The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Bonus Interview from Pivot Miami: Meredith Kopit Levien, the President and CEO of the New York Times

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

Scott shares his interview with Meredith Kopit Levien, the President and CEO of the New York Times, which took place during Pivot Miami this past week.  Meredith discusses the future of news and journalism, the NYT's moves around subscription, and how it plans to innovate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey y'all, I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found.

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credit cards. Head over to nerdwallet.com forward slash learn more to find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet. Finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Welcome back for a special episode of the Pop G Pod. You're welcome. In today's episode, we're sharing our interview with Meredith Kokelevian, the president and CEO of The New York Times, which took place at Pivot Miami this past week. Meredith and I discussed how The Times has managed to stay relevant and demonstrated incredible agility and its ability to reinvent itself really well.

And also what new spaces it's looking to enter that will occupy our daily lives. So with that, enjoy our interview with Meredith Kopit-Levian, the president and CEO of the New York Times. Sarah Palin. Discuss. Let me, I'll get to that.

Let me just say thank you for having me. It's good to be here. Thanks for being here. I get to be colleagues with Kara. What a thrill. What a thrill. We'll come to that, I'm sure. Listen, it's a good day.

It's a good day for the free press. I think it's a good day for journalism in case you have not seen or you don't get news alerts. I think we alerted it. So, suit dismissed. just provide some context. Basically, it's a little bit complicated. A judge ruled yesterday and a jury ruled today that essentially that the law is clear, that journalists should be able to own

and correct their mistakes. And essentially what they ruled is that libel suits by public figures, you know, they upheld a precedent that libel suits by public figures, you know, shouldn't be used to intimidate journalists. And the bar is very high for proving malice. Good day.

The bar... Yeah. for proving malice. Good day. The bar is higher to be proved of spreading COVID through New York recklessly. But anyways, a little inside Palin info. So it brings up an interesting issue, and that is, so an article came out that loosely or not so loosely connected Sarah Palin with shootings in Arizona. It was corrected or fact-checked or corrected. And then she said that, was it defamation or slander? What was her? Bible.

Bible, excuse me. Meanwhile, what she incurs, if you will, every day on Twitter and Facebook is exponentially, I would argue, more damaging or less fact-checked. Do you see a need, and this kind of goes into a rabbit hole of 230, but is there a need to close the gap? If places with actual newsrooms are spending all their resources, and this is resource heavy, even just to get this dismissed. But how do we have newsrooms? And how do we have journalists who, my understanding is, have been cut in half the last 30 years? If we have one set of media that you don't even try and file a suit, and then we have another set of media that can be, I mean, if enough small newspapers get these cases from politicians, they're going

to go out of business. So what is your view on, in terms of what we should be doing to close that gap or should we? Is it a lost cause? Yeah. I don't think it's a lost cause. I think it is one of the most pressing issues, I would say, sort of polarization in society and trust generally in institutional media is related, but also one of the most pressing issues. Look, I think this is where you're going. I think the internet has failed us as a society in a lot of ways around information that gets you to, to understanding or to engage in a productive and fruitful way with the world. And I think in the wake of that, I think we started to see that like as a society, probably in 2016. And I think we've been seeing more and more of that. And I think, you know, I think it's a moment for brands.

I think it's a moment for institutions that can sort of uphold the requirements of a relationship with individuals and with a society to help them get on the journey to truth. And I think you're making a really big point, which is the way newsrooms are run is all about that. And the way publishers are run is all about that. I'm not sure, you know, or I don't believe that's what platforms do. I think they make software to sort of, you know, get for anyone to be able to publish content it's just a totally different thing i like the idea i feel it's hopeful my sense of kind of these iconic legacy print companies that really invest in their newsrooms either get bought by a billionaire democrat or slowly go out of business and that we're the new york times right now is one it's kind of a unicorn in the sense that it's building what feels like a good business. I mean, it depends how you look at it.

