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With The Washington Post being sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million on Monday, attention turned to the Sulzberger family — which insists there will be no sale of The New York Times.
“Will our family seek to sell The Times? The answer to that is no,” said Times Company chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and vice chairman Michael Golden in a statement published by the paper. “The Times is not for sale, and the trustees of the Ochs-Sulzberger Trust and the rest of the family are united in our commitment to work together with the company’s board, senior management and employees to lead The New York Times forward into our global and digital future.”
In the last seven days, The Boston Globe has been sold for $70 million, and the Newsweek brand was sold for an undisclosed amount. Then, on Monday, Bezos surprised media watchers by acquiring the Post from the Graham family.
In a quarterly earnings report released last week, the Times reported that subscribers to the digital edition of the paper totaled nearly 670,000. “The Times has both the ideas and the money to pursue innovation,” Sulzberger Jr. and Golden stated.
The Sulzbergers are the last family dynasty to control a major U.S. paper, having managed the affairs of the newspaper of record since 1896.
Other well-known newspaper families have sold off their stakes in iconic papers. The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones were sold by the Bancroft family to News Corp. for $5 billion in 2007. The Chandler family sold the Times-Mirror Company, publishers of The Los Angeles Times, in 2000 to the Tribune Company (which, in turn, announced earlier this year that it will spin off its publishing assets).
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