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Good morning,
This week’s Stratechery Interview is with New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. Levien became CEO in 2020, after previously serving as Chief Operating Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, and Head of Advertising. I previously interviewed Kopit Levien in August 2022.
The New York Times editorial team always elicits strong reactions, both in the political realm and also in tech, but that’s not what this interview is about; what is indisputable is that the New York Times as a business is both incredibly interesting and incredibly successful. Over the last decade the newspaper has gone from strength to strength, building a thriving subscription business, expanding its bundle from news to Games to Sports to Cooking and more, and now — to take things full circle — has a rapidly growing advertising business.
We discuss all of that in this interview, starting with the Games and Sports categories, why the bundle is about expanding the New York Times brand, and the company’s recent push into vertical video. Then we discuss what it means to be a destination site, while also using Aggregators to acquire customers. We spend time on AI, including the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, why Kopit Levien sees humans as the moat against AI content, and how the company is using AI on both the business and editorial sides. Finally we discuss the potential for building communities, why advertising is working, and how surviving in an Aggregator and AI world is about fighting entropy.
As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.
On to the Interview:
An Interview with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien About Betting on Humans With Expertise
This interview is lightly edited for clarity.
Topics:
Games and Sports | The Bundle and the Brand | Video | Platform Engagement | AI | Content Communities | AdvertisingGames and Sports
Meredith Kopit Levien, welcome back to Stratechery.
MKL: Hi Ben, thanks for having me, so happy to be here.
It’s hard to believe, but it has been four-and-a-half years since you last came on — I was thinking two or three years ago — nope, it’s almost half a decade. I was actually shocked that I’ve been doing interviews for that long, but apparently I’ve been doing them for like six, six-and-a-half years.
MKL: You have, and I’ve listened to a lot of them!
I appreciate it. Well, we already did the whole background conversation then, we both worked for the student newspaper, lots of commonality there. So let’s fast forward to the time of that interview. It was August 2022, and speaking of mind-blowing lengths of time, you had bought Wordle earlier that year, it’s hard to believe it’s been that long and then you had just purchased The Athletic. How do you feel about those acquisitions five years on?
MKL: That’s such a fun place to start. We acquired both of them, if I remember correctly, within a week of each other, and I would say we feel great about both of them and both of them have exceeded our expectations in so many ways.
Is Wordle the greatest media acquisition of all time?
MKL: You know what I tell people? That New York Times Games is the most up-and-to-the-right thing I’ve experienced in my career in terms of just people’s attention to it and the way it kind of touched culture and still touches culture every day, and the ability for Wordle to be like a megaphone for these other incredible games that we already had that most people didn’t know about.
And then what’s so amazing to me is we now have, I think 11 games — half of them are free, half of them are paid games, tens of millions of people play our games every day. And we have made the vast majority, we’ve made those games. And before Wordle and after Wordle, Wordle in and of itself is extraordinary, but before and after, we’ve made other extraordinary games, it’s so awesome.
Is it a bit of like annoying that’s like everyone thinks about Wordle, “Oh, you bought Wordle”, and you’re like, “Look, we made most of these, give us more credit here!”?
MKL: Listen, credit to Josh Wardle, it’s an awesome game, and it just touched culture like nothing else. But it has served us so brilliantly — it has just shined this huge light on all these other games and it’s given us a chance to prove our chops as a game studio and we just keep making hits. I am so proud of our games team, Jonathan Knight and the whole team around him, they have done such good work and they are still hard, hard at it, that team works so hard. I’m a Connections player, so Wyna Liu is my hero, but they’re all amazing and they put out really good work. Games, it’s going swimmingly, I hope we get to talk even more about it.
As long as we’re here, like how has your – because we were talking a bit about, Wordle sort of came out of the blue — it was this game that popped up, you snapped it up, super smart — and we were talking in our interview about it being an in-point to the New York Times broadly.
MKL: Yeah.
Has that evolved as you expected or has it evolved in different ways? In the context of not just Games being a property but also it tying into the whole thing.
MKL: What a great question. To answer that, let me step back for a minute and say our strategy is for the whole of the New York Times and all the different parts of the portfolio to be an essential subscription for curious people everywhere who want to understand the world and make the most of their lives.
We’ve got three pillars to that, 1) be, and become even more every day, the world’s best news destination 2) have these leading lifestyle products, including Games, but also Sports, Recipes, shopping advice, that really help people do their passion more deeply or better or enjoy it even more and then put those two things together, news and the lifestyle products, in an interconnected experience so that the New York Times is incredibly relevant to you every single day, whatever is going on in the world or your world.
Right. This is a point you made before, is you wanted the New York Times to not just be — sometimes the news is slow, or sometimes stuff’s happening you don’t care about, and you wanted to have other stuff for people along the way.
MKL: Listen, I want to be really clear. We are first and foremost a high quality independent news journalism company, that is our mission, it is the most value-creating thing we do for society and economically, and that is by miles. And to your original question, it’s just amazing to have all these other points of introduction to people and point all these other ways to bring people into the Times ecosystem and to get them to form a habit with us. Once we do that, once we can engage them in something, our bet is that we can engage them in more and more, and there’s lots of examples of that.