The stock is up 15x since its lowest in 2009, but it was higher in 2004. I mean, the whole space has just gotten the crap beaten out of it, right? And what do you see people, I mean, it doesn't feel, there's all these little startups, but if you were going into journalism, or if your daughter or son were thinking about journalism, if they didn't have a burning passion for it, and they were just looking at it from a business perspective, do you think, do you see new models? Do you see new ways? We have some people here from Substack, but I would argue I see top 1% getting 90%. Is the business

having a renaissance, or is it just going to continue this kind of slow burn with a few notable players hanging in there? So you're, there's so much in what you just asked. I apologize. No, no, no, that's good. Let me say a few things. You're asking about the times and kind of where we are in our journey. And you're also asking about the industry writ large. And I'll say, as it relates to the times, I think the single biggest reason the times is where it is today. And I'll just say, we reported earnings last week or the week before, losing all sense of time. But we crossed the $2 billion mark in revenue for the first time, I think, since 2012. So in many,

many years. So to your point, the company, it's hard to argue that the company isn't thriving. The thing that has made the company thrive over everything else, like on a, you know, reasons one through 10, why is the Times doing well? Reasons one through seven are because the first dollar in the place goes to the journalism. It goes to the sort of differential value of the work. And I just, I think that's the thing that has to be solved. And I do think, I think subscriptions as a business model for journalism, it just makes more sense than advertising as the only model. It's a more direct reflection of the value that you're giving to people.

I mean, you've talked so much about subscription, but I think it works. And I don't think the Times is the only place it can work. I was just, I think the next speaker coming up is the founder of Puck. And I would say, you know, if you have a niche and you can actually make something that is differentially valuable against a sea of less expensive or free. We're still competing with free a lot. Alternatives, I think you can have a business. And by the way, I would say that in any space beyond journalism, we have a recipe app that has more than a million subscriptions. Most of what's out there in the recipe market is free, right? And there's some sort of paid sites ascending, but a lot of what's out there is free. And yet we have one of the

largest audiences for recipes and we have more than a million subscriptions because the quality of the recipes is really good. So I think that's just a, you know, if your product is awesome and differentially valuable and people can't get it somewhere else, they're going to buy it from you. So I think that's what's happening. And I certainly think that's what's happening at the Times. I don't think the Times is the only player that can succeed. So you talked about subscriptions. You set a goal of hitting, I think, 10 million subscribers by 2025.

And you passed it with the acquisition of The Athletic. It feels like you've gone from one third of revenue or two thirds of revenue was advertising just 10, 15 years ago. Now it's, I think, less than a quarter. So it's fairly clear that you're moving, and I think definitely to a subscription model. What are the other opportunities for subscription? If you look out there and think this category, I would have never thought of the Times in sports. I remember being in the page one meeting where they pitch stories and the sports guy would pitch

a story and everyone else would just roll their eyes and like, you know, look at the ground. Where do you think the New York Times has credibility to get into other subscription types of services? Yeah, great, great and timely question. Let me say that the shortest way I can describe the strategy we've been running for years now, like half a dozen years, it's five words, we make journalism worth paying for. And we've just begun to sort of say to the world that the next phase of that strategy, which is still grounded in those five words, I guess, now journalism and like other great stuff worth paying for, is we now aim to be the essential subscription for everyone in the English speakingspeaking world, for now at least,

who wants to understand and engage with the world. And so we're going to do that in three ways. It's our intention to. We need to continue to lead news. We should talk about that. I want to say I've actually been asked by a number of people here today, like, does this mean you care less about news? I want to say hardcore accountability journalism and news more broadly. And the sort of core report of the New York Times is still the main idea of the place. I think it's always going to be the main idea of the place. It's always going to be the biggest driver, I believe, of our business. It's why, you know, something like 50 million people on average come to us every week. So news,

continuing to lead in that is a huge part of what we're doing. The second thing, though, to your point is we are saying, what are the other spaces within the kind of brand permission set, the New York Times, where, you know, the space itself occupies a big place in the lives of curious people, and we can build a daily habit. So we've already done it, you know, as of before we bought The Athletic, we had a million subscriptions to cooking. We had a million subscriptions to games. We started in crossword puzzles. We added spelling bee. We talked about Wordle, if you want. But we had that.

