NYT publisher AG Sulzberger on Trump, OpenAI, and the economy

29:07What news source are you consuming that would surprise people listening to this conversation? Are you a Steve Bannon War Room fan? Oh, I'm less interested in the sort of talk ecosystem, you know, the pundit ecosystem. I was just about to say. But like even here, right, you're a reporter. You're actually – and you're out there still reporting. You're working the phones. You're talking to people. You're going to places. You're trying to understand issues. You are – if you're like any of our reporters, you're waking up in the night wondering if you missed something, wondering if someone might be misrepresenting something to you, thinking about the one more call that can give you confidence.

29:49I'm doing a great job. Let's skip you with it. I'm doing a great job. So I'm looking in the reporting ecosystem. So I'm less drawn to cable, right? I basically watch no cable and I'm less drawn to the podcast ecosystem. Beyond that, I read really broadly. You know, the folks I read most closely, After the Times, The Journal, The Post, The FT, The Guardian,

30:19The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, right? So that ecosystem, you know, and then a bunch of digital media and sub stacks and, you know, newsletters that find their way to me. We'll be right back with A.G. Salzberger, but first, a word from a sponsor.

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31:49And we're back. I'm going to make a lurching transition here. Great. A year should go. Lots of the publishers you just mentioned, including Vox Media, we're recording this. Axel Springer, which owns Business Insider, who I work for, just to get the disclosures out of the way, signed deals with OpenAI to license their stuff. You're suing them instead. You're suing OpenAI and Microsoft. You're not the only publisher suing an AI company, but that's definitely the most high-profile one, and you suing OpenAI when lots of other people are taking their millions of dollars. Instead, I think you've spent$11 million last year just prepping this lawsuit.

32:27Why are you suing them and why not take the money like everyone else is? So because it's an active lawsuit, there's going to be some limitations on what I can say here. But look, at the highest level, this is about a core principle. The first thing, let me just say very directly, we're not anti-innovation. We're not anti-AI. We don't think the future can be held at arm's length, right? In fact, you know, a big part of my career, my entire career as a leader of this organization has been about embracing innovation in service of an enduring mission, right? You know, an enduring journalistic mission.

33:07And I think we've been really well served by that. We have already won a Pulitzer Prize in part with thanks to the use of AI-supported investigative reporting. You know, we're using AI to make our products better. Every single story we produce is automatically... Yeah, there was some pronouncement that was treated like a big deal, like you guys were going to use AI in the newsroom, which seemed kind of straightforward to me. Oh, that was not a big deal. I was surprised that it was a newsroom, but anyway. Yeah, no, but we're using it to, you know, translate everything into audio, right? And, you know, if you're a visually impaired person or if you're just a multitasker, right, you know, that's a great service.

33:44You know, it's easy to imagine a world in which, you know, AI can translate everything we produce simultaneously into every language on earth. So we're not anti-tech. We're not anti-tech in any way. Um, but, um, being pro-innovation does, shouldn't mean that we also have to believe that any company can come and take everything we've ever produced, um, without permission, without compensation, and use it to create competitive products and experiences, right? And, you know, there's a legal principle behind that belief, right, which is, you know, intellectual property that really matters, right? It is not legal to just grab all the work someone's done.

34:37Napster found that out, right? You know, when they, you know, did a similar thing and decided to take every song ever made and every album ever made and decided that they would take that without permission and without compensation and create a product, a competitive product. And, you know, and we're saying that that's not OK. But NAFSA didn't survive that legal challenge, right? But the destruction of the music industry continued, right? People continued to take music for free. even though the music industry eventually found a new system that allowed them to do streaming. Yeah, I'm just going to push back on you pretty hard on that one.

35:14You know, the music ecosystem, you know, was in free fall until the Napster ruling. And then it steadily built itself back up and is now significantly larger than it was pre-Napster. I mean, it stayed pretty fallen for a long time. It took the industry a long time to figure out a new model. Oh, for sure. For sure. Look, innovation is always going to be disruptive. And there's plenty of people who would say that Spotify and iTunes, right, like that the monetary split isn't good enough, right? So it's not to say that the current ecosystem is perfect, but it's certainly a healthier ecosystem in which those intellectual property rights are recognized.

35:57So when I talk to the publishers who are doing these deals, they all know this business history. They've seen it before. And their conclusion is this is coming whether we like it or not. We can get some terms and some money if we sign up. Otherwise, we get nothing and this change happens to us regardless. Why is that not a risk for the time? Why did you decide that you're better off suing than dealing? I mean, a lot of those folks are also privately, you know, cheering on and some of them. Yes, no, no. They like what you're doing. They just think that it's not going to work. We have two things that are probably different about us.

