NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Running a Media Brand in the Age of AI

23:26I will say it's not been my experience as a media consumer that you're seeing a ton of kind of journalistic work outside of the journalistic organizations, not saying there's none there. But so I would say we are looking for where we find the best stuff and the people doing it in a manner that we think they can really thrive at the New York Times. And that's to a very rigorous journalistic standard, and particularly a rigorous standard for independence.

23:56Tracy Alloway:I have two questions on video. One is very short, and I'll ask it first. You have some great reporter, senior reporter. They do this big investigative thing. They've been at the Times for a long time. And then they're like, and now you're going to hold a little microphone and you're going to talk into a little iPhone and explain this to 90 seconds for an Instagram Reels person. Do they like that? Or are they like, come on, like I'm a serious journalist. You're making me hold this little degrading microphone in front of me. What's that like? Yes. I mean, I will just say it's, first of all, the quality of those videos is very high okay not everyone is perfect though we're but the quality is high it's like i'll make sure and i have been here i have been here 13 years and i can tell you moments where it felt like we were pushing to do something new or to change or newsroom leadership was pushing and that felt like there was a lot of resistance this is not that moment this is a moment where i think people are so excited that the Times is leaning in in a really robust way to a new format.

25:01What does that new format do for us? We put you on camera. You get to explain how you got your story. That is fundamentally interest producing. It is trust building. We get to show the independence of the process, why you got that information in an uncompromised way. Often now you'll see a journalists like almost holding the receipts of the information they have. That is all so good for showing what is the core act of journalism. It's reporting. It's professionally trained people going out into the world and unearthing new information. The more we can show that, the more people are interested, the more the public understands what is independent journalism, why does it matter?

25:43Tracy Alloway:One other question. So the stock overall, New York Times has done very well, But I believe the last two quarters, including yesterday's earnings announcement, is sold off a bit after earnings. And there is this anxiety about essentially I think video production is costly. And this is now five or ten years ago. Everyone was talking about pivot to video then, and that sort of fizzled out, et cetera. It fizzled out because it was a naked attempt to go get ad dollars. On Facebook. And this is about can you build an audience of millions of people to come watch in addition to read and listen. Can you walk through a little bit more of that video ROI and how it works?

26:22Tracy Alloway:Yeah. Let me first address your sort of push on valuation of the company in any given moment. I often think I have the best job in media, certainly the best. We can argue after the show. But because this is a company, public company, but it's a family-controlled public company, why does that control structure exist? Two reasons. One, keep the journalism independent and in service to nobody's interest but the public, not even our own commercial interest. And two, it allows us to play a long game. And what does every CEO really want to do? You want to make big, bold, ambitious bets that you can get consumers at real scale to do something.

27:06and then you want to give those things time to play out. And I want to tell you what I've learned in my own career is making great things, it takes time and it takes resource and investment. And we are building a larger and more profitable company with every sort of passing quarter at the New York Times. And I believe strongly we will continue to do that with more subscribers and more revenue and more profit. And all of that is a virtuous circle to getting to do, delivering on our public mission better and better. But we have the benefit of taking a long view of our strategy. And therefore, we give it the investment.

27:47We give it the resources. We give it the time to play out. And I think to your point, I think you said in your intro, the stock was$6 when someone asked you to come to DealBook. What a shame that you didn't come. That team is killing it, continues to kill it. Andro Sorkin is the best. But all the value creation we've done is from making a handful of really considered, really ambitious bets about how to have the widest possible engaged audience for all of our work. And that takes time and it takes investment. And I am so confident and comfortable that others may have an anxious moment. our work is to have a really clear ambitious vision for where we're going for how we serve the american public the global public with our journalism and our amazing lifestyle products and i am confident to my core that we have great potential to do economic value creation as we do that as long as we stick to our strategy and see it really clearly but i think to joe's point like the original pivot to video seemed to be very much we didn't really make right away but in general it seemed to be very much advertiser driven it was a cynical play to get ad dollars in the moment when the video ad market was exploding and now everyone talks about it as more consumer engagement reader or watcher engagement and all of that and i personally do not understand it yeah okay so i watch videos on youtube i do it mostly because the platform is convenient but i'm not actually watching them for the most part.

