A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher and Chairman of The New York Times: Mission Under Pressure

Thank you. It is nice to be back here. I was reflecting that the last time I was here was 30 years ago when you guys rejected me. So I'm taking this as a measure of vindication.

Yeah. So that is mostly true. So there's this old saying that you can either work at the New York Times or you can read the New York Times, but no one has time to do both. And I've been really determined to prove that wrong. And that's 'cause I believe really strongly that you're only as good as your product. Our product is journalism. And I really wanna have my eyes on everything we produce. So, it's why I said it's directionally true. I, you know, I'm in the app all day long on our newsletters, our podcasts, but I do use print as a sweep-up mechanism to make sure that, like, my eyes have touched every story in the evening.

You're making me feel so old.

Great. All right, well, I'm glad to have opened your horizons a bit.

We also have an app.

Well, thanks for the question, and I'm very happy to inspire you all with my from the bootstraps story of overcoming all the odds to rise to the pinnacle of American journalism. No, look, we believe really strongly in a model of leadership that we call stewardship, right? You use that word. And being a steward, you know, is recognizing that you are part of something, and that your part in it is part of a longer journey. And that journey started, as you said, you know, 175 years ago. Our part of the journey starts in 1896 when my great-great-grandfather purchased the paper. He actually was a scrappy entrepreneur at the time. And he had a really different vision for what journalism could be in this country. It was a time when the press was overtly partisan tied to parties and ideological causes. And he had this radical idea that the press should be independent and that it should serve the public alone. And that model was really successful. He took what was then actually the failing New York Times and turned it into, you know, this growing, you know, not yet the number one paper in New York, but on the journey there as one of the most respected papers in the country. And when he died, he did an equally remarkable thing, which is he left behind this will that called on his family to do a very specific thing, which is to protect the editorial independence and integrity of the New York Times and to ensure it remains a fearless newspaper and unselfishly devoted to the American public. And if it sounds like I've memorized that, it's 'cause I've memorized it. I have it taped above my computer as sort of a North Star for me and my work. And, you know, that starts in a will. It ends up in a trust. But that direction is such a gift because it has allowed the family to think about things like independence, integrity, devotion to the public as we have each taken our turn stewarding this enterprise. And it's something we're really proud of. And my great-grandmother had this line, 'No big heads,' and it was repeated just constantly. And it was a way of saying, 'We are here to serve this institution. The institution is in no way here to serve us.' It will never reflect our personal politics. It will never advance our personal ambitions and goals, you know. And we view that service as, like, one of the great privileges of our lifetime. Sorry if that all sounds corny, but it really is true.

