The New York Times

Overview

In January 2009, the richest man in the world lent a quarter of a billion dollars to a newspaper — at 14 percent interest. The New York Times Company, publisher of the daily long described as America’s newspaper of record, was sitting on $1.1 billion in debt with $350 million in loans coming due within two years, and it had just suspended its dividend entirely (Poynter; Economic Times). The lender was Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim — then reckoned by Forbes the richest man in the world — and the terms were punishing: a six-year loan plus warrants to buy stock at a rock-bottom $6.35 a share (Poynter). Two months later the company sold 21 floors of its own 52-story Midtown Manhattan headquarters, a building that had opened only in 2007, for $225 million — and leased the space straight back for 15 years (Economic Times).

That is the part of the Times story the standard profiles skip. The paper survived because the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has controlled it since 1896, refused to sell when the owners of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post chose to — and because a family trust’s grip on a special class of shares made a sale nearly impossible anyway (Poynter; TheStreet). Today the company is the juggernaut of the newspaper industry: 12.78 million subscribers at the end of 2025, 139 Pulitzer Prizes (more than any other news organization), a newsroom of more than 2,000 journalists, and 2024 pre-tax profits of $351 million (TheWrap; Indian Express; Poynter). This profile is about the business machinery behind the journalism: the debt crisis, the family firewall, the paywall that failed before the one that worked, and the games-and-recipes bundle that made the Times a subscription company.

The winter of 2009

The crisis had been building for years. Through the late 1990s the Times Company had diversified — buying The Boston Globe, investing in TV and radio, even taking a stake in the Boston Red Sox — and by 2009 the bill came due in the middle of a global financial meltdown (Poynter). Few banks would lend to a newspaper company at any price, so the Times paid Slim’s double-digit rate; company treasurer Tony Benten later called it “a very stressful time frame,” adding that cheaper offers had come with terms “much more restrictive,” potentially tying management’s hands just as a broad digital transformation was beginning (Poynter).

The Slim money was only the start of the triage. The $225 million headquarters sale-leaseback to investment firm W.P. Carey & Co. followed in March (Economic Times). The dividend — cut the previous fall — was suspended entirely in February 2009, saving $133 million a year (Economic Times). The company shopped its 17.8 percent stake in the group that owns the Red Sox, sold About.com for $300 million, and in 2013 unloaded The Boston Globe for $70 million — a paper it had bought for $1.1 billion in 1993, its “worst investment ever” (Poynter). Inside the building, March 2009 brought a 5 percent temporary pay cut and October brought the elimination of 100 newsroom jobs (Poynter).

Slim did very well out of the rescue. The Times paid the loan off early — after two years and seven months — and refinanced cheaper; Slim’s profit on the loan itself was roughly $90 million (Poynter). He waited until January 2015 to fully exercise his warrants, by which time the shares had doubled to $12.60; his 16 million shares gave him 17 percent of the company’s public stock, worth roughly $100 million on paper (Poynter). He kept holding as the stock climbed — $23.25 in January 2018, $32 at the start of 2020, the year he sold the last of his stake — turning his $100 million warrant investment into more than five times that (Poynter). Three months after the loan closed, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. profiled Slim for Time’s 100 most influential people issue, calling him “a model of responsible capitalism” (Poynter).

The family firewall

What made the 2009 story possible — and what made a sale unthinkable — is the Times’ capital structure. The company has two classes of stock: Class A, which the public buys, and Class B, held privately — with the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust owning 89 percent of the Class B shares and 19 percent of the Class A (TheStreet). Class A shareholders elect only 4 of the company’s 13 directors; Class B elects 9 (TheStreet). The family set it up this way when the company went public in 1969 — Sulzberger said it was designed “specifically to get us through times like this” — and defends it as protection for the paper’s journalism against Wall Street’s quarterly pressures (TheStreet).

Wall Street has never liked it. In 2008, Morgan Stanley portfolio manager Hassan Elmasry, whose fund owned 7 percent of the company, led a campaign against the structure — and at that year’s annual meeting roughly 42 percent of Class A shareholders withheld their votes for the four public directors, up from 30 percent the year before (TheStreet). It changed nothing: the Class B holders were unanimous, and the revolt was purely symbolic (TheStreet). Washington Post CEO Donald Graham, whose own company used a similar structure, warned that dropping it would mean “a line of buyers eager to purchase the company would form within minutes” — private equity firms, billionaires, international media companies (TheStreet). The structure also explains the fine print of the Slim deal: even as the company’s largest shareholder at around 17 percent, Slim could only vote for Class A directors — a third of the board — and a board seat was never part of his agreement (Poynter).

The paywall that failed, then the one that worked

The Times tried charging for the web once before — and quit. In 2005 it launched TimesSelect, walling off op-ed columnists like Thomas Friedman plus the archives for $49.95 a year (AllThingsD; NewsBreaks). It generated around $10 million a year, was judged a failed experiment, and was dropped in September 2007 (AllThingsD). Then the advertising collapse of 2008–2009 changed the math: as one 2010 report put it, $10 million a year suddenly “sounds like a nice boost for a paper that lost more than $35 million in its most recent quarter” (AllThingsD).

