Indeed, this fourth generation scion of the Ochs-Sulzbergers, and the fifth family member consecutively to rule an almost regally dynastic news organisation – Gay Telese entitled his 1969 history of the paper The Kingdom and the Power – insists that his youthful liberalism has by no means disappeared. “It was a highly-politicised time and, yeah, I liked being part of it,” he recalls. “I miss those days and maybe I’m getting back to those days. If I am not mistaken, when our founders Henry Raymond and George Jones ran that first edition of The New York Times in September 1851, they had a statement of purpose noting that they intended the paper to be radical in all those things in which change was necessary, and conservative in all those things where change was not. I like to think we are still clinging to that line.”

But in the quiet of his Manhattan home, or scrambling towards the peaks when indulging in his hobby of rock-climbing – “It’s a good way of clearing your head” – Sulzberger may occasionally reflect on the irony of the long-ago anti-war stance that almost resulted in a fist fight with his father and predecessor, former Marine Corps officer Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr. Liberalism or no liberalism, Arthur Jr and the Times have been under fire from without and within for more than a year; not quite at war, perhaps, but metaphorically much blood has been spilled.

Sulzberger’s parents divorced when he was four years old, and until he was in his mid-teens he lived with his mother and stepfather, largely separated from Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger’s upward path through the company, bought in 1896 by Punch’s grandfather, Adolph Ochs. Ochs’s son-in-law and Punch’s father, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had succeeded to the throne to be followed by Orville Dreyfoos, who inherited the keys of the kingdom after marrying a Sulzberger. Arthur Jr’s dad took over upon Dreyfoos’s premature death in 1963 and is still very much involved with the Times and the other communication arms of the business. “He has an office on the eleventh floor and comes in every morning until around lunchtime,” says his son. “When we have big issues, like Jayson Blair,” he volunteers, “he’s always a good source of experience and intellect.”

Despite not being fully exposed to his father’s day-to-day involvement with newspapers, the young Sulzberger never even thought about entering another profession. “It was the journalism that attracted me.” He worked on his high school newspaper, obtained temporary journalistic summer jobs, including a brief stint at The Daily Telegraph in London – dynasties have influence – and after graduating from college worked as a reporter on a North Carolina paper, and in London for Associated Press, before joining the Washington bureau of the Times in 1978. It wasn’t until 1983, by which time he was a news executive in New York, that he switched to the commercial side of the business.

“I didn’t think I was going to like it and thought I would go back to journalism,” says the youthful 52-year-old Sulzberger, shirtsleeved and apparently relaxed – remarkably so, considering recent destabilising events at the Times – high above West 43rd Street, a baseball pitch away from the square that bears the paper’s name. “But I made the jump from assistant city editor to selling advertising, one hell of a jump, and to my chagrin discovered a couple of things. One was that I liked it, which I didn’t expect. Another was that news and advertising share some really important things in common: immediacy, a sense of ‘That was fine for yesterday – what are you doing today?’, and intuition. I worked with some great ad sales people who would have made great reporters – they knew how to hear no, no, no, no, no, and just wait for the yes. They would never have given up on a story.”

With a constantly expanding dynastic line, Sulzberger was not a shoo-in for the top job. But in 1992 he was appointed publisher and five years later succeeded his father as chairman of the board. Only four members of the family serve on the 15-seat board at any one time, one of whom at present is Arthur’s cousin, Michael Golden, the publisher of the now totally Times-owned International Herald Tribune (three other family members currently work at the Times; another on the business side of one of the company’s other papers). Some of the flak attracted pre-Jayson Blair by Sulzberger consisted of accusations of over-aggressive business behaviour when negotiating the end of the partnership, with The Washington Post, that previously controlled the Paris-based title.

Sulzberger bridles slightly when I mention this. “That [the accusation] was inaccurate. It was a difficult conversation, obviously, but there were options and I am not going to get into it except to say it [sole ownership by the Times] was the option they preferred.” The IHT, it should be said, has flourished, as has the Times under Junior’s stewardship. The company profile is almost overwhelming: last year its revenues totalled $3.2billion, and for the fourth consecutive year it was ranked top of Fortune magazine’s list of America’s most admired publishing companies. In addition to the Times and the IHT, the group owns The Boston Globe, 16 other newspapers, eight network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio stations and more than 40 websites. It is also part-owner of a New England sports company, giving it a share of the Boston Red Sox baseball team and 80 per cent of a New England TV sports network.

