The New York Times (NYT)[b] is an American daily newspaper based in
New York City. The New York Times covers domestic, national, and international news, and comprises opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of the longest-running newspapers in the United States, it serves as one of the country's
newspapers of record. As of February 2024, the newspaper has a readership of 9.7 million digital-only subscribers and 660,000 print subscribers, making it the
second-largest newspaper in the country by print circulation. The Times has
received 137
Pulitzer Prizes as of 2023, the most of any publication, among other accolades. The New York Times is published by
The New York Times Company; since 1896, the company has been chaired by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, including its current chairman and the paper's publisher,
A. G. Sulzberger. The Times is headquartered at
The New York Times Building in
Manhattan.
The Times was founded as the conservative New-York Daily Times in 1851, and came to national recognition in the 1870s with its aggressive coverage of corrupt politician
William M. Tweed. Following the
Panic of 1893, Chattanooga Times publisher
Adolph Ochs gained a controlling interest in the company. In 1935, Ochs was succeeded by his son-in-law,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who began a push into European news. Sulzberger's son-in-law
Arthur Ochs became publisher in 1963, adapting to a changing newspaper industry and introducing radical changes. The New York Times was involved in the landmark 1964
Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which restricted the ability of public officials to sue the media for
defamation.
The New-York Daily Times was established in 1851 by New-York Tribune journalists
Henry Jarvis Raymond and
George Jones. The Times experienced significant circulation, particularly among conservatives; New-York Tribune publisher
Horace Greeley praised the New-York Daily Times. During the
American Civil War, Times correspondents gathered information directly from
Confederate states. In 1869, Jones inherited the paper from Raymond, who had changed its name to The New-York Times. Under Jones, the Times began to publish a series of articles criticizing
Tammany Hall political boss
William M. Tweed, despite vehement opposition from other New York newspapers. In 1871, The New-York Times published Tammany Hall's accounting books; Tweed was tried in 1873 and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The Times earned national recognition for its coverage of Tweed. In 1891, Jones died, creating a management imbroglio in which his children had insufficient business acumen to inherit the company and his will prevented an acquisition of the Times. Editor-in-chief
Charles Ransom Miller, editorial editor Edward Cary, and correspondent George F. Spinney established a company to manage The New-York Times, but faced financial difficulties during the
Panic of 1893.
In August 1896, Chattanooga Times publisher
Adolph Ochs acquired The New-York Times, implementing significant alterations to the newspaper's structure. Ochs established the Times as a merchant's newspaper and removed the hyphen from the newspaper's name. In 1905, The New York Times opened
Times Tower, marking expansion. The Times experienced a political realignment in the 1910s amid several disagreements within the
Republican Party. The New York Times reported on the
sinking of the Titanic as other newspapers were cautious about bulletins from the
Associated Press. Through managing editor
Carr Van Anda, the Times focused on scientific advancements, reporting on
Albert Einstein's then-unknown theory of
general relativity and becoming involved in the
discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. In April 1935, Ochs died, leaving his son-in-law
Arthur Hays Sulzberger as publisher. The
Great Depression forced Sulzberger to reduce The New York Times's operations, and developments in the New York newspaper landscape resulted in the formation of larger newspapers, such as the New York Herald Tribune and the New York World-Telegram. In contrast to Ochs, Sulzberger encouraged
wirephotography.
The New York Times extensively covered
World War II through large headlines, reporting on exclusive stories such as the
Yugoslav coup d'état. Amid the war, Sulzberger began expanding the Times's operations further, acquiring
WQXR-FM in 1944—the first non-Times investment since the Jones era—and established a fashion show in Times Hall. Despite reductions as a result of conscription, The New York Times retained the largest journalism staff of any newspaper. The Times's print edition became available internationally during the war through the
Army & Air Force Exchange Service; The New York Times Overseas Weekly later became available in Japan through The Asahi Shimbun and in Germany through the Frankfurter Zeitung. The international edition would develop into
a separate newspaper. Journalist
William L. Laurence publicized the
atomic bomb race between the United States and Germany, resulting in the
Federal Bureau of Investigation seizing copies of the Times. The United States government recruited Laurence to document the
Manhattan Project in April 1945. Laurence became the only witness of the Manhattan Project, a detail realized by employees of The New York Times following the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Following
World War II, The New York Times continued to expand. The Times was subject to investigations from the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, a
McCarthyist subcommittee that investigated purported communism from within press institutions.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger's decision to dismiss a copyreader who plead the
Fifth Amendment drew ire from within the Times and from external organizations. In April 1961, Sulzberger resigned, appointing his son-in-law,
The New York Times Company president
Orvil Dryfoos. Under Dryfoos, The New York Times established a newspaper based in
Los Angeles. In 1962, the implementation of automated
printing presses in response to increasing costs mounted fears over
technological unemployment. The New York Typographical Union staged
a strike in December, altering the media consumption of New Yorkers. The strike left New York with three remaining newspapers—the Times, the
Daily News, and the New York Post—by its conclusion in March 1963. In May, Dryfoos died of a heart ailment in May. Following weeks of ambiguity,
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger became The New York Times's publisher.
The New York Times remained cautious in its initial coverage of the
Watergate scandal. As
Congress began investigating the scandal, the Times furthered its coverage, publishing details on the
Huston Plan, alleged wiretapping of reporters and officials, and testimony from
James W. McCord Jr. that the
Committee for the Re-Election of the President paid the conspirators off. The exodus of readers to suburban New York newspapers, such as Newsday and
Gannett papers, adversely affected The New York Times's circulation. Contemporary newspapers balked at additional sections; Time devoted a cover for its criticism and New York wrote that the Times was engaging in "middle-class self-absorption". The New York Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post were the subject of
a strike in 1978, allowing emerging newspapers to leverage halted coverage. The Times deliberately avoided coverage of the
AIDS epidemic, running its first front page article in May 1983.