So, no one believes me when I say this. I mean, literally no one. And none of you will either. But look, the vast majority of people in my family, we have about 100 people in the family, will never work a day at the New York Times. And they are just, you know, they feel like their contribution is giving the leadership at the Times, which very intimidatingly includes three of my board members in the front row, if I look nervously down there throughout this, they feel like their job is to give the leadership at the Times room to run and to make the right long-term decision. I thought I was gonna be in that group, and that really didn't change until college, not at Stanford when my favorite professor was a journalism professor, a great investigative reporter who worked at the local paper. And she called me after I graduated and said, you know, 'I've set up an internship for you at the Journal, and I want you to do it.' And I said, 'Tracey, you know I have no interest in going into journalism.' And she said, 'I know you say that, but I think you'd like it. I think you'd be good at it, and I think you should try it. And if you don't like it, you'll have the answer to a question you'll never wonder. But I really think you should give it a shot.' I did, and she knew what I didn't know, which is being a reporter is the most fun an adult is allowed to have at work. It's just this magical blend of spending half your day learning, like being out in the world, talking to the most interesting people and going to the most interesting places and getting, like, right all the way into the most interesting issues. No two days are the same. You're just learning all the time. And then this, the other half of your day is teaching. Right? 'Cause you're constantly thinking, okay, like what did that all mean? How do I make it clear? How do I make it interesting? And it's this very solitary, creative pursuit. And that blend was just infectious. And so, I spent the next few years as a local reporter at various spots around the country, Providence or not Providence, actually Narragansett, Rhode Island, tiny little town in the smallest state, where I was a town reporter, and then went out to Oregon, and then eventually to New York, and then to Kansas City. And it was just such a valuable experience, and I think it shaped a lot of what I think about leadership, but also really widened my aperture for this country and the diversity of experience and views, and hopes and fears in the country. And if you don't mind, I'll tell one story 'cause I actually think it's a useful example of like just how those early jobs, how much they matter later, even if the scale is different. So when I was covering Narragansett, Rhode Island, I got a, you know, sort of this, stumbled upon this big story, which is the Narragansett Lions Club, right? So stop the presses already. The Narragansett Lions Club, which actually was the power center in the community. It's where all the business leaders were. It's where the local elected officials were. They didn't accept women, and they were one of the only Lions Club in America not to accept women. And so, I started working the story, and at some point, the head of the Lions Club storms into my little office and, in front of my colleagues, starts sweet-talking me. 'You know, you're a great reporter. I really wanna help you out. Like, the story's gonna make that all hard. You know, maybe you could pull back on the story. I've got a bunch of other great stories I can help you with.' And when that doesn't work, starts threatening and eventually says, 'I'm gonna personally organize an ad boycott of the Providence Journal, and it's gonna cost you guys millions of dollars. Your bosses are gonna be furious. You're gonna lose your job.' And of course we publish 'cause, you know, sweet-talking and threats don't work. And you know, two months later, women are in, getting invited into the Lions Club. But why do I say that? 'Cause what I've just described is exactly what happens when it's a titan of Silicon Valley calling, or exactly what happens when it's a foreign leader, or exactly what happens when it's the president of the United States. It's just a different scale.

Yeah. Yeah, I thought a lot about it. I mean, it was a pretty humbling thing to come into the Times. I mean, just the level of journalistic talent there is so extraordinary, and I had no illusions that I was as strong as, you know, many of the people I'd be, most of the people I'd be working alongside. And so I really thought a lot about how to come in, and you know, I basically set a few rules for myself. The first was accept any assignment, no matter how terrible. And there were so many terrible assignments 'cause they all the editors realized that when they had a terrible idea other people wouldn't do, they could bring it to me then. I volunteered for the Sunday shift, volunteered for holidays eventually volunteered for the Kansas City job that no one seemed to want. They were crazy not to want it. I made really clear that I would never go around hierarchy, right? That like, it was my editor was my editor, and he could talk to his editor and then I really worked hard to make it clear that I valued candor and developmental feedback because I mean, you can just imagine, like, you know, at that point I'm a little south of 30. I'm way too young in my career to have now be on my own with everything I've learned. It's like, you know, the great thing about being a young person entering a great newsroom is the ability to learn from people. So, I had to, like, really hammer home to people, like, you know, and ask very intentionally, like, 'What did I do wrong in this story?' 'What could I have done better?' You know, 'Any advice on other, another voice I could've used?' So, you know, I was described in the press as having the temperament of an overeager intern. And I think that was probably right.