36:42I would call them advantages. One, we're on stronger financial footing now. And two, we just take a longer view. And we are willing to spend money to protect an enduring right that matters, and not just for the times. It matters for our whole ecosystem. It matters. And not even just for other journalism organizations. It matters for musicians and actors and, you know, screenwriters and, you know, artists and researchers and, you know, novelists. And I think if you take the long view, you recognize that it's important to stand up for this one because otherwise, you know, I don't think there is anything to ensure that those payments can or will continue.

37:34So separate but connected to the lawsuit, it seems like we're headed towards a shift and certainly lots of big companies like Google think the shift is happening where instead of going to a Google or someplace and looking for an answer and being sent to the Times or Vox or any other site, you just get the answer spit out there. You have no reason to visit those sites. The referral traffic goes down. It seems like that reality is coming one way or another. Well, I haven't heard you. I've heard that you are talking to people in the newsroom about this, saying this is a big challenge for us regardless.

38:08What is the – what's the plan to deal with what seems to be a real shift in the way people consume information? I mean – so I'll say two things that are – will sound contradictory. They're not. It's just I think a big part of the job of a journalism leader in this era is to hold sometimes conflicting thoughts in their head simultaneously. So one is the platforms exert disproportionate control over the flow of attention on the internet in the digital era. And when I say the platforms, I mean it's a handful of companies really control how people spend their time and how they find things in digital environments.

38:56That is a reality. That's Google. Twitter, Amazon. Exactly. I mean, yeah, maybe TikTok. You want to add to that list. But, you know, even if you just take the shortest possible list, you know, you'll still end up with a majority, even if you just pick two or three places. And we're going to need to figure out how to navigate that environment. Right. future readers of the Times are not going to have their first interaction with the Times by downloading our app or typing www.nytimes.com. Because this is the standard response for all publishers. Well, people will come to us first because of our authority and they know that they're getting it through us.

39:41They're going to come to the source. And in most cases, I don't think it's going to work at all. It's plausible for the Times. Every future reader, you're going to meet for the first time somewhere else. And so you just have to be out in those environments. At the same time, our strategy has been extremely explicit, you know, since I think 2014 or 2015, that we are destination first, right? That we have been trying to build a destination. And to build a destination, you have to build direct relationships. And we've seen for a long time how dangerous it is to be overexposed to the algorithmic whims of the platforms.

40:19And, you know, the answer to that is to build those direct relationships. And there's many ways that we've been doing that, right? I think the daily is an example of going off platform to introduce ourselves and start to build a habit in your life that then allows people to say, oh, this is different. This is different than other news sources in a way that I appreciate and value. The morning, right? So we have the most listened to news podcast and we have the most read newsletter. Those are examples of us going elsewhere to then build relationships that are destination-based. There's a lot of vertical video on the homepage right now.

41:06Is that because you want to make that stuff and then put it on platforms like TikTok and then bring people back to the Times? Or do you think people who are going to NYT.com want to see video? It's more the latter than the former, but it's both, right? Again, holding those two contradictory thoughts, right? You know, I think TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, right? Like all these places have introduced a new language for communicating information that's really interesting and has value. And, you know, we're unapologetic about wanting to learn from all that. The highest value we see is it's a different way for people to engage with our product, right?

41:51You know, and with our journalism, right? So it's a little bit more lean back. It's a little bit more sort of grabbing a short moment. It's also showcasing the expertise of our reporters, right? Like putting a human face to the work we do. This is something you guys have talked about for a while. This is not just a random person. This is a person with authority. Here's what they look like. Here's why they know what they know. And exactly. They're going to explain how they got the information that they're talking about. And in a low trust environment, I think that type of work, that type of explanation becomes more important.

42:28You know, and at the same time, right, this is a forum that feels more native on a place like TikTok or on a place like YouTube, right? YouTube actually rewards a little bit more long form stuff. So you see us for the moment. They're also pushing on shorts. The Klein show there, the Daily there. And, you know, if that's how we meet, you know, the next generation of future Times loyalists, that's great. When you put video – I mean the Times has a conservative lowercase c audience. It tends to. Do they flip out when they see video on their homepage and that's not what they want? Or do they sort of accept that this is 2025 and sometimes there's video?

