The New York Times

On September 18, 1851, the paper published its first issue under the name New-York Daily Times. Its founders were Henry Jarvis Raymond, the main force behind the paper, and his business partner George Jones, who served as publisher.⁠[1]

The first edition sold for one cent.⁠[2]

The paper was established as a “penny paper” that aimed to avoid sensationalism and to report the news in a restrained and objective way.⁠[3]

Henry Jarvis Raymond graduated from the University of Vermont in 1840, served as lieutenant governor of New York from 1855 to 1856 and helped form the Republican Party in 1856. In 1857 the paper dropped “Daily” from its banner. Raymond remained its editor-in-chief until his death in 1869.⁠[1]

Despite price increases, the paper was losing $1,000 a week when Adolph Simon Ochs bought it in 1896.⁠[3]

On March 29, 1960, the paper ran “Heed Their Rising Voices,” a ten-paragraph full-page advertisement for which the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King Jr.Martin Luther King Jr.Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was an American Baptist minister and social activist who led the U.S. civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. He headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.Open the full entry and the Struggle for Freedom in the South paid $4,800.⁠[4]

In 1962 Lester B. Sullivan, Montgomery’s commissioner of public affairs, who supervised the police and fire departments, sued the paper and four civil rights leaders who had signed the advertisement—Ralph AbernathyRalph AbernathyRalph Abernathy (1926–1990) was an American Baptist pastor and civil rights leader who was Martin Luther King Jr.’s chief aide and closest associate in the 1950s and 1960s. He co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and led it as president from 1968, after King’s assassination, until 1977.Open the full entry, Solomon S. Seay Sr., Fred Shuttlesworth and Joseph E. Lowery—claiming that the word “police” in its third paragraph libeled him although he was not named. A Montgomery circuit court jury awarded him $500,000, and the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the award.⁠[4]

On March 9, 1964, the Supreme Court of the United StatesSupreme Court of the United StatesThe Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court of the U.S. federal judiciary. Established under the Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789, it has consisted since 1869 of a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices and sits in Washington, D.C.Open the full entry ruled unanimously, 9–0, in the paper’s favor, in a majority opinion by Justice William J. Brennan. It held that under the First Amendment, applied to the states through the Fourteenth, a public official may not recover libel damages for a falsehood about his official conduct unless he proves “actual malice”—“with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”⁠[5][4]

The Court also held that the advertisement’s factual errors did not strip it of protection and that paid advertisements are covered.⁠[4]

Later in the 1970s, under Adolph Simon Ochs’s grandson Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the paper introduced sweeping changes and brought out a national edition transmitted by satellite to regional printing plants.⁠[3]

In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamaraRobert McNamaraRobert McNamara (Robert Strange McNamara, 1916–2009) was an American business executive and government official who was president of the Ford Motor Company, served as U.S. secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, and was president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.Open the full entry commissioned a secret government study of American involvement in Vietnam; when completed in 1968 it comprised 47 volumes of more than 7,000 pages. In early 1971 Daniel EllsbergDaniel EllsbergDaniel Ellsberg (1931–2023) was an American military analyst and economist who worked at the RAND Corporation and took part in the Defense Department’s top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam. In 1971 he gave the study, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to the press; the charges brought against him were dismissed in 1973, and he spent the following decades as a peace and anti-nuclear activist.Open the full entry, a RAND CorporationRAND CorporationThe RAND Corporation is an American nonprofit research organization headquartered in Santa Monica, California. It grew out of Project RAND, set up by the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1946 under contract with the Douglas Aircraft Company, became an independent nonprofit in 1948 and conducts research on national security, health, education and social policy.Open the full entry employee who had worked on the project, secretly made copies. After several months of review, the paper began publishing the so-called Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971.⁠[6]

After the first three installments, the administration of Richard NixonRichard NixonRichard Nixon (1913–1994) was an American politician who represented California in the U.S. House and Senate, served as vice president from 1953 to 1961 and was the 37th president of the United States from 1969 to 1974. His administration opened relations with China, signed strategic arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union and ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War; he resigned over the Watergate scandal on August 9, 1974, the only U.S. president to do so.Open the full entry, invoking national security, obtained a restraining order barring further publication, which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld.⁠[6]

The Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear the case on June 26, 1971, and issued its opinions on June 30, the whole legal process having taken 15 days. In a 6–3 decision it dissolved the restraining order and allowed the paper to continue publication; Chief Justice Burger and Justices Blackmun and Harlan dissented. The three-paragraph per curiam opinion held that the government “carries a heavy burden of showing justification” for such a prior restraint and had not met it.⁠[6]

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. was publisher of the paper from 1992 to 2017 and chairman of The New York Times Company from 1997 to 2020. The paper won 61 Pulitzer Prizes while he was publisher. When he became chairman in 1997, its circulation was about 1 million, mostly in the New York metropolitan area.⁠[7]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry dates the launch of the paper’s online edition to 1995; a 2020 company release gives 1996 as the launch year of NYTimes.com.⁠[3][7]

In 1997 the print edition began using colour photography. In 2005 the paper introduced TimesSelect, a subscription service for portions of the online edition, and discontinued it two years later, when all news, editorial columns and much archival content became free. In 2006 it launched Times Reader, an electronic version of the print edition.⁠[3]

In 2007 the paper relocated to the newly constructed New York Times Building in Manhattan.⁠[3]

In 2011 the paper instituted a subscription plan for its digital edition that limited free access to content.⁠[3]

In the second quarter of 2020 the paper’s digital revenue exceeded its print revenue for the first time in its 170-year history; as of September 2020 it had 6.5 million total subscriptions.⁠[7]

A.G. Sulzberger has been publisher of the paper since January 2018. He wrote the “Innovation Report” in 2014, the year the paper had 800,000 digital subscribers, a base that had grown to 5.7 million by September 2020.⁠[7]

Meredith Kopit Levien, the company’s chief operating officer, succeeded Mark Thompson, who had joined The New York Times Company in 2012, as president and chief executive officer on September 8, 2020, and joined the board.⁠[8]

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. retired as chairman and director on December 31, 2020, becoming chairman emeritus, and A.G. Sulzberger succeeded him as chairman on January 1, 2021.⁠[7]

Joseph Kahn, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who had been managing editor since September 2016, succeeded Dean Baquet as executive editor, overseeing the global newsroom, on June 14, 2022. At the end of 2021 the paper reached 100 million readers a month and had 6.7 million print and digital subscriptions.⁠[9]

The paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for its Pentagon Papers coverage.⁠[3]

By the early 21st century the paper had won more than 120 Pulitzer Prizes, including citations, considerably more than any other news organization. Britannica judges that its strength lies in editorial excellence and notes that it has never been the largest newspaper in terms of circulation.⁠[3]