Max Frankel's editorial coverage of the epidemic, with mentions of
anal intercourse, contrasted with then-executive editor
A. M. Rosenthal's puritan approach, intentionally avoiding descriptions of the luridity of gay venues.
Following years of waning interest in The New York Times, Sulzberger resigned in January 1992, appointing his son,
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., as publisher. The
Internet represented a generational shift within the Times; Sulzberger, who negotiated The New York Times Company's acquisition of The Boston Globe in 1993, derided the Internet, while his son expressed antithetical views. @times appeared on
America Online's website in May 1994 as an extension of The New York Times, featuring news articles, film reviews, sports news, and business articles. Despite opposition, several employees of the Times had begun to access the Internet. The online success of publications that traditionally co-existed with the Times—such as America Online,
Yahoo, and
CNN—and the expansion of websites such as
Monster.com and
Craigslist that threatened The New York Times's
classified advertisement model increased efforts to develop a website.
nytimes.com debuted on January 19 and was formally announced three days later. The Times published domestic terrorist
Ted Kaczynski's essay Industrial Society and Its Future in 1995, contributing to his arrest after his brother
David recognized the essay's penmanship.
Following the establishment of
nytimes.com, The New York Times retained its journalistic hesitancy under executive editor
Joseph Lelyveld, refusing to publish an article reporting on the
Clinton–Lewinsky scandal from
Drudge Report. nytimes.com editors conflicted with print editors on several occasions, including wrongfully naming security guard
Richard Jewell as the suspect in the
Centennial Olympic Park bombing and covering the
death of Diana, Princess of Wales in greater detail than the print edition. The New York Times Electronic Media Company was adversely affected by the
dot-com crash. The Times extensively covered the
September 11 attacks. The following day's print issue contained sixty-six articles, the work of over three hundred dispatched reporters. Journalist
Judith Miller was the recipient of a package containing a white powder during the
2001 anthrax attacks, furthering anxiety within The New York Times. In September 2002, Miller and military correspondent
Michael R. Gordon wrote an article for the Times claiming that Iraq had purchased
aluminum tubes. The article was cited by then-president
George W. Bush to claim that Iraq was constructing
weapons of mass destruction; the theoretical use of aluminum tubes to produce nuclear material was subject of debate. In March 2003, the United States
invaded Iraq, beginning the
Iraq War.
The New York Times attracted controversy after thirty-six articles from journalist
Jayson Blair were discovered to be plagiarized. Criticism over then-executive editor
Howell Raines and then-managing editor
Gerald M. Boyd mounted following the scandal, culminating in a town hall in which a deputy editor criticized Raines for failing to question Blair's sources in article he wrote on the
D.C. sniper attacks. In June 2003, Raines and Boyd resigned.
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. appointed
Bill Keller as executive editor. Miller continued to report on the Iraq War as a
journalistic embed covering the country's weapons of mass destruction program. Keller and then-Washington bureau chief
Jill Abramson unsuccessfully attempted to subside criticism. Conservative media criticized the Times over its coverage of
missing explosives from the
Al Qa'qaa weapons facility. An article in December 2005 disclosing
warrantless surveillance by the
National Security Agency contributed to further criticism from the
George W. Bush administration and the
Senate's refusal to renew the
Patriot Act. In the
Plame affair,
a Central Intelligence Agency inquiry found that Miller had become aware of
Valerie Plame's identity through then-vice president
Dick Cheney's chief of staff
Scooter Libby, resulting in Miller's resignation.
During the
Great Recession, The New York Times suffered significant fiscal difficulties as a consequence of the
subprime mortgage crisis and a decline in
classified advertising. Exacerbated by
Rupert Murdoch's revitalization of The Wall Street Journal through his acquisition of
Dow Jones & Company,
The New York Times Company began enacting measures to reduce the newsroom budget. The company was forced to borrow US$250 million (equivalent to $339,799,072.64 in 2022) from Mexican billionaire
Carlos Slim and fired over one hundred employees by 2010. nytimes.com's coverage of the
Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, resulting in the resignation of then-New York governor
Eliot Spitzer, furthered the legitimacy of the website as a journalistic medium. The Times's economic downturn renewed discussions of an online paywall; The New York Times implemented a paywall in March 2011. Abramson succeeded Keller, continuing her characteristic investigations into corporate and government malfeasance into the Times's coverage. Following conflicts with newly-appointed chief executive
Mark Thompson's ambitions, Abramson was dismissed by Sulzberger Jr., who named
Dean Baquet as her replacement.
Leading up to the
2016 presidential election, The New York Times elevated the
Hillary Clinton email controversy and the
Uranium One controversy; national security correspondent
Michael S. Schmidt initially wrote an article in March 2015 stating that
Hillary Clinton had used a private email server as secretary of state.
Donald Trump's upset victory contributed to an increase in subscriptions to the Times. The New York Times experienced unprecedented indignation from Trump, who referred to publications such as the Times as "
enemies of the people" at the
Conservative Political Action Conference and tweeting his disdain for the newspaper and
CNN. In October 2017, The New York Times published an article by journalists
Jodi Kantor and
Megan Twohey alleging that dozens of women had accused film producer and
The Weinstein Company co-chairman
Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct. The investigation resulted in Weinstein's resignation and conviction, precipitated the
Weinstein effect, and served as a catalyst for the
#MeToo movement. The New York Times Company vacated the public editor position and eliminated the copy desk in November. Sulzberger Jr. announced his resignation in December 2017, appointing his son,
A. G. Sulzberger, as publisher.
Trump's relationship—equally diplomatic and negative—marked Sulzberger's tenure. In September 2018, The New York Times published "
I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration", an
anonymous essay by a self-described Trump administration official later revealed to be
Department of Homeland Security chief of staff
Miles Taylor. The animosity—which extended to nearly three hundred instances of Trump disparaging the Times by May 2019—culminated in Trump informing federal agencies to cancel their subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post in October 2019.
