New York Times

The Ochs-Sulzberger family controls the publication, owning 88 percent of Class B, or privately held, shares. However, the company is also publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim the largest shareholder of publicly traded shares, owning 16.8 percent of the company’s Class A stocks. The Ochs-Sulzberger family trust has the ability to elect 70 percent of the board of directors and otherwise steer the outcome of business matters that do not involve its public shareholders. In the third quarter of 2015, the New York Times Company had total revenues of $367.4 million, which came from circulation, advertising and other sources, including its conferences and live events division, Crossword product and rental income. The company earned $48.6 million from digital-only subscription products in the third quarter of 2015, and has just over 1 million online subscribers.

The newspaper was founded as the New-York Daily Times in 1851 by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones. It shortened its name in 1857, then dropped the hyphen in the 1890s. It began offering a Sunday edition in 1861, to cover the Civil War. Adolph Ochs bought the publication in 1896; five generations of his descendants have owned it ever since. Its slogan is "All the news that’s fit to print," and its nickname is the Gray Lady. The paper’s average Sunday circulation is 1.2 million, and its website boasts 5 million homepage views a day.

He became publisher of the paper in 1992 and the chairman of the New York Times Company in 1997, succeeding his father. The Ochs-Sulzberger family has owned the paper since his great-grandfather, Adolph Ochs, purchased it in 1896. Sulzberger started his career as a reporter at North Carolina’s Raleigh Times in 1974, then as a London correspondent for the Associated Press. He joined his family’s paper in 1978. The publisher’s wife is a general partner in an investment firm, Rustic Canyon/Fontis Partners.

When he was named executive editor in May 2014, he became the first African-American to serve as in this role at the Times, which is the highest-ranking position in the paper’s newsroom. Baquet won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for leading a team of three Chicago Tribune reporters who exposed corruption on the Chicago City Council. He previously served as the Times’ managing editor, after being an investigative reporter and national editor for the paper in both New York and Washington, DC. He also served in that role at the Los Angeles Times.

Baquet defended the paper’s decision not to print the Charlie Hebdo cartoons after the Paris attacks, and called one critic ‒ Marc Cooper, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California at Annenberg ‒ an "asshole" in a Facebook post.

The Mexican billionaire owns about 16.8 percent of the paper’s Class A shares, making him the largest holder of the New York Times Company’s publicly-traded shares. (The Ochs-Sulzberger family owns 88 percent of Class B, or privately held, shares.) Slim loaned the company $250 million in 2009, at the height of the global recession. The Times repaid the loan by 2011. The business magnate owns a conglomeration of retail, industrial and telecommunications companies, and is listed as the world’s second-richest person with an estimated net worth of $72 billion. Conservative bloggers blamed Slim for influencing the Times’ reporting on immigration issues.

In 1995, Friedman took over the paper’s Foreign Affairs column ‒ which has run since 1937 ‒ after 14 years at the paper in various roles. He has won multiple Pulitzers: in 1983 and 1988 for international reporting from Lebanon and Israel, respectively, and in 2002 for distinguished commentary. He sat on the prize committee’s board from 2004 to 2013. His book ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem’ won the National Book Award in 1989, while ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’ was an international bestseller. Haroon Moghul, a senior editor at the Islamic Monthly, has described Friedman as hating Islam, writing, "He hates Muslims enough to want to bomb them."

Risen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security correspondent for the New York Times. In his 2006 book, ‘State of War’, he wrote about the botched US intelligence operations to halt Iran’s nuclear program. He was subpoenaed by the Justice Department over his confidential sources in the book ‒ specifically former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling, who was convicted of leaking classified material under the Espionage Act ‒ but he refused to testify. After seven years, the government decided against compelling Risen to testify against Sterling, who was sentenced to 42 months in prison. He and Eric Lichtblau won the 2006 Pulitzer for national reporting "for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty."

The op-ed columnist joined the Times in 1999. He is also a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. Krugman won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity," according to the Swedish committee. "By having integrated economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models, Paul Krugman has deepened our understanding of the determinants of trade and the location of economic activity." The Economist ranked him as the third most influential current economist at the end of 2014. He was accused by a UCLA professor of stealing his ideas in 2013.