You mentioned you had three things, you had the news, you had the lifestyle, what was the third one?
MKL: Yeah, so news, news is such a small word for such a big idea.
You mentioned that sports is a lifestyle so is sports not news? Is that lifestyle? It’s kind of interesting where that fits.
MKL: We do sports news, we do sports journalism, we do news journalism. But let me stay on the news thing for a minute because we’re often even trying ourselves in how we articulate it to not let it be this small idea. We do high quality, original, independent journalism, which means we are unearthing new and important information through reporting and also providing often deeply reported commentary and analysis on the really big topics that are going on in the world and also on things that just matter at the level of relevance of people’s daily lives.
You could read us today for what is happening with this fragile ceasefire in Iran and you could also read us today for health advice or for what movie to go see or what restaurant people are eating in in New York City right now. News is this very broad thing at The New York Times, and we’ve got these four lifestyle products. I would say to you what we’re doing with The Athletic is absolutely journalism, often it is like news journalism, but make no mistake, and we are doing it with the rigor and the independence that The Times does. It’s journalism, but we are doing it for fans, we are doing that journalism.
Right. It never occurred to me until you sort of mentioned it — it’s not wrong to say that sports is a lifestyle category.
MKL: Totally.
That intersection is actually kind of interesting to think about.
MKL: Let me tell you something — I have an almost 15-year-old, he is an athlete, and he is a giant sports fan and when I think, “What are his lifestyle pursuits?”, when I fill out the parent statement in the school applications, first he’s a sports fan, and The Athletic is serving that fandom.
Do you think there’s a bit where some of this sports journalism has been caught up in, “We are journalists”, bit and has missed the fact that people watch sports in many cases as a pastime to relax. I look forward to turning on the baseball game at night, I don’t want the perils of the world, this is supposed to be an escape. It’s also most helpful to put it in this lifestyle category because that’s actually meeting people where they are.
MKL: I think that’s a great point. What I will say is The Athletic often does very hard-hitting sports journalism, it is certainly covering the important topics and the tough topics across the major leagues and teams in the United States and European football and a bunch of other things, so it is doing that, hard stop. But if you look at the multiplicity of things they’re doing and you look in a day’s time, it’s probably well over 100 stories that get published every day, an enormous amount of that is beat reporting on what happened to your team in the league that you most likely watch and it is literally meant to make you closer to the team, the fan, the game.
I think all high quality information is — consumers of information want uncompromised information and so The Athletic is just like uncompromised the way The Times is uncompromised, it’s going to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, even when that’s to uncomfortable places. But the whole purpose of the broad set of things we do at The Athletic is to make you a better fan, and we know that.
Whereas the purpose, and again, that does not mean we don’t do hard-hitting journalism, we absolutely do, but we are independent of anyone’s interest in that journalism but the sports fan. And for the Times, we’re not writing or producing our work for any particular audience, we’re doing it in service to the public’s interest.
Is that a value of keeping The Athletic brand separate from the New York Times?
MKL: We are absolutely committed to building the brand The Athletic, it was a deliberate choice, I’m very invested in that choice and we’ve still got a lot of running room to build it.
I say the biggest opportunity with The Athletic is just to make more sports fans. We’re making real progress with it and let me tell you, you asked me at the beginning, “How’s it going?”, we bought a company that was losing a ton of money because they were investing into a huge sports newsroom, it’s like a giant newsroom with a little business. We said it would take some time, but then it would be accretive to the Times — it is absolutely that. We got there in many ways earlier and better than we expected and today we’ve got well over 500 journalists at The Athletic. So it’s an even bigger journalistic proposition and it’s really contributing as a business to The Times and we’re thrilled about that, and I want to say we’re only four years and a few months in, we’re just getting started on all the ways we can support fandom of the major sports.
I think we were nailing the journalism thing, you’re always going to get better and better at that, they were good at it before we acquired them, we’ve helped them be even better at it, do it more robustly, do it in a more edited way and add like a layer of national, and in some cases global, sports coverage. But there’s just a lot of stuff that there’s a lot of white space in the market to serve fans deeply reported, uncompromised information and we’re going to do that.
You have such a good product organization and you have the whole Games initiative, how much do you think about the prospects for games in the context of sports? Whether this be fantasy sports or sort of a whole host of like daily pick-ems — it’s interesting because there’s obviously a huge gambling angle to this but how many of those sort of offerings are possible without necessarily being gambling or whatever it might be?
MKL: Yeah, great question. We think there’s real opportunity for Puzzles/Games, and Sports, we think we’re good at both of those things. We already have our first collab, I think it’s about a year old, we launched a Sports Connections puzzle, it is super fun. We did some great marketing for it with famous athletes, which was hilarious, and it’s played a lot, so people love it, and I would say that is early.
We’re building out the team, we just hired a new Chief Product Officer at The Athletic, he comes following years of building communities at Facebook. We took one of the guys from the Times newsroom who’d been a leader of the Upshot, who’s incredible at building interactive work, and he’s now leading interactive work at The Athletic, so we think there’s real opportunity for that.
