How Punch Protected The Times

In 1969, shares of The New York Times Company began to be listed on the American Stock Exchange.

The driving force behind the listing was the company’s chairman and chief executive, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who was then 43 and had been at the helm for six years. Eager to expand the company, he needed a listed stock that the company could use to make deals. But a listed stock had to have voting rights. And that conflicted with another of Sulzberger’s goals: to ensure that his family, which had owned the paper since 1896, would remain in control of the company and its flagship newspaper.

Since the 1950s, the company had given stock to favored employees and others, stock that could be bought and sold but had no voting rights. The solution was to give that stock — Class A shares, they were called — some voting rights, but not enough to threaten the family’s control. The Class B shares, held largely in a family trust, still gave the Sulzbergers the power to elect around 70 percent of the board.

Sulzberger, who was known as Punch, died on Saturday. In the encomiums that followed, much was made of his fierce dedication to the First Amendment and his overseeing the remaking of The Times, especially the addition of feature sections that brought new advertising, and new life, to “The Gray Lady.”

But that long-ago decision to issue two classes of stock has also had long-lasting ramifications. As someone who joined The Times right around the time the Internet was beginning to wreak havoc on the newspaper business, I have watched us tighten our belts, offer buyouts, sell off divisions and even, in 2009, borrow $250 million from Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican billionaire. (The money was paid back in 2011.)

But I’ve never had to worry that The Times would go the way of so many other once-great papers, abandoning independent foreign reporting, for instance, or shrinking the news hole to the point where the paper could be read from cover to cover in 10 minutes. As many other well-known newspaper families have abandoned the business — most recently, the Bancrofts of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal — the Sulzbergers have remained steadfast in their belief that they were put on this earth to preserve and protect The New York Times.

In recent years, that dedication has been sorely tested. As advertising gravitated away from the printed page and toward the Internet, Times Company stock has been hit hard. Profits have declined. In 2009, the company eliminated the dividend, which had been a source of cash for family members. At Dow Jones & Company, the ruling Bancroft family decided to sell to Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation. By all appearances, the Sulzbergers never flinched.