Detail of a New York Times Advertisement – 1895, Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs.—Wikimedia Commons
The first issue of what would become The New York Times was published on September 18, 1851. The newspaper’s founders, Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, initially titled their publication The New-York Daily Times. In the premier issue Raymond and George announced:
"We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come."
In 1857 the publishers changed the paper’s name to its current title, The New York Times. After the onset of the Civil War, readers began to demand news every day of the week. The Times began publishing a Sunday edition in April of 1861.
The paper’s iconic slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” was coined in 1896 by Adolph S. Ochs, who acquired the publication in the same year. The catchphrase, which first appeared on the paper’s front page on February 10, 1897, was chosen to highlight the Times’s commitment to journalistic integrity.
Despite its specifically regional title, The New York Times has become what many consider to be the most respected newspaper in the United States, providing coverage of national and international events, entertainment, business, sports, arts and opinion editorials for readers worldwide. The Times has won over 100 Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence. Though the Times is not the U.S. paper with the largest overall distribution, the Sunday edition is the nation’s largest, with an average circulation of 1.38 million copies.
In September 2010, speaking at the WAN-IFRA 9th International Newsroom Summit in London, The Times’s current publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. indicated in that remaining competitive in the face of a plethora of online news sources may eventually require the paper to seriously consider ending its print edition in the future. No specific time frame for discontinuing the print editions was given.
—Conrad Ziyad
Links/Sources:
http://www.nytco.com/company/milestones/timeline.html
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/newspaper-circulation-wsj-bucks-the-downward-trend/19454284/
Related:
One hundred years of famous pages from the New York times, 1851-1951; / with an introd. by Henry Steele Commager.
The New York times [microform].
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