The long walkout, over wages, automation and other issues, was also devastating to the once-boisterous world of New York newspapers. When the strike began in 1962, there were seven major dailies in the city, all of them already threatened by competition from television and burdened with high costs and low income. Within five years the field had shrunk to three: The Times, The Daily News and The New York Post.

The Times, a morning paper, toyed with the idea of creating an afternoon daily to go head-to-head with the afternoon Post. In 1967 it went so far as to create prototypes for two possible papers. But in the end it dropped the project, deciding it would be too much of a drain on the company’s resources.

At The Times, 1963 was the first year it had lost money since 1898. But even in good years, profits were precariously small. It hardly helped that the paper was based in a city that was in economic decline and unable to stop the flight of many affluent New Yorkers — newspaper readers and advertisers included — to the suburbs.

“I personally never had the concern that the paper was going to go out of business,” Mr. Sulzberger later recalled. “But it was obvious to me that we had a problem on the business side, the problem being structural: the way we worked together or, more accurately, the way we didn’t work together.”

Business as Usual Won’t Do

Mr. Sulzberger moved swiftly to bring financial order, and to show skeptics that he was in charge. Some of his early actions were the sort that any struggling businessman might take. But for The Times of that era, they bordered on revolutionary. Mr. Sulzberger insisted that the news department operate on a budget — unheard-of at the time. He strived to reduce the company’s payroll, then about 5,400 strong, a work force appreciably larger than today’s. He tried to get the advertising and circulation departments, each jealous of the other’s powers and privileges, to coordinate their efforts.

By nature, he was fastidiously neat. The habitual clutter on reporters’ desks drove him to distraction. And he felt no better about untidy organizational charts.

It made no sense to Mr. Sulzberger that the daily Times and the Sunday paper were separate and sometimes competing fiefs. In 1964 he ordered that they both report to a single executive editor, Turner Catledge, who had become something of a father figure to the new publisher.