Behind the Times (66 page)

Arthur Sulzberger and his lieutenants began talking up the importance of creating new “products.” The Times Company needed to adopt “the thinking habits” of a larger corporation. Arthur’s ongoing subcommittees on the future—in some respects, the son
was
like the father—began to act as if print were passé. If the newspaper of the future finally deaggregated into electronic data bases, then the
Times
had to be ready with its own array of marketable products. As Jack Rosenthal had asked, rhetorically, “
Who said information must come in the format of a newspaper?” At one point, of course, the
Times
was involved with the new information media. In the 1980s it owned one of the premium
cable-television systems in the country, NYT Cable in southern New Jersey. The securities analysts considered NYT Cable an attractive property; the system was equipped with the latest addressable-converter equipment, and it served a growing suburban audience. Yet in 1988 the
Times
sold NYT Cable, and walked away from its high-tech product line. Punch Sulzberger explained at the time that the company wanted “to focus our efforts on our core businesses.” When Punch Sulzberger’s father sold off the
Times’
facsimile business thirty years before, he cited that same intention to concentrate on the core paper. At the beginning of 1993, the Times Company owned thirty-one small- to modest-sized regional newspapers and published seventeen average-to-good-magazines, including
Family Circle
and
McCalls
; it also owned a group of television stations, mainly in smaller Southern markets. But the core of the core business was, obviously, the
New York Times
newspaper.

As Punch Sulzberger and Walt Mattson shifted company strategy away from
the new media of cable, they put greater resources into the National edition of the
Times.
Although they were not exactly turning their backs on the “basic”
Times
newspaper distributed in New York City, the surrounding suburbs, and the Northeast region, Boston to Washington, the planning committees had concluded that further advertising and circulation gains in these areas were unlikely. The proposed acquisition of the
Boston Globe
in mid-1993 was further confirmation of the national strategy, and the belief that the “basic”
Times
was reaching its upper limits of growth. Consequently, if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.

The soft consumerist sections of the 1970s had attracted the upmarket
New Yorkers and suburbanites needed to keep the
Times
financially and journalistically healthy. By the late 1980s, however, the city’s population growth and its economic activity slowed. In the four decades since 1950 New York City lost 7 percent of its population, from 7.9 million to 7.3 million in 1990. While New York had to give up congressional seats, California, Texas, and Florida were gaining new seats. As New York appeared to stagnate, Sunbelt cities reached double digit growth rates; Los Angeles and San Francisco became, respectively, the nation’s number-two and number-four metropolitan areas in population. Punch Sulzberger decided that the
Times
would reach out to its kind of readers no matter how far they lived from West 43rd Street. He was being prudent; but it still looked like the
Times
was joining an exodus from New York, along with Fortune 500 corporations relocating to low-tax states and a middle class in flight from an increasingly nonwhite city.

The new strategy became evident as early as 1988, when the
Times
began publishing three editions. The “basic” paper, the New York
New York Times
, was the four-section edition available in the city, the suburbs, and along the East Coast. It sold some 900,000 copies on weekdays. Even this paper was no longer city-specific; a majority of its readers lived outside the five boroughs. A second
Times
, the National edition, was the two-section paper beamed by satellite to five printing plants around the country. It sold 140,000 copies weekdays. The first section was composed of international and national news, plus one page of news of the New York metropolitan region, edited down from the basic paper. The second section led with material culled from the Business Day pages; a digest of the “basic” paper’s coverage of culture, life-style, and sports followed. The third
Times
version was the California edition, a three-section daily also transmitted by satellite and printed at three West Coast plants. The added section, the Living Arts, offered a somewhat wider selection from the
Times’
cultural and consumer-service features. The California edition was introduced cautiously, like a swimmer testing the cold Pacific waters. Distribution began in the San Francisco Bay area in April, 1988, followed by expansion to Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and the Tacoma-Portland region. After more testing, the Living Arts idea was incorporated into the National edition and all eight satellite plants began distributing a three-section
Times.
The National edition staff learned how to think in “non-New York” terms. Copy editors were reminded
by Al Siegal, the keeper of
Times
style, that a reference to “the mayor” could mean Tom Bradley to some readers while “upstate” might signify Northern Michigan for others. A story about a ballet company’s plans could no longer refer to “a national five-city tour.…” The cities had to be specified. The play of page-one news often was different in the National edition; one typical morning, a major development involving the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island was the lead story in the “basic” New York paper, while the National edition editors consigned Shoreham to the bottom of their first page.

