeted about it eight days later, Sulzberger "pushed back hard" to dispute the President's characterization of the meeting. Sulzberger said in a statement that at the meeting, he "told the president directly that I thought that his [anti-press] language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous. I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence." [37] [38] [39] Sulzberger met with President Trump in the Oval Office a second time, on January 31, 2019, for an on-the-record interview along with Times reporters Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman. [40] [41]
He has said that an independent press "is not a liberal ideal or a progressive ideal or a Democratic ideal. It's an American ideal." [42] In 2020, Sulzberger voiced concern about the disappearance of local news, saying that "if we don't find a path forward" for local journalism, "I believe we'll continue to watch society grow more polarized, less empathetic, more easily manipulated by powerful interests and more untethered from the truth." [43]
According to anonymous sources within the newspaper's staff, upon taking his position in 2018 Sulzburger "told employees explicitly that his biggest concern was that the paper’s audience saw it as a 'liberal rag...' [his] vision for the paper is to change that perception and court conservative readers." [44] [45] However, this view was refuted by The Economist , which published a study evidencing a gradual leftward shift in the partisan slant of The New York Times, beginning in 2017. [46] The New York Times' former opinion section editor, James Bennet, in light of the paper's Tom Cotton controversy, also disagreed, arguing that by catering to a partisan readership and an influx of new journalists focusing on digital content the New York Times under A.G. Sulzberger had taken on an "illiberal bias". [47]
A POLITICO Magazine report detailed that Sulzberger has made a sit-down interview with President Joe Biden a priority for the newspaper, which claims to have interviewed every sitting president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. [48] Despite efforts to secure an interview, including appeals from Sulzberger directly to Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House has not allowed the Times the same level of access to the president as it did during the Trump Administration. An anonymous Times journalist told Politico in 2024, “All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day...It’s A.G. [Sulzberger], He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.” [48] In a statement from The New York Times, an uncredited spokesperson responded to the story emphasizing that it "should be troubling that President Biden has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term" and the paper's commitment to a free press. [49] [50]