Adding The Athletic was about adding, you know, entree into a giant space. Like sports is such a big space where people have a daily habit following the teams and the leagues that they love. And we think we can make it sort of bigger and better. And the idea is lead a news, build leadership in these other spaces, put it together in a way where we become, you know, essential to the daily lives of millions and millions more people. I'm on board. So what categories do you think the New York Times would add additional? I'll give an example. Why wouldn't you start charging $2,500 a year for Dealbook? I am happy to charge you $2,500. And, you know, it's interesting. Jim Bancroft and I

were just chatting about sort of live events on the way in. And I was saying, you know, this is awesome. Dealbook has an awesome live event. You know, there are things we do where there are sort of high-priced, you know, tickets to go participate in something that's more than the content subscription itself. But let me answer your real question, which is, I've been asked this a few times today, what might you buy next? What other spaces? I don't rule out that essential subscription for millions more people, we've got a lot of value to sort of work with already today, even in the core news report. Just like within, think about what that core news report does in terms of culture and lifestyle

before you get to the other products. So we are deeply focused right now on how do we unlock that value to go after a really big market. I want to correct one thing you said. We achieved, we set a goal in 2019 that we would get to 10 million subscriptions, not subscribers, by 2025. We were, you know, in any scenario, we were running well ahead of that. So multiples from one person. That's right. That's right. So, and we actually, we had an earnings call where we like just gave everybody the calculus. So, and then we said, now we're setting a target because you imagine we expect many people, part of our penetration strategy is people are going to buy news and

other things. And we, our research tells us there are a lot of people who would be willing to pay for more than news from the Times. But the individual subscriber, I think, is just a better way for people to track our progress. So we said we got to 10 million subscriptions much earlier than we expected. We would have done it anyway, we believe, without The Athletic. The Athletic helped us get there even faster. And now the target is 15 million subscribers, which if we

expressed in the same calculation of subscriptions would be a substantially higher number. So I appreciate you fact-checking me real time. I generally do. But I use it as a segue to a question, and that is, when you're in a pandemic and topics related to health care or vaccine efficacy take on just a new level of gravity, and obviously there's this huge controversy or a lot of attention being paid around what obligation does Spotify have to checking or fact-checking vaccine misinformation, at the same time recognizing that the dissenter's voice, what might feel misinformation-ish at that time, things change. How do you balance, or do you have the same approach around everything, or are there certain issues that

kind of bubble up and say, we've got to devote additional resources to this in terms of fact checking? How do you balance? And I realize this is the other side of the house. I'm not speaking to AJ, I'm speaking to you. But it feels as if in a time like this, there's just a different, there are different topics that require additional scrutiny. Yeah. Thoughts on what's going on with Spotify and how it's changed the way you approach it? I think there are two good questions in there. Let me go first to like, what do you do about like a really big story that you didn't know was coming? I mean, you know, I think if you'd asked us in 2019, what are the big stories we would have said? It's, you know, it's climate,

it's, you know, polarization and populism and politics and it's sort of tech changing everything. I don't think it was on, you know, the average person at the New York Times radar screen that it would be, you know, a destructive global pandemic that would be, you know, bring tragedy on the, you know, horrible scale. We've seen the, I think the reason the Times has, I think, been a dominant journalistic player on that story, a really important journalistic player on that story. There was a period at the peak of the pandemic when something like Every Other Adult American was coming to the New York Times. And a big reason for that, and still one of the most trafficked pages on the Times is we built this COVID case

tracking database, which just crossed a billion views. But that answers your question, I think, in two ways. One, I think for a news organization to really be kind of of general interest, and we intend to be that, you have to be pretty lavishly staffed across the breadth of human experience. And it turns out, you know, we had done extraordinary work on Ebola, and we had these unbelievable people in our science desks who were the experts to cover infectious diseases. So, like, you know, like like you kind of have to have that, right? And we can go anywhere you want from that, but you kind of have to have that. And so I would say there's something about for a news organization, just having the resources to be able to do that

wherever the story goes. And then just to very practically answer your question, yes, we do pour resources into when the story goes somewhere else, we do pour resources into it. When the administration changed in 2016, we poured resources in there. I think when the tech story got as big as it has gotten, we poured resources in there. And how do you fight the tension between clickbait and things that might seem antagonistic and result in more clicks. Enragement equals engagement equals more Nissan ads. How do you, do you have, do you ever just check back and say, everyone has to ask themselves, is this news versus noise?