Trump's tax returns have been the subject of three separate investigations. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, the Times began implementing data services and graphs. On May 23, 2020, The New York Times's front page solely featured U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, An Incalculable Loss, a subset of the 100,000 people in the United States who died of COVID-19, the first time that the Times's front page lacked images since they were introduced. Since 2020, The New York Times has focused on broader diversification, developing online games, producing television series. The New York Times Company acquired The Athletic in January 2022.
The New York Times is owned by
The New York Times Company, a publicly traded company. The New York Times Company, in addition to the Times, owns Wirecutter, The Athletic, The New York Times Cooking, and The New York Times Games, and acquired Serial Productions and Audm. The New York Times Company holds undisclosed minority investments in multiple other businesses, and formerly owned The Boston Globe and several radio and television stations.[19] The New York Times Company is majority-owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through elevated shares in the company's dual-class stock structure held largely in a trust, in effect since the 1950s;[20] as of 2022, the family holds ninety-five percent of The New York Times Company's
Class B shares, allowing it to elect seventy percent of the company's board of directors.[21]Class A shareholders have restrictive voting rights.[22] As of 2023, The New York Times Company's chief executive is
Meredith Kopit Levien, the company's former chief operating officer who was appointed in September 2020.[23]
As of March 2023, The New York Times Company employs 5,800 individuals,[24] including 1,700 journalists according to deputy managing editor
Sam Dolnick.[25] Journalists for The New York Times may not run for public office, provide financial support to political candidates or causes, endorse candidates, or demonstrate public support for causes or movements.[26] Journalists are subject to the guidelines established in "Ethical Journalism" and "Guidelines on Integrity".[27] According to the former, Times journalists must abstain from using sources with a personal relationship to them and must not accept reimbursements or inducements from individuals who may be written about in The New York Times, with exceptions for gifts of nominal value.[28] The latter requires attribution and exact quotations, though exceptions are made for linguistic anomalies. Staff writers are expected to ensure the veracity of all written claims, but may delegate researching obscure facts to the research desk.[29] In March 2021, the Times established a committee to avoid journalistic conflicts of interest with work written for The New York Times, following columnist
David Brooks's resignation from the
Aspen Institute for his undisclosed work on the initiative Weave.[30]
The New York Times editorial board was established in 1896 by
Adolph Ochs. With the opinion department, the editorial board is independent of the newsroom.[69] Then-editor-in-chief
Charles Ransom Miller served as opinion editor from 1883 until his death in 1922.[70]Rollo Ogden succeeded Miller until his death in 1937.[71] From 1937 to 1938,
John Huston Finley served as opinion editor; in a prearranged plan,
Charles Merz succeeded Finley.[72] Merz served in the position until his retirement in 1961.[73]John Bertram Oakes served as opinion editor from 1961 to 1976, when then-publisher
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger appointed
Max Frankel.[74] Frankel served in the position until 1986, when he was appointed as executive editor.[75]Jack Rosenthal was the opinion editor from 1986 to 1993.[76]Howell Raines succeeded Rosenthal until 2001, when he was made executive editor.[77]Gail Collins succeeded Raines until her resignation in 2006.[78] From 2007 to 2016,
Andrew Rosenthal was the opinion editor.[79]James Bennet succeeded Rosenthal until his resignation in 2020.[80] As of 2023, the editorial board comprises fourteen opinion writers.[81]The New York Times's opinion editor is
Kathleen Kingsbury[82] and the deputy opinion editor is Patrick Healy.[17]
The New York Times's editorial board was initially opposed to liberal beliefs, opposing
women's suffrage in 1900 and 1914. The editorial board began to espouse progressive beliefs during Oakes' tenure, conflicting with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, of which Oakes was a member as
Adolph Ochs's nephew; in 1976, Oakes publicly disavowed with Sulzberger's endorsement of
Daniel Patrick Moynihan over
Bella Abzug in the
1976 Senate Democratic primaries in a letter sent from
Martha's Vineyard. Under Rosenthal, the editorial board took positions supporting
assault weapons legislation and the
legalization of marijuana, but publicly criticized the
Obama administration over its portrayal of terrorism.[79] Since 1960, The New York Times has
endorsed Democratic candidates, supporting a total of twelve Republican candidates and thirty Democratic candidates.[83][84][i] With the exception of
Wendell Willkie, the Times's Republican presidential endorsements have won the general election. In 2016, the editorial board issued an anti-endorsement against
Donald Trump for the first time in its history.[85]
Since 1940, editorial, media, and technology workers of The New York Times have been represented by the
New York Times Guild. The Times Guild, along with the Times Tech Guild, are represented by the
NewsGuild-CWA.[86] In 1940,
Arthur Hays Sulzberger was called upon by the
National Labor Relations Board amid accusations that he had discouraged Guild membership in the Times. Over the next few years, the Guild would ratify several contracts, expanding to editorial and news staff in 1942 and maintenance workers in 1943.[87] The New York Times Guild has walked out several times in its history, including for six and a half hours in 1981[88] and in 2017, when copy editors and reporters walked out at lunchtime in response to the elimination of the copy desk.[89] On December 7, 2022, the union held a one-day strike,[90] the first interruption to The New York Times since 1978.[91] The New York Times Guild reached an agreement in May 2023 to increase minimum salaries for employees and a retroactive bonus.[92] The Times Tech Guild is the largest
technology union with
collective bargaining rights in the United States.[93]
Content
Circulation
As of February 2024, The New York Times has 10.36 million subscribers, with 9.7 million online subscribers and 660,000 print subscribers,[94] the
second-largest newspaper by print circulation in the United States behind The Wall Street Journal.[95] The New York Times Company intends to have fifteen million subscribers by 2027.[96] The Times's shift towards subscription-based revenue with the debut of an online paywall in 2011 contributed to subscription revenue exceeding advertising revenue the following year, furthered by the
2016 presidential election and
Donald Trump.[97] In 2022, Vox wrote that The New York Times's subscribers skew "older, richer, whiter, and more liberal"; to reflect the general population of the United States, the Times has attempted to alter its audience by acquiring The Athletic, investing in verticals such as The New York Times Games and The New York Times Games, and beginning a marketing campaign showing diverse subscribers to the Times. The New York Times Company chief executive
