Could the Sulzbergers end up like the Bancrofts? It's a question people have been asking since the latter clan sold Dow Jones to Rupert Murdoch last year, and it's one Joe Hagan looks at in New York this week.
While there are plenty if differences between the family that owns The New York Times and the one that sold the Wall Street Journal, writes Hagan,
Today there is greater possibility for division in the Sulzberger family than there was a decade ago. In the last ten years, at least seventeen new family members have turned 25, the age at which they are allowed to join the trust's board or vote for trustees, expanding by 38 percent the number of people with input into the family's dealings. In 2001, the family trust was quietly amended, expanding the number of family trustees and allowing a less than unanimous vote on "extraordinary corporate transactions" -- leaving the door open for a faction of family members to push for a sale.
Compared to the Bancrofts, the Sulzbergers are a cohesive bunch, and that's no accident.
Younger members of the family are...inculcated in the beliefs of the Sulzbergers on private annual retreats to places like Hawaii. One Timesman compares the indoctrination to Skull and Bones, but it seems more the stuff of summer camp. They sing songs together like "We Are Family" and keep abreast of each other's lives through a newsletter called The Lookout. A surprisingly large portion of the family stays connected through the social networking site Facebook, including Punch Sulzberger's sister Ruth Holmberg, the 87-year-old mother of the Golden brothers, who lives in Tennessee.
But they are also increasingly eccentric:
Victoria Dryfoos, daughter of Katie, lives in Martha's Vineyard and has sought to "promote awareness of ... and provide income for Huichol families," a Native American group in Mexico. (She's also committed to maintaining the historical integrity of lighthouses, according to a long letter she wrote to a local paper.) Sarah Perpich, David's 28-year-old sister and Sulzberger's niece, is a fashion writer, stylist, and personal shopper. "For me, fashion is life, and life is art," she writes on her blog. Meanwhile, Dan Cohen's son Alex, a student at NYU, plays drums in a band called the Mysterious Case of Jake Barnes with cousin Dave Golden (making it the unofficial Ochs-Sulzberger house band).
Supporting all these bohemian lifestyles requires a lot of wealth, and that's a problem these days:
People familiar with the family's trust say it is surprisingly undiversified, with a high proportion in Times stock. The family's collective and individual shares are valued at a third of what they were worth in the late nineties. One Wall Street executive briefed on the family's holdings estimated that the central trust is now worth somewhere between $270 million and $300 million.
If the Times survives as a family-owned institution despite the pull toward dynastic entropy, concludes Hagan, it will be in large part owing to the family's unique values:
The Ochs-Sulzbergers' continued involvement has helped to create a mythology around the paper and the family, a sense of noblesse oblige that may be more powerful than the financial pressures. The family's dedication to journalism is "a noble, familial thing that courses through their veins," says a family friend. "And anyone who strays from that gets slapped down pretty quickly."
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