Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That’s such a good point. Nobody, probably not even Kara Swisher—as much leverage as she does have—is not going to be able to go to AG and say, hey you just added two million subscribers this year. I need some percentage of that. Right, no one’s got a revenue share deal with The Times in their employment contract. But I mention this was both a bear and bull case. My verdict is still no, that The New York Times is not a tech company. Even though the business profile and the dynamics that we just described definitely make it look that way, the organization with power inside this company is still in the newsroom. Much like Facebook has your sort of product, Apple has designers, Microsoft has PMs, Google has engineers, The New York Times has journalists at its core with all the power. They brought in lots of people to be a part of the newsroom. When we talked earlier about the business side, being all non-journalists, there’s still something to the fact that the most important thing to The Times is their brand, their objectivity, their ability to be discerning in this world. Where you have things where a tech company would be like, whoa, we have the number one podcast? Let’s launch 30 podcasts. Or like, whoa, a lot of people like our cooking app? Lets launch 10 other experimental apps. Or like, the crossword’s going well. For games let’s try and be Zynga. Let’s try and do a ton of crazy data science and launch a bunch of games. It’s happening over the course of years instead of months and they’re not running hard into these opportunities that I think you would see for a tech company in the startup world if they were falling into the success that The New York Times is. I think the thing holding them back is the very thing that made them successful, which is the trust in their brand that they need to maintain with this level of journalistic integrity. Totally. I think it gets back to literally—as we told in the history, baked into the immutable mission of the trust and the company—to continue to serve as an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence, and unselfishly devoted to public welfare. As a news organization, that is what they are. That is undeniable.…

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