Meredith Kopit Levien stated that the average age of subscribers has remained constant.[98]
Newsletters
In October 2001, The New York Times began publishing DealBook, a financial newsletter edited by
Andrew Ross Sorkin. The Times had intended to publish the newsletter in September, but delayed its debut following the
September 11 attacks.[99] A website for DealBook was established in March 2006.[100]The New York Times began shifting towards DealBook as part of the newspaper's financial coverage in November 2010 with a renewed website and a presence in the Times's print edition.[101] In 2011, the Times began hosting the DealBook Summit, an annual conference hosted by Sorkin.[102] During the
COVID-19 pandemic, The New York Times hosted the DealBook Online Summit in 2020[103] and 2021.[104] The 2022 DealBook Summit featured—among other speakers—former vice president
Mike Pence and Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu,[105] culminating in an interview with former
FTX chief executive
Sam Bankman-Fried; FTX had
filed for bankruptcy several weeks prior.[106] The 2023 DealBook Summit's speakers included vice president
Kamala Harris, Israeli president
Isaac Herzog, and businessman
Elon Musk.[102]
In June 2010, The New York Times licensed the political blog FiveThirtyEight in a three-year agreement.[107] The blog, written by
Nate Silver, had garnered attention during the
2008 presidential election for predicting the elections in forty-nine of fifty states. FiveThirtyEight appeared on nytimes.com in August.[108] According to Silver, several offers were made for the blog; Silver wrote that a merger of unequals must allow for editorial sovereignty and resources from the acquirer, comparing himself to
Groucho Marx.[109] According to The New Republic, FiveThirtyEight drew as much as a fifth of the traffic to nytimes.com during the
2012 presidential election.[110] In July 2013, FiveThirtyEight was sold to
ESPN.[111] In an article following Silver's exit, public editor
Margaret Sullivan wrote that he was disruptive to the Times's culture for his perspective on probability-based predictions and scorn for polling—having stated that punditry is "fundamentally useless", comparing him to
Billy Beane, who implemented
sabermetrics in baseball. According to Sullivan, his work was criticized by several notable political journalists.[112]
The New Republic obtained a memo in November 2013 revealing then-Washington bureau chief
David Leonhardt's ambitions to establish a data-driven newsletter with presidential historian
Michael Beschloss, graphic designer
Amanda Cox, economist
Justin Wolfers, and The New Republic journalist
Nate Cohn.[113] By March, Leonhardt had amassed fifteen employees from within The New York Times; the newsletter's staff included individuals who had created the Times's dialect quiz,
fourth down analyzer, and a calculator for determining buying or renting a home.[114]The Upshot debuted in April 2014.[115]Fast Company reviewed an article about
Illinois Secure Choice—a state-funded retirement saving system—as "neither a terse news item, nor a formal financial advice column, nor a politically charged response to economic policy", citing its informal and neutral tone.[116]The Upshot developed "the needle" for the
2016 presidential election and
2020 presidential elections, a reviled thermometer dial displaying the probability of a candidate winning.[117] In January 2016, Cox was named editor of The Upshot.[118] Kevin Quealy was named editor in June 2022.[119]
Political positions
According to an internal readership poll conducted by The New York Times in 2019, eighty-four percent of readers identified as liberal.[120]
The New York Times has published recipes since the 1850s and has had a separate food section since the 1940s.[122] In 1961, restaurant critic
Craig Claiborne published The New York Times Cookbook,[123] an unauthorized cookbook that drew from the Times's recipes.[124] Since 2010, former food editor
Amanda Hesser has published The Essential New York Times Cookbook, a compendium of recipes from The New York Times.[125] The Innovation Report in 2014 revealed that the Times had attempted to establish a cooking website since 1998, but faced difficulties with the absence of a defined data structure.[126] In September 2014, The New York Times introduced NYT Cooking, an application and website.[127] Edited by food editor
Sam Sifton,[124] the Times's cooking website features 21,000 recipes as of 2022.[128] NYT Cooking features videos as part of an effort by Sifton to hire two former
Tasty employees from
BuzzFeed.[124] In August 2023, NYT Cooking added personalized recommendations through the
cosine similarity of text embeddings of recipe titles.[129] The website also features no-recipe recipes, a concept proposed by Sifton.[130]
In May 2016, The New York Times Company announced a partnership with startup Chef'd to form a meal delivery service that would deliver ingredients from The New York Times Cooking recipes to subscribers;[131] Chef'd shut down in July 2018 after failing to accrue capital and secure financing.[132]The Hollywood Reporter reported in September 2022 that the Times would expand its delivery options to US$95 cooking kits curated by chefs such as
Nina Compton, Chintan Pandya, and Naoko Takei Moore. That month, the staff of NYT Cooking went on tour with Compton, Pandya, and Moore in Los Angeles,
New Orleans, and New York City, culminating in a food festival.[133] In addition, The New York Times offered its own
wine club originally operated by the Global Wine Company. The New York Times Wine Club was established in August 2009, during a dramatic decrease in advertising revenue.[134] By 2021, the wine club was managed by
Lot18, a company that provides proprietary labels. Lot18 managed the
Williams Sonoma Wine Club and its own wine club Tasting Room.[135]
The New York Times archives its articles in
a basement annex beneath its building known as "the morgue", a venture started by managing editor
Carr Van Anda in 1907. The morgue comprises news clippings, a pictures library, and the Times's book and periodicals library. As of 2014, it is the largest library of any media company, dating back to 1851.[136] In November 2018, The New York Times partnered with
Google to digitize the Archival Library.[137] Additionally, The New York Times has maintained a virtual microfilm reader known as TimesMachine since 2014. The service launched with archives from 1851 to 1980; in 2016, TimesMachine expanded to include archives from 1981 to 2002. The Times built a pipeline to take in
TIFF images, article metadata in
XML and an
INI file of
Cartesian geometry describing the boundaries of the page, and convert it into a
PNG of image tiles and
JSON containing the information in the XML and INI files. The image tiles are generated using
GDAL and displayed using
Leaflet, using data from a
content delivery network. The Times ran
optical character recognition on the articles using
Tesseract and
shingled and
fuzzy string matched the result.[138]
Content management system
The New York Times uses a proprietary[139]content management system known as Scoop for its online content and the
