The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is a newspaper published in New York City by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., edited by Bill Keller and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. It is owned by The New York Times Company, which also publishes about forty other newspapers. The newspaper is nicknamed the "Gray Lady" and traditionally has been considered as the newspaper of record in the United States. In abbreviated form, it is usually referred as the "Times".

The New York Times, one of the most important papers in the history of American newspapers, was founded on September 18, 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones. Adolph Ochs acquired the Times in 1896, and under his guidance the newspaper achieved an international range, circulation, and reputation. In 1897 he created the paper's slogan "All The News That's Fit To Print," generally interpreted as a stab at competing papers in New York City (the New York World and the New York Journal American) that were known for yellow journalism. After relocating the paper's headquarters to a new tower on 42nd Street, the area was named Times Square in 1904. Nine years later, the Times opened at 229 43rd Street, their current headquarters, later selling Times Tower in 1961.

The Times was originally intended to publish every morning except on Sundays; however, during the Civil War the Times started publishing Sunday issues along with other major dailies. It won its first Pulitzer Prize for news, reports and articles about World War I in 1918. In 1919 it made its first transatlantic delivery to London. The crossword began to appear in 1942 as a feature, and the paper bought the classical station WQXR in the same year. The fashion section started in 1946. The Times also started an international edition in 1946, but stopped publishing it in 1967 and joined with the owners of the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post to publish the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The Op-Ed section started appearing in 1970. More recently, in 1996 The New York Times went online, giving access to readers all over the world on the Web. A new headquarters for the newspaper, a very tall building designed by Renzo Piano, is currently under construction at 41st Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan.

Today The New York Times is probably the most prominent American daily newspaper. It has traditionally printed full transcripts of major speeches and debates. The newspaper is currently owned by The New York Times Company. The Times has won 90 Pulitzer Prizes (the most prestigious award for journalism in the US, presented each year by Columbia University). In 1971 it broke the Pentagon Papers story, publishing documents revealing that the U.S. government had been painting an unrealistic picture of the progress of the Vietnam War. This led to New York Times Co. versus United States which declared the government's prior control of the classified documents was unconstitutional. In 1972, the Times exposed the Tuskegee experiment, in which African Americans suffering from syphilis were secretly denied treatment over a period of decades. More recently, in 2004 the Times won a Pulitzer award for a series written by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman on employers and workplace