A Conversation with Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO, The New York Times Company

Delighted to be here. I'm gonna just dive right in so we have as much time together as possible.

Exactly, exactly.

I've been trying to shake that reputation for 25 years, but, oh, it's, so keep it on the DL.

Yeah. Well, first, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I was realizing when my carpool up, I've never been to, I've been to Columbia a lot, but I've never been to the business school. So it's a real, real treat to be here. And The New York Times is filled with people from Columbia Business School and has many openings for more. So see me, see me after. Let me start by saying that I am, I've been a lifelong lover and consumer of journalism. I think when I was 10 years old, you probably, if you'd asked me who had just sung that cool song, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. But I could like, go really deep on the long-term implications of the Iran hostage crisis. Like, I just, I was a nerdy kid. I loved journalism. I worked on all the newspapers in my childhood. I worked on my college newspaper, played a big role in my college life. And I fought, I would go be a journalist. I came from the kind of family who said, you cannot go to New York to be a fact checker because you will not eat. And so I ended up taking a job right out of college at a company we both know, called the Advisory Board, actually as somebody who's researching and writing, I was good at asking questions and I could write a little bit. And so that was my first job. And somewhere in that first year, I wasn't particularly better at it than anyone, but I was very productive. I worked very hard. So I won an award for producing the most reports, and I had to get up in front of the whole company and like, give a thank you for the award. And I was living at home with my parents, so I was probably wearing one of my mother's outfits. And I had a relatively sunny disposition. And literally the next morning, the head of sales for this think tank, the Advisory Board was in my cubicle and said, come work for me. And that was it. And I would say from 22 to 30, I was there for a little bit. I did some other jobs, all in sort of sales, marketing, commercial things, and just like felt, it felt soulless. It did not feel organic to my being and the owner of that think tank, the Advisory Board, a guy named David Bradley, when I was 30 years old, he had bought the Atlantic and I sent him a note and said, can I come talk to you? I'm not enjoying my career. I wanna do something in journalism. And he basically said, come sell advertising here for a year. I said, I don't wanna do that. I wanna be a journalist. And he said, you're really good at sales. Do the thing you're good at. If you hate it in a year, I'll help you be a journalist. And 25 years later, you know, it's seven years there, five and a half at Forbes, 12 at The Times, I've basically spent my career working to help propel a sustainable model for high quality journalism. And I would say to a group of people, like, at maybe somewhere close to the beginning or the middle of the beginning of your careers, you know, what do you take from that? I really have been trying to shake the sales thing for years, but for me, like, take the thing you're good at and use that to get into the space you wanna be in. The homework that I do every night at The New York Times is I have to read and watch and listen to an immense amount of journalism. I would do that if they didn't pay me. I mean, that's a really, really great thing to do. I'll also tell you, I get asked all the time, you knew you wanted to be a CEO. How did you get to be one? And I always say, I really didn't know I wanted to be a CEO until the day they sent the announcement. Like, I was really kind of reluctant to that. But what I did wanna do was I was obsessed with journalism, and I wanted to solve bigger and bigger problems in journalism. And I think that probably helped get me to where I am. And then the last thing I wanna say is, you know, I haven't worked very many places. Two of them for the same owner. You know, I've really benefited from going places and sort of staying a long time and just working on bigger and bigger versions of the same problem. And even just like being known to the people I work with and having them be known to me. And I always tell people, it's like almost better to go to a place that does something you really care about and be there for years, even if the actual job you're doing doesn't satisfy you in the moment.

Right now, my work at The New York Times is selling the idea, this really essential idea of what independent journalism is and why it matters in a world where I think there's just less and less public consciousness for that.

