NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Running a Media Brand in the Age of AI

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:17)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:22)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
Tracy, I think I've mentioned this story once or twice on the podcast. I repeat things as I get older.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:30)
You repeat the lore.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:32)
I repeat the lore. There are new listeners who haven't heard of it. In 2009, when I was in a Business Insider, my first sort of real journalism job, I got a call from someone, I don't remember who, but someone asked me, they're like, oh, would you be interested in coming in for an interview at Dealbook?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:49)
Oh, yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:49)
I'm part of The New York Times.
And at the time, I was just like, what? Why would I want to board the Titanic? The stock was at $6 a share, old print media, I was part of the internet, et cetera. I was like, no, I didn't, I was like, no, why would I want to do that? I'm part of the new thing.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:10)
I think this is a very old traditional media versus new media divide because around that time, I guess I would have been at the FT already and the New York Times kind of looms very large in print media, to put it mildly.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:24)
So there are two things that I, when I think about that moment that really stand out and how different we are 17 years later, something like that. One is the New York Times was certainly not the Titanic and it's done extraordinarily well since then, almost can't overstate how much it's reversed. But two, there's something else, which I think is interesting, which is that maybe at the time, those of us sort of do independent media, et cetera, like maybe it's like, oh, the goal is to reach a brand like The New York Times. Whereas these days, one of the things that arises is people who are at big platforms and publications like The New York Times might look and see how lucrative independent media is and be tempted to like, oh, do I need the label? Do I need the platform anymore? There's so, I could make a ton of money on Substack or something like that.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:10)
Lots of spin outs of journalists going independent for sure. The other thing I was thinking of is just the melding of digital and print media, right? Because it feels like both sides look a lot more like each other than they're used to. So you have the old school print publications that have gone big on digital, including games, video, podcasts, all that good stuff. Meanwhile, a lot of the independent writers, the bloggers, are now known for producing very high quality content and journalism. So it's kind of like everyone's come together.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:43)
Yeah, this is a big fusion. Anyway, to understand contemporary media business, we have to understand The New York Times clearly, just like a huge winner. There's melding of all different kinds of businesses under what at one point was, quote, a newspaper.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:56)
I'm just excited for the media naval gaze.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:58)
That's right, we love that. Anyway, I'm very excited to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Meredith Kopit Levien. She is the president and CEO of The New York Times. She just reported earnings yesterday. We were recording this August 6th. Meredith, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

**Meredith Kopit Levien** (3:15)
I'm delighted to be here, fan of the show. New fan, but fan of the show.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:19)
Thank you.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:19)
Love to hear it. What is The New York Times? Because at one point someone would have said, oh, it's the newspaper. If someone says to you, what is The New York Times? What is it?

**Meredith Kopit Levien** (3:27)
I think The New York Times is the essential service for curious people everywhere who want to understand and engage more deeply with and enjoy the world.

**Tracy Alloway** (3:39)
When you first took on the CEO position, what would you have described as your biggest challenge at a place like The New York Times? Because again, Joe and I have come up of age in the journalism business during a very turbulent time when all we heard was death of the media, death of the media, death of the media, most of what many of us are still alive.

**Meredith Kopit Levien** (3:58)
Yeah. What a fun question.
I've been in this job, CEO, for six years, but I was the Chief Operating Officer for, let's call it, three or four years before that. And then I had a couple of commercial jobs at the Times before that. And I would say, as I was coming into the role of CEO, we were beginning to get to the point where it felt like the really hard arc of digital transformation was like we were doing that. We had done that and we were finding success with it. And I would say like this really hard period of playing defense. You know, how do we deal with the fact that we've got a newspaper business, a print business that's declining rapidly? And how do we get to enough scale in our digital business to make up for what we're losing in digital? So that's like around my own transition of role. We were beginning to transition from playing defense to thinking more ambitiously about what is all that The New York Times can be and do as a force for value creation for its users, for society, for investors. So to me, my own transition kind of came at a time where we were beginning to say, how do we think even more ambitiously about it? And then I'll just say that in all the time that I've been there, so I've been there 13 years, and this is true, I came from two other media companies, I spent the better part of my career working in and around journalism and media. The big lesson I've learned is that how and how much you can grow your media business is like first and always a question of how and how much you can grow the engaged audience for your work. Grow it, sustain it, grow it more, find the next group of people.