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Watch the Cat. The prospects are that the Times, under the control of the "public trust"-minded Sulzbergers, will long remain a top newspaper. Under the will of Adolph Ochs, control of the Times and of the Chattanooga Times (circ. 54,453), will go after the death of Mrs. Sulzberger to the Sulzbergers' three daughters, Marian, 31, who is married to Orvil Dryfoos; Ruth, 29, music critic of the Chattanooga Times, the wife of Ben Hale Golden, who is now getting his careful newspaper schooling at the Chattanooga Times; Judith, 26, a doctor married to Dr. Matthew Rosenschein Jr.; and one son, Arthur ("Punch"), 24, who married a New York Times office girl, served in the Marines and is now a junior at Columbia. When control passes to the four the Times will suffer no financial shock from inheritance taxes; shrewd Mr. Ochs arranged for them to be paid when the trust was set up.
Financially, the future looks secure in other ways. Despite its enormous outlay for news, the Times is a profitable paper, owes not a penny to anyone. Last year the Times's advertising linage was at a record high of 36,089,736, and it is still climbing. Since the 50 common-stockholders and 200 preferred-stockholders join the Sulzbergers in regarding the paper as a public trust, the Times has paid no common dividends for 20 years, used the money for expansion and better news coverage. (It pays an 8% preferred dividend every year.)
And though some other newspapers may sometimes feel the pressure of advertisers' opinions, the Times has no worries on that score. Whenever an advertiser has tried to put pressure on the Times by threatening to take his ads somewhere else, he has been politely told to do so. Publisher Sulzberger's view is the view of other bosses of the nation's well-established newspapers: "We think the advertisers need us more than we need them, and they usually find that out."
For 54 years, as the Times will proudly point out in its 100-year history, it has been printing news "without fear or favor." That task, rather than crusading or editorial campaigns, is what the Times still considers its job. In the words of Constant Times Reader Arthur Hays Sulzberger: "We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat."
* Edited by Julian P. Boyd, financed ($200,000) by the New York Times, published by Princeton University Press.
* Other Pulitzer winners: Gian-Carlo Menotti, best music, in The Consul (TIME, May 1); South Pacific, best play; A. B. Guthrie, best novel, The Way West; Samuel Flagg Bemis, best biography, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy; O. W. Larkin, best history, Art and Life in America; Gwendolyn Brooks, best poetry, Annie Allen; Seattle Times Reporter Edwin O. Guthman, best national reporting, in clearing a professor of Communist charges (TIME, Nov. 7); Christian Science Monitor Correspondent Edmund Stevens, best international reporting, on Russia; Chicago Daily News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for public service in exposing Illinois newsmen on state payrolls (TIME, May 9, 1949); Editor Carl M. Saunders of the Jackson (Mich.) Citizen Patriot, best editorial, on Memorial Day; Photographer Bill Crouch of the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune; Cartoonist James T. Berryman of the Washington (D.C.) Evening Star.