Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Completely debt-free. They have all of this incredibly high-margin digital subscription revenue that no other news organization in the world has. They have multiples more subscribers than The Wall Street Journal. When you say that no other organization the world has, The New York Times (I think) today is 7½ million new subscribers. The closest one is The Washington Post was somewhere like two, and then after that it drops real far. The LA Times has a half-million or less, and it goes on and on down from there. When you look at the number of subscribers that they ever had in print, like ever, in 2002 they had (I think) 1.1 million. The New York Times was the number one print circulation newspaper, at least in America. Only a million subscribers to the print edition. They figured it out and just at the right time, and then had this frigging unbelievable tailwind happen with the Trump presidency. In the meantime, like you alluded to in the hook at the beginning of the show, they’re hiring all the best journalistic talent in the world to come right at The Times, and they’re paying them more than anyone else because they can afford to, because they’ve got essentially a Netflix-like business model at this point.…

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