Yeah. So, I was such terrible casting for this. I, you know, I wasn't on social media, as has been embarrassingly revealed. I read the print newspaper. You know, I text like a grandpa, you know, with one finger and you know, and I had been doing my reporting, you know, not on digital ideas, you know, just heads down, you're sort of not thinking about the broader business context. But I'm asked to lead this effort, and I turn to basically the only tool in my toolbox, right? It's like the thing I've spent my entire career building, which is, I turn to reporting. And reporting is really well-suited for something like this, it turns out, because a big part of it is figuring out what your questions are and not being embarrassed if they're dumb, finding smarter people than you on a subject, explicitly trying to find people who disagree, being super skeptical of conventional wisdom, and then trying to pull the patterns out of everything that you've accumulated, right? And when I did all that, it became abundantly clear to me that the assignment I had been given was all wrong, right? 'Cause the assignment was to build a, was to come up with an idea for a digital product, right, that would enhance The New York Times portfolio in some way. But the pattern wasn't that we lacked for ideas in the organization. It was that the ideas were systematically being suppressed inside The New York Times, that our most innovative, creative digital thinkers were actually being treated as second-class citizens. And when I say that, like, I'm not saying that, like, in an abstract way. Like, I found out. I was irate when I found it out. I was talking to one guy who was viewed as, like, one of our essential digital leaders, and he told me he'd been denied business cards because the newsroom at the time didn't want people to think that he was a full member of The New York Times, right? They thought it'd be bad for the brand, right? And so people like that were going to our competitors, right, places like BuzzFeed and Fox and VICE, and they, those competitors were completely ascendant. They were, many of them had already overtaken us in digital audience. You know, we had 170-year head start here and we were already losing ground. And then there's this business context in the background that, again, I'd been sort of blissfully unaware of as I'd just done my work as a journalist. You know, we had gone from 12,000 to 3,500 employees in the course of a decade or less. We had built this brand new headquarters and within two years had to sell it and rent back the space. Our print business was accounting for something like 80% of our revenue still when I wrote the innovation report, maybe even more, and was, you know, hemorrhaging money. And the digital business was not growing anywhere near fast enough. And so it was this just, you know, that, so you had this context and then us basically doing everything we could to hold the people and the ideas at who could help us meet this moment at arm's length. And they were leaving. They were voting with their feet. And so, you know, what I decided is that instead of building a digital product, we had to spark a meaningful cultural shift. And the way we did that, again, I don't have that many skills. You know, I'm a journalist, so like I wrote, I wrote, and I wrote a 100-page memo. And I remember saying to the team that I was working with on it: 'Our goal here is, with this memo, is to kill the status quo as a place of refuge and to shift the conversation inside the Times from, should we change, whether to change, to how to change.' 'Cause whether to change is an incredibly unproductive conversation. How to change, you always win, right? Because it's just like everything's firing. Everyone understands that, like, you're not gonna be able to stand still.

Classic innovator's dilemma. Like, we were best in class, yeah, at the time.

