The New Yorker Interview:

The paper’s publisher discusses bias in reporting, the Times’ financial comeback, and criticisms of its coverage of Trump, trans issues, and the war in Ukraine.

By David Remnick

Long before David Carr, the late Times media critic, published his 2008 memoir, “The Night of the Gun,” I asked him why he never wrote a book about newspapers and the rise of digital journalism. David, who had already gone fifteen rounds with life and was not prepared to wrestle with a book that would hold little popular interest, waved off my question, saying, “Have you ever noticed at Barnes & Noble that the books about media are on the fourth floor?”

Nevertheless, libraries are filled with books about the Times. There are volumes that celebrate and critique the paper and its history, ones that dissect its triumphs (the Pentagon Papers) and its low points (its derelict coverage of the Holocaust). What has yet to be examined in full is how the Times endured a prolonged era of financial decline, one so exigent that the Sulzberger family, which has owned the paper since the late nineteenth century, might have been forced to sell the paper—just as the Graham family would sell the Washington Post, for just two hundred and fifty million dollars, to Jeff Bezos. In 2009, Michael Hirschorn wrote in The Atlantic, “What if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May? It’s certainly plausible. . . . The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start.” Instead, the Times reversed its fortunes, steadily transforming itself into a thriving, highly diversified digital enterprise while remaining the most important news-gathering organization in the country, and arguably the world. With the collapse of so many local and second-tier newspapers, with the disappearance of once promising sites like BuzzFeed News, the Times occupies a nearly singular place in American journalism, a fact that makes honest scrutiny of the paper in all its forms even more necessary than ever.

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