And I’ll tell you just this week, it might even be today, I’m losing track of my dates, we are launching something called The Beast. I don’t know if you’re an NFL fan, but it is the most comprehensive guide I think that exists on the planet to the NFL draft class and it includes literally information on thousands of players who are draft hopefuls and then very deep profiles of 400 of them. Before we owned The Athletic, and actually until a year ago, we’d publish it like as a book, a physical book, it’s this like monster book because there’s so much information in it and teams use it, there’s nothing else like it. Now you’ll see as it launches this week, it’s got all these incredible interactive features now on the individual player profiles and if you’re someone, if you love an NFL team and you really care, you’re going to pay attention to The Beast.
So I think we’re just getting started on features that may be games and also other things that support a fan who’s super passionate about their team.
The Bundle and the Brand
I keep interrupting you, but you mentioned three things, so we’ve got to get that third thing. What was the third thing in addition to news and lifestyle?
MKL: World’s best news destination, leading lifestyle products, and put those two things together in an interconnected product experience for a bundle that makes The Times relevant for whatever is going on in your world, or the bigger world, every single day. That’s the idea.
Got it. We talked a lot about bundling last time and obviously that’s really the core of your strategy, how though has that evolved in the last five years? Is this really a most people are coming in the door through these lifestyle brands and you’re bringing them to the news, whereas it used to be the other way before? I’m throwing that out there as a hypothesis, how does that actually work?
MKL: I actually think the essence of it is about having this portfolio of world-class news coverage, news broadly defined, and then not just products, but these products that either are or are becoming the leaders in their category. These categories are giant spaces where tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of millions, of people spend a lot of time. It’s the fact that we have rare and valuable news coverage and lifestyle products in these huge spaces that’s really working.
So to me, the word “bundle” can mean — the low common denominator version of it is, “It’s a marketing concept or merchandising concept” — in our experience, we’ve got this singular idea of being essential in meeting a lot of different kinds of information and experience needs in a person’s life. Rather than it be this idea of, “We’ve got one big important thing” — I’m going to come back to news in a minute because news is central to all of it — but you’ve got this one major hero thing and then you append a bunch of other stuff so the consumer thinks there’s some other value there, we have invested and built these products out in such a way where each thing should be deeply valuable to the person who cares about buying the right products and is going to deeply research them, and therefore they use Wirecutter.
You talked about expanding the brand, is this what you mean? Where you hear “New York Times”, it’s not, of course news is always the most important, I know you’re going to say that, so I’ll say that for you.
MKL: I’m going to say that again and again, because it’s true. It’s also the most economic-value creating thing we do.
Right. But you want people to think that, “New York Times, that’s the best games”, or, “That’s the best cooking”.
MKL: New York Times makes the best puzzles, it has the best recipes, and by the way, just advice for home cooks who want to cook, it’s where I go if I’m a sports fan, and it’s absolutely going to give me the best uncompromised shopping advice — that’s sort of the spirit of it.
It’s not just a news indicator it’s like a “stamp of quality” indicator.
MKL: It’s a stamp of rigor and quality, and I’m going to keep using this word, “uncompromised”. Really high quality information that’s done in an uncompromised way and therefore has value at real scale.
And the “uncompromised” comes from the business model?
MKL: Uncompromised comes from the idea that at our core what we do is independent journalism. You could even say every bit of it, even the games are like journalistic in that they are sort of planned in a very deliberate way and thought out.
Right. They’re not randomly generated, someone is actually editing every puzzle.
MKL: That’s right. Humans with expertise are making these things and in some cases harnessing technology to do that even better. It’s really working, and I want to say to you, I wouldn’t have had these words four-and-a-half years ago, but at the core what we’re trying to do in a very complex information ecosystem, really shaped and controlled by a small number of dominant tech platforms, we are trying to make news coverage and products that are so good that people seek them out and ask for them by name.
MKL: Seek them out, ask for them by name, make room in their lives.
The destination site has been — there’s a few companies that I always feel very pleased about, I feel like they’re like my children in a way.
MKL: Are we one of your kids?
You are one of my kids!
MKL: I appreciate that, we could use all the parents, we could use it.
That’s why I loved that, I’ve mentioned it multiple times, but the strategy document that you guys, it’s been like a decade now — I’m like, “This is beautiful”, and I think it really was on this point of destination sites, this idea that the way around a world of Aggregators that just commoditizes everything is people have to seek you out directly. Google will say a competition is only a click away and no one seems to take that seriously, people can actually click on you and go there.
MKL: My answer, we all read your Aggregation Theory and all the updates you’ve done to Aggregation Theory. The way I think about it is for more than a decade, we have had these like four D’s that we’re obsessed with. Ready?
- We have to be a daily habit
- We have to have direct relationships with people
- We have to be a destination and let me say to you, by destination, I mean, we do most of the economic value creation and we also give the best experience if you actually come to us in the whole of the experience.
- Then I say the fourth D is we only do drive-bys if they’re deliberate.
So what do I mean by that? We know we exist in an ecosystem shaped by these dominant tech platforms and so and we have to have a wide free layer for our work, we have to, otherwise you can’t bring in the next subscribers. So we are very deliberate where we can be about how we go about doing that and the idea is we need to be able to get you to sample our stuff and fall in love with it and we’ve got to give you enough time and space to make a habit of it so that ultimately you subscribe.
