By comparison, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. went through more extensive and far-flung training before becoming publisher in 1992, although his recent tenure has been beset by a series of extended controversies — particularly the fabrication scandal involving Jayson Blair and the criticism that Judith Miller operated with inadequate oversight — that have marred the paper’s reputation and sparked questions about his leadership. Even when the Times broke the story of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping, it faced scorn for holding the story for close to a year.

As Ken Auletta wrote in the New Yorker in December, “These newsroom crises have come when the Times can least afford them — during a period of technological and economic uncertainty that has affected the entire industry. The Times’ stock price fell 33.2 percent between December 31, 2004, and October 31, 2005 — sixty percent more than the industry average, according to Merrill Lynch newspaper analysts. The operating profit of the Times Company has also slipped in each of the past three years. Owing to the cost of fuel, newsprint, and employee benefits, expenditures are increasing by between four and five percent a year and revenues by only about three percent, a senior Times corporate executive says.”

But Auletta also reported that the Times — whose educated readership is highly appealing to advertisers — is one of the few American newspapers with consistent circulation gains. Also, the paper’s online edition “is the world’s most heavily trafficked newspaper Web site.” Despite such assets, though, he questions whether the Times will be able to generate the necessary Web revenue to support the paper’s $200 million news budget and to withstand related questions from Wall Street.

Alex S. Jones, a former Times reporter who directs the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is more sanguine about the paper’s long-term outlook. “I think the New York Times has been taking some pretty heavy blows, but I believe the institution is so extraordinarily important and that the family culture is so extraordinarily strong that in the long term the Times will prevail,” Jones says. “I think they’re having a rough patch at the moment.”

When it comes to succession, Jones says, “I think this new generation, the generation of Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, is being given a much more sort of orderly and structured opportunity than the family [previously] had in place. As I understand it, everyone in the family who wants to get a crack at a job in the company will get a chance. But the value system in the family is that you really have to earn it, and part of that is starting somewhere else and proving yourself somewhere else before you come to the New York Times.”

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Jones believes that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. will ultimately be succeeded by one of his cousins, his son, or one of his son’s many cousins. “I think that the prospects of a member of the family being the chairman and publisher after Arthur Jr. are very great,” he says. “I think that is the tradition of the family. I think the family believes that it is in a position of stewardship that needs to be in family hands. At the same time, that is premised on the idea that there is someone worthy.”

Asked about young Sulzberger’s prospects for one day ascending to the publisher’s office, Auletta says, “My own sense is that it’s too early to burden the young reporter with the question of, ‘Are you going to succeed your father?’ It’s a remarkable family that way. It prides itself on its humility and it tries to instill that.”

In this respect — and in view of the larger questions facing the newspaper industry — Sulzberger’s time at the Providence Journal seems well placed. While being a good journalist requires a variety of skills, Auletta notes, “before you do all that, you have to have the ability to ask questions, and to listen to the answers, and that requires some degree of humility. If you take someone who could have easily been born with a silver spoon in his mouth ... and instead he goes to work at a small newspaper, out of town, it seems that he’s displaying some humility. His father did the same thing. I think that’s smart and also attractive. You don’t want your colleagues to think you’re some spoiled brat.”

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On the Web:

The Providence Journal: //www.projo.com/
The New York Times: //www.nytimes.com/
Ken Auletta on Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the Times: //www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051219fa_fact

Email the author:

Ian Donnis: idonnis@thephoenix.com