Yeah. So let me say a few things about it. It's funny. So I'm at The Times 12 and a half years when I got the call to go be the head of advertising. Like everyone in my life said, don't go. People said The Times, best days as a business are behind it, it's always gonna be good at the journalism, but the business part is sort of over as a big ascendant. Not that the business was over, but the idea that it had a future as bright as the past. And people also said, and the place is never gonna change. So let me say I learned two really, really big lessons about change at The New York Times. One is, every person, every company, everybody has the capacity to change. The real question is, do you have the impetus? Like, is something gonna cause you to change? And we had this great catalytic event at The New York Times shortly after I got there that caused us to change. The now publisher of The Times, a guy named A.G. Sulzberger at the time was working in the newsroom trying to sort of report on what the newsroom needed to do to change and why it wasn't changing fast enough. And he spent like a year working with a tiny team on a secret report called the Innovation Report that was so secret that it was hand delivered eight copies. I wasn't important enough or senior enough to get one of them eight copies hand delivered, about how the place needed to change. Two weeks later, it was on BuzzFeed, the whole world read it. It was a hundred pages basically said, The Times had sort of failed. It was winning at the journalism, but getting its clock cleaned by the BuzzFeeds and the Vices and the HuffPos of the world at finding the widest possible audience for that work. And then suddenly it was like we didn't have to convince the thousands of people at The New York Times that they had to change. It was all there. It was like, this is what's gonna happen to our business if we don't do it. And the second great rule of change that I learned at The New York Times is, you have to make people comfortable that you're not gonna break the thing that makes you so valuable to begin with. And I call it, you have to name the immutables, and by the way, it should be a really tiny list, because you're gonna grow and you need all the change to get your growth. But at The Times, what is that list? We seek the truth. We help people to understand the world. We do it independently. And it's like we had to spend a lot of time convincing people that's not gonna change. And people really got it. And they saw that in our actions. And then the last thing I'll say is, and then we made some really hard calls. And that's really what you're poking at about the direction of travel for the business. That essential subscription strategy. It's really 10 years old. I would take you back to 2015, when we launched it.

The most important call at The New York Times, most important thing that's happened to propel our success now is we said, come hell or high water, good times or bad, we gotta keep investing in the journalism that you could tell the whole story of The New York Times. By that, we also said, and you're poking at this, gotta be a digital first, subscription first business. That sounds like a big duh now, but I can tell you we're making gobs of profit at the time from those other things, newspaper and advertising, we said, we gotta live by that. And we said this thing, and I actually think this has so many implications for businesses today. I call them the four D's. We said, we're gonna buck what the Vices and the BuzzFeeds and the Voxes are doing. And we have to honor these four D's. We have to be a destination. People have to seek us out, ask for us by name. That's the only way we make any money. We have to have direct relationships with people. We have to be a daily habit. We've gotta be so good that people at scale will make room for us in their lives. And then the, like, the don't D can't be drive-by. Like this is not about somebody who's gonna like see us on Facebook. Those principles by the way, power our business today. That's kind of why we are where we are today. And the other one, and this is, I joke, I like ran for office on this last one to do the things I just mentioned. We had to recognize that we were competing for engagement for people's time and attention with the most powerful companies the world had ever known in the information space. And they were providing information at billion people scale. So we had to get really good at making software. We now have a 6,000 person company. We have a thousand people doing some version of working on software at The New York Times. And all of that now allows us to be, you know, continuously building a wider and wider engaged audience for the work. And every business question at The New York Times, the first answer is, can we get a bigger and bigger engaged audience for it? Not drive-bys?