Video
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I was going to ask this towards the end, but that’s a good lead into it. You’ve had a big focus on video recently, and it’s super interesting – actually, I have a few questions about this. One is it’s pretty weird to go to the video tab on the desktop and all the videos are vertical. Was that very controversial?
MKL: There’s video all over the site now so you’re gonna see it in a lot of places. When we say destination, we know a lot of people during the workday are reading us or watching us or listening to us on the desktop web, but we are so kind of first to that phone. Our bet is the ability to watch a video on a phone, you are going to want it in vertical and we now have a home for it in this tab. I encourage everybody, download our app, and you get the best version of what we’re doing.
Download your app and make sure you register your user account and get the experience. It’s really interesting because I’ve noticed with Stratechery actually, a huge portion of my audience now is just audio, I think more than half my subscribers listen instead of read. You mentioned you mostly listen, which is fine. But as far as the reading goes, actually, I still have a huge amount of people reading on the desktop as compared to mobile.
MKL: By the way, I listen when I run because all my other media time is reading.
Right.
MKL: And now I’m forcing myself to watch.
Right, you’ve got to dogfood it.
MKL: I’m like listening to YouTube when I run.
Just talking shop, is there a bit where, as you look back on the evolution of media, there’s a thing where actually it turned out that the browser ended up being a text medium, and then the phone was actually the multimedia platform?
MKL: That’s such a great question, that’s so well put and I need to take that in for a minute and think about it. What I’ll say that I think that’s related to that in a web world, we needed a website that people would type in and then like pin and always be able to go back to, that worked and the Times has been very good at that. In an iOS and Android world, we need an app, and we’re very, very good at that.
I would actually say to you, we’re still pretty early in really getting more and more people to use our app. Today, the majority of people who use our app are subscribers, the engagement is enormous, but it’s like mostly the people who subscribe. We have not made the app a really important place for prospects and we’re starting to do that, the Watch tab is part of that.
I think it remains to be seen in a world where the Times is as preferred a brand and a source for watching as it is for reading and listening. Which, by the way, I want to say to you, those things are not going to go away, we’ve been at this for 175 years.
Right.
MKL: The old media doesn’t go away, the people who do it still do it. They vary it a bit, but many of them still do it.
To your point, this is a big part of your approach is you have this huge reporting base, which the medium, that’s all ones and zeros, they can write an article, and they can be on a podcast, and they can show up in video.
MKL: And they can put a camera, they can literally hold a camera in front of them from somewhere on the edges of Iran and describe what they’re seeing. So I think it remains to be seen, I think the market is still kind of forming and structuring. We regard video as doing three really important things for us. One is it helps us engage the people we already have, and anything that helps us engage the people we already have is very good for business.
Churn mitigation is always a win if you’re a subscription business.
MKL: It’s good for business, and I would argue it’s good for journalistic impact and everything. Good for society, but very good for business.
We also think there is an enormous number of people in all generations of life, but especially young people, who spend time watching, and they’re either watching news or they’re watching things that are in a zone adjacent.
We are the only generation that really just maximized text, it’s been all downhill ever since. We got all the text in the world, we read it all, and then now everyone’s just watching video.
MKL: I could do a whole other episode on that and fight to get my very intelligent kid to just like sit back and read and how important I think that is to brain development.
But we think video will help us engage whole new audiences, that is a big bet we’re making, we’re already starting to see some of that, we are very excited about it.
And then the third thing that video does for us, and I think that’s really important, I think we all know that trust in all institutions is at an all-time low, trust in media is at an all-time low, I hate the word “media” because it lumps in journalism and a bunch of other things, but trust in all of it is low. And the more we can show you the work, the more we believe you will come to understand what an independent journalistic process to pursue the truth wherever it may leave looks like.
Interesting. So it’s like brand-enhancing for what you’re going for overall.
MKL: Totally, and trust building. I’ll just tell you, we are much more aggressive today than we’ve been. One of the formats that we’ve scaled the most and there’s still so much room to go is just a reporter on camera describing the story.
Which by the way then your production is vertical anyway so it ties right in.
MKL: But there are times you go into a studio and explain something, so it doesn’t have to only be vertical, it goes a really long way. And we have made a very deliberate choice where we’ve said, we don’t particularly have a business model on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube Shorts, but we’ve got to be in those places.
Platform Engagement
I wanted to ask you about that because when you think about podcasts, for example, there’s a huge push in general to be on YouTube and I think it’s pretty obvious because podcasts are incredible for audience retention. I’ve talked about for my business, all these people listening to Stratechery don’t go anywhere. Whereas people would have emails build up before that, and they’re like, “I have too many emails, I should just unsubscribe”, the problem is I get much less sharing because it’s much easier to forward an email and the podcast, you just go to the next podcast and then it’s sort of done. So you have podcasts in general going to YouTube because they feel like the algorithm is the way to acquire new users.
The reason to bring this up is I go to the New York Times YouTube page right now, your last main video is from seven days ago. Your last Short is more recent, but it’s about Trump escalates threats to destroy Iran. Well, there’s been some news development since those threats.