Microsoft Word-based content management system
CCI for its print content. Scoop was developed in 2008 to serve as a secondary content management system for editors working in CCI to publish their content on the Times's website; as part of The New York Times's online endeavors, editors now write their content in Scoop and send their work to CCI for print publication. Since its introduction, Scoop has superseded several processes within the Times, including print edition planning and collaboration, and features tools such as multimedia integration, notifications, content tagging, and drafts. The New York Times uses private articles for high-profile opinion pieces, such as those written by Russian president
Vladimir Putin and actress
Angelina Jolie, and for high-level investigations.[140] In January 2012, the Times released Integrated Content Editor (ICE), a revision tracking tool for
WordPress and
TinyMCE. ICE is integrated within the Times's workflow by providing a unified text editor for print and online editors, reducing the divide between print and online operations.[141]
By 2017,[142]The New York Times began developing a new authoring tool to its content management system known as Oak, in an attempt to further the Times's visual efforts in articles and reduce the discrepancy between the mediums in print and online articles.[143] The system reduces the input of editors and supports additional visual mediums in an editor that resembles the appearance of the article.[142] Oak is based on ProseMirror, a
JavaScript rich-text editor toolkit, and retains the revision tracking and commenting functionalities of The New York Times's previous systems. Additionally, Oak supports predefined article headers.[144] In 2019, Oak was updated to support collaborative editing using
Firebase to update editors's cursor status. Several Google Cloud Functions and Google Cloud Tasks allow articles to be previewed as they will be printed, and the Times's primary
MySQL database is regularly updated to update editors on the article status.[145]
Since 1895, The New York Times has maintained a
manual of style in several forms. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage was published on the Times's
intranet in 1999.[146]
The New York Times uses
honorifics when referring to individuals. With the AP Stylebook's removal of honorifics in 2000 and The Wall Street Journal's omission of courtesy titles in May 2023, the Times is the only national newspaper that continues to use honorifics. According to former copy editor Merrill Perlman, The New York Times continues to use honorifics as a "sign of civility".[147] The Times's use of courtesy titles led to an apocryphal rumor that the paper had referred to singer
Meat Loaf as "Mr. Loaf".[148] Several exceptions have been made; the former sports section and The New York Times Book Review do not use honorifics.[149] A leaked memo following the
killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 revealed that editors were given a last-minute instruction to omit the honorific from
Osama bin Laden's name, consistent with deceased figures of historic significance, such as
Adolf Hitler,
Napoleon, and
Vladimir Lenin.[150]The New York Times uses academic and military titles for individuals prominently serving in that position.[151] In 1986, the Times began to use
Ms,[149] and introduced the gender-neutral title
Mx. in 2015.[152]The New York Times uses initials when a subject has expressed a preference, such as
Donald Trump.[153]
The New York Times maintains a strict but not absolute obscenity policy, including phrases. In a review of the Canadian
hardcore punk band
Fucked Up, music critic
Kelefa Sanneh wrote that the band's name—entirely rendered in asterisks—would not be printed in the Times "unless an American president, or someone similar, says it by mistake";[154]The New York Times did not repeat then-vice president
Dick Cheney's use of "fuck" against then-senator
Patrick Leahy in 2004[155] or then-vice president
Joe Biden's remarks that the passage of the
Affordable Care Act in 2010 was a "big fucking deal".[156] The Times's profanity policy has been tested by former president
Donald Trump. The New York Times published Trump's
Access Hollywood tape in October 2016 containing the words "fuck", "pussy", "bitch", and "tits", the first time the publication had published an expletive on its front page,[157] and repeated an explicit phrase for fellatio stated by then-
White House communications director
Anthony Scaramucci in July 2017.[158]The New York Times omitted Trump's use of the phrase "
shithole countries" from its headline in favor of "vulgar language" in January 2018.[159] The Times banned certain words, such as "bitch", "whore", and "sluts", from Wordle in 2022.[160]
Headlines
Journalists for The New York Times do not write their own headlines, but rather copy editors who specifically write headlines. The Times's guidelines insist headline editors get to the main point of an article but avoid giving away endings, if present. Other guidelines include using slang "sparingly", avoiding
tabloid headlines, not ending a line on a preposition, article, or adjective, and chiefly, not to pun. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage states that wordplay, such as "Rubber Industry Bounces Back", is to be tested on a colleague as a
canary is to be tested in a coal mine; "when no song bursts forth, start rewriting".[161]The New York Times has amended headlines due to controversy. In 2019, following two back-to-back mass shootings in
El Paso and
Dayton, the Times used the headline, "Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism", to describe then-president
Donald Trump's words after the shootings. After criticism from FiveThirtyEight founder
Nate Silver, the headline was changed to, "Assailing Hate But Not Guns".[162]
Online, The New York Times's headlines do not face the same length restrictions as headlines that appear in print; print headlines must fit within a column, often six words. Additionally, headlines must "break" properly, containing a complete thought on each line without splitting up prepositions and adverbs. Writers may edit a headline to fit an article more aptly if further developments occur. The Times uses
A/B testing for articles on the front page, placing two headlines against each other. At the end of the test, the headlines that receives more traffic is chosen.[163] The alteration of a headline regarding intercepted Russian data used in the
Mueller special counsel investigation was noted by Trump in a March 2017 interview with Time, in which he claimed that the headline used the word "wiretapped" in the print version of the paper on January 20, while the digital article on January 19 omitted the word. The headline was intentionally changed in the print version to use "wiretapped" in order to fit within the print guidelines.[164]
Nameplate
The nameplate of The New York Times has been unaltered since 1967. In creating the initial nameplate,
Henry Jarvis Raymond sought to model The London Times, which used
textura popularized following the
fall of the Western Roman Empire and regional variations of
Alcuin's script, as well as a period. With the change to The New-York Times on September 14, 1857, the nameplate followed. Under
George Jones, the
