Following in his father’s footsteps, Arthur G. Sulzberger III reports to work Monday as a Metro desk reporter at The New York Times.
The 28-year-old son of publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. will start off as a contributor to the City Room, a local blog.
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Beyond his duties as a junior reporter and writer, the fifth-generation Sultzberger is clearly being groomed to inherit the reins of the struggling newspaper company, which in addition to its flagship publication, publishes The Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune.
Like his father before him, the younger Sulzberger begins at the Times after developing his reporting chops at The Oregonian and The Providence Journal. (His father began at The Raleigh Times and then reported for the Associated Press before taking a job in The Times’ Washington bureau and eventually moving over to the business side in preparation for his promotion to publisher in 1992 and then, company chairman in 1997).
Those who have worked with Arthur Gregg Sulzberger – his middle name is the maiden name of his mother, Gail Gregg, who separated from Arthur Jr. last year – give him high marks.
“He’s incredibly down-to-earth, modest and eager to learn the right way,” one Times newsroom source told the New York Observer. “If you look at his journalism, it’s journalism that people here would produce.
“When I looked at his clips, I said ‘Oooh! This guy ain’t bad!’” the source added. “I was actually very pleasantly surprised.”
While the younger Sulzberger was at The Oregonian, he wrote under the byline, Arthur Sulzberger, breaking a series of stories that led to the resignation of the sheriff of Oregon’s largest county.
“Sheriff Bernie Giusto was the longtime and greatly admired sheriff here, and there was a two-year investigation that was relentless, and Arthur’s work helped push Giusto from office,” said Sandy Rowe, editor of The Oregonian.
But at the start of the 21st century, being a dogged reporter and a decent guy may not cut it for the heir apparent to run a beleaguered multimedia company which faces competition not just from other media companies, but from Internet giants like Google.
As business blogger Henry Blodget noted yesterday, New York Times stock now costs less than the Sunday paper, and it’s getting cheaper all the time amid a stampede of readers and advertisers to the Internet.
And even with a $250 million cash infusion from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the Times’ debt is estimated at $1.1 billion and some investors are restless. On Thursday, the paper suspended dividend payments to shareholdersfor the first time in four decades as a publicly traded company.
Still, the Times’s family-controlled stock structure seems likely to protect the company from most challenges from outside investors. And few doubt that “Pinch” Sulzberger, as the Times’ chairman is nicknamed, would like to see his son take over.
In the 1992 book The Girls in the Balcony, which documented a sex-discrimination suit against the Times, author Nan Robertson quotes Sulzberger telling a female executive, “I want to leave my son a different newspaper from the one I’m inheriting.”(It wasn’t until later that the executive thought to point out that Sulzberger has a daughter as well.)
Annie Sulzberger shows little interest in the Times, however, pursuing a career in art preservation while “aspiring to be a Daily Show correspondent,” according to New York magazine’s description of her Friendster page (which also features a photo of her and her brother smoking a hookah while watching a Woody Allen film).
So Arthur Gregg Sulzberger III steps up to the plate, where he can expect to be scrutinized like virtually no other reporter.
That may be good preparation as he auditions for the daunting role of newspaper savior.
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