MKL: You think? Consult top of app.
But the point is clearly it’s not a priority for you. How does that tie into the balance of destination site versus customer acquisition and all those sorts of things?
MKL: It’s a great question. Let me start by saying our general thesis, and I’ve been here a long time now, so I’ve got enough reps to say it bears out. If we make great work that should scale because it’s unlike anything else out there, and it’s important, it will. I want to say that, that is our bet. And so I will say to you, we’re still at.
That’s my bet too.
MKL: I listened to enough of your work to know you think that too. It’s a really important principle that we’ve just like hit again and again and again as a business. First, we have to make like the best stuff there is, and it’s got to be done in an independent way and it’s got to be done with rigor into a high standard of quality.
So the chapter we’re in now with video is very much scaling production, which is like, “What are we making?”, “What is it?”, “What is the New York Times if you can watch it?”. We are early in that and we’re going to admit that all over the place. We are, as I started to say, putting a lot of that work. The best place to experience it is come to our app, go to the website, even if you have to, you know, even if on the site, some of it is shot for vertical, best place to experience it is our destinations.
But we need to be in the places where huge numbers of people are. So the work is also on TikTok and Instagram, it’s on YouTube both in short form and on YouTube, we’re starting to put our longer form stuff there. And the truth is, it’s a place where we can see, you are right, a lot of it is dictated by algorithms, but also you get a sense of what is a hit.
I’m going to name a few things that are just like unequivocally hits at the New York Times as video. The Ezra Klein show was only a podcast, it’s now a video show too — that guy is so brilliant, he has such an incredible following, we are so excited about that show. Right around the time we were putting him on video, we launched, to the extent that Ezra is examining the biggest ideas on the left, Ross Douthat is examining the biggest ideas that are animating the right. Ross has been a longtime columnist at the Times, we launched a show, I think we launched the pod and video at the same time it was one of the first ones where we said, we’re going out.
You say they’re going huge, are they going huge on your properties, or are they going huge on the RSS feeds and the other platforms?
MKL: Out in the ecosystem. And when I say huge, we were early in all of this, they’re building audiences and growing. The Daily is huge, The Morning, we have the largest general interest news newsletter I think on the Internet in terms of readership, five or six million people open it every day.
And do you see very tangible, measurable, people are finding this other platforms and coming back to the Times and subscribing? Or is this more ethereal, this is enhancing the brand, in the long run this will pay off?
MKL: It’s a great question. The broad answer I’m going to give you, and I ran the subscription business for a long time, I was on top of the product organization, I was accountable for it, the thing I’m sure is that we have to make stuff that is so good that it’s worth paying for even in the presence of free and less expensive alternatives, and we also have to have many tens of millions of people who do not yet pay, who are regularly engaging with our work. We do believe we have to be sort of out there in the ecosystem — of course, you and I both know, you know, we see a receding link-based economy.
Did you see that discussion between Nate Silver and Nikita Bier the other day?
MKL: Oh, I haven’t seen it yet.
They were talking about, because Nate Silver did some sort of article about who’s getting prominence on X and things along those lines, and one of Nikita’s pushback about The New York Times not having prominence, not just on X but on all social platforms, is you do what I do, which is we’re old and lazy and just post an article with a link and Twitter doesn’t feature links anymore. Fine, it is what it is, I have my built-in audience, it’s okay. And it’s like, well, if you actually want to grow, you have to do the whole thread thing like, “This is what’s in this article”, and at the end there’s a link. And Nikita pointed out that the New York Times does the bare minimum, it’s basically like an RSS feed for links, of course they’re not getting featured.
Is that something where, I’m telling you now, you didn’t read it, you’re like, “Oh yeah, we should fix that”, or is that a, “Well, you know what? We’re not a social media company, we are a destination site, and that’s just the way it’s going to be”.
MKL: It’s a fair question, I think you should regard us as first and most importantly trying to make the best stuff that can and should scale because it’s amazing. And remind me, I’m going to mention two other video shows to you that are so different. And then we are also looking to always master the evolving audience ecosystem. And I think if you followed us, it’s interesting on YouTube, we’re doing more now show by show to build audience so just like you mentioned, the New York Times channel, but like Ezra’s feed is surely updated, Ross Douthat’s feed is updated.
I’ll mention these two other shows. We launched our cooking team, launched a show maybe six months ago called The Pizza Interview, we have this amazing test kitchen on the west side of Manhattan and like every major celebrity with something important to say can come on that show now, they make a pizza and they talk about their work. So the cast of Stranger Things came with the finale, Ariana Grande came.
That’s a great concept.
MKL: It’s amazing. And that show is building so much momentum, so different than what you would expect. It is fun, it’s really working. We’ve had a show, I don’t know if you’re a music fan, Ben, but we’ve got a music critic and a music reporter, Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, they have had a podcast on The Times for like a decade called Popcast, where they talk about music. It was sort of made at the edges of the enterprise, these guys are so talented, and we’ve just brought them to video and kind of prime time and man is that scaling. They actually did a live show at an all-company meeting with Lizzo, it was unbelievable. They’re getting everybody, it’s so, so great.