terminals of the "N", "r", and "s" were intentionally exaggerated into swashes. The nameplate in the January 15, 1894, issue trimmed the terminals once more, smoothed the edges, and turned the stem supporting the "T" into an ornament. The hyphen was dropped on December 1, 1896, after
Adolph Ochs purchased the paper. The
descender of the "h" was shortened on December 30, 1914. The largest change to the nameplate was introduced on February 21, 1967, when type designer
Ed Benguiat redesigned the logo, most prominently turning the arrow ornament into a diamond. Notoriously, the new logo dropped the period that remained with the Times up until that point; one reader compared the omission of the period to "performing plastic surgery on
Helen of Troy." Picture editor John Radosta worked with a
New York University professor to determine that dropping the period saved the paper US$41.28 (equivalent to $362.29 in 2022).[165]
Print edition
Design and layout
As of December 2023, The New York Times has printed sixty thousand issues, a statistic represented in the paper's masthead to the right of the volume number, the Times's years in publication written in
Roman numerals.[166] The volume and issues are separated by four dots representing the edition number of that issue; on the day of the 2000 presidential election, the Times was revised four separate times, necessitating the use of an
em dash in place of an ellipsis.[167] The em dash issue was printed hundreds times over before being replaced by the one-dot issue. Despite efforts by newsroom employees to recycle copies sent to The New York Times's office, several copies were kept, including one put on display at the Museum at The Times.[168] From February 7, 1898, to December 31, 1999, the Times's issue number was incorrect by five hundred issues, an error suspected by The Atlantic to be the result of a careless front page type editor. The misreporting was noticed by news editor Aaron Donovan, who was calculating the number of issues in a spreadsheet and noticed the discrepancy. The New York Times celebrated fifty thousand issues on March 14, 1995, an observance that should have occurred on July 26, 1996.[169]
The New York Times has reduced the physical size of its print edition while retaining its
broadsheet format. The New-York Daily Times debuted at 18 inches (460 mm) across. By the 1950s, the Times was being printed at 16 inches (410 mm) across. In 1953, an increase in paper costs to US$10 (equivalent to $109.38 in 2022) a ton increased newsprint costs to US$21.7 million (equivalent to $296,414,676.62 in 2022) On December 28, 1953, the pages were reduced to 15.5 inches (390 mm). On February 14, 1955, a further reduction to 15 inches (380 mm) occurred, followed by 14.5 inches (370 mm) and 13.5 inches (340 mm). On August 6, 2007, the largest cut occurred when the pages were reduced to 12 inches (300 mm),[j] a decision that other broadsheets had previously considered. Then-executive editor
Bill Keller stated that a narrower paper would be more beneficial to the reader but acknowledged a net loss in article space of five percent.[170] In 1985, The New York Times Company established a minority stake in a US$21.7 million (equivalent to $296,414,676.62 in 2022) newsprint plant in
Clermont, Quebec through
Donahue Malbaie.[171] The company sold its equity interest in Donahue Malbaie in 2017.[172]
The New York Times often uses large, bolded headlines for major events. For the print version of the Times, these headlines are written by one copy editor, reviewed by two other copy editors, approved by the masthead editors, and polished by other print editors. The process is completed before 8 p.m., but it may be repeated if further development occur, as did take place during the
2020 presidential election. On the day
Joe Biden was declared the winner, The New York Times utilized a "hammer headline" reading, "Biden Beats Trump", in all caps and bolded. A dozen journalists discussed several potential headlines, such as "It's Biden" or "Biden's Moment", and prepared for a
Donald Trump victory, in which they would use "Trump Prevails".[173] During Trump's
first impeachment, the Times drafted the hammer headline, "Trump Impeached". The New York Times altered the
ligatures between the E and the A, as not doing so would leave a noticeable gap due to the stem of the A sloping away from the E. The Times reused the tight
kerning for "Biden Beats Trump" and Trump's
second impeachment, which simply read, "Impeached".[174]
In cases where two major events occur on the same day or immediately after each other, The New York Times has used a "paddle wheel" headline, where both headlines are used but split by a line. The term dates back to August 8, 1959, when it was revealed that the United States was monitoring Soviet missile firings and when
Explorer 6—shaped like a
paddle wheel—launched. Since then, the paddle wheel has been used several times, including on January 21, 1981, when
Ronald Reagan was
sworn in minutes before
Iran released fifty-two American hostages, ending the
Iran hostage crisis. At the time, most newspapers favored the end of the hostage crisis, but the Times placed the inauguration above the crisis. Since 1981, the paddle wheel has been used twice; on July 26, 2000, when the
2000 Camp David Summit ended without an agreement and when Bush announced that
Dick Cheney would be his running mate, and on June 24, 2016, when the
United Kingdom European Union membership referendum passed, beginning
Brexit, and when the
Supreme Court deadlocked in United States v. Texas.[175]
Since 1997,[180]The New York Times's primary distribution center is located in
College Point, Queens. The facility is 300,000 sq ft (28,000 m2) and employs 170 people as of 2017. The College Point distribution center prints 300,000 to 800,000 newspapers daily. On most occasions, presses start before 11 p.m. and finish before 3 a.m. A robotic crane grabs a roll of newsprint and several rollers ensure ink can be printed on paper. The final newspapers are wrapped in plastic and shipped out.[181] As of 2018, the College Point facility accounted for 41 percent of production. Other copies are printed at 26 other publications, such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Dallas Morning News, The Santa Fe New Mexican, and the Courier Journal. With the
decline of newspapers, particularly regional publications, the Times must travel further; for example, newspapers for Hawaii are flown from San Francisco on
United Airlines, and Sunday papers are flown from Los Angeles on
Hawaiian Airlines. Computer glitches, mechanical issues, and weather phenomena affect circulation but do not stop the paper from reaching customers.[182] The College Point facility prints over two dozen other papers, including The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.[183]
The New York Times has halted its printing process several times to account for major developments. The first printing stoppage occurred on March 31, 1968, when then-president
Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term. Other press stoppages include May 19, 1994, for the death of former first lady
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and July 17, 1996, for
Trans World Airlines Flight 800. The
2000 presidential election necessitated two press stoppages.
