New York Times, The

The New York Times (NYT) is an American daily newspaper, founded and continuously published in New York City since September 18, 1851. The paper is owned by The New York Times Company. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., whose family has controlled the paper since 1896, is the paper’s publisher as well as the company’s chairman. The Times has won 132 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization, and its website is dominant. The online version of the Times site is the most popular among all U.S. newspapers, with more than 22 million unique visitors per day, as of January 2025.

The Times enjoyed early success when editors set a pattern for the future by appealing to a cultured, intellectual readership instead of a mass audience. The paper made it a point to avoid sensationalism and concentrated on a restrained and objective stance toward news reporting.

The Times’ founders were Henry Jarvis Raymond, a politician and journalist, and George Jones, a former banker; they called their newspaper the New-York Daily Times. In 1857, the New-York Daily Times eliminated the hyphen in its name and became The New York Times. The paper’s print version is the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States, and third-largest newspaper overall, after The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Following industry trends, its weekday circulation has fallen to fewer than one million daily since 1990, as newspaper industry trends have shown shrinkage in their print editions and distribution.

The New York Times Company, which is publically traded, has been governed by the Sulzberger family since 1896. A.G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher and the company's chairman, is the fifth generation of the family to head the paper.

The paper’s motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, appears on the front page, and its website adapted the motto to “All the News That’s Fit to Click.” The slogan was seen as a jab at competing publications, such as Joseph Pulitzers’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, both of which were known for lurid and sensationalist reporting that came to be called “Yellow Journalism.”

The international version, formerly called The International Herald Tribune, is now called the International New York Times and the Times paper hails itself as “the newspaper of record.” The newspaper is organized into nine sections: News, Opinions, Business, Arts, Science, Sports, Style, Home, and Features. The New York Times stayed with the eight-column format for several years after most papers switched to six, and was among the last newspapers to adopt color photography.

The Times was established as a penny paper that would avoid reporting on lurid topics and instead report the news in a restrained, objective fashion. It enjoyed early success as its editors set a pattern for the future by appealing to a well-educated and intellectual readership. The paper’s high moral and literary tone did not help in the frenzied competition of other papers for readers in New York. The Times was losing $1,000 a week when Adolph Simon Ochs bought it in 1896.

On April 21, 1861, The New York Times began publishing a Sunday edition to extend its daily coverage of the American Civil War. The main office of The New York Times was attacked during the New York City draft riots of 1863, which resulted from the institution of a draft for the Union Army.

Ochs built the Times into an internationally respected daily in part by hiring an editor away from the New York Sun, Carr Van Anda. Ochs placed stress on full reporting of the news of the day. He maintained good coverage of international news, eliminated fiction from the paper, added a Sunday magazine section, and reduced the paper’s newsstand price back to its original price of a penny. The paper’s use of all available resources to report the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 enhanced its prestige. In its coverage of two world wars the Times continued to enjoy its reputation for excellence in reporting world news.

In 1971 the Times became the center of controversy when it published a series of reports based on the  “Pentagon Papers,” a secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War that had been covertly given to the Times by government officials. The U.S. Supreme Court found that the Times was protected by the freedom-of-the-press clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The publication of the “Pentagon Papers” brought the Times a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. By the early 21st century the paper had won more than 120 Pulitzers, considerably more than any other news organization. In the 1970s the paper, under Adolph Ochs’s grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, introduced important updates to the paper’s technology and organization. Sulzberger brought out a national edition that was transmitted by satellite to regional printing plants.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger took over the Times when his father-in-law, Ochs, died in 1935; Sulzberger helped expand the newspaper after the Second World War. Its famous crossword puzzle first appeared in 1942, and the Times published an international version for 21 years. The Times joined with The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune to create the International Herald Tribune in 1967.

Since 1996, The New York Times has been publishing online after witnessing declining print sales throughout the 2000s, and the paper looked for ways to downsize. By March 2005, The New York Times had 555 million page views and around 146 million visitors annually. By March 2009, the Times became the most visited newspaper site, with twice as many site visits as the next largest digital newspaper. A 2008 application allowed visitors to read the Times on smartphones.

The Times continued to utilize new technologies and expanded its circulation; the newspaper launched an online edition in 1995 and employed color photography in its print edition in 1997, the first newspaper to do so. The publication introduced a subscription service called TimesSelect in 2005 and charged subscribers for access to portions of its online edition. But the program was discontinued two years later: all news, editorials, and much of its archival content was opened to the public. In 2006 the Times launched an electronic version, the Times Reader, which allowed subscribers to download the current print edition. The following year the publication relocated to the newly constructed New York Times Building in Manhattan and soon began, like many industry publications, to struggle to redefine its role in the face of free Internet content. In 2011 the Times instituted a subscription plan for its digital edition that limited free access to content. The Times’ article archive contains 13 million entries. 

Joseph Kahn is the executive editor.