Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…ally 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. these are experiences that sit in giant spaces. So there's a big market for sports, for games, for shopping advice, and for recipes. So that's one. Two, I would say there are things where we felt like The Times could do something rare and really valuable. I talk about the size of that Athletic newsroom, and by the way, the Athletic audience is the fastest-growing audience on The Times. Because if you're a sports fan, where are you getting your really good, hardcore, in-the-locker-room sports journalism from? And then they're also in spaces where people are doing something all the time. You're shopping, people. People shop all the time. Wirecutter drove something like a billion dollars of commerce last year. And the real magic of all of this is that the whole is kind of more than the sum of the parts. Each part of the portfolio and our news coverage feed each other. So, you know, it's just as likely for someone to come in to play a game and then read a story about the war in Ukraine as it is the other way around. We were talking a few weeks ago about the importance of first-party owned and operated, you know, consuming The New York Times Company content on New York Times Company-owned sites. We feel the same way. Please do that. Yeah. In the age of AI, it's interesting, right, that you are a human-curated company. Everything that The New York Times does is human-curated. Absolutely. But a lot of the people in this room, they turn to AI to do a lot of the things that you just described. And yet, business is going great. How do you think about that? Yeah. Well, let me say a few things about The Times and about AI. The first one is that we firmly believe that journalism, particularly journalism about important things going on in the world, is first and foremost a human endeavor. It is by humans; it is for humans. You're not going to send—you might send a drone—but what they are going to find on the front line of a war versus a human being talking to people who've just been impacted... I think those are just like two different things. So that's one. Two, we feel really optimistic that AI has the potential to be a force multiplier to everything we do. And what does that look like? It looks like making our journalism much more accessible to people. I'm a runner, and I now take in a lot of The New York Times text articles listening to an automated voice read them to me most mornings. And we're just at the beginning of that. We have journalists who are using AI in some instances to comb through huge troves of public documents to get to a story in a better way. And I could go on and on, but the idea is AI sort of appended to 3,000 human beings doing journalism, making games, recipes, and so forth. It's the combination of those things. And the last thing I'll say is I'm very optimistic about AI, assuming that the journalism we spend a ton, and games, and everything else we do spend a ton of money on and work really hard at through human beings... hing I'll say is I'm very optimistic about AI, assuming that the journalism we spend a ton, and games, and everything else we do spend a ton of money on and work really hard at through human beings... I believe it's going to be great as long as that doesn't all get misappropriated by the large language model makers. Can we ask you about the OpenAI lawsuit? You're suing OpenAI and Microsoft for training without permission on New York Times content. Why? Why? Well, why did you decide to file the lawsuit? Yeah, listen, the first thing to say is that these companies making large language models are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute, energy, and talent. We've seen lots of stories about that in recent days. And so we believe they should also be spending money that equates to fair value exchange on the content that they have built their models on. So that's one. We believe the law is on our side. And by the way, not just the side of journalism. This is not just an issue for news organizations, although that is a pretty important issue to society. This is an issue for anybody who makes creative work, anyone who makes IP. And I want to say that America having a flourishing community of creators, IP makers, is foundational to our competitiveness, and really important to how we show up in the world. This is a big, broad issue. We think the law is on our side, and we have a lawsuit, as you've just described. And we are also, you know, eager to partner with companies when the terms are right and make sense. And as we've done, we just did a partnership with Amazon, and we did that because we saw it as having sustainable, fair value exchange and giving The Times control over how its journalism and other content would be used. So there's a thing that a lot of people — probably especially in this audience — have in their mind that wasn't really a thing yet when we did our episode in 2021. Which is this perceived anti-tech bias or anti-business bias of The New York Times. When people bring that up to you, you would say what? First, I'm not sure a lot of people have that in mind. I'll challenge that premise. But I will say we don't. It's not a thing. The job of The New York Times is to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. And sometimes that's to uncomfortable places. And we do that job first and foremost by reporting. Reporting is we're going to unearth new facts that we think, and others think, matter in the world to a lot of people. And it's worth saying, because I do get asked about bias all the time on any topic, it's worth saying we put an enormous amount of effort and care and money and method into trying to reduce bias in every way we can. In the process, we have a giant standards operation that really says this is an okay source or this isn't. That really says, yes, these are verifiable facts or they aren't. Every story of The New York Times is edited by at least two people. I could go on and on about all the ways we hold ourselves to account. t really says, yes, these are verifiable facts or they aren't. Every story of The New York Times is edited by at least two people. I could go on and on about all the ways we hold ourselves to account. And on tech in particular, I want to say that many of the tech companies, the big tech companies that shape the information ecosystem, have a level of power and influence and the potential to drive profound change in people's lives in a way that governments or nations might. So we cover them accordingly. And by the way, we cover them really broadly. We did a package on AI and a view from today of what it's going to do in people's lives. And there was as much in there about all the great things AI is going to do. And I do think the more we expose people to reporting, which we do on The Daily and in lots of other formats, the more they trust us and the more they see the lengths that people like Andrew Ross Sorkin go to, to really help you understand what really is. I mean, just to underscore the shift that's happened in the last 15 years, since the financial crisis, where tech was one industry among many and now is responsible for the majority of the market cap in this country, in this world. Trillion dollars. It's a big reason why people listen to Acquired. So we feel it too. On that topic of media evolution—media close to home for us—you're home with some of the biggest podcasts in the world. Yeah, how either podcasting specifically or all the different media you're doing beyond the written word, how do you think about delivering journalism today? Yeah, I was once standing—I started the Times 12 years ago—and I was standing with Andrew Ross Sorkin in a green room. I think I was there as his handler. He must have been going to talk to an advertiser. And I grabbed him right before he walked on stage. And I said, "Don't talk about the paper. We're not just a paper company." And I would say that is how we think about and approach whatever the delivery mechanism is—if it's text, if it's video, if it's audio—we are just thinking, how do we bring our work and engage the widest possible audience? And podcasts, the thing that you do, have just been great for the Times in doing that. We've got lots of hit shows: The Daily, The Ezra Klein Show, our new show, which is the New Right's answer to The Ezra Klein Show; "Interesting Times with Ross Douthat," and "Hard Fork," which I think is similar to you. What are those shows doing for us? One, they are deepening the engagement we have with people who already love the Times. They're making many, many, many new people love the Times. And I think, really importantly, they're helping us build a different relationship with the people we're doing this coverage and making these products for. When I meet someone whose podcast I listen to, as I'm doing with you guys, I think you're my running partners, because I've spent hours on a run listening to the two of you talk. And I think it's just a different kind of relationship. Let me say this about The Daily: we figured this out early in its life, but it's still the case today.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.