The
Times
invested $10 million in 1988 alone in the three-section California edition. Promotion efforts included an extensive television and billboard campaign in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and introductory subscriptions at half the newsstand price of 50 cents. The circulation department sponsored West Coast cultural events to give the paper visibility among potential readers and advertisers; a program note for the opening night of
Swan Lake
at the San Francisco Ballet called discreet attention to the
Times’
financial contribution. The
Times
also helped underwrite the fourth annual Moving Pictures Ball, honoring Steven Spielberg, in Los Angeles. The West Coast efforts produced modest results. Circulation in the San Francisco area increased from 18,000 to 31,000 the first year, while in the Los Angeles area, including Orange County, circulation went from 12,500 to 21,000. The numbers translated to about $454 in promotion and other expenditures for each new reader gained, a very high price to pay. On the other hand, these readers had the same desirable demographic profile found in readers of the “basic” New York edition.

The new strategy was correct in its assumption that thousands of professional men and women around the country wanted the
Times.
National advertisers were harder to find. The National edition was an aesthetic success: a smart, good-looking, fast-reading product, a compact version of the basic paper without—bluntly—too much of the crime, grime, and race tensions of the city. But it wasn’t the engine for company growth that management initially envisioned. In fact, it wasn’t making money at all. By 1991 some 250,000 upmarket people were reading the National edition; some special-interest advertisers, like book publishers, found the paper useful. The advertising-agency space buyers for such big-ticket products as automobiles, computers, and financial services were less impressed; they decided that a national
Times
didn’t make good sense for them. From their point of view, they
could reach almost two million readers
for their clients in either of the other two national newspapers, the
Wall Street Journal
and
USA Today
; similarly, the newsweeklies,
U.S. News & World Report
,
Time
, and
Newsweek
, offered readerships ten to twenty times larger than that of the
Times.
As demographically desirable as the National edition audience was, the Sulzbergers’ planning committees had to consider the strong possibility that it had a limited future; it might never be attractive for national advertisers until its circulation doubled.

The planning committees now reported to Arthur Sulzberger. They told him what he already knew: The expansionist 1980s were over. The
Times
newspaper “will probably never reclaim the dominance it had” in that gilded decade, suggested a
Times
internal document circulated in May 1992, four months after Arthur Sulzberger was named publisher. “We need to invest time and effort on the
Times’
other business. A considerable portion of our resources will be dedicated to pursuing other revenue opportunities.” Arthur Sulzberger put the same conclusion in more direct terms: “
The painful economic truth is that we can no longer do business the old way.” If escape from New York was no longer possible, then perhaps the future lay in the escape from newsprint, into electronic publishing. The trouble was, when the
Times
ventured down that road with NYT Cable a few years earlier, it decided to turn back. Now it was taking yet another U-turn, slowly to be sure, gingerly exploring the on-line future with 900 numbers for crossword-puzzle clues, sports scores, and weather forecasts. It did not escape notice that the
Times’
business rivals were moving a bit faster. In 1991 the
Los Angeles Times
began testing two facsimile prototypes, one a six-page edition of late-news made available by fax to opinion makers in Moscow, the other, a “fast-fax” of the prices of the top fifteen stocks, sent out immediately after the 3:00
P.M.
closing bells rang at the New York exchanges. In June 1992, Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the
Wall Street Journal
, announced that it was joining with Pacific Bell, the telephone company, to offer the
Daily Reporter
, a form of “voice mail news.” For $2 a month, subscribers to the
Daily Reporter
could punch up the phone company’s voice mailbox service and listen to three-minute news summaries—world news headlines, a financial report, and a sports update. The customer who wanted only one news service paid 75 cents a month; by contrast, a one-month subscription to the
Wall Street Journal
newspaper cost around $15. The two companies said that the service could be customized
to provide more specific kinds of news, depending on subscribers’ suggestions. The
Daily Reporter
took reader-friendliness to the next logical step, borrowing a slogan from the fast-food chains: Have it your way.