So I write this 100-page memo. The biggest thought in it was I didn't want anything that people could argue about. I didn't want, like, a ton of good ideas. I wanted a handful of completely ironclad ideas. And when I say a handful, I mean a handful. So there's basically four or five, I can't remember now, core arguments. One, we need to introduce data into the newsroom so that our journalists are aware of how people are finding and engaging with their work. You know, two, we need the people who write the stories to talk to the people who design the website. And if that sounds crazy, they weren't talking. They weren't allowed to talk in our enterprise. You know, a third one was, we need to work as hard to get our work in front of an audience in the digital era as we did in the print era. And think about how insanely far we went in the print era, right? We, like, had printing presses and we printed it out and we put it on trucks and we drove those trucks to your town and then we handed it to kids on bikes and they biked it to your house. But we were doing none of those things. So this is all very cloak and dagger, a 100-page memo, I print out eight copies of it. I hand deliver eight copies to the eight people that the editor had told me she wanted to see it. And then, a couple of weeks later, the whole thing is published in full on BuzzFeed, the very, you know, website we had, you know, warned was overtaking us, under a headline, New York Times in Chaos. And it was, I thought it was, I thought I'd done immeasurable damage to the institution. I mean, truly immeasurable damage to the institution, right? Like, all this dirty laundry out there, 'cause to make a case like that you gotta say the tough stuff. The lawyers were worried, you know, and it ended up being the single best thing that happened to our transformation. And I'll, can I say a bit on why? 'Cause I think it's actually useful. So, I run into, later the day that it's published on BuzzFeed, I run into one of our oldest investigative reporters, best investigative reporters, a guy named David Barstow. Four-time Pulitzer winner part of the team that got Trump's taxes. I mean, a really incredible guy, but exactly the type of guy who you would think would read a Case for Change and say, 'Uh-uh.' You know? And I run into him. He's an investigative reporter so he's an intimidating guy. And he looks at me and he says, 'I read that report of yours.' And I said, 'What did you think?' And he's like, 'I was sure I was gonna hate it.' I was like, 'And?' And he's like, 'Well, if you were here at, like, a lot's gotta change,' and I was like, 'I don't think anything needs to change, I think we're doing just fine, I think you got me 90% of the way there.' And he said, 'But that 10% that 10% is full of my, like, deepest fears and anxieties.' Right? Like, 'Are you gonna destroy the journalism? Are you gonna ruin the mission, abandon the mission? Am I gonna be rendered irrelevant?' And the only thing that kept me going through those fears and anxieties was that I knew you and I knew other people on your team. And I kept thinking, 'I bet they have a good answer to this.' And so here's my advice to you. Go and hear every fear and anxiety in the newsroom and give them their answers. And so I did that. I set up a 90-minute meeting with every person in the newsroom, groups of no more than 50. We had 1300 people, so it gives you a sense of how long that took. And, you know, did a little bit of a spiel at the beginning, but mostly just hearing the questions, the concerns. And increasingly, like you could feel the energy building, the ideas, the creativity, the positivity. And to me, like, there's a handful of lessons there that I think, that I hope will be useful for all of you. One, communication is item six on every leader's list and you never get to item six. Right? 'Cause one through five self-repopulates, right? And you need to push it all the way to the top, especially if you're facing real challenge or going through a period of real transformation. Two, most leaders have this inclination to hide the problem from their staffs. And they do that not 'cause they're bad people. They actually do it like, in this, like, sort of misguided, like, parental instinct, almost like hiding problems with family finances from the kids, you know? They wanna be able to say, 'Don't worry about that. We got this. Everything's gonna be good.' And most people are pretty damn smart, and certainly reporters are pretty damn skeptical. Like, everyone in the organization knew that we were facing real challenges, but we weren't talking about those challenges directly, and we were still talking about the need to change, right? So, like, why do you need to change if everything's going just great? And so I have come to really believe that you have to share the problem. Like, like, find those really crushing statistics about your own company's performance that you want to avert your own eyes from and now share that to say, 'This is gonna be really hard and we don't have all the answers, and, but we're gonna need to try a bunch of things. Some of it's not gonna work, and I need your patience.' And once you do that, it actually unlocks the third thing, which is, the best ideas flow upward in an organization. And that's not to say no leader has ever had good ideas. But if you're running an organization of any size, there are way more ideas down there that are bottled up than you could come up with yourself. And once you share the problem, it's much easier for people to contribute. And then I'll just say one last thing, which is people fetishize change. And if you wanna get a proud culture, right, a legacy culture, a mission-driven culture to buy into change, you need to be really clear about what is not changing. 'Cause if everything can change, you have no reason for being. Younger, hungrier folks should come and displace you. But if you can articulate the thing that's not gonna change, for us it was original, reported journalism, right? Like without fear or favor. And if you can say that, say all of this change is in service of this enduring thing that we all signed up for then all of a sudden, people will give themselves a different level of sort of emotional buy-in to sign up for the ride. Yeah.

Against all odds. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, so I get named to this job and literally, like this is literally true, the people who give me the news that I'm gonna be stepping in as the next publisher tell me, 'You only have one job for the rest of your career. And it may be impossible, which is to find a sustainable business model to support the expensive work of quality journalism in the digital era.' And, and Trump's election basically announces the arrival of like another suite of challenges. And you know, and I think they're actually, they're broader-based than just Trump, but it announces the arrival of a moment that is marked with, well, probably the most significant anti-press moment we've had in this country in a century, right? Marked by growing distrust of the media, increasing attacks on the rights and legitimacy, and safety of journalists, growing polarization and tribalism, where people are getting stuck in their echo chambers and very intolerant of anything that challenges what they want to believe. And Trump isn't responsible for all of that, but he was a big force as he came in with this incendiary anti-press rhetoric, you know, calling us the enemy of the people in a, you know, not just fake news, not just the failing New York Times, but enemy of the people, and eventually scaling that to accusing us publicly of treason, a crime that the federal government is charged with prosecuting, and that carries the death penalty. And so a big part of my job has been positioning the company to be not just economically resilient, right, and, you know, technologically resilient, but to be resilient in terms of our ability to do this important fearless journalism in this much more combustible environment. So things like, you know, we immediately invested significantly in expanding our Washington operations, probably two to three times larger than it was at the beginning of the Trump era. We 5Xed our investment in investigative reporting, 5Xed. We 10Xed our spend on safety and security and press freedom work, which is a statistic I'm quite sobered by. Gives you a sense of how much the environment shifted. And then for myself, it became clear that a big part of my job would be to talk about the media and

