The New York Times is widely recognized as one of the world’s great newspapers, with a legacy of investigative, international, and national reporting that in the 21st century has been complemented by digital lifestyle products focused on cooking, gameplay, and sports. With almost 11 million digital subscribers as of 2025, it is one of the world’s most widely read news publications.

Becoming The Times

The Times was established in 1851 as a penny paper that avoided sensationalism and reported the news in a restrained and objective fashion. It enjoyed early success as its editors set a pattern for the future by appealing to a cultured, intellectual readership instead of a mass audience. In 1871 The Times published its first major work of investigative reporting, which exposed the corruption of New York City government perpetuated for two decades by William M. “Boss” Tweed and Tammany Hall (the governing body of New York’s Democratic Party). Tweed’s corruption was so rampant and profitable that the then-publisher of The Times, George Jones, was offered $5 million (about $131 million in 2025) by the New York City comptroller if The Times stopped publishing Tweed stories. Jones declined and Tweed was tried and convicted.

Still, its high moral tone and journalistic rigor did little for its bottom line in the heated New York City newspaper market. Despite price increases, The Times was losing $1,000 a week (roughly $38,000 in 2025) when Adolph Simon Ochs bought it in 1896.

In announcing his acquisition on page 4 of The Times on April 18, 1896, Ochs outlined his plans for the paper:

It will be my earnest aim that The New-York Times give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language that is parliamentary in good society, and give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be learned through any other reliable medium; to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved; to make the columns of The New-York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.

Ochs would also establish the motto “All the news that’s fit to print.” It first appeared on the front page of the The Times on February 9, 1897; it has been there every day since.

Finding its journalistic voice

Ochs built The Times into an internationally respected daily. Aided by an editor he hired away from the New York Sun, Carr Van Anda, Ochs placed greater stress than ever on full reporting of the news of the day, maintained and emphasized existing good coverage of international news, eliminated fiction from the paper, added a Sunday magazine section, and reduced the paper’s newsstand price back to a penny. The paper’s imaginative, aggressive, and unprecedented deployment of reporters to cover every aspect of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 was a model for the reporting of disasters that continues to this day. In its coverage of two world wars The Times continued to build on its reputation for on-the-ground reporting, despite risks to reporters and photographers and cost to the newspaper.

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In 1945, a Times science reporter, William L. Laurence, was the only journalist to witness the explosion of the atomic bomb over Nagasaki, Japan. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his reporting, but, “Atomic Bill” (as he was known by his Times colleagues) was, with the knowledge of Times editors, being paid by the Manhattan Project, making him “willingly complicit in the government’s propaganda project,” according to nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein. For its part, The Times seemed happy to have unprecedented access to the government on an enormous news story. In an official history of The Times, publisher Arthur Hays Sulzburger (who succeeded his father-in-law in running the paper in 1935) said The Times was “proud” to have Laurence “perform an important war service.”

The second half of the 20th century

In 1964 The Times was party to a significant First Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was a case that rose not from a news story but from a full-page ad taken out by civil rights activist Bayard Rustin and others to protest attacks by the Ku Klux Klan on college students in Montgomery, Alabama. The Times published the ad, which, as it turned out, contained factual errors. With the encouragement of a Montgomery lawyer, the city’s police commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, sued The Times for libel in state court. A jury quickly determined that the combination of factual errors and the damage done to Sullivan’s reputation constituted libel and ordered The Times to pay $500,000. In appealing the verdict to the Supreme Court, The Times was asking the high court to create new protections around the First Amendment. On March 9, 1964, Justice William Brennan in delivering the opinion on the 9–0 verdict did just that. The ruling set a new standard for a publication to be found guilty of libeling a public figure, establishing that statements must not only be false but also be made with “actual malice,” which the court defined as “with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” 

Seven years later, The Times was again at the center of a controversy that wound up before the Supreme Court. On June 13, 1971, The Times began publishing a series of articles based on the Pentagon Papers, a history of the U.S. government’s involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that was classified as “top secret” by the federal government. After the third daily installment appeared in The Times, the U.S. Department of Justice obtained a temporary restraining order preventing further publication, contending that continued publication would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to U.S. national defense interests. The Times—joined by The Washington Post, which also had the documents—fought the order through the courts. On June 30, 1971, in what is regarded as one of the most significant prior-restraint cases in history, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a 6–3 decision allowing the newspapers to resume publication, finding that the government had failed to justify restraint of publication.

