Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…And to be clear, like some of the things they reference like BuzzFeed and others a lot of the traffic that they’re getting is they’re just taking The New York Times and other articles, rewriting the headlines, and posting them on their own sites. And The New York Times is like, that seems fine. 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.…

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