43:07You know, I don't buy the conservative audience. Like, honestly, I don't buy that we have any type of audience anymore. You know, I think sometimes when people are describing what they think our audience is at the times. Well, you kind of know who a New York Times subscriber is, right? You had kind of a pretty good sense of the demographics for that. Yeah, pretty good sense. But what I'm saying is, so I think when people are saying a phrase like that, they're actually thinking the times of 160 years or 165 years. But over the last 10 years, we've become the second or third most read news source in the country.

43:46We have the most listened to news podcast, most read newsletter. We went from 1 million to 11 million subscribers. subscribers. You know, we now have, you know, the old stereotype, right, was, you know, is your, you know, your uncle who's a lawyer or professor on the Upper West Side was the Times subscriber. Well, we now have more subscribers in California, and Texas is next on the list after New York, and then Florida, right? So our audience is getting significantly more diverse, age diverse, racially diverse, politically diverse, certainly geographically diverse. I think our fastest growing regions right now are actually the South and the Midwest for subscriber growth.

44:30So, you know, we haven't had any pushback on this stuff. You know, I remember in that sort of older era when we tried to eliminate the bridge column and Dean Baquet, who published more hard-hitting, controversial journalism than probably any leader in our history said it was the single most pushback he had ever gotten to any decision of any type was eliminating the bridge column. We're past that. Our audience really values the fact that this is a place that is really committed to maintaining our standards for excellence and independence and our first order commitment to quality journalism, but changing just about everything else about how we deliver it.

45:16That 11 million subscriber number, I mean, I remember when you guys moved to subscriptions, it was the – you could tell the leadership of the paper on down was not sure it was going to work, right? The fact that – the idea that you'd have 11 million subscribers basically a decade later seemed implausible. So you have that number. It's super impressive. I was talking to one of your employees. He said, we have 11 – we've never had more subscribers and we've never been less relevant and their argument was sort of twofold. One was, you know, you have the Trump administration literally sort of pushing you guys out and replacing you with, you know, trying to replace you with, like we talked about at the beginning, with pliant coverage.

45:55And two, I think more broadly, there is this world where people might be seeing a New York Times video on their TikTok, but they could also just be seeing a slew of other random stuff, some of which was news, some of which is random stuff. And it's just a cacophony of news, cacophony of stuff. And so within that, the Times is no longer as prominent as it used to be. Does that argument make sense? I know you're going to disagree, but do you understand the argument? Oh, I certainly understand the argument. And to be clear, a version of this argument emerges every time there's some sort of significant sort of change in society and how it gets to the news.

46:37I bet the first memo you can find about how newspapers like the New York Times are no longer relevant or was probably written in the 1920s around the rise of radio. And you can only imagine what the memos looked like as TV was rising. And then we all know you know, what the memos looked like. In the 90s. In the 90s as the internet was rising, right? And, you know, an institution like the Times was being derided as a dinosaur, right? You know, destined for extinction. You know, once again, last year, we had one of the largest audiences of any news source. I think it was us, CNN, and Fox were the three largest.

47:25overall audiences. NBC may have been there as well, despite the fact that we are a paid news product. And we had by far the highest engagement per visitor of any news source. And you combine that to, there are more people spending more time with the New York Times than at any time in our history. I mean, it's just, and it's not even close, right? And you have a sense of how relevant we are, right? So even the, you know, the folks who criticize us. So like, you know, Trump has been relentless in his criticism, but when the plane went down, you know, over the Potomac, if you look at his press release, the first thing he does, The first sentence of it quotes our investigation, our major investigation we had done a year earlier on air traffic safety and the various lapses that we had revealed in many ways sort of predicted some of the tragic outcome.

48:30Um, President Biden was a fierce critic of the New York Times. But when we spent six years on the ground in some of the most dangerous places on earth to look at the true toll of, uh, um, uh, drone warfare programs run by the United States on civilians across the Middle East, we prompted not only admissions of wrongdoing by the, by the Pentagon. But we prompted significant reform on how war was waged in this country, right? So, you know, people are always wringing their hands on this stuff. But I think our track record speaks for itself. When I was talking to folks in advance of this interview and said, I'm going to talk to your publisher, what are you interested in hearing?

49:20I was surprised. And can I say one other thing on that just because that's not to say that we haven't seen this massive growth in this other type of ecosystem, right? So really the talk ecosystem. This is the Joe Rogans. And people taking advantage of that, right? I mean Joe Biden didn't give you guys a sit-down interview. You made a big fuss about that. No one even considered that Trump would do that and he's going through the Theo Vons and Joe Rogans of the world he wants to communicate. Well, Trump oddly is much more accessible to the press and I would be surprised actually if he doesn't give us a sit-down interview.