Small and experimental as these projects were, from Arthur’s perspective they meant that other media organizations were already testing new “product.” Facing slow-growth with the National
Times
and uncertain-growth with blue-sky informational services, Arthur reversed the marketing strategy of the previous decade. His
Times
would look homeward. It would be a New York City newspaper, with a distinctly popular appeal, to attract a broader, younger audience. As the 1990s began, Arthur increased by 50 percent the size of the
Times’
sports report, making room for more coverage of the local teams, and counting on more sports to bring in younger male readers. He started the Styles of the
Times
section, with its features devoted to young, Downtown trendoids. And he hired new staff and invested major resources in expanded coverage of the metropolitan region. These new beats of the
Times
, like the people assigned to them, were intended to reflect “diversity.” New York at the time of Arthur’s birth was essentially a white city. In 1951 the population of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other non-whites numbered around one million, out of almost eight million New Yorkers. By Arthur’s fortieth birthday, the number of whites in New York had declined by 50 percent while the non-white population had increased fourfold. Whites were another one of the racial minorities in Arthur’s New York; the 1990 U.S. census showed the city to be 43 percent Caucasian, 28 percent black, 24 percent Latino, and 7 percent Asian (counting some white Hispanics twice). The newest force in the city were foreign-born immigrants. According to a city Planning Commission report released in February 1993, there has been a 25 percent rise in New York’s foreign-born population since 1980. As a result, 2.1 million of the city’s 7.3 million residents were born outside the United States—almost one in every three New Yorkers. At the City College of New York, an incubator for generations of
Times
readers, as well as a recruiting ground for generations of
Times
staff, fourteen thousand undergraduate students were registered for classes in the spring of 1992; more than half of them were born outside the United States. As Arthur explained to the meeting of black journalists in Kansas City, the
Times
had two good reasons for hiring the
children of the city and its new immigrants: first, the “moral imperatives” of affirmative action; second, with the end of “the fat, happy days of the 1980s, diversity makes
good business sense in these current tough economic times.”

The
Times
strategy during the Punch Sulzberger years was based on an appeal to an affluent audience. The paper enterprisingly adapted to the television age by developing consumer-oriented features. It transformed itself from a single-buy newsstand newspaper, in large part dependent on that day’s run of news and the local weather conditions, to a subscription service that followed its readers to their suburban homes, and in the case of the National edition, to their doorsteps in Grosse Pointe and Palo Alto. Through those years the
Times
maintained its reputation for strong national and international reporting—what Punch Sulzberger always referred to as “our franchise, what we do best.” On the day in January 1992 when Punch Sulzberger formally turned over the title of publisher to his son, circulation was at an all-time high, with 1.2 million copies sold daily and over 1.6 million on Sundays. When the
Times
periodically raised its prices during the Punch Sulzberger years, subscribers dutifully paid their higher bills. The core audience wasn’t put off by price. Explaining this demonstration of
“demand elasticity,” Donald Nizen, the former director of circulation, asked: “When was the last time you heard anyone complain at a dinner party that their copy of the
Times
costs too much?” Note that in his example, the
Times’
readers weren’t making small talk at a subway station or corner coffee shop; they were not the sort of New Yorker who fretted over spending a few pennies more a day.