Casualty of the turmoil

He is, however, perfectly willing to discuss the Jayson Blair episode and beyond. When it was discovered that the reporter, previously favoured and protected by the paper’s editors, had blatantly been faking stories, it was, says Sulzberger, “a huge black eye. I can’t speak for anybody else, but there were shock waves…for me it was very traumatic. It came at a remarkable time, when we had just won seven Pulitzer prizes and were riding reasonably high. It was a bolt out of the blue. And it wasn’t just Jayson Blair. To be fair, the events that transpired here had deeper roots than that. It was a wake-up call for us, it was a wake-up call for the industry. It forced us to confront in a very positive way the systems we had in place in our newsroom. And I think we are… no, I know we are a better paper for having gone through that”.

The paper’s public response to the scandal, a four-page mea culpa verging on self-flagellation, was criticised by former Times managing editor Arthur Gelb as “a vast over-reaction”. Sulzberger doesn’t think so. “No, actually I’m proud of that [apology] – we owned up and put our finest people on the story. Maybe we should have cut it back to two pages, but it was important that we didn’t try to hide it. We tried to be straight with our readers and straight with ourselves. That’s our responsibility. Not not to make mistakes. We’re human and are always going to make mistakes – but to own up to them. This is the only profession protected by the constitution of the United States and that rightly places a burden upon us – to take seriously the role the founding fathers saw for the press, to keep democracy alive. It was a painful period, but we are through it. A new editor is in place [Bill Keller became executive editor; Jill Abramson the paper’s first female managing editor], new stories are on the horizon and our new procedures are working.”

With the departure of Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, a public editor (ombudsman) was appointed and a regular corrections column and “editor’s notes” – more detailed explanations – introduced. But the tumult within the Times has not subsided and the “new procedures” seem to have ensured only that each new hiccup receives maximum publicity. A further public display of penitence, when a 1,200-word article signed by “the editors” avowed the paper had not been “as rigorous as it should have been” in asking questions during the run-up to the Iraq war, was followed by public editor Daniel Okrent writing in the Times that it had been duped by “the cunning campaign” of those determined the world should accept Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. This led to the Times being ridiculed by those who thought the paper was demeaning itself, and to Howell Raines, who had been in charge when the Iraq conflict begun, leaping back into the spotlight to refute much of the Times’ self-criticism. And the furore was still raging when it emerged that in his first seven months in the job, Daniel Okrent had sent 4,600 queries to members of staff, a statistic that no doubt fuelled newsroom outrage at Okrent’s acceptance of what some considered an inappropriate outside board appointment.

Sulzberger might have been forgiven for departing to find a rock to climb at this point, but he quickly responded when subsequently I suggested to him that the Iraq war repentance (in which he was not personally involved) was unnecessarily voluminous. “A quality journalistic organisation owes it to itself and its readers, or viewers, to acknowledge its own errors,” he said. “We ask others to do so regularly. If we don’t have the courage to do so ourselves we’re being, at best, disingenuous.” As for Howell Raines’s very public opinion: “It’s simply the wrong, and shallow, context in which to view an issue of journalistic credibility.” (In his Atlantic article, Raines observed that, “…the sad fact is that Arthur Sulzberger, who was my partner in the great enterprise of revitalizing the Times, and who remains my friend, may no longer be in a strong enough position internally to push all the reforms we felt were essential”. Sulzberger remains unerringly polite about Raines, but the quality of the friendship may be strained.)

Enormous challenge

Considering the outstanding achievements of the company over the past decade, and Sultzberger’s determination to keep it at the forefront of a rapidly changing and expanding news industry, the Times’s sackcloth-andashes phase may eventually be relegated to no more than a blip in its history – especially as research has shown, the publisher claims, that the brand has suffered no lasting damage. During his tenure, Sulzberger has been responsible for the development of an eight-section colour Times, and its national expansion with 18 new print sites, plus successful ventures into electronic media. Circulation of the Times has increased in ten of the last 11 audited periods and is healthy at a little over 1.1 million on weekdays and 1.7 million on Sundays. “We are opening new markets, we’re getting the paper into the hands of people around the country in a way we couldn’t have done a decade ago,” he says. He also claims that, against a worldwide trend, the Times has held a low average readership age of 42 for the daily paper and 44 on Sundays – “It’s younger than I am, which terrifies me! But it speaks for the work we have done in bringing the Times in print to younger readers, to schools and colleges. That’s exciting.”