In 1995 The Times and The Post—longtime rivals for journalistic scoops—would team up again to publish the 35,000-word manifesto of the Unabomber, a domestic terrorist who claimed responsibility for a bombing campaign that had lasted 17 years, killed 3, and injured dozens. The Times and The Post had been sent the manifesto, which came with a threat: publish this within 90 days or there will be further attacks. Despite valid concerns about giving in to a terrorist’s demand and with the encouragement of the FBI and Justice Department, The Post published an eight-page special section that contained the entire document on September 19, 1995. (The Times shared the cost of publication with The Post.) The publication led to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty to the attacks.

The Times has long been a force in international news, publishing an international edition for decades before acquiring, in partnership with The Washington Post, the failing International Herald Tribune in 1967. The English-language newspaper published in Paris became the main vehicle for the distribution of Times and Post journalism abroad until 2002, when The Times bought out The Post. The International Herald Tribune ceased publication in 2013 and was replaced by The International New York Times. In 2012, The Times began publishing a web site in Chinese for Chinese readers, but it has consistently been plagued by government interference and occasional blocking of the site.

Throughout the 1990s, The Times continued to utilize technology to expand its circulation, launching an online edition in 1995 and employing color photography in its print edition in 1997. Like most print publications that charged readers for its product, The Times was initially slow to embrace full digital publishing that offered Times content for free online. As the 21st century proceeded, however, that too would change.

The Times in the 21st century

In the early years of the 21st century, The Times endured two scandals that raised largely unprecedented questions about its journalistic integrity. In 2002 Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Judith Miller wrote a series of articles (some with other Times reporters) that indicated Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Miller’s findings were widely repeated, and her reporting was even cited by the administration of Pres. George W. Bush as evidence justifying the need to invade Iraq in 2003. The articles, however, were wrong, based on fabricated intelligence. In a 2004 editor’s note, The Times apologized to its readers, saying in part:

…we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged – or failed to emerge.

While The Times did not cite Miller by name, she was forced to resign in 2005 after further controversies.

In 2003 The Times told its readers that one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, had fabricated at least 36 of the 77 articles he had written while on the paper’s National staff, including such high-profile stories as those about the Washington, D.C., sniper case. Blair’s widespread deception—and the paper’s failure to catch it sooner—led to the resignations of executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd. Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., called the incident “a huge black eye” for The Times.

In 2011 The Times named Jill Abramson as its first female executive editor, the top leadership role in the newsroom. She lasted in the position less than three years, being fired for what some described as a tough management style. Many publicly questioned if she was the victim of sexism. She was succeed by Dean Baquet, the paper’s first Black executive editor.

The Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes (136 as of 2025) than any other publication, including the Public Service award in 2018 for reporting on sexual predation that sparked the #me-too movement. In 2020 reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer for the 1619 Project, an ambitious exploration of the role of slavery has played in U.S. history. The Times, which had almost 11 million digital subscribers as of 2025, has moved to expand its appeal beyond those seeking investigative, political, and international reporting, bringing to other topics the excellence and innovation the paper is known for. The Times has published recipes since the 1850s and created a Dining section a century later, but in 2014 it launched NYT Cooking. Similarly, The New York Times crossword has been a staple of the publication since the 1940s, but in the digital age, NYT Games’ stable of games (some developed internally and some, like Wordle, acquired) has drawn a new and younger audience. In 2022, in a further move to expand its reach, The Times, which has never been known for its coverage of sports, acquired The Athletic.

Much of this change has been led by A.G. Sulzberger, who in 2017 became the sixth member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family to be publisher. Just 37 when he took the role, Sulzberger had spearheaded The Times’s 2014 innovation report that challenged the newsroom to “get more readers to spend more time reading more of our journalism.”