its importance and the values that I think should be guiding it in these periods of pressure. And that ranges from, you know, writing a long essay in the Washington Post before this most recent election saying, 'The Trump administration has been studying very overtly the anti-press playbook that has been put into place in eroding democracies like Hungary and India and Turkey and that playbook is really clear. And here are the lessons we can learn from the experience of journalists in those countries about how the press has been systematically attacked and eventually mostly dismantled or gutted. And here are what the effects on civil society that would have.' And that work, you know, allowed us to prepare, but also allowed us to help the rest of the industry prepare for what would come. Um, you know, I'm sorry to say that a lot of the industry didn't exactly use that time well. Um, but it also meant going to the White House and, you know, challenging the president directly on his anti-press rhetoric. You know, and my message is, I want it to be very explicit, like I want no favors. Like, you are free to attack The New York Times by name. You are free to attack me by name. We're the big boys. We can take it. But I want you to understand that this anti-press push that you've been making is being greedily embraced by aspiring strongmen all over the world who have just been looking for any excuse to crack down on free expression and the free press in their countries, the pesky questions of independent journalists. And saying to the president, 'I believe this is really dangerous. I believe that people will die and be jailed.' And sure enough, you know, I look back at when I said that to now, and the world has gotten more dangerous than ever for journalists. So, you know, that is sort of the posture that we've had to approach. At the same time, I'm also needing to remind everyone that, yes, we're really proud that in a moment when a lot of the press has become nervous about reporting critically on this administration, that we're an institution that has built the single biggest body of accountability reporting ever produced by a single news organization on a single subject, on Donald Trump, right? And we're proud of that. But we're nobody's opposition, right? Just like as we're no one's cheerleader, we're not part of any, we are independent and the same complaints that President Trump has had about the press, many of them, we heard from Joe Biden every time we reported on questions about his age and fitness. He became the first president in a century not to sit down with the New York Times for a single interview because he was so upset about his coverage. So, when you put all that together, a big part of my job is just to give the staff, again, the resources to do their work, but also the confidence that we have their back to do that hard work in such an incendiary environment and volatile environment.

Boy, that's a great one. And you didn't even mention that he become the first sitting president to sue a U.S. news organization. He sued us for the third time. So yes, lots of fronts. What have we learned? I mean, I think the most important thing is we have to tune out the cheers and the jeers. And like, cheers are just as dangerous as the jeers, right? You've got everyone sort of baiting you to join a side. And we really believe that our model of journalism is independence. We believe that that is the single highest value to the American public, right? Not every institution in American life needs to be independent, but America needs some independent institutions. And, you know, I've really come to believe that, like, you know, if you look at, like, the core role of the press, seek the truth, help people understand the world, hold power to account. Now map that to some of the, like, the pathologies of this era, misinformation. What's the antidote to misinformation? It's truth. It's fact. Polarization and tribalism. What's the antidote to that? Right? It's understanding. Elite impunity, right? What's the antidote to that? Accountability. And so, I just, you know, I think our message is we just need to keep our head down and just keep doing the work. Follow the facts where they lead, approach every story with an open mind, an empty notebook, but also be completely unafraid to push through the pressure that we're gonna get from powerful forces to bring that to the public.