29:28Most podcasts, I still listen audio only. I do not watch any podcasts. What is your take on why consumers actually value video as opposed to written or audible news? That is such a good question. And let me first say it has been our experience, even in the kind of print to digital transition and the web to mobile transition and even into audio and we've got a monster success in audio, right, with The Daily and a number of other podcasts, all of which are video shows now except The Daily. Daily's still monster, monster success. It has been our experience that the old format does not go away. If you listen, you're going to listen.

30:11I'm a runner. I listen more than I watch to most things. I listen to a lot. I actually listen to automated voice of our articles most mornings while I'm running so that I'm caught up on what's on the homepage of the Times. I would regard this effort in video, at least at the Times, as following a belief. And I think there's just clear evidence that it's there, that there's a huge amount of people who read and listen. And we're getting a lot of those people, by the way, still running room left there. But we are doing really well with a lot of those people. And then there's a giant audience of people who watch, and they watch, what do they watch?

30:49Some watch news. A lot of them are watching entertainment that has some current affairs bent to it or is adjacent to news. I actually think a lot of what you're referring to on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram is that. And we see an enormous opportunity to feed that audience's interest. A new audience for us, right? This is not a replacement behavior for reading and listening. This is the Times making a big move into a market that we play in only in a nascent way today and to serve that market and honestly to answer to a white space that is there for really high quality journalistic content and reported content.

31:32And I think there's sort of two sides to it. There's still a lot of people, they may be older, but who watch the news on television, still a lot of people. And there is a giant number of people who are either passively scrolling video platforms and getting kind of news adjacent stuff, or they're going to YouTube and they're watching long stuff. And we see a huge opportunity to take share in both of those places. And we're really early at it. But that's what it is. I, listen, I ran our commercial business that when the pivot to video happened, that was a cynical attempt to get ad dollars without regard to the thing I said at the very beginning, which is, can you get millions of people to engage with the thing?

32:16We want to do things at a scale of millions of people engaging with it every day. And I see that opportunity in video.

32:24Tracy Alloway:When we talk about video or even when we talk about games or when we talk about recipes and then, of course, Corn News, you know, OK, there's this great New York Times brand. But I also and I think I associate the brand with a sort of you said we're curious, pretty relatively educated, liberal minded and so forth. And I'm curious, like, how you think of all of these things with one of the big risks for all media, which is to some extent audience capture. Yeah. And people worry about it's like, OK, you have this audience and there's two risks that arise. One is you might have – good reporting might involve things that offend the audience, et cetera.

33:05Tracy Alloway:Or people might just seek out media that's even more satisfying to them ideologically or personally than – it's like the New York Times is insufficiently speaking to like my niche interest. Obviously, this is an editorial question, but it's also a business and long-term question. It's a great question. How do you think long term about like the size and durability of an audience that might want to be spoken to in specific ways? I love that question. And let me first say, how do we think of our audience? Curious. They are educated. Open-minded. And what is our job? Open-minded is a little safer than liberal.

33:44Open-minded. Yeah. And if you look at the total audience of the New York Times, it reflects that sort of who is there reflects the population at large much more than your liberal comment would suggest. We are going to pursue the truth wherever it leads, even when, and this is often the case, it leads to very uncomfortable places that people do not want to know. And I think you one only need to stand on the street in front of our office on days where we're being protested. sometimes in different ways by opposing groups, both of whom think we exist to defy their cause. That's nonsense. It's nonsense.

34:24When you've angered both sides, that's how you know you've You know, our job, I could give you so many stories and anecdotes where it's the conventional wisdom is that this thing happened. And in fact, something else happened, which is much more difficult for the public to grapple with. And we're going to tell it that way when we have the evidence that that's what's happening. You know what? That pisses people off. And we're not there to please. We are there to give people understanding about the most important things happening in the world. And that is just paramount. And so I love your words, audience capture.

