Speaker unverified: prediction

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…Raymond. Okay, this one. I wonder if this whole room is going to know this one: What iconic New York location is named after The New York Times? Oh, Times Square. Of course. We have a billboard there. Who is the most iconic CEO in The New York Times Company's modern history? And that person might be backstage as we speak. We know this one. Yes, we do! New York City, please welcome the CEO of The New York Times Company, Meredith Kopit Levien. You've got to go over there. It's great to see you. That is great to see you. That was fun. A huge thank you to Andrew Ross Sorkin, everybody. Good enough for Andrew Ross Sorkin. I'll go anywhere Andrew Ross Sorkin goes. And he is out late for taping at 6 AM on CNBC. So, he's got to go get some sleep. I think he is. I think he is. Well, Meredith, it is great to have you here today. If there is one Acquired episode in the canon that is quintessentially, iconically New York, it's The New York Times Company, of course. And you guys, you're killing it. As we talked about in our episode, in 2008, the company was on the brink of death. You had sold your headquarters building. And here, in the few short years since then, you are the largest digital subscription newspaper in the entire world. You are the only standalone global newspaper company left. Market cap of almost $10 billion, an all-time high. Publicly traded, things are going great. Is that a question? No. So, tonight... I mean, keep going, keep going. Yeah, you just sit there, we'll just talk about you. So tonight, it's been four years since our 2021 episode. We want to ask you about a bunch of things that have happened since then, sort of as an update for the Acquired audience and the Acquired canon. So first, how is the subscription business going, and what has stayed the same and what's changed since that big 2014 Innovation Report that changed everything? Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I'm so delighted to be here with you guys. It's going well. It's going well. I think, where you left off, we had about 5 million subscribers in 2021. We are closing in now on 12 million. And the company is growing as you described. It's growing revenue, it's growing profit. I think more importantly, it's growing in its journalistic impact, it's growing in its cultural impact. And we really look out and see growth possibility in all directions. Every week now, 50 to 100 million people are coming to The Times website and apps. Some 20 million or so people listen to our podcasts and read our newsletters. We've got about 150 million people who've registered with us, and that number is still growing. Millions of people use it every day. So that all feels like real growth possibility. You ask about 2014. I'd say that's the year where we set a course for a long-term strategy about being essential in people's lives. Back then, print was still the lion's share; it was still the dominant engine of the business, and we were still doing great at the journalism. But I will say, we were getting our clocks cleaned by digitally native, upstart journalism companies at building a big audience for that journalism. So, you asked me what's different now? I would say, one, print is... e were getting our clocks cleaned by digitally native, upstart journalism companies at building a big audience for that journalism. So, you asked me what's different now? I would say, one, print is... well, the newspaper is well inside of 30% of the business. We've got a huge engaged audience, as I just described. Wait, the physical newspaper is still almost 30% of the business? It's well inside. It's probably 20, 25%, but yeah, and by the way, it's going to be around a long time. People love it. The thing that I think we're going to talk about is that we've got a much wider product set now in every way: more coverage, more topics, more formats. We show up in people's lives in new and different ways. And I think maybe the last thing I'll say is, culturally, we sort of found our way to go from playing defense to playing offense. We were defined back in 2014 by this big question: 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. 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.…

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