Al Gore appeared to concede on November 8, forcing then-executive editor
Joseph Lelyveld to stop the Times's presses to print a new headline, "Bush Appears to Defeat Gore", with a story that stated
George W. Bush was elected president. However, Gore held off his concession speech over doubts over
Florida. Lelyveld reran the headline, "Bush and Gore Vie for an Edge". Since 2000, three printing stoppages have been issued for the death of
William Rehnquist on September 3, 2005, for the
killing of Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011, and for the passage of the
Marriage Equality Act in the
New York State Assembly and subsequent signage by then-governor
Andrew Cuomo on June 24, 2011.[184]
nytimes.com has undergone several major redesigns and infrastructure developments since its debut. In April 2006, The New York Times redesigned its website with an emphasis on multimedia.[185] In preparation for
Super Tuesday in February 2008, the Times developed a live election system using the
Associated Press's
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service and a
Ruby on Rails application; nytimes.com experienced its largest traffic on Super Tuesday and the day after.[186]
Applications
The NYTimes application debuted with the introduction of the
App Store on July 10, 2008. Engadget's Scott McNulty wrote critically of the app, negatively comparing it to The New York Times's mobile website.[187] An
iPad version with select articles was released on April 3, 2010, with the release of the
first-generation iPad.[188] In October, The New York Times expanded NYT Editors' Choice to include the paper's full articles. NYT for iPad was free until 2011.[189] The Times applications on
iPhone and
iPad began offering in-app subscriptions in July 2011.[190] The Times released a
web application for iPad—featuring a format summarizing trending headlines on
Twitter[191]—and a
Windows 8 application in October 2012.[192]
Efforts to ensure profitability through an online magazine and a "Need to Know" subscription emerged in Adweek in July 2013.[193] In March 2014, The New York Times announced three applications—NYT Now, an application that offers pertinent news in a blog format, and two unnamed applications, later known as NYT Opinion[194] and NYT Cooking[126]—to diversify its product laterals.[195]
Podcasts
The Daily is the modern front page of The New York Times.
The New York Times manages several podcasts, including multiple podcasts with Serial Productions. The Times's longest-running podcast is The Book Review Podcast,[197] debuting as Inside
The New York Times Book Review in April 2006.[198]
In October 2021, The New York Times began testing "New York Times Audio", an application featuring podcasts from the Times, audio versions of articles—including from other publications through Audm, and archives from This American Life.[201] The application debuted in May 2023 exclusively on
iOS for Times subscribers. New York Times Audio includes exclusive podcasts such as The Headlines, a daily news recap, and Shorts, short audio stories under ten minutes. In addition, a "Reporter Reads" section features Times journalists reading their articles and providing commentary.[202]
The New York Times has used video games as part of its journalistic efforts, among the first publications to do so,[203] contributing to an increase in Internet traffic;[204] the publication has also developed its own video games. In 2014, The New York Times Magazine introduced Spelling Bee, a
word game in which players guess words from a set of letters in a
honeycomb and are awarded points for the length of the word and receive extra points if the word is a
pangram.[205] The game was proposed by
Will Shortz, created by
Frank Longo, and has been maintained by Sam Ezersky. In May 2018, Spelling Bee was published on nytimes.com, furthering its popularity.[206] In February 2019, the Times introduced Letter Boxed, in which players form words from letters placed on the edges of a square box,[207] followed in June 2019 by Tiles, a
matching game in which players form sequences of tile pairings, and Vertex, in which players connect vertices to assemble an image.[208] In July 2023, The New York Times introduced Connections, in which players identify groups of words that are connected by a common property.[209] In April, the Times introduced Digits, a game that required using
operations on different values to reach a set number; Digits was shut down in August.[210] In March 2024, The New York Times released Strands, a themed
word search.[211]
In January 2022, The New York Times Company acquired Wordle, a word game developed by
Josh Wardle in 2021, at a valuation in the "low-seven figures".[212] The acquisition was proposed by David Perpich, a member of the Sulzberger family who proposed the purchase to Knight[213] over
Slack after reading about the game.[214]The Washington Post purportedly considered acquiring Wordle, according to Vanity Fair.[213] At the 2022
Game Developers Conference, Wardle stated that he was overwhelmed by the volume of Wordle facsimiles and overzealous monetization practices in other games.[215] Concerns over The New York Times monetizing Wordle by implementing a paywall mounted;[216]Wordle is a client-side
browser game and can be played offline by downloading its webpage.[217]Wordle moved to the Times's servers and website in February.[218] The game was added to the NYT Games application in August,[219] necessitating it be rewritten in the
JavaScript library
React.[220] In November, The New York Times announced that
Tracy Bennett would be the Wordle's editor.[221]
In April 2009, The New York Times released a crossword application for
iOS developed by
Magmic.[222] A
sudoku application developed by Magmic was released in October.[223] NYT Crosswords debuted on the
Google Play Store in November 2016.[224] In April 2017, the application was added to the
Amazon Appstore. NYT Crosswords supports saving across devices and nytimes.com.[225] In March 2023, NYT Crosswords was renamed to NYT Games to address the application's other games, including Wordle, Spelling Bee, Tiles, and Sudoku. According to Jonathan Knight, chief executive of The New York Times Games, the Times was concerned over how the application would rank in search results for "crossword".[226] In May 2007,[227]The New York Times released The New York Times Crosswords for the
Nintendo DS. The game, developed by
Budcat Creations and published by
Majesco Entertainment, features
The New York Times crossword puzzles from March 2004 to November 2006. The New York Times Crosswords includes a campaign mode, in which the player solves seven successive puzzles with increasing difficulty.[228]
In February 2016, The New York Times introduced a Spanish website, The New York Times en Español.[230] The website, intended to be read on mobile devices, would contain translated articles from the Times and reporting from journalists based in
