David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I think the way to grade this one is forward looking, what's an A+—this of course is a business outcome—what's an F, and then what’s the C scenario? To me, the A+ is that they are literally at the inflection point where they don't need to hire many more journalists, many more engineers, many more designers. I know they are still hiring aggressively for these roles, but they start to taper in the fixed costs required to produce what they produce. They're able to just turn on a machine to continue acquiring subscribers which is a little bit of a risk to me, because while we're still in a fast news cycle environment, we no longer have the Trump presidency. Hopefully, we won't have the Corona virus soon. God willing 2022, we can go by and I'll forget to check the news and it'll be awesome. That won't be great for The Times. It's worth calling out. That is counter to their interest. I've been thinking about that, though. I don't think that's likely to happen anytime soon. Look at how crazy 2021 has been. I’ve been literally just thinking about this for like my own life and sanity. I think we just got to accept that we live in a world of accelerating change, which means lots of frequent disruptions of all types. All of which is probably good for the news business. Yeah and this turns into a B, if they're not—on this fixed cost base—able to just continue the subscriber tear that they've been on, but just modestly, linearly continue to acquire subscribers. I think there's an absolute A+ case if they do keep making investments and really turn into more of like a tech company of experiment, learn, rapidly iterate. The New York Times has revenue opportunities lying around all over the place that they're not taking advantage of. If they can figure out a way to monetize those, in a way that feels authentic to The Times but is also a really good business strategy, which I feel I'd give them a C so far, maybe a B-, then I don't care about, let's taper off the hiring. Go high Google levels of people and go build more and more stuff then double down on what's working.…

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