And you're responsible for hitting the bottom line. Is there always a tension, a healthy tension around money versus enragement, if you will? It's a really good question. And I love that expression. You're going to have to repeat that. Enragement equals engagement equals car sales. I like that. I think before I came to The Times, I would have thought, especially in an ad-driven world, my first job at The Times was running advertising. I would have thought, especially in an ad-driven world. My first job at the Times was running advertising. I would have thought there was a lot of tension around that. There really isn't. Like, everybody kind of gets at the place that, like, it's the fact that the first dollar goes to the journalism that makes the whole thing work. I think the Times, you know, we can sometimes have

a reputation of moving slowly on things. You and I were just chatting about a colleague, a very important colleague of mine, who I said is incredibly thoughtful and deliberate. It's a deliberate place. And when you're dealing with kind of truth and speaking truth to power and accountability, like you have to kind of move deliberately. So how do we deal with that? What does that look like? We have a very large and sort of growing standards department. I bet all of the high quality journalism organizations have that. Ours is very significant and we're regularly saying,

what else do we need to add to this? And like, you'd be, one of the things that has been incredibly interesting to me is the things that require standards. So if you imagine the whole supply chain of journalism from like how something goes from an idea in an editor's head to what we tweet when the story gets published. There's like standards for all of that. And there is a team of highly experienced journalists whose job is to say, are we doing that right the whole way through? We don't get it right every day.

We certainly don't. Are we correcting mistakes swiftly just to go back to Palin? That's what happened there. But that's one of the control mechanisms for the thing you're describing. And I'll just say very candidly, I don't feel the tension of, you know, can we deliver?

I mean, there are moments where you say like, gosh, we could grow revenue even faster or we could grow the bottom line even faster. But you just can't sort of be on the business side of the New York Times and not believe it's the differential quality of the work that actually makes the business grow. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances,

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Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. We talked about business model and the move to subscription, which seems to be slow and steady and really robust. What about when you think of mediums? So from print to digital, some flashes of brilliance in podcasting, The Daily. I think you have some others. I haven't really listened to any of them. And then, but when you think about other mediums, it seems like most... I'm swaying. There you go. What does this word sway? Anyways, she abandoned me. When you think about other

mediums or the times, it feels like the most successful media companies are going to be multi-channel and across different mediums. When you look at a medium, whether it's TV, ad-supported TV, streaming media, licensing, great stories to other film production companies, doubling down on more podcast events, which can be profitable. So they tell me. When you think about, okay, over the next 10 years, cruel truth of capitalism is you have to find our resources, right? You have to manage that. Which mediums do you are going to over-invest in, under-invest, new mediums that Times traditionally hasn't been in? Mediums. So those are all good questions. We do think about that. I would say, I'll say a few things in no particular order. I think data journalism

and sort of visual, multimedia data and visual journalism is a place where the Times has differentiated itself. And I think we're like at the beginning of the ways that can be applied to get people to, you know, to be able to seek the truth and understand the world. So I think we're just at the beginning of that. That is one of those places where it's like you can't sort of pour resources in fast enough. And there's just so much more that can be covered in a way that makes people kind of engage when they otherwise might not. Like that's the particularly in like big, weighty, hard topics about, you know, any number of things. So that's one. I think we're at the beginning of audio. I think we're at the beginning of it at The Times. I think we're at

the beginning of it in the world. I think the use case for audio is like so big. Everyone should listen to Sway and the other podcasts we make at The Times. And they've all really... What's the fastest growing podcast brought to you by the New York Times? I would say The Daily still has a really, really strong audience. And even though it has some natural kind of ebbing and flowing, it's pretty amazing how it's held up in a moment when the news cycle really changed. And we're, you know, so we're excited about that. We're excited about Kara's show. We're excited about the Ezra Klein show.