Great. All great. Let me say two things, one of which may, but actually both of which may surprise people, I feel like I'm always trying to correct people's understanding of this. One is, vast majority of economic value at The New York Times today and likely tomorrow and likely always comes from news, comes from how we engage people around our news journalism, all the authority, the idea that we have these great big brands. The rest of them, they borrow a lot of authority from news. So I just, I've gotta say that first. Second thing I get asked all the time, what are you gonna buy next? What other space are you gonna enter? Listen, we have our long-term strategy, and the strategy does endure. We're trying to be essential for curious people everywhere that will be enduring. That strategy has sort of propelled and is powered by four advantages that, this is, I think most of the answer to your question, that really matter and put The Times in a different position. The first one of them is, we are already today in really big spaces that in some cases, tens of millions of people, in other cases, hundreds of millions of people spend time in: news, world class journalism, broadly defined, sports, recipes, shopping advice, games. So we're in these giant spaces. We don't need to be in another space. I don't rule out that we might be one day, but we do not need to be to keep growing the company. Second thing I would say is what we have, we have strategically and sort of thoughtfully invested into an engine that can produce world-class journalism and every other kind of content that we make. And now the existence of that engine and its breadth and its scale is like more rare and valuable than ever. It is really hard to do. You know, we reported from 150 countries last year in every state in this one, on every topic you could imagine. The Athletic, which is the sports site we acquired four years ago, it is by miles the world's largest sports journalism operation. It has 500 plus people, just journalists covering sports in this country and other places. You know, we have 11 games now. The big games, the ones whose names, you know, tens of millions of people play them. We created all but one of them, which we bought pretty economically, the one we didn't very economically and so on. So we've got this content recipe, shopping advice, we've got this engine and producing content. We've also done most of that up until this point in text. It's mostly been stuff you read and a little bit stuff you listen to, or interact with in games, outside of games. Our ability to innovate in format and to do it in video, what is that gonna do for us? By the way, we already have reporters everywhere. We already have a machine everywhere. You add a layer of production to then put those reporters on camera. I've just published an article, or maybe I haven't even published yet, but I can go on camera and explain what is happening here. That is awesome. That is gonna help us reach tens of millions of people who we don't already reach today. And by the way, it's trust building. You see a human being behind a story and they tell you, this is what I did to get this story. You're gonna trust it more. And then lastly, I'll just say, you know, our model, we are subscription first. We make the majority of our money from subscriptions now, but we actually have four growing revenue streams: subscriptions, advertising, where, you know, distributors pay us for our content that is more rare and valuable, and we have an affiliate business. So that's, all of that has growth in it.

Yeah. Context. Let me, can I talk for a minute about like how I think we got here? Sure. I do think people have been complaining about journalism since the dawn of time. Often it's people who wanna disavow the work, and sometimes there's very good reasons for the complaints. By the way, journalism, hardcore news, journalism that holds power to account on behalf of the public. Everybody should pay attention to it and complain about it when it sucks. I can't say that enough. It is done in service to the public. So there should be complaints and the standards should be very, very high. Let's talk about how we got here. I think three things have happened that have really caused, I agree with you that it is very different now in terms of polarization and the loss of trust generally. One is, you know, we've had more than a decade now of leaders in high places speaking out to disavow and discredit journalism they don't like. And that obviously has an effect. Often that is done to stifle further journalism. I think everybody understands that. Second thing that I think does not get talked about enough is, most people now including me, have some portion of their media diet fed to them by an algorithm. TikTok, Instagram, Shorts, pick your poison. What is that algorithm meant to do? It is meant to push you things that it thinks you already believe. It's gonna match the proclivities you already have, and it's gonna further them. That's not what independent journalism, by the way, that serves a purpose. I trade Instagram Reels with my teenager all the time. It's fun. But that is not what independent journalism is. Independent journalism is meant to open your mind, to challenge your perspective, maybe to show you things you didn't already know. So I think that play has shaped people's expectation for kind of what is media? And then the third thing that like never gets talked about is something like, sorry, something like three quarters of all the newspaper journalists in this country lost their jobs in the last 20 years. What? And lots and lots of newspapers closed. What does that mean? Most people don't run into, especially people your age don't run into journalism at like, the level of relevance of their daily lives at the level of like, oh, I have common interest with my neighbor who may vote differently, but we both care about little league and the grocery store. So all those things have made it worse. What is different now? One, there's much less institutional reinforcement. I tell everyone who visits me at The New York Times, go look at the picture of Richard Nixon. We've got a boardroom filled with pictures of people who visited. Nixon is one of the only ones who wrote under his picture. He wrote the following. Some people read The New York Times and like it, some people read The New York Times and don't like it. Everybody reads The New York Times. Richard Nixon had strong opinions about how he was covered, but he understood that like democracy needed independent journalism even if it pissed him off. And so that's different now. The other thing that's different now is there's all this other stuff, including Substack and podcasts, many of which are very, very good, but a lot of which is not doing the work that journalists do, asking follow up questions, having expertise in the space. And so there's all this substitutional stuff. So what are we doing about it? I said, one of the things already, put our reporters on video. Let them tell you what they're doing. They're human beings behind this. And let them describe the professional process that they go through to get the story. I tell everyone, if you wanna see what professional journalism does, or read or listen to the transcript from the two hour interview with the president of the United States from a few weeks ago that four White House reporters did. It is unbelievable the level of preparation they had to ask him follow up questions. That is the thing that is, that's what professional journalism does. So we have to show more of the work. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, our research tells us the more you use us, the more you trust us. So to the extent we can show up in lots and lots of ways in your life, in things that are in addition to our civic purpose and to the work of journalism on behalf of the public holding power to account. You know, we've got 70 people at The Athletic covering the NFL. We have more chicken recipes that you can make in 30 minutes that are gonna taste good probably than any other quality place of recipes does and so on. And so the more, or just come play our games and if we provide you with fun every day, you're gonna feel that I think that much more likely to trust The New York Times, or at least think we're worthy as an institution.