35:01We're just not doing that. That is, to the extent that that assumes some compromise in that pursuit of truth, That is not what we do. We do not chase audiences. We want a giant audience. We want a giant engaged audience, but we're going to win them because I actually think most people want information, particularly in this environment where there's so much slop and disinformation or you just don't know where something came from and is it true at all. people want to know the thing that I'm getting is true. They want to know that a fair process was pursued to get that truth. They'd like to see the receipts of that process.

35:43That is what we're doing. And I want to say that is what we are doing in news, very broadly defined news, big, big space. That is what we are doing in sports for fans. That is what we are doing in shopping advice. We Wirecutter, our product review site, I'm sure there are lots of ways we could make money beyond producing high quality independent reviews, that's not captured either. We're going to, if the mattress everybody thinks is better or cooler, isn't the one that our testers say is most comfortable, we're going to say the truth about that too, even if that other mattress company is the big advertiser.

36:18So that's the promise. We believe, and I think we have shown for a long time now, that promise is value-creating for society and it is economically value-creating. Period.

36:47Tracy Alloway:Ugh, hon, the ice cream has turned to soup. I think the fridge is finally dead. Hopping on grandappliance.com. Great idea. They were awesome with the Samsung Ranger microwave we bought last year. Oh, they have matching Samsung in stock and next day delivery. Let me see. Oh, yeah, that looks perfect. I hope we get the same delivery crew. Those guys were awesome. Agree. Total pros. Another crisis averted by the team at Grand Appliance. Appliance experts since 1930. Make it a summer of live with Live Nation. Get two lawn tickets for just$55 and see Billy Idol, Empire of the Sun, Five Finger Death Punch, Logic and G-Eazy, TLC and Salt-N-Pepa, Wu-Tang Clan, and many more.

37:34More shows were just added. Hit your friends and grab tickets now at LiveNation.com slash Summer of Life. That's LiveNation.com slash Summer of Life. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts I, um, I can't stop scratching my downtown Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown Some things you'd rather type than say out loud There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7 Healthcare just got less painful. We should talk about AI. Yeah, yeah. For sure. So it seems like as soon as we kind of started getting through the digital transformation.

38:24Here's AI. Here's AI. Here's AI. A new problem to solve. Yeah. And media organizations so far are approaching it in very different ways. So I know you've done a licensing deal with Amazon. Meanwhile, there are other organizations, perhaps the one we're sitting in, that have said they don't want to do licensing agreements. They want usage-based fees and that sort of thing. In your mind, what is the ideal compensation setup for journalism when it comes to LLMs? Let me say a couple of things about that. First, we spent like close to$2 billion last year producing half a million works of content, stories, photos, videos, expressive, creative work that required enormous resource to go make and human beings to go make.

39:07and we've been doing some version of that for 175 years. So we have a giant corpus of stuff. We know that stuff is incredibly valuable to society, to anyone who might use it, including the LLMs. You mentioned we've done a deal. We have also sued three companies. We're two and a half years, maybe almost three now, into suing OpenAI and Microsoft. We sued Perplexity last December, and we've done a deal. And what is all that about? That is about standing up to the idea that these companies have stolen our stuff, they've used it without our permission or any kind of control, and they've built products that can compete with us.

39:50And there are multiple ways to take care of that problem. One is to enforce our rights in court. Another, highly related to your point, is to do deals. So what do good deals look like? In our mind, they can be continuous with a strategy to have a sustainable and growing business for a publisher or anybody producing high-quality information. One. Two, we give permission, very clear permission, to use our work and then have control in all the uses, all the ways that it might be used. And then third, and obviously, there is sustainable fair value exchange for the use of that work. And the Times is very open to dealing when we can find those terms.

40:35I think the stakes are really, really high here. And I just want to say this does not get talked about enough. These companies, the LLMs, are spending tens of billions of dollars, sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars on talent, on compute, on power. they should be spending the money that is sufficient value for exchange they are getting from what they call data, which is high quality independent journalism and other kinds of creative work.

