When Adolph Simon Ochs began his journalism career in 1869, he earned $1.50 a week delivering newspapers in Knoxville, Tennessee. At his death sixty-six years later, he had built the New York Times to a half-million daily circulation and made it one of the most respected newspapers in the world. Ochs was a man of little formal education, ending his sporadic schooling permanently at the age of fifteen. He was heaped with honorary university degrees late in his life after creating a publishing empire that today produces books, magazines, trade journals, and scholarly reference works as well as newspapers. The New York Times building, housing the editorial offices of many of these publications, occupies a good portion of the most valuable real estate in midtown Manhattan.

That empire, and the remarkable journalism career on which it was built, began when Adolph Ochs, and later his brothers George and Milton, began...