David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…We should also say, classically, the person leading the newsroom at The New York Times has traditionally not been a member of the family. To intentionally create that distance between the publisher, the people responsible for The Times as a business and of course, stewarding its mission are not actually the people making the calls on what stories run in their paper and which ones don’t. Now of course, in practice, the publisher family does actually own the paper. So they can make a final call, but that arm’s length is intentionally created. Yup. That was great or somewhat okay, give maybe a C grade to Punch during his tenure. I think what was less great was from a capital allocation perspective, what you really want to do here is differentiate versus this new medium. But you also want to invest in the new medium. They realize this and they, along with many other newspaper families in the 60s, 70s, 80s start buying television stations. Back in 1944, the family actually had bought two radio stations in New York. Punch realizes, probably with the help of and encouragement of some bankers on Wall Street, that they should go buy some televisions and some television news properties as well. Plus this is conglomerate times. Let’s diversify.…

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