41:03Tracy Alloway:This is a different AI related question, but I've been very curious speaking to every executive. How are you thinking about the New York Times' own, I guess I would say token consumption, allocating access to models for, obviously, I'm sure the developers are all using cloud code or codex or whatever. Has token spend gotten to the point where you think about, okay, 2027, what are we investing in? Is it up to that level yet where it's like sort of in your circle, you have to think about token spend? Let me say it's a great question. And every CEO I know, I'm also on another public company board.

41:42Everyone is talking about this. Everybody is wondering how everybody else is thinking about it. We keep saying it's going to be the standard question for executives in the way that you ask about workers. I think it's like a second question. And as you would imagine, we've rolled out coding tools to a huge swath of people in product development at the times and marketing at the times. We actually have a big AI initiatives team in our newsroom that's building really cool stuff. I can talk about some of that too. It would be a miss not to talk about that. But the way we think about it today, first is what's the work that should be human-led.

42:18And I want to say high-quality independent journalism, human-led, human-led, creative stuff. We make this a creative company. We make stuff that is best by humans for humans. Doesn't mean AI isn't going to help us do a bunch of things better, more efficiently, more productively, but human-led in the creative work. So I just, I want to say that. And so for us, I think everyone, I think anybody who's saying otherwise probably doesn't really know yet. I think we're all in a period of seeing what can the tools do. And, you know, we've got close to a thousand people doing digital product development in the New York Times and 3 ,000 journalists and people making content.

43:00The journalists and making content group, if you ask me, my guess is that keeps growing, right? As long as we keep succeeding as a company, that keeps growing. And I think it's going to be some time before the tools themselves, given all the evaluations and the human judgment, I think it's going to be some time before anybody's going to give you a really credible answer to that question, honestly. Fair enough. Okay. What are you doing with AI? A bunch of things. So can I just, let me give you examples, better way to, The Epstein files dropped on a Friday night, and I think it was like three million pages of documents.

43:39And we obviously have all these reporters who had all these queries and questions and sort of ideas of what would be important for the public to know from those files. Our AI initiatives team built a tool set to use and comb and look for patterns and clusters. and our production of high-quality journalism, human-led high-quality journalism, from being able to use the tools to comb and look for patterns and see what was in the trove was just awesome the next week. Like, awesome. We were able to get to information in a much faster way. We were able to tell different kinds of stories. Amazing. So that's a use of AI.

44:16And we've got a whole team in the newsroom that's looking at where are the best uses. I think huge troves of public information. So this is an old example, but when Trump was coming back into office and appointing cabinet members, we would be able to use AI to look at their full public record in a much more efficient way. And then there's some stories you couldn't tell before when this Sidney Sweeney jeans, jeans, fracas happened. The idea on social media was that it was like people on the left were... The libs are outraged. The libs are outraged. And we actually used AI to prove that it was first a construction of the right.

44:56So there's all kinds of interesting things you can do. My favorite example is we were trying to convey this new trend in sport, and we used AI to sort through all this existing aerial imagery of tennis courts. Do you know what I'm going to say next? How many of them were converted to pickleball courts to just show, But like I've just given you like a range of things and to make the work more accessible. Automated voice translation. We had an early experiment in translation. The tech will get better. I see real opportunity when the tech gets better.

45:33Tracy Alloway:My old boss, Henry Blodgett, points out. Guest on this show. Past guest on this show and pointed out on this show that historically at newspapers, there might have frequently a division between reporters and writers. someone calls in data. Yes, he did say that. Does the idea of a reporter out in the field calling and typing in some data and having an AI generate it automatically offend you as a possible workflow? Rather than... Yeah, rather than someone in the quote writing... Rather than tell you what offends me, let me tell you what I think the act is. Okay. I think the act of a reporter, and by the way, the foundation of journalism is reporting.

46:16Reporting, right. Reporting. What is reporting? It is going out into the world and following a professional process to, in a fair way, unearth new information. Yeah. It is talking to people. It is going to the scene where awful things are happening or good things or important things are happening. And then with sensitivity and judgment, translating that into what does the consumer get on the other side, the reader, the