What you see is we are just in the early days of saying, “How and where should we build the big audience for this?”. The Daily, which is nine years in still in the top podcasts, there is I think it’s the largest general interest news podcast, most people do not listen on The New York Times, they listen on Apple or Spotify.
Right.
MKL: And you know that because of what you do for a living. So we’re open-minded about that and also pushing really hard on the companies that shape the ecosystem to make it so that great stuff can scale.
Yeah, I’ve had plenty of discussions with YouTube.
MKL: I’m sure we’re going to talk about that too.
AI
Well, we’ve actually gone quite long, I do need to ask you about – there’s this technology called AI you may have heard of, I do have a few questions for you on that. Just to get it out of the bag, you’re in ongoing litigation with OpenAI. Obviously, I’m sure that constrains what you can talk about to a certain extent. But sort of big picture, what’s the point of this? What do you want to accomplish?
MKL: We’re in ongoing litigation, two-and-a-half years now with OpenAI and Microsoft, we’ve also sued Perplexity. Why? They stole our stuff, they used it without permission, without fair value exchange, copyright infringement and they build products that compete with us, so that’s why.
Let me just say, why did the Times do this? You know, we have spent over 175 years, an enormous amount of resources on high-quality independent journalism, and I want to say this, we’re fighting here, obviously, for the Times, but for the industry writ large for high quality journalism and content creation writ large and for the public to have high quality information and content. We have made an enormous investment, we’ve been doing it for a very long time, and we have a huge number of works.
Is your biggest concern the training or the output?
MKL: We believe that there should be sustainable fair value exchange for our work used in any way, number one, so fair value exchange sustainably. Number two, we believe we should have control and the law says we should have control over how our work is used, and I would say those are kind of for everyone.
And for the Times very specifically, by the way, we’re not just suing, we have a deal with Amazon, we choose to deal, these things are of a piece enforcement of our rights in court and dealing is all to put a stake in the ground to say high quality journalism deserves to be paid for and it should be. And, by the way, the LLMs are only going to be as good as the information that courses through them.
The third bit is can we do a deal that’s consistent with our long-term strategy, which involves ultimately having direct relationships with our consumer.
Do you worry about — you’ve had this huge growth in terms of these lifestyle verticals, things like recommendations, things like cooking. Some of those AI is really, really good and useful at, do you feel a threat there? Have you seen an impact there?
MKL: We’re enforcing our rights in court for very specific reasons.
I want to do a number of AI categories so let’s set aside the court case. Let’s just say in terms of NYT Cooking, super compelling. Also, I go to ChatGPT, I ask for a recipe and it will give me one.
MKL: Totally fair question. I want to say to you first, we’re also using AI like assertively in our product.
Right, my next question is how you’re actually using it.
MKL: Let’s come back to that. The most important part of our strategy, and maybe to the extent there’s a theme from this conversation, is that The New York Times creates human-led high quality news journalism and all this other stuff, including recipes that are better because of the humanity, the expertise, the professional process that goes into them. And I want to say, because you asked about cooking specifically, every one of those recipes, we have 25,000 recipes and counting in a database, every one of them, human-tasted, human-tested, they’re better. People say to me all the time, “Your recipes are just better”, yes! Because professional chefs and cooks are using them and it doesn’t get published until we’ve done that.
We think that’s going to have enduring value, we think in an information ecosystem where it’s harder and harder to find quality stuff, brands are going to matter more and human-made content is going to matter more.
The week you filed the lawsuit, when I wrote about it, I entitled it The New York Times’ AI Opportunity.
MKL: I remember what you wrote about it.
In this world of everyone getting individualized content and actually that makes you more valuable, not less.
MKL: Listen, society needs a shared fact base. People need high quality, uncompromised information and they need to be able to find it with ease and they need to be able to know what is true and worth their time and we think the Times and each of our portfolio brands, each of our lifestyle brands is like a signal to that. So we are obviously investing enormously into all that.
Has that been validated in the numbers?
MKL: Look at our business results. It’s been a strong period for our business results, I can’t tell you what will happen in the future, but I can tell you we are very, very focused on two things. One, making our products even more kind of rare and valuable at real scale to people, and we are also incredibly focused, part of how I got into this chair, we are incredibly focused on harnessing technology to make the journalism richer where it can help us do that, make our journalists able to get to more things or get to the things more deeply.
We are incredibly focused on using technology, and this includes AI, to make the work more accessible. I told you earlier, I’m a runner, you can listen to almost every article now. You can’t listen to the live journalism, but everything else you can listen to in an automated voice and I think we’re on the third generation of that voice, it’s so much better. It’s still like, we’ll mispronounce one or two things, but it’s great.
See, I read my own articles and I still mispronounce things, so maybe that’s actually the human component. The moment it starts pronouncing things perfectly, I’ll know it’s a robot.
MKL: We we’ve been aggressive with that. Let me give you an example in the journalism that the Epstein Files, I think it was like three-and-a-half million pages, they came out like late in the day on a Friday and we’ve got a whole AI Initiatives team in the newsroom and they like built a tool to be able to comb those documents and the magic of what we were able to do from them was the fact that we could create this tool that said like, there’s all these different story angles to get to, how do you get at it with ease? And then the beat reporters and the editors who have the expertise and the kind of rigor to say, “What should the public know from this?”, it’s the combination of those things that made it awesome.