A series of articles penned by Times reporter Judith Miller before and during the George W. Bush administration tied weapons of mass destruction to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Senior officials in the Bush cabinet would cite those articles in justifying the start of the Iraq War in 2003, only for her role with the paper to be terminated for that very reason in 2005. Not, however, before the paper could clarify her errors:

"Ms. Miller may still be best known for her role in a series of Times articles in 2002 and 2003 that strongly suggested Saddam Hussein already had or was acquiring an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction... Many of those articles turned out to be inaccurate," then-Public Editor Byron Calame wrote.

In May 2003, Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign after the paper revealed he had "committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events," the Times wrote in an extensive apology. "He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not." A 2013 documentary about Blair called him "the most infamous serial plagiarist of our time," and documented "how he unleashed the massive scandal that rocked the New York Times and the entire world of journalism." Blair cited alcoholism, cocaine dependence and mental illness for his troubles at the Times.

The scandal also had a race aspect "because Blair was young and black, and the product of a training program aimed at increasing the racial diversity of the news staff," the Niemen Report wrote, adding that critics ‒ mostly "conservative white" ones ‒ claimed that Blair’s misdeeds had been overlooked for years because of his race.

On December 16, 2005, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau broke the news to the world of President George W. Bush’s 2002 presidential order authorizing the NSA’s use of ‘The Program’. Their source was Department of Justice attorney Thomas Tamm, who questioned its legality from the start, PRI reported in an episode of ’The World.’ But Bill Keller, the New York Times editor working with Risen and Lichtblau, decided to run the story past top White House officials to get the government’s side of the issue. The paper delayed the story for 18 months from the time Tamm first talked to the two reporters in the summer of 2004 until after the presidential election.

Just half a month after the first of Risen’s NSA stories hit the pages of the Times, reports began to surface of the delay in publication. "The administration first learned that the New York Times had obtained information about the secret eavesdropping program more than a year ago and expressed concern to editors that its disclosure could jeopardize terrorism investigations," one of its own articles stated on December 31, 2005. "The newspaper withheld the article at the time, and the government did not open a leak investigation at that time, presumably because such an inquiry might itself disclose the program."

In 1971, what may be the greatest whistleblowing scandal in US history triggered a constitutional crisis over freedom of the press when the New York Times published a top-secret study of the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Officially titled "United States — Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense" they were put together by the Vietnam Task Force created by the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in June of 1967. An aide for one of the heads of the task force, Daniel Ellsberg, leaked the papers to Times reporter Neil Sheehan, and first appeared in paper on June 13, 1971. A federal judge soon halted the Times’ publication of the series. Other newspapers then began publishing the documents.

The Nixon administration asked the courts for an injunction to block any further publication of the report and moved to punish any newspaper publisher who revealed the contents. The Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the Times, the Washington Post and other media and allowed them to continue publishing stories on the study in a landmark case for the First Amendment.

In June 2015, NYT reporter Frances Robles reported background information on the Charleston church shooting suspect that later turned out to be a deliberate prank by a British blogger.

On June 21, Benjamin Wareing announced he had provided Robles entirely fabricated information about the suspected shooter. He had made up that Dylann Roof was a ‘Brony’ — an adult male fan of the TV show ‘My Little Pony’ — interested in 9/11 ‘truth’ memes, or had a Tumblr filled with personal thoughts. Robles had not questioned Wareing’s claims, and the NYT had published them as facts.

Teen prankster tricks New York Times into printing that Charleston shooter was a Brony. http://t.co/2aAVJoMyyJ top

— Pat Stevenson (@pstevenson1961) June 25, 2015

Wareing said his prank was intended to demonstrate "how easily a wholly false testimony could be used in one of the world’s most accredited news sources." He subsequently posted an apology for causing trouble for the paper and the reporter, and announced he would be taking a break from blogging because "Headlines focused on the wrong message have led to me and my family being attacked."

In July 2015, citing "multiple high-level government sources," the NYT published a revelation that inspectors at the State Department and intelligence agencies sought a "criminal" investigation into whether the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified data while using a private email server for official business.

After Clinton’s aides complained, the paper edited the report to say the inquiry was "into whether sensitive government information was mishandled," rather than whether Clinton herself mishandled anything.

At some point the following day, the Justice Department changed its characterization of the inspectors’ referral from "criminal" to "security," prompting the NYT to write an entirely new article.

"It was not clear how the discrepancy arose," the paper’s editors said.