The print expansion of the paper also includes an international drive spearheaded by the inclusion of Times’s weekly news supplements in a cluster of foreign newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph in England. But Sulzberger resists any sentimental attachment to newsprint and is proud that the profit-making NYTimes.com is – mainly through substantial advertising – the world’s leading newspaper-owned website. “I’m a print man and print is still the powerhouse, and I suspect it will be for a very long time,” he says. “But, yes, we can envisage it vanishing. One day there were tablets of stone and the next day there weren’t. But it doesn’t matter. It is not the paper of our newspaper that defines us – it’s the word ‘news’ that defines us. That’s what we sell. That we do it on paper is great as long as people care for it on paper. But the minute they don’t, that’s all right too.” Advertisements for the Times’s electronic edition – “an exact reproduction of the day’s paper, downloaded to your computer by 4.30am Eastern Time every day; just $12.50 for the first six weeks” – often fill an entire page.

Another, momentous, sign of the changing Times is the construction of a $850 million 52-storey skyscraper at 8th Avenue and 40th Street, which is scheduled early in 2007 to become the newspaper’s third home in the Times Square area. Typically, Sulzberger’s heart-strings remain unplucked by the prospect of leaving the building that has been the paper’s home for almost 100 years. “It will be only two-and-a-half blocks away, so every employee is going to get their chair and whatever they can pile on it and just walk two-and-a-half blocks,” he jokes. “It’s going to be cheap, I’m telling you!” But it is clear he does possess a genuine love of newspapers and journalism, and rejects Arthur Gelb’s claim, in a recent book, that the romance has gone out of the business. “It’s as challenging and as dynamic and as romantic as it has ever been,” he says. “When you’re covering a story and working on how you’re going to get it into the paper, how you’re going to translate it for the web… and, by the way, you might be working with a camera crew – that’s compelling stuff.”

His liberalism manifests itself in his determination to engage ethnic minorities in the business, and he was also among the first to offer domestic partner benefits to gay and lesbian employees. Also significant is the recent appointment of Janet Robinson as the first female chief executive in the company’s history.

“Changing any organisation is difficult,” he says, “but it’s critical for our future. In this city and this country we are in the midst of a demographic shift unlike anything we’ve seen since the turn of the 20th century, in terms of the immigrant population, in terms of the number of languages spoken. It is a powerfully important time and we are not doing our job as journalists if we don’t reflect that world – if we don’t have women sitting at the table when decisions are made, if you don’t have minorities sitting at the table, then you are going to give a narrow slice of the world.”

Increasingly bumpy ride

Over the years, many have forecast the downfall of the king of the Times, but so far, despite an increasingly bumpy ride, he has failed to oblige. It looks as if only a misjudgment on the rockface can prevent him remaining astride the dynasty until he decides to vacate the throne (Arthur Jr has two post-college graduation children, but says of eventual succession to the top job: “More importantly, I have [a total of] of 13 sisters and cousins and they have children too.”)

He still misses direct participation in journalism, he says, but has no doubts that in leaving it behind he made the right decision. “When I was at the Washington bureau I turned in a story to the desk and an editor came up and said to me: ‘Arthur, the Times allows for two kinds of writing – great writing and straightforward writing.’ And he handed back my story. There was no doubt where I stood! But, look, I was a fine reporter.” [This appears to be in sharp contrast to his father, who, according to Gay Telese, was spending an off-duty day at Le Mans when working as a reporter in the Paris bureau and witnessed a crash in which 83 spectators were killed. Despite being the only Times man present, it did not occur to him to file the story.]

“I wasn’t going to win a Pulitzer, but I was careful, diligent and I cared. I cared about the news, I cared about the institution. But as publisher, I have got back to the journalism in a way. I don’t write and I don’t edit, but I’m involved in helping to create and rethink the launch of new sections, I attend the Page One meeting – I go in just to listen – and every Wednesday I sit down with the editor and the editorial page editor and we have lunch and talk about all kinds of things.

In a speech to the International Press Institute, Sulzberger recalled the writings of the journalist James “Scotty” Westlin, who in his memoirs proclaimed: “I don’t want the press to be popular, just to be believed.” As Sulzberger accompanies me out through a boardroom decorated with photographs of famous visitors to the Times over the years – presidents, prime ministers and Nelson Mandela – I remind him of this. “Yeah,” he nods. “Great quote, isn’t it?”