“Sure, Arthur has made his share of mistakes. But they get recycled all the time, and he rarely gets the credit he deserves for what he’s done right,” says his longtime friend Peter Osnos, a former Washington Post reporter and the founder of the publishing house PublicAffairs. “You can’t judge him solely on the basis of success, because no one in the business can claim success in the current situation. You do have to give him credit for good judgment in anticipating the role of the Internet and his deep commitment to the values of the institution. Arthur was talking about the impact of the Internet on newspapers earlier than anyone else in our industry, and the records show that. So you have this strange kind of thing where you have the vision and you have insight, but you don’t get the business side of it right—but literally, without exception, no one has. Arthur has, however, re-invented the newspaper on several levels and positioned it for the future.”

Nine years ago, in an entirely different economic climate, the industry magazine Editor & Publisher named Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Publisher of the Year, and he was hailed as “brilliant” and “visionary.” His investments in satellite printing had pushed the national edition of the Times to unprecedented success, “achieving a 20 percent advertising revenue growth … largely due to national and help-wanted business going gangbusters.” The mistakes he has made with investments and in adapting to new technology are the same mistakes made by every newspaper in America. Most journalists consider Sam Zell, the billionaire who bought the Tribune Company, to be a Neanderthal for his wholesale trashing of the once proud Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and regard Gary Pruitt, chairman of the McClatchy chain, as a well-mannered and passionate defender of journalistic excellence. Yet both are staring at bankruptcy. “Who has gotten it right?” asks one industry analyst. “Arthur has made some bad decisions, but so has everyone else in the business. Nobody has figured out what to do.”

In short, you can choose whichever take on Arthur you prefer. As an old football coach once told me, “Write whatever you want: if I win, you can’t hurt me, and if I lose, you can’t help me.” The publisher’s reputation shifts with the wind, and today journalism is leaning into an exceedingly ill wind.

The Wrong Lesson

Arthur is still often referred to as “Young Arthur,” even though he is old enough to be a grandfather, or by the despised nickname that puns on his father’s, “Pinch.” Even as his locks gray and he nears almost two decades as publisher, he remains the prince-in-waiting who once haunted the newsroom in his socks, his trousers held up by colorful suspenders, peering in a harmless but nevertheless insufferably proprietary way over the shoulders of hard-boiled reporters on deadline. “I have heard him many times refer back to ‘when I was a reporter,’” says one former Times executive, theatrically cringing. “He’ll just do it as a throwaway—‘When I was a reporter.’ I will say this to him one day: Don’t say that. You know what? You don’t have to say that. Do you think it’s giving you more credibility with journalists? It actually gives you less.” On the business side, according to one former associate, he was viewed with contempt. “They saw him as insubstantial, as flighty, as glib, and as not caring about them as much as he cared about journalists.”

But Arthur has one big thing going for him, particularly with the reporters and editors who are the real stars in the Times building. Arthur is motivated, as he himself says, not by wealth but by value. He believes, to be sure, that wealth follows from value, but you can see, even as he says it, that the wealth part is not what drives him. Journalism drives him. The Times’s reputation and influence drive him. He is not just a newspaper publisher and a chairman of the board. He is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and the pride he feels in that name doesn’t have anything to do with how much is in his bank account. No matter what moves he makes, no matter what errors he commits, Arthur will remain every journalist’s dream publisher. He has long protected the newsroom from predatory managers with their bean-counting priorities, and today he represents its best hope, reporters and editors would like to believe, of weathering the crisis without the soul-killing budget cuts that turn great newspapers into little more than supermarket circulars. The same people who roll their eyes when they hear him wax nostalgic about his years in the newsroom pray for him daily, because, like them, he completely buys the myth: Journalism sells.