Publishers noted: in which our publisher reviews the building of another publisher.
An immigrant who cannot speak English is turned out of a hotel in the Financial District across from City Hall. Twenty years later, he buys the hotel, demolishes it, and replaces it with the world’s tallest tower, to house the city’s largest-circulation newspaper, which he owns.
Such was the very American story of publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who arrived in America in 1864 as a recruit picked up off the streets of Germany to fight for the Union Army and then made his way to the pinnacle of America’s newspaper world. By 1878, he owned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Facing some bad karma after his managing editor shot an upset reader, Pulitzer relocated to Manhattan and bought the New York World from Jay Gould in 1883. In the first issue published with Pulitzer as publisher, he announced the paper would be “dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates,” and the people responded: within three months the World ’s circulation had doubled. Channeling today’s social media profiles, the World would print its circulation numbers on the front page.
By 1889, Pulitzer was ready to build a tower. His architect, a former engineer named George P. Post, wielded two other new arrivals, the iron-frame and the elevator, to bring the building to 309 feet. In its sixteen-foot-tall cellar, the presses churned out hundreds of thousands of issues a day. A gold-plated dome housing Pulitzer’s private office pierced through its cornice. Editors were pleased they could spit down onto their rival, the Sun, whose office were across City Hall Park and only seventy-seven feet tall. Post’s design was the first secular building taller than the steeple of Trinity Church. According to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, one visitor, on reaching the top floor, cheekily asked if God was in. In 1955, the tower was demolished to make way for an on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. Pulitzer’s World was long dead. In 1931, the rival Scripps-Howard newspaper chain had bought it, closing the paper down and laying off its three thousand employees simply to shut out a competitor, lamely appending the word World to one of his own papers’ titles.
From Bezos to Murdoch to Musk, media magnates and their hunger for platforms and audiences are still with us today. Even in the much smaller architecture press, there are few truly independent platforms left. To assure our audience that its loyalty to NYRA will never be bought by a conglomerate or magnate, we are in the final steps of becoming a nonprofit. Because the powerful have paths outside ownership to keep publishers in line, namely litigation, NYRA is happy to be joining the League of Independent Online Newspapers (LION for short), which will give us access to media liability insurance and allow us to benefit from the insight of small papers across the country.
We have not quite reached the New York World ’s million-copies-a-day high-water mark, but after we unveiled our new format, we sold a record number of new subscriptions in September. Though it is larger and longer, our new format actually costs less to print than before, so in October, we were able to offer a lower subscription price. We called it the NYRA inflation reduction act. It made October another record month for subscription sales. It was not only financially possible—it was the right thing to do. We hold that architecture has a tangible impact on the well-being of everyone and, with that in mind, would like to make the work of our contributors accessible to a broad public.
We have also finally found a physical home. The School of Visual Arts Design Research, Writing and Criticism program offered NYRA a residency in its second-floor studio space on 21st Street. We have a place to stack our back issues and to argue over layouts in person. As part of the residency, our editors Samuel Medina and Marianela D’Aprile are leading writing workshops for students, which is helping us think about how to build a broader learning program for all of our writers.
The most enduring and dynamic parts of Pulitzer’s legacy actually manifested through education and nonprofits. He played a critical role in the foundation of the two best journalism schools in the United States, at the University of Missouri and Columbia University in New York. His gift of $2 million ($60 million today) to the latter also endowed journalism’s top award, the Pulitzer Prizes.
We have momentum and a heck of a lot of talented people, but building an audience large enough to sustain this work takes time. Until then, we are in critical need of sponsors to provide the publication with sufficient runway to grow our capacity and take on new opportunities.
If you, too, have some extra resources and would like to put them to work creating an enduring and dynamic legacy… let’s talk.