Speaker unverified: preference

Transcript context

…uestion: could we transform out of being a newspaper company? And I think now we're defined by our ambition for what all that The New York Times and journalism broadly can be and do in people's lives. there are games, sports, Wirecutter, cooking, recipes. That means it's subscriptions to things beyond news. It feels like in a lot of ways you guys have actually recreated what the newspaper was back in the day. It wasn't just news when you got a stack of newsprint every day or every Sunday delivered. It was lots of things: it was comics, it was shopping, it was classifieds. I would sort of describe it as you are the largest first-party content company by subscriber count in the world. I mean, what other... It's more than a newspaper now. Am I thinking about that right? Yeah. The easiest way to think about it is we are aiming to be the essential subscription for curious people everywhere who want to understand and engage with the world. And there are three ways we're going about that. One, we want to be the world's best news destination. Hard stop. Two, through building and buying, we have these market-leading lifestyle products, and we want those products to help people make the most of their lives and passions. And we have put all that together in a connected product experience or bundle so that The New York Times is valuable in your life, whatever is going on. So, build or buy. I mean, it sounds really good to have all this other stuff. Often these expansions fail at businesses; acquisitions fail. Oh, we're going to launch a cooking section, or a local section, that just fails comparison shopping. Why do you have, what, five, six, seven expansions now that are working? What's the difference? Yeah, well, they've been a combination of building and buying. But I would say, in my time at The Times, there are three companies that we've bought — three things we've acquired — that have gone really well because they hang from that deliberate strategy I just described. The Wirecutter, which is like a modern-day Consumer Reports for product reviews. The Athletic, which has, to our knowledge, the world's largest sports newsroom, at 550 journalists and counting. And then a little thing you might have heard of called Wordle, which we actually acquired the same week, because The Athletic was very, very exciting. 550 million? Single-digit million? Well, we might have to do our... Greatest Acquisition of All Time episode between the two. ally acquired the same week, because The Athletic was very, very exciting. 550 million? Single-digit million? Well, we might have to do our... Greatest Acquisition of All Time episode between the two. these are experiences that sit in giant spaces. So there's a big market for sports, for games, for shopping advice, and for recipes. So that's one. Two, I would say there are things where we felt like The Times could do something rare and really valuable. I talk about the size of that Athletic newsroom, and by the way, the Athletic audience is the fastest-growing audience on The Times. Because if you're a sports fan, where are you getting your really good, hardcore, in-the-locker-room sports journalism from? And then they're also in spaces where people are doing something all the time. You're shopping, people. People shop all the time. Wirecutter drove something like a billion dollars of commerce last year. And the real magic of all of this is that the whole is kind of more than the sum of the parts. Each part of the portfolio and our news coverage feed each other. So, you know, it's just as likely for someone to come in to play a game and then read a story about the war in Ukraine as it is the other way around. We were talking a few weeks ago about the importance of first-party owned and operated, you know, consuming The New York Times Company content on New York Times Company-owned sites. We feel the same way. Please do that. Yeah. In the age of AI, it's interesting, right, that you are a human-curated company. Everything that The New York Times does is human-curated. Absolutely. But a lot of the people in this room, they turn to AI to do a lot of the things that you just described. And yet, business is going great. How do you think about that? Yeah. Well, let me say a few things about The Times and about AI. The first one is that we firmly believe that journalism, particularly journalism about important things going on in the world, is first and foremost a human endeavor. It is by humans; it is for humans. You're not going to send—you might send a drone—but what they are going to find on the front line of a war versus a human being talking to people who've just been impacted... I think those are just like two different things. So that's one. Two, we feel really optimistic that AI has the potential to be a force multiplier to everything we do. And what does that look like? It looks like making our journalism much more accessible to people. I'm a runner, and I now take in a lot of The New York Times text articles listening to an automated voice read them to me most mornings. And we're just at the beginning of that. We have journalists who are using AI in some instances to comb through huge troves of public documents to get to a story in a better way. And I could go on and on, but the idea is AI sort of appended to 3,000 human beings doing journalism, making games, recipes, and so forth. It's the combination of those things. And the last thing I'll say is I'm very optimistic about AI, assuming that the journalism we spend a ton, and games, and everything else we do spend a ton of money on and work really hard at through human beings... hing I'll say is I'm very optimistic about AI, assuming that the journalism we spend a ton, and games, and everything else we do spend a ton of money on and work really hard at through human beings... I believe it's going to be great as long as that doesn't all get misappropriated by the large language model makers. Can we ask you about the OpenAI lawsuit? You're suing OpenAI and Microsoft for training without permission on New York Times content. Why? Why? Well, why did you decide to file the lawsuit? Yeah, listen, the first thing to say is that these companies making large language models are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute, energy, and talent. We've seen lots of stories about that in recent days. And so we believe they should also be spending money that equates to fair value exchange on the content that they have built their models on. So that's one. We believe the law is on our side. And by the way, not just the side of journalism. This is not just an issue for news organizations, although that is a pretty important issue to society. This is an issue for anybody who makes creative work, anyone who makes IP. And I want to say that America having a flourishing community of creators, IP makers, is foundational to our competitiveness, and really important to how we show up in the world. This is a big, broad issue. We think the law is on our side, and we have a lawsuit, as you've just described. And we are also, you know, eager to partner with companies when the terms are right and make sense. And as we've done, we just did a partnership with Amazon, and we did that because we saw it as having sustainable, fair value exchange and giving The Times control over how its journalism and other content would be used. So there's a thing that a lot of people — probably especially in this audience — have in their mind that wasn't really a thing yet when we did our episode in 2021. Which is this perceived anti-tech bias or anti-business bias of The New York Times. When people bring that up to you, you would say what? First, I'm not sure a lot of people have that in mind. I'll challenge that premise. But I will say we don't. It's not a thing. The job of The New York Times is to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. And sometimes that's to uncomfortable places. And we do that job first and foremost by reporting. Reporting is we're going to unearth new facts that we think, and others think, matter in the world to a lot of people. And it's worth saying, because I do get asked about bias all the time on any topic, it's worth saying we put an enormous amount of effort and care and money and method into trying to reduce bias in every way we can. In the process, we have a giant standards operation that really says this is an okay source or this isn't. That really says, yes, these are verifiable facts or they aren't. Every story of The New York Times is edited by at least two people. I could go on and on about all the ways we hold ourselves to account.…

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