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Meredith Kopit Levien

Chief Executive Officer, President & Director, NEW YORK TIMES CO -CL A

Search every verified Meredith Kopit Levien interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Meredith Levien, president and CEO of the New York Times, discussed the company's legal actions against AI companies and its broader strategy in several recent interviews. In a June 2026 Axios event at Cannes, she said the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft because those companies "have taken our work" and used it "without our permission and compensation" to build products that "can substitute for the New York Times." She described the stakes as high for journalism, creators, and the public, and noted that the company has spent roughly $20 million on AI-related litigation over two and a half years. She also said the Times spent close to $2 billion last year producing half a million works of content, and that the company's "most economically value creating thing" is high-quality independent news journalism, while also aiming to be a market leader in other areas like games, recipes, and video. In a separate podcast interview with Odd Lots, Levien said the Times is using AI tools in its reporting, including to analyze social media narratives around stories such as the Sydney Sweeney controversyholiday, and described video as a major growth opportunity, noting the company is "really early" in that space. During a live conversation with Kara Swisher at Cannes, she expressed concern that algorithms feeding people content matching their world views could diminish the role of high-quality independent journalism in society. She also credited the company's dual-class share structure with enabling long-term thinking, saying it allows the Times to make "really hard calls" and give investments time to play out before rushing to monetize them.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“We spent like close to $2 billion last year producing half a million works of content, stories, photos, videos, expressive, creative work that required enormous resource to go make and human beings to go make. And we've been doing some version of that for 175 years. So we have a giant corpus of stuff. We know that stuff is incredibly valuable to society, to anyone who might use it, including the alums you mentioned. ”

“The most important reason the New York Times has had all the success, whatever success it's had over the last number of years, is because the first dollar in the place goes to the high quality, independent news journalism, period. Hard stop. And I think there's like an idea in the world that sort of hard core independent news journalism, particularly about serious topics, is like a loss leader. You do it because you ”

“These companies, the LLMs are spending, you know, tens of billions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars on talent, on compute, on power. They should be spending the money that is sufficient value for exchange. They are getting from what they call data, which is high quality, independent journalism and other kinds of creative work.”

“The most economically value creating thing we do, kind of writ large, is high quality independent news journalism. Now, make no mistake, we want to be or already are the unequivocal market leader in every other space we play into.”

“We spent like close to $2 billion last year producing half a million works of content, stories, photos, videos, expressive, creative work that required enormous resource to go make and human beings to go make. And we've been doing some version of that for 175 years. So we have a giant corpus of stuff. We know that stuff is incredibly valuable to society, to anyone who might use it, including the alums you mentioned.”

“The most economically value creating thing we do, kind of writ large, is high quality independent news journalism. Now, make no mistake, we want to be or already are the unequivocal market leader in every other space we play into.”

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