I’m going to give you one more example that I just kind of said immediately, “Oh, there’s a real interesting opportunity here”. Remember the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes thing?
Yep.
MKL: So the early of read on that was that the left was up in arms about this Sydney Sweeney ad and we had journalists who basically did a story using AI to comb social media to sort of say, “How did this happen?”, and what they found was it was actually construction on the right, started as a construction. Like the idea that there was kind of fury about it started as a construction on the right and then became like a bigger thing.
So I think any new technology, it is our job, it is my job, to see that people are not afraid of it, and are using it in responsible and appropriate ways. We’ve just rolled out Claude Code to our product engineering team, so they can prototype faster and do all kinds of things. So The Times is not anti-AI or any other tech, we have laid a stake in the ground to say this next chapter of the ecosystem has got to be shaped in a way that allows high quality journalism organizations and other high quality creative content organizations to do their work in a way where they can earn the living they should from that work but we are certainly not anti-tech.
Content Communities
Just to go back to this AI bit and The New York Times AI Opportunity idea. You just touched on the, This is a trusted brand, it’s validated by humans”, it’s leaning into the humanity of it. I’ve expanded that bit a little bit as well as I’ve been thinking about this thesis, and I have this concept that I’ve been thinking about called totem content, where if everyone is reading AI content, everyone’s reading different stuff. The idea of having one piece that, “Did you read the Stratechery article today?”, or whatever it might be, is actually going to be more valuable, not less. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of community, it feels like no content company has ever solved community. You have a thriving comment section, but you’re not making friends in the comment section, it’s sort of a performative bit.
MKL: We’re not introducing friends to one another, not necessarily yet.
If I know someone who is interested in the same sports team or is interested in Wordle or Connections or whatever it might be or is interested in a particular facet of the world and I knew who they were, there’s something there and there’s a continual trigger for us to talk about it. Where’s your thinking about this? You do this all the time, there’s lots of group chats with New York Times articles shared it, is that something, though, that you want to or you see an opportunity to lean more into?
MKL: My very short answer is yes, with like a double underline. Yes, yes, yes. At the core of the mission’s role is to help society make sense of itself in a way that serves the common interest, the public interest, “common” is the main word in community. So yes, and I agree with you, I don’t think it’s been solved in any way yet by us or anybody else in the sort of publishing or journalism industry, but we’re beginning to focus on it much more earnestly.
I want to say two other things. Within the news report, we do a ton of culture and lifestyle journalism, and going back a couple of years, we launched the 100 Best Books, and we launched it with a bunch of input from experts beyond the Times, but of course, all coalescing around our books experts and we launched it with a bunch of features, because it was like an inherently shareable idea, “I read these books, Ben, you should read these books, what’s on your book list?”, and then we did it for movies. We’re just at the beginning of it, I think it’s a huge opportunity, I am super interested in it.
And the last thing I want to say, and it kind of brings us back to where you started with me. I will never forget, I was with my son and his friend, on the ferry to the Vineyard, and his friend was like, “Oh my gosh, I play Wordle every day and then after that, I go and I play…”, and he named four rip offs because he liked the game so much. Point being, we need to make more games, we have, we did, we’re still making more. But none of those games, you know, have like the competitors, people may play them, but like you don’t hear about them the way you hear about Wordle, they haven’t broken through. Why is that? There is one puzzle a day from a company whose brand ethos is it makes you smarter that you do with the people you love and by the way, it’s true for Wordle and Connections and Strands.
Everyone’s playing the exact same puzzle.
MKL: And it is a shared experience. Just to go back, you asked me about sports, fandom is a shared experience, and we’re thinking very hard about how we support that game moment in a way that I think The Athletic has a very big opportunity here.
And I think in news, what we want, journalism can’t solve society’s big problems, and there are many big problems, but society’s problems cannot be solved without high quality independent journalism. So the idea of, “Can we get more people engaged with one another?”, on really big, important, weighty topics that need independent journalism, I think that’s a big idea and a big opportunity for The Times, for journalism, for the country, for the world.
Advertising
Has the New York Times fully crossed the Valley of Despair in terms of advertising? Part of all this was you had to like build a subscription business but now that you’re known as a subscription business, advertising is suddenly a growth opportunity instead of a decline to manage?
MKL: I came to run the ad business, the woman who runs the ad business now, Joy Robins, she’s an extraordinary leader. The ad business I joke all the time is going so much better under her than it ever went many years ago. I think that we have really found a formula that works.
What is that formula?
MKL: We are a, and I bet, long after I’m here, we are a subscription-first business, meaning we make things that are meant to be extraordinary to consumers at great scale. So many of our ads are shown to subscribers because so much of our engagement is from subscribers and we’re obsessed, especially in a changing ecosystem, with getting the next group, the prospects, really, really, really engaged with our work and our obsession with engagement and with quality products in giant spaces that marketers want to be near, news broadly defined, but on the authority of news. Marketers want to be next to other healthy, thriving brands, and I think The Times is that today, but they also want to be in sports and they want to be next to our games, which are cultural sensations, and by the way, do you think marketers like shopping? Quality shopping and cooking, there’s so many marketers want to do stuff with that.