On January 20, 2010, after studying more than 30 businesses that charged for web content, the Times announced it would try again — this time with a metered model copied from the Financial Times, offering a set number of free articles a month before asking readers to pay (AllThingsD; NewsBreaks). The details, unveiled in March 2011: 20 free articles a month, then three plans at $15, $20 or $35 per four weeks depending on whether the reader wanted smartphone, tablet, or both apps alongside the website (AFP). Canada got it first so the company could “fine-tune the customer experience”; the U.S. and the rest of the world followed on March 28, while print home-delivery subscribers kept free digital access (AFP). Journalism professor Dan Kennedy called it a smart approach but cautioned the Times was “not a very good test case for the news business as a whole” — its readers, he said, included “a huge base of people out there who are willing to pay for the Times and pretty much nothing else” (AFP).

From newspaper to bundle

The paywall bought the paper time; the bundle bought it growth. In 2014, A. G. Sulzberger — Arthur’s son — wrote an internal Innovation Report arguing that a lingering print-first culture was slowing digital change; he became publisher in January 2018 and chairman in 2021 (Poynter). Mark Thompson, recruited from the BBC, ran the company as CEO from 2012, and his deputy Meredith Kopit Levien succeeded him in 2020 (Poynter).

The acquisitions that defined the era were not news properties. In January 2022 the Times bought Wordle — the once-a-day word game created by Brooklyn software engineer Josh Wardle — for an undisclosed price “in the low seven figures,” promising it would “initially” stay free and setting a public goal of 10 million subscribers by 2025 (Japan Times). The “initially” provoked a minor uproar from fans fearing a paywall (Japan Times). The bet paid off fast: Wordle drew ”10s of millions of users,” enough of whom sampled the other Times games to drive the best quarter of paid games-subscription growth the company had ever seen (Poynter). A month later the Times closed the $550 million purchase of The Athletic — about half its cash on hand — adding 1.1 million subscribers in a single stroke (Poynter; Japan Times). Earlier digital buys had included the product-review site Wirecutter and the audio app Audm (Japan Times).

By the end of 2025 the strategy had produced 12.78 million total subscribers — 12.21 million of them digital-only — with more than half (6.48 million) on bundles combining news with Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic (TheWrap). The company added 1.4 million digital-only subscribers in 2025 alone and set its sights on 15 million by the end of 2027 (TheWrap; Poynter). In September 2025 it introduced family subscriptions — up to four users on one account, each counted as two subscribers — and by early 2026 it was investing in video and a “Watch” tab in its app while suing OpenAI and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations (TheWrap).

The paper behind the business

The business story sits on top of a 175-year-old newspaper. The first issue of the New-York Daily Times appeared on September 18, 1851, founded by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones; it became The New York Times in 1857 and added a Sunday edition in April 1861 as Civil War readers demanded news every day (Smithsonian). In 1871 the paper’s publication of city boss William “Boss” Tweed’s “secret accounts” brought down the Tweed Ring (Encyclopedia.com). By the 1890s the paper was failing — until 38-year-old Adolph S. Ochs of the Chattanooga Times bought it in 1896 for $75,000, much of it put up by wealthy Democrats, promising to “give the news impartially, without fear or favor” (Encyclopedia.com). Ochs coined the motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print” in 1896; it first appeared on the front page on February 10, 1897 (Smithsonian). His business plan was simple — spend on quality and profits will follow — and in his first 25 years the paper plowed 97 percent of what it earned back into the enterprise (Encyclopedia.com).

The publisher’s chair then passed down the family line: Ochs to his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to his son-in-law Orvil Dryfoos, to Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., to A. G. Sulzberger (Encyclopedia.com; Poynter). Along the way the paper published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — a decision vindicated by the Supreme Court on June 30, 1971 — and won the 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which extended First Amendment protection against libel suits by public officials (Encyclopedia.com). Its trophy case now holds 139 Pulitzer Prizes, a record high as of May 2025, including that year’s breaking-news photography prize for Doug Mills’ images of the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump — one frame capturing a bullet in mid-air (Indian Express).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state the paper’s current print circulation — no verified recent figure was found, only that print subscription revenue fell 2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. It does not name the architect of the Times headquarters; the building is described only as the 52-story Midtown Manhattan tower opened in 2007, which is what the cited sources support. The dual-class ownership figures (89 percent of Class B, 19 percent of Class A) are from 2008 reporting and are presented as such, not as current holdings. The 15-million-subscriber goal is stated as the target announced with the fourth-quarter 2025 results, not as a current fact. The OpenAI and Perplexity lawsuits are noted only as existing; this profile makes no claim about their merits or status. The Pulitzer total of 139 is dated to May 2025 — later wins are not reflected. And “newspaper of record” is used here as the paper’s long-standing public description, not as this profile’s independent finding.