Adolph Ochs: From Newspaper Boy to the Savior of the NYT
This article presents curated highlights from a comprehensive piece on the “Some fun, dark, fantastic facts about The New York Times”, specifically focusing on Henry Jarvis Raymond, its founder. It extracts key segments that shed light on Raymond’s critical role in shaping the newspaper’s early years and enduring legacy.
Adolph Ochs
A kid of Jewish immigrants who started as a newspaper boy, he bought a local newspaper with a small amount of down payment, and turned around it, and eventually took over NYT.
He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1858, seven years after the founding of The New York Times, to Jewish immigrants from Germany, in pretty poor. After the civil war, he has to work as a boy to help support the family. He gets a paper route for the Knoxville Chronicle and he ends up just falling in love as a young child with the newspaper business.
At age 14 in 1872, he drops out of school in Rhode Island, comes back to Tennessee, restarts working at The Chronicle, this time in the printing operations.
In Chattanooga, he knows that there’s an existing newspaper called The Chattanooga Times, but it’s not very well-managed. Young Adolph negotiates with the guys who own The Times in Chattanooga to buy the paper for a downpayment of $250. Effectively — for those in small cap private equity, they’ll know this term — a seller’s note of $5500. He gets them to agree for this tiny downpayment.
Within 10 years, he’s completely turned around the paper. It’s the premier newspaper in Chattanooga. He really believed in The Chattanooga Times as an unbiased paper of the people, representing a balanced view of the world. Chattanooga was the perfect place to pull that idea from.
How he took over NYT
“The yokel from Tennessee had accomplished the impossible. He had bought The New York Times using none of his own money.”
He then gets wind of the bankruptcy proceedings going on in New York for The New York Times. At first, he’s like, that’s too big. But some mentors convince him that he can do this. In 1896, he goes up to New York. He’s in his late 30s at the time. He shows up in New York, walks in the bankruptcy court.
He convinced the Chattanooga bank to wire money to a New York bank so that if in New York, people check to see like, are you wealthy, he had a bank account with money in his name. To the Chattanooga bank who he knew well, he wrote them a personal check and said, look I’m good for it. I promise. Just wire the money. I don’t intend to use it.
President Grover Cleveland visited Chattanooga during his campaign,, where Adolph Ochs, the key figure at The Chattanooga Times, met him as part of the welcoming committee. Ochs, trying to acquire The New York Times, later reached out to Cleveland for a reference. He wrote to the President, seeking an endorsement of his credentials as a dedicated and capable newspaper publisher, based on his record with The Chattanooga Times, to aid in his negotiations.
He walks in with a letter of endorsement from the president of the United States. Incredible. The bankruptcy committee accepts his plan. He pays $75,000 upfront to the creditors which he also has scraped together with borrowed money, because he owes $100,000.
After taking over
‘All the news that’s fit to print.’
Ochs lays out his plan for positioning The New York Times which is that they’re going to provide journalistic integrity and something that is “not going to soil the breakfast linen.”
He comes up with a motto to express this new positioning to the New York public, and he comes up with the phrase, ‘All the news that’s fit to print.’ He’s not too sure about it, though.
He runs a prize competition for anybody in New York who can come up with a better slogan, offering $100 prize for the winner. They run it, get lots of entries, the winner is chosen, and the official motto of The New York Times is going to be, ‘All the world’s news, but not a school for scandal.’
He’s like, that’s nice, I’ll pay you $100, but I’m keeping my motto.
He also comes up with an informal credo for the company and for the newsroom, which is
‘To give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of any party, sect, or interest involved.’
Dropped the price and gain controlling
When your back is against the wall, you have to make something work. You have no resources and you’re running out of money. That’s when genius happens when you’re forced into these constraints.
Ochs was so financially motivated to sell more copies since there’s a key clause in his newspaper purchase deal: if he could make the newspaper profitable for three straight years, he’d gain additional shares from escrow, granting him controlling ownership. Initially a minority owner without control, Ochs needed the paper to be profitable for 36 consecutive months. There was confusion over whether this meant 36 months or three calendar years, which led to a legal dispute. Ochs’s strategy to achieve this was to reduce the selling price to boost circulation and, consequently, profits.
- Grows 3X in his first year. Back up to 30,000 circulation.
- By 1899, it’s at 76,000, so back above the 75,000 that it had been.
- Crosses 100,000 in 1901, 200,000 in 1912
- by the 1920s after World War I, he’s up at over three quarters of a million circulation, and has become the dominant, not just paper in New York but probably the most prestigious, most respected, most widely-known American journalistic organization
The birth of the modern Times
Ochs made a really big bet on whether we should be producing more business content and people will be willing to pay more for it because it is either actually a business expense or it inspires them that they could do more with their business. They were the first big American newspaper to target businessmen at that time.
The headquarter, Time Square
The Times Tower, The New York Times, Time Square
In 1904, The New York Times moved its headquarters to The Times Tower at 1475 Broadway, situated in what was then known as Longacre Square, which was later renamed Times Square in honor of the newspaper. The entrepreneur Adolph Ochs, never missing a chance for promotion, celebrated the move with a fireworks display. This festive event evolved, and from the New Year’s Eve of 1907 to 1908, Ochs introduced the tradition of dropping a large electric ball atop the building, a custom that has continued to become synonymous with New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square, all thanks to Adolph Ochs.
The stock tickers too were originally The New York Times that implemented that on the outside of their building.
Ochs passed away in 1935
Hardcore sexism
They faced a succession issue because he had only one child, a daughter named Iphigene. Despite her capabilities, the prevailing sexist attitudes of the time, including those of Ochs himself, made it unthinkable for her to take over the company.
If she had been born probably 30 years later, which is when Katharine Graham was born, she would have been Katharine Graham at the Washington Post, before Katharine Graham. But there was just no countenancing by Adolph or anyone else involved in the company, that she should take it over.
Adolph Ochs avoided making a direct decision about his successor for The New York Times. When he passed away in 1935, his will left the decision to three individuals: his daughter Iphigene, her husband Arthur Sulzberger, and Ochs’s nephew Julius. Each had one vote to decide the next publisher. Arthur Sulzberger eventually became the publisher, with Ochs having arranged the voting in such a way that Iphigene’s choice would be pivotal, ensuring that Arthur would be motivated to be a good husband to her.
