Someone on the list within the past few days made an offhand reference to "publishers aren't supposed to meddle in news coverage" but there's no magisterial "supposed to" about it. At the Rocky Mountain News our editor is our publisher (though before we entered the joint operating agreement with the Denver Post, we had a separate layer of management with the publisher overseeing both the news and the business side). At our competitor the Denver Post, Dean Singleton is the owner of the chain that owns the paper and named himself its publisher. Although I doubt he does a lot of hands-on editing, he did hand-pick the editor, with whom he works closely, and he also directly oversees the editorial page.
At small papers the owner/publisher/editor are often the same person. At a family-controlled paper, including the NYTimes, the publisher is normally close to the news side. In other words, different papers do it every which way, there is no accepted standard. I'm sorry I don't recall who said that and our Esteemed Moderator tells me the archives are not working right at the moment.
