When Meredith Kopit Levien speaks, the news industry does well to listen. The CEO of the New York Times has been an exemplary steward of a news brand whose success is self-evident and doesn’t need repeating here.
Earlier this month she was interviewed by Ben Thompson for Stratechery, a great website that addresses the strategy of media and tech companies. It was a distinctly friendly conversation but none the less interesting for that (reflexively combative interviewers take note).
In it, Levien talked about her strategic thinking, from which many in the business could learn, but also, in my view, she inadvertently outlines a looming issue for the Times.
Here are my key takeaways:
1 The NYT’s vision statement is not just window dressing
After a bit of throat-clearing back-and-forth she starts her answer to Thompson’s first real question, about how Wordle fits into the NYT, thus:
“What a great question. To answer that, let me step back for a minute and say our strategy is for the whole of the New York Times and all the different parts of the portfolio to be an essential subscription for curious people everywhere who want to understand the world and make the most of their lives.”
This tells me that this strategy really is the driving force of the Times. She clearly knows it off by heart – though Gray Lady-ologists might note that she dropped “English-speaking” in this iteration – and it guides her in what she does. She leads with it.
My question to you is can your chief executive do the same? Is your company’s vision the first thing you talk about when describing your aims as a business? If not, ask yourself why?
2 Levien has a plan for the industry
I don’t mean she is thinking about the industry as a whole, but in talking about the NYT she explains what I think every news publication should aspire to do.
That is: “… at the core what we’re trying to do in a very complex information ecosystem, really shaped and controlled by a small number of dominant tech platforms, we are trying to make news coverage and products that are so good that people seek them out and ask for them by name.”
This is the way forward. News publishers cannot get sucked into the grey morass of mass-produced commodity news. They must be distinctive and differentiated to survive.
Can your publication really, truly say that it is? If not, what is getting in the way of doing that? Because you need to find a way around that.
3 Oh, wait, she does actually have a plan you can follow
It sits in the “four Ds” that she describes: developing a daily habit among your users; having direct relationships with customers; building a destination that people want to visit; and accepting drive-bys [fleeting visitors] only if it’s part of a deliberate strategy.
These are broad principles but they are ones that I’ve seen work at a number of publications.
The trick is to stay the course. You should remember that it took a few years for the NYT to get its subscriptions flywheel really turning.
4 Human-made is her recipe for beating AI
Levien was talking specifically about the paper’s Cooking strand. She claimed that its recipes were “better” than their AI equivalents because all 25,000 were “human-tasted, human-tested”.
I’ve heard the Times’s recipes are great, but as someone who has just spent a few days cooking Claude-curated recipes I’m not sure I’m so convinced by this one. The AI recipes I used were really good, and free, and I can’t see what a human layer would have added.
Also bear in mind that AI recipe work is going to get a hell of a lot more sophisticated in the months and years to come. Being human-made might not be a catch-all advantage. This will likely apply to all forms of content.
5 Audience-first journalism? Not at the Times
This was really interesting. Levien said of The Athletic, the paper’s sports vertical, that it was emphatically oriented towards the user and the goal was “to make you a better fan”.
But of the rest of the NYT she said: “We are not writing or producing our work for any particular audience, we’re doing it in service to the public’s interest.” Later on she described the act of doing this as “uncompromised journalism”.
I am wary of such claims, having talked to enough readers and seen enough data to know that very, very few users see journalism as “uncompromised”. Having worked in enough newsrooms I also know that nor should they. I will maintain that there is no such things as unbiased journalism – we should aspire to it, but we will never reach it.
More worrying is that an increasing proportion of the public see journalism as a whole as compromised: the latest figures show that in America only 28% of people trust journalism.
In my humble view, and with all due respect to Levien, journalism needs to get much more responsive to its audience rather than hand down its judgments from on high. If someone tells you something is “in your own best interest”, the response is usually not pretty.
Likewise, I think even the New York Times needs to be wary of assuming that it knows what’s in the public’s interest, without asking them and then continually assessing whether they are meeting that need. Because otherwise, even from its current heights, the New York Times will decline.
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Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the
transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]