I do think we’ve arrived, I’ve been more optimistic and excited about our ad business over the last year than I’ve been at any other point and I think given the scale that we have achieved — Ben, you and I both grew up on the web, just think about the number of page views the New York Times has, like, all that engagement. And we’ve spent half a decade, longer than that, building very sophisticated first-party data. So we’re never going to have the scale of a platform or the targetability of a platform, but we are certainly well above what I would suspect any other kind of publisher can do.
That’s the question — is there anything actually generalizable from the New York Times? Like you’ve done it, you’ve won it, can anyone actually replicate this?
MKL: First of all, we have not won anything, I want to say that very clearly. We have so much more to do, to grow, to make sure.
Relative to basically every other newspaper, I’m going to declare you a winner.
MKL: Let me tell you the few things that I think are absolutely extensible. I often say we’ve spent so much of our time wanting to make a market and then support a market for digital subscriptions to journalism, and journalism being something of value that is worth paying for. We believe that a thriving, healthy ecosystem with lots of competitors who we’re fighting every day with is actually better, it’s certainly better for society, we think it’s just better generally.
And I want to say there are you, Puck, there are so many other things that have been invented since I came to The New York Times. So in some ways, there are aspects of the information ecosystem and journalism that that are thriving, certainly not local journalism, certainly not deeply reported journalism and that’s very unfortunate.
The things that I think are extensible, one, when I get asked, “Why has the Times succeeded?”, if I can only give one short answer, it is we kept investing in journalism, that’s it. Good times, bad times, we kept investing in the journalism. There was something there that actually was worth paying for, one. And two, we stuck to our values. So the Times can’t be bought, the journalism is never compromised, we can’t be cowed, we can be hated in lots of places, and people know they’re still going to get our best understanding, they’re going to get the results of a pursuit of truth wherever it will lead, even when that’s to uncomfortable places.
If I had to boil it down to like two short things, I’m ripping off a line from our publisher, AG Sulzberger, that I think does it so beautifully, he says, “It’s value and values”, we kept investing to make sure the product was still really valuable and then we just never let go of our values, I think that those are ideas that are extensible to everyone.
The other thing I’ll say to you, and this is maybe my contribution, we clocked early on, 9 or 10 years ago, we are competing for engagement with the most powerful companies, information companies the world has ever known, who are so much richer than us, so dominant, and we’ve got to get really good at engagement. We’ve got to get really good at making people want to come back, and we’ve also believed in the power of brands as signals to get people to ask for us. I say all the time, they’ve got to ask for us by name. The New York Times, Wordle, Connections, Strands, The Athletic, Cooking, Wirecutter, people have to ask for us by name, and we’ve invested into all those things, I think those are all extensible ideas.
Well that’s why I say you’re one of my idea children, destination site, I write about Aggregators and my personal strategy is to do everything the exact opposite as them because why would I want to even compete in that game? So that certainly resonates.
MKL: And you have so many readers and listeners at The New York Times, we’ve been reading you as long as you have felt like a parent of us.
Well, I appreciate it. You are, for the record, older than, The New York Times I should say. 175 years this year, very exciting, congratulations.
MKL: (laughing) Very exciting. Can I say one thing? If we can do anything with like a 175th — Is it a birthday? Is it an anniversary? — if we can do anything in this moment, the most important thing we want to accomplish is just raising people’s consciousness for the idea of what high quality independent journalism is and does. It is human beings with a professional process and real expertise going out into the world and unearthing new information, following a very honed professional process to do so, so that the public can know what’s happening. We are spending a lot of our energy this year at 175 years old, just trying to remind people what that is and there’s so many other things you can do in media now. You know, I listen to a bunch of stuff, there’s so many things that are like adjacent to news.
Oh, I appreciate it. I’m not a reporter, so I need someone to actually go out and unearth facts.
MKL: But it is not that, most of it is not that and I think as local journalism has been in such dire straits for so long, and there’s so few local newspapers and fewer journalists and as people get more and more of their media diet fed to them by an algorithm that’s meant to match the things they already think and as leaders work to discredit independent journalism with all those forces going on in the world, I think the public has a — I think it’s just harder to know or remember or be conscious of the importance of the thing our journalists are doing every single day.
There’s one thing, I know we’ve gone slightly long, but when you say that, what I find inspiring and why I like to talk to you and write about the New York Times is, I’m sure it’s a relief to you, I’m just completely independent of any partisanship or political angle.
MKL: Totally, you’re not compromised.
I find it so interesting from a business perspective and what you’re articulating there is what is inspiring is it’s a fight against entropy, where the easiest path for people and for publications is to just give in to the algorithm, as it were. And it’s kind of nice to go to YouTube and not see any of your videos there, because it’s sort of like an assertion that that’s not the path we’re going to go, and I certainly can relate to that and find that inspiring and that’s why I enjoyed talking to you.
MKL: I enjoyed talking to you, this was a lot of fun, thank you.
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