Yeah, we're not doing that anymore.

Totally.

Yeah. None of that, by the way, was leaked that I know of. We generally are, we talk about the things we're doing with AI. And I do say, if you wanna understand, we're actually suing OpenAI and Microsoft together. I spend a lot of time saying and Microsoft. And I do think reading the complaint is just a good way to understand what we're trying to do. We're also now suing Perplexity. And I just wanna say we have also made a deal with Amazon. So how should you regard this? What those lawsuits are about is protecting our intellectual property, which is the whole of our business and defending our rights around it. So hard stop. Why would we sue over here or do a deal over here? You know, we, as you say, have been open to working with tech companies where we feel like we have control over how our content is used and there's fair, sustainable, fair value exchange for our work and it's consistent with our strategic direction. So we are always open to that and have a long track record of doing it. Why sue? I think the stakes are really, really high here. And I wanna say to you that, to the best of my understanding, there's a handful of ingredients that go into making an LLM work. There's talent and we know that they're paying hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars these companies to get the talent to make their LLMs. I believe they are paying hundreds of millions, maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars for the power and the compute that is necessary to make those LLMs work. What's the third ingredient? They would call it data, we would call it copyright protected journalism and other content from The New York Times. They should be paying a fair wage for that too. So that's what that's about. I'm super passionate about the fact that that is not just an issue for The New York Times. And it is not just an issue for journalism. This is an issue for all holders of copyright protected intellectual property. It's an issue for society and ultimately it's gonna be an issue for the LLMs. 'cause if these places don't have a business model, there's not gonna be high quality creative content produced anymore including journalism. So that's why the suits. What are we doing with AI? Lots of things. You know, I'm a runner. I now listen to a lot of The New York Times articles read to me by an automated voice, which I think is on its third generation and sometimes still mispronounces words, but it's gonna get better and better and it's already pretty good. That's a use of AI. If you want to make Gochujang cookies, which is one of our most famous recipes, but you only wanna make them for four people and not a dozen, you can use AI to scale up or down that recipe. And then I think most interestingly, and we're using it in lots of ways, we're using AI to help our journalists do more and more interesting work. So everybody remembers what erupted after the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad. And there was a sort of narrative that the left was just apeshit about Sydney Sweeney. And we used AI to actually prove that the sort of impetus for the idea that the ad would even be talked about came from the right. We used AI to comb social media and make that case. The Epstein files dropped, the giant trove of documents that we're all still reading about and we are still reporting on, came out on a Friday. And I think, you know, a couple days later we were able to say how many times President Trump was mentioned in them and do lots of other things. So I could go on and on. The big point I wanna make to you is, I do not believe, we do not believe that AI will be able to replace the very human work of a professionally trained journalist with expertise on a thing or in a region or on a beat going out into the world and bearing witness. And then with creativity and expressively translating that, and with sensitivity and judgment for other humans into understanding. AI is not gonna replace that, can augment it, it can help it lawfully used, responsibly used, but it's not going to replace it. And the last thing I'll say is 'cause of that, we actually believe what we do. It's all worthy of protecting and enforcing our rights around. It's also, we believe gonna become more valuable in an information ecosystem overrun with synthetically made stuff.

The LLM makers are also making moves, you know, all of big tech, the big platforms that are creating real headwinds for publishers too. And we've been very loud about that as have others. So you gotta think about those two things together so they're not making it easy.