While the Times has settled its succession plan and has made concrete gains in both strategy and revenue recently, there is no shortage of lingering anxiety at the headquarters on Eighth Avenue. Photograph by Todd Heisler / NYT / Redux

In 2009, a byline began appearing in the Times that carried with it the harbinger of dynastic transition. A new general-assignment reporter named A. G. Sulzberger was banging around the city, writing about a Third Avenue flop house upstairs from J. G. Melon, a high-end burger joint; about the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. New York, a ship fashioned in part from the wreckage of the World Trade Center; and about the fading popularity of the “humble tool” known as the Pooper Scooper. Not long after, the very same Sulzberger was based in Kansas City, where he described the experience of being a vegetarian in a city known as a “Mecca of meat.” At Arthur Bryant’s famous barbecue place, he rejected the brisket and the “lard-bathed French fries” and drank a Bud for lunch. Despite the grandeur of the byline, carnivorous readers could not help but feel sympathy for their self-denying correspondent.

A. G. Sulzberger’s apprenticeship is now at an end. On New Year’s Day, he will become the publisher of The New York Times, occupying the position that his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., who is sixty-six, assumed after the retirement of his father, Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger. A. G., who also goes by Arthur, is thirty-seven. He is the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to lead the paper. Earlier this week, he came by our offices for an interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour. He seemed earnest, serious, disciplined, even a bit nervous. This surely had less to do with the fact that this was his first interview as publisher than it was about the challenges at hand. The institution that he now leads is almost certainly the most influential media property in the country—and, arguably, the most important civic institution in private hands. He comes into this inheritance while revenues from print advertising plummet, Google and Facebook consume more than three-quarters of the digital-ad market, and the President of the United States feels free to smear his home-town paper as the “failing” New York Times.

And yet this is an optimistic moment for a family that bought the paper in 1896 but, despite its commitment to the future, seemed in recent years to be losing its hold. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the outgoing publisher—he will remain as chairman—has taken a lot of criticism, not least for making some costly deals. When the accelerating digital revolution intersected with the financial implosion of 2008, there was more and more talk that the Sulzberger family might have to sell control of the Times to a far wealthier investor, such as Michael Bloomberg. This was alarming. Bloomberg, who constantly complained about the way he was covered in the paper as mayor, had ill-concealed contempt for the Times. (I’ve heard it direct.) If Bloomberg had bought the Times, there was no guarantee that he would have run it with the same commitment to journalistic depth and daring. The Times under Ochs-Sulzberger ownership has made mistakes over the decades, serious ones, but its principles and sense of ambition—its commitment to publish “without fear or favor”—remain benchmarks in the news business.

For all the low and painful moments in his tenure (including the firing of two executive editors, Howell Raines and Jill Abramson), Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., achieved serious things. Above all, he managed to sustain, and even deepen, the quality of the paper’s journalism while deciding on the right financial path for a vital future—an emphasis on digital subscriptions sold at a high price to a national, and even an international, audience. And so even while ad revenues are dropping precipitously, the Times’ subscription picture is brightening. The Times now has 3.5 million subscribers—2.5 million of them digital-only. Meanwhile, the paper this year continued to publish remarkable reporting, including Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker on the Trump White House, and Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, Susan Chira, Emily Steel, Michael Schmidt, and others on sexual harassment in the United States.

A few years ago, A. G. Sulzberger led a study that became known as the Innovation Report, a self-critical hundred-page-long exploration of newsroom culture and the future that helped set the paper’s current digital direction.

The paper’s promising situation is at odds with what happened at the Wall Street Journal, in 2007, when the Bancroft family, a far more fractured and less journalistically committed clan than the Sulzbergers, gave up on the paper and sold it to Rupert Murdoch for five billion dollars (a gaudily inflated price). And it’s different from what happened at the Washington Post. The Post’s chief proprietor, Donald Graham, was deeply committed to the paper, but, in the end, he and his family could not find a feasible way out of decline. Graham’s last great service to the Post, no matter how personally painful it might have been to carry out, was, in 2013, to find a buyer in Jeff Bezos, the founder and chairman of Amazon. So far, Bezos, who is worth nearly a hundred billion dollars, has poured money into the paper, demanded deeper digital innovation, and left the journalism to the editors, led by Martin Baron.

Sulzberger grew up in New York and went to the Fieldston School. His mother is Gail Gregg, a writer and painter; in 2008, his parents announced they were divorcing. He graduated from Brown, in 2003, with a degree in political science and worked at the Providence Journal and the Oregonian before coming to the Times.

Jill Abramson, who helped bring Sulzberger along as a young reporter and editor at the Times, told me that he was initially quite anxious about coming to the paper. “He was nervous that people would think it was nepotism,” she said. “But he was a terrific reporter and writer. I genuinely would have hired him if he’d had a different last name.” Sulzberger studied the paper with unusual attention. “Early on, I remember I met him for breakfast, and he read the Times more carefully than I did,” Abramson said. “That made an impression on me. He recited the first paragraph of a story by Monica Davey, out of Chicago. He was clearly studying up on everything.”

Sulzberger competed in a kind of bake-off for the top spot at the paper against two of his cousins, Sam Dolnick and David Perpich. All three are said to command respect at the Times, but the combination of Sulzberger’s work on the Innovation Report, his journalistic experience, and, yes, the fact that his father was first among equals in the family, helped settle matters. The three cousins are said to maintain a good familial and professional relationship. Dolnick is a masthead-level editor who works on digital initiatives, including podcasts, and Perpich is an executive at the paper and runs the Wirecutter, a gadget-review site, which the Times bought last year.

But even while the Times has settled its succession plan and has made concrete gains in both strategy and revenue recently, there is no shortage of lingering anxiety at the headquarters on Eighth Avenue. Sulzberger recently promised that there would be no cuts to the news budget for the next two years, but ad revenues continue to drop, the Trump Administration continues to lash out at the purveyors of “fake news,” the newsroom staff is squeezing into fewer floors, and the media business, in general, is not exactly a warm bath of stability. Our interview with A. G. Sulzberger, which was edited for space and clarity, transcribed by Hannah Wilentz, and produced for the Radio Hour by Mythili Rao, began with notes of both congratulation and trepidation.

David Remnick: I should begin by congratulating you on getting what seems like one of the hardest jobs imaginable. Do you feel like you should be congratulated, or do you feel like you should be given a cool glass of water?