Mexico City.[231] The Times en Español's style editor is Paulina Chavira, who has advocated for pluralistic Spanish to accommodate the variety of nationalities in the newsroom's journalists and wrote a stylebook for The New York Times en Español[232] Articles the Times intends to publish in Spanish are sent to a translation agency and adapted for Spanish writing conventions; the present progressive tense may be used for forthcoming events in English, but other tenses are preferable in Spanish. The Times en Español consults the
Real Academia Española and
Fundéu and frequently modifies the use of diacritics—such as using an acute accent for the
Cártel de Sinaloa but not the
Cartel de Medellín—and using the gender-neutral pronoun
elle.[233] Headlines in The New York Times en Español are not capitalized. The Times en Español publishes El Times, a newsletter led by Elda Cantú intended for all Spanish speakers.[234] In September 2019, The New York Times ended The New York Times en Español's separate operations.[235] A study published in The Translator in 2023 found that the Times en Español engaged in
tabloidization.[236]
The New York Times in Chinese
In June 2012, The New York Times introduced a Chinese website, 纽约时报中文, in response to Chinese editions created by The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Conscious to
censorship, the Times established servers outside of China and affirmed that the website would uphold the paper's journalistic standards; the
government of China had previously blocked articles from nytimes.com through the
Great Firewall,[237] and the website was blocked in China until August 2001 after then-general secretary
Jiang Zemin met with journalists from The New York Times.[238] Then-foreign editor
Joseph Kahn assisted in the establishment of cn.nytimes.com, an effort that contributed to his appointment as executive editor in April 2022.[239] In October, 纽约时报中文 published an article detailing the wealth of then-premier
Wen Jiabao's family. In response, the government of China blocked access to nytimes.com and cn.nytimes.com and references to the Times and Wen were censored on microblogging service
Sina Weibo.[238] In March 2015, a
mirror of 纽约时报中文 and the website for
GreatFire were the targets for a government-sanctioned
distributed denial of service attack on
GitHub in March 2015, disabling access to the service for several days.[240] Chinese authorities requested the removal of The New York Times's news applications from the
App Store in December 2016.[241]
The New Yorker's Max Norman wrote in March 2023 that the Times has shaped mainstream English usage.[250] In a January 2018 article for The Washington Post,
Margaret Sullivan stated that The New York Times affects the "whole media and political ecosystem".[251]
The New York Times's nascent success has led to concerns over media consolidation, particularly amid the
decline of newspapers. In 2006, economists Lisa George and
Joel Waldfogel examined the consequences of the Times's national distribution strategy and audience with circulation of local newspapers, finding that local circulation decreased among college-educated readers.[252] The effect of The New York Times in this manner was observed in The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, the newspaper of record for
Fargo, North Dakota.[253]Axios founder
Jim VandeHei opined that the Times is "going to basically be a monopoly" in an opinion piece written by then-media columnist and former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief
Ben Smith; in the article, Smith argued that the strength of The New York Times's journalistic workforce, broadening content, and the expropriation of Gawker editor-in-chief
Choire Sicha, Recode editor-in-chief
Kara Swisher, and Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney. Smith compared the Times to the
New York Yankees during their
1927 season containing
Murderers' Row.[254]
The New York Times's coverage of the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict has received criticism, and the paper's stance on Israel has been a topic of contention. The New York Times published a headline claiming that Israel was responsible for the
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, attributing the explosion to claims by
Hamas. The Times issued an editors' note several days later;[255] president
Joe Biden reportedly privately expressed that the headline could have escalated the
Israel–Hamas war.[256]
The New York Times has received criticism regarding its coverage of transgender people. When it published an opinion piece by
Weill Cornell Medicine professor
Richard A. Friedman called "How Changeable Is Gender?" in August 2015,[257]Vox's German Lopez criticized Friedman as suggesting that parents and doctors might be right in letting children suffer from severe dysphoria in case something changes down the line, and as implying that conversion therapy may work for transgender children.[258] In February 2023, nearly one thousand[259] current and former Times writers and contributors wrote an open letter addressed to standards editor Philip B. Corbett, criticizing the paper's coverage of transgender,
non-binary, and
gender-nonconforming people; some of the Times' articles have been cited in state legislatures attempting to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.[260] Contributors wrote in the open letter that "the Times has in recent years treated
gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of
pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on
trans children that omits relevant information about its sources."[l]
Notes
^Includes 9,700,000 online-only and 660,000 print subscribers.
^Also referred to as simply the Times[1] or the NY Times.[2]The New York Times uses the domain nytimes.com.[3]
^In 1896, the Times endorsed
John M. Palmer, the
National Democratic Party nominee, its only endorsement for a candidate who is not a member of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.[83]
^The national edition of The New York Times uses 11.5 inches (290 mm) pages.[170]
Apcar, Leonard (April 2, 2006).
"A Letter to Our Readers". The New York Times. Archived from
the original on April 16, 2015. Retrieved November 6, 2023.
Diamond, Sarah (July 2, 2023).
"The Naming of Gaming (and Its History)". The New York Times. Retrieved July 20, 2023. In 1934, The Times ran excerpts from sermons from two churches in New York City in which the pastors denounced lotteries.
Knapp, Shepherd (1909). A history of the Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York.
Lankevich, George J. (2001). Postcards from Times Square. Square One Publishers.
ISBN9780757001000.
Martin, Shannon; Hansen, Kathleen (1998). Newspapers of Record in a Digital Age: From Hot Type to Hot Link. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
ISBN9780275959609.
Stern, Robert A. M.; Mellins, Thomas; Fishman, David (1999). New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age. Monacelli Press.
ISBN9781580930277.