I could go on and on. And I'll just, I'll say we also have, you know, we're testing a lot of things in audio. There's a fair amount of just like creative energy that has to go into innovation. It's not all going to work. One of the things I love about being at the Times is we put resources into that stuff. So we also are sort of wondering, you know, how big will read aloud

audio be? We bought a tiny little app called Autumn, which has read aloud long form journalism. And we've got a live beta now. It's closed beta, but an experiment out in the wild. Some of you are probably on it to say, can we combine sort of podcasting and read aloud audio and things that aren't full programs? So I think audio is going to be quite big. And then I would just say, I want to talk for a minute about video. I think, you know, the times couldn't be what the times is now as a report on the world without having video be a lot more of what we do. But it didn't, you know, if you'd asked me eight years ago when I got there, how it would go, it's not gone. As I would have said. Like the places we've really differentiated ourselves.

We have an incredible forensic video team that does investigations. They like look at how a bomb fell in Syria and help the world understand whose bomb was it and how did that happen. So I just, I think there are a number of areas. Sorry, that was a long answer. That's all right. So granted, hindsight's 20-20. You weren't at the company when this happened. But did the New York Times and Condé Nast and the FT, didn't we all just, wasn't the stupidest thing we could have done was to let Google crawl your data or our data?

Shouldn't we have, if we could go back in a time machine, wouldn't we say Google, Facebook, none of you can get near our data and debase it the way they have. Wasn't that the original sin of content was to let these crawlers come in? From where we stand now, looking back, it certainly looks problematic. What I'll say is, you know, and that was what, like, 18 years ago, 19 years ago, you know, maybe 15. If you say when Google was founded, maybe 15 years ago, 12 years ago. Now, I would say, to your point, we are sure that we need to be a destination. We need to be something people ask for by name that they actually go to. We need to control as much as is humanly possible our own data.

And most importantly, we need a direct relationship with the consumer. So were those decisions made then in service to what we now know? Absolutely not. I will say, though, now, like once you get to a place where you're doing that, and I'll say our digital ad business has really had a nice comeback in certainly last year. And we think there are aspects of it that will really sustain first party data, you know, brands wanting to work with another brand that people ask for by name, that sort of thing. So that's all sort of,

that's the business we're building. But Google plays a role in our subscription funnel, an important role. And I'd be, you know, let's, I don't want to pretend that they aren't such an important firmament of the Internet that having people be able to search and then land on a New York Times page isn't really important to us. So it's, you know, it's hard to know looking back in time. So we're going to open it up to questions. Just one last question. Ten-year-old? Yes. All right.

Justice, he renamed himself JJ. JJ. Yeah. Nice. So any thoughts? A lot of people, I think that kind of the struggle that almost or most of us in the room face about trying to balance being successful and relevant professionally, which just requires a certain level of commitment. I would say there is no balance. There's just trade-offs. Any advice to people? 10 is just such, I've described that as like 8 to 12 is just magic. But at the same time, trying to stay relevant professionally, which you've achieved. Any of this like top-line thoughts or myths you want to dispel around,

you know, managing that professional relevance and trying to maintain, you know, that nice relationship with your kid. I'm so glad you asked me that. Let me, I'm going to say something really unpopular. I think you just have to be really, I have had to be extremely intentional about wanting to raise a happy, well-adjusted kid who wants to spend time with me and who I want to spend time with. And even if that first thing is going to go away, that's like not a requirement. But, you know, I don't want to look back. I have one kid. I fought really hard to have him. I don't want to look back in my life and feel like I missed his childhood. So what have I done? You know, I've got a big job that spills over into lots of parts of my life. I've limited, you know, I don't do very much besides really actively parent and run

the New York Times. Like I don't, you know, I've really... We'll get your act together. Seriously. No, I just, I haven't, you know, I just want to say I got up... That's it, huh? That's like all I do. I got up this morning, I will say I got up and I went running and I wasn't, you know, I just want to say I got up. That's it, huh? That's like all I do. I got up this morning. I will say I got up and I went running and I wasn't like, I said this to somebody earlier today. I wasn't like, oh my God, I'm going to, he's going to miss the bus if I don't get back and I should stop. And then I like went on a whole run.

Meredith, thank you very much. Lots of fun. Good to see everyone. Our producers are Caroline Shaverin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. We'll catch you next week on Thursday. managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another

and get the real work done. Tune into How's Work, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions, what should you use it for, what tools are right for you, and what privacy issues should Thank you.