David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There’s this interesting allegory to the yellow journalism era where what Sulzberger and the 10-12–person team asset is if we are willing to step up internally, make a big change, bring the right leaders into the newsroom—tech, product, distribution, marketing, growth leaders—and adopt them as our own, we think that we can hold our values, grow our subscription business, and grow our reach. It is this pretty bold assertion to say we’re not going to sink to the clickbait level of everyone else. We are going to continue to produce great journalism with an intense focus on integrity, and also fix our business. They’re reading it like, if we didn’t know that it worked, you would be reading this thing being like, good luck. I didn’t read the report as closely as I know you did, so I don’t know how much of this was in the report versus they do it. They also learn the lesson of not missing technology waves, so they launch apps. In 2014, they launched The New York Times cooking app, which has become hugely successful. Hugely successful. In 2016, they launched the crossword app, which has become hugely successful. The crossword app on its own is a $30-million-a-year business with zero marginal cost because they’re just running historical crosswords from years and years and years, and I think some new ones, but the apps business that they have—they call it other digital—is growing at 60% year over year and it’s crazy high-margin revenue. Think of the cooking, the crosswords, all that stuff.…

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