49:51You know, he's a longtime reader and appreciator of the times. He's a print guy. But access should not be seen as a sign of the importance of the work that's done, right? Like we also have very little access in Russia or China, right? We have to be able to continue to report fully and independently in the absence of access. It is true that there is an influential cohort of people, right, including both of these presidents who have found that they have found some not inconsiderable advantage to going in front of like-minded talk people, right, either on TV or in the podcast ecosystem who won't challenge them the way an independent reporter from, say, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal would.

50:47Biden also didn't sit down with either of those news organizations for an interview. At the end of the day, all those folks also depend on the work that institutions like The Post and The Journal and The Times and the AP and Reuters and Bloomberg are doing. Because, you know, we're the ones that are unearthing facts. We're on the ground reporting the next story that they can all argue about, that they can spin, that they can try to contextualize. Without the work that you and other mainstream media are doing, there's nothing to talk about on a podcast. That's right. We'll be right back with A.G.

51:19Salzberger, but first, a word from a sponsor. And we're back. I did want to ask you about the opinion section. When I talked to folks who work at The Times and said, I'm talking to the publisher, what do you want to hear them talk about? What's going on with the opinion section, which surprised me the first few times I heard that response, but it was pretty consistent. First of all, can you explain what your relationship is to the opinion section of the paper and how it's different than the news section? Yeah. So at The Times, we have sort of two walls that are meant to preserve the independence of our news report.

51:55So the first wall is between news and business, right? So that means that unlike most organizations, the executive editor does not report to the CEO, right? And that is very intentional so that the executive editor has the independence to do things. And this happens at a pretty regular cadence that may not be in the best commercial interests of the place. So, for example, writing a tough investigative piece on one of our most reliable advertisers. Right. You know, we, you know, had an example a handful of years ago where we wrote a piece that got us kicked out of China after a major investment to create a new Chinese language news product.

52:46Right. But we had this incredible investigative report that showed, you know, corruption, self-dealing at the highest levels of government in China. and something that every news organization deals with that tension between edit and dollars. And in the real world, there's usually some sort of give and take. But you think you can have a firm enough wall that the your editorials, the people creating news for you don't have to worry about that. That's right. If you're thinking year to year, there might be some advantage to overlooking, you know, you know, what's in the best interest of the reader.

53:20But if you're thinking decade to decade and generation to generation, there never is. Trust is the most important asset that we have. The second wall is between news and opinion. So our opinion team is run by Katie Kingsbury. Our newsroom is run by Joe Kahn. Both of them report into me separately. So your question was, what's my relationship there? Yeah, because the takeaway I was getting from, and these were reporters generally I was talking to, was they weren't really that curious about how you felt about what was happening in the newsroom. I seem to sort of take for granted that you liked it or you know what that i'm not taking it seriously no no no there was no question about how you felt about it but they seemed to feel that you were actively involved in in reshaping changing redirecting the opinion page in some direction i don't think that that's quite i don't think that either characterization is quite fair you know i've been as involved in anyone as as anyone in the transformation of the times, you know, from a very print-centric.

54:22I believe my role is not to be involved in day-to-day coverage in the newsroom. I think that's part of our model of independence. But I continue to be involved in questions of standards, you know, standards on high-stakes editorial decisions such as— By the way, you're the owner, or you're representing the ownership of the paper. I mean, that seems pretty reasonable. Yeah. So if I had a lawyer here, they'd point out that we control – we're the controlling shareholder, not the owner. But that's actually not the spirit. The spirit is that everyone needs a boss, right? And in fact, the Ock-Solzberger family that has controlled the times for over a century actually has an incredibly well-documented record of non-interference with editorial.

55:13I've never had a single member of the family push me in any direction on coverage, which is a remarkable thing. It's what makes us different, I think, than a lot of other ownership structures out there or control structures. So it tends to be I'm involved at the level of sort of strategy on major decisions. Is it safe to send someone into Russia right now, right? We're about to publish former President Trump's taxes. Are we ready for potential fallout from that? So decisions like that. But Joe runs the newsroom with a lot of autonomy. And Katie runs the opinion section with a lot of autonomy. So the perception that you are more involved in opinion than you are in news is not correct?

55:59I mean, at a day-to-day level, I'm not involved in the coverage of either. At a strategic level, I am certainly involved in both. And it's possible that we're in a period of more strategic change in opinion. But really, like Katie has my full confidence. She's an excellent editor. And her deputy, Patrick Healy, is an excellent editor. And, you know, virtually everything that I see, you know, I'm seeing as a reader opening the paper the next morning. And I kind of thought, oh, this seems kind of picky about who's running the op-ed section. Most people won't care. And the feedback I got from that was the op-ed broadly is some of the most popular stuff in The Times.

56:46And that's why it is so meaningful. It is how people think of as – it's what people think of as The Times very often is the op-eds. Yeah. Look, I bet people are more interested in opinion right now. So, I mean, look, we believe that first and foremost, we are a reporting organization. I would say we're the country's most important reporting organization right now because of the amount of resources we put into it. So just to like put that into some numbers, we had over 50 people on the ground in Ukraine this last year. And that was a year in which Ukraine certainly wasn't trending or winning any algorithmic attention, right?

57:25And we had 50 people there because it was still important and the world needed to know what was happening there. We've added – We used to say that 10 years ago – what's going to happen to the Times question was the Baghdad Bureau. was the analog then. Or covering Sudan, right? Like we've had a number of reporters going at great... No one is subscribing to the Times so they can read your Sudan coverage. They expect it. They might expect it. But you're not generating clicks. You're probably not selling subscriptions because of your Sudan coverage. Yeah, I think the easy metrics don't show that that's going to be the winning thing.

57:58To sum up, you were involved in managing opinion section not more than anything else. This is not a great way to end a podcast. I have this question for you. I wish I could give you more conspiracy theories to work with. So let's go back here. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Since you published that op-ed we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, he has dramatically changed the way at least that op-ed section works. Do you think that piece you wrote, warning people about Trump's approach to press freedom, would run in The Washington Post of 2025? I have no reason to believe it wouldn't.

58:36I haven't, you know, I obviously haven't haven't haven't tried. What do you think of what he's done of that paper? Yeah. Look, as you can imagine, I'm asked that a lot. And, you know, you can never know everything from the outside. But here's what I do know. The country needs a strong Washington Post. It really does. You know, journalism jobs in this country have been declining faster than coal miners. And the Post has been one of the places that has defied gravity there. And our industry needs a strong Washington Post. I think they make the rest of us better. And they continue to have an amazing depth of talent.

59:21And so I'm rooting for them. I know it's been a challenging stretch. And I've presided over challenging stretches too. You know, but people counted them out a few years ago, you know, before Bezos stepped in. And then they had one of the greatest runs in the history of the organization. So, you know, I am, you know, I remain really hopeful and I remain a subscriber. It's weird to end an interview with the New York Times publisher talking about the Washington Post. Do you want to talk about the weather or something? Get us out of here. Well, I mean, look, if you're looking for another note to end on, our industry right now is buffeted by a series of challenges that our copy desk at The New York Times is careful about words like existential, right, which are so easy to throw around but often harder to back up.

1:00:17But I think that our industry, our profession, you know, remains under existential threat in terms of the business challenge. I think the challenge of serving an increasingly polarized and tribalized public. The challenge to press freedom in this country, right? The, you know, the first topic that we touched on. And on top of all that, we've got perhaps the next great technological shift that our industry will need to keep pace with, right, with the arrival of AI. And you look at that, and this is a period of just tremendous pressure on news organizations in this country. And the thing that I'd say that we need to do through all this is to narrate why this isn't just a problem for journalists, but why it's a problem for citizens, for society, for democracy.

1:01:19And to remind people that we are the flow, we are responsible for the flow of reliable information, or a disproportionate amount of the flow, certainly. I think the press is uniquely suited to combat some of the underlying problems that sort of connect all the existential problems of this moment in the world. Right. So like we all know the problems. Right. It's a democratic erosion and climate change and, you know, inequality and all sorts of other things. You know, that just the pace of technological change. But underneath that, I think I think society is really struggling with misinformation, with polarization and with impunity.

1:02:17Right. With this notion of, you know, this group that is just sort of floated away and is accountable to no one. And those are exactly the challenges that the press was basically designed to take on. Right. You know, it's like, what's the answer to misinformation? A reliable, trustworthy source of truth. Right. What is the challenge to polarization? It's actually understanding. It's reporters on the ground helping expose the experiences and hopes and fears of people who are not like you, right? To humanize them. And what is the challenge to impunity? It's accountability journalism. And so, you know, if there's one thing I'd leave you or your listeners with, it's just, you know, the press is an essential ingredient in all this.

1:03:08And I think more vulnerable than ever, but also more needed than ever. And that is how you end a podcast interview, A.G. Salzberger. You have your hands full. Thank you for taking time. All right. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks again to A.G. Salzberger. Been looking forward to that one for a long time. thanks to Jelani Carter who produces and edits the show thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you for free zero dollars in this economy but thanks to you guys for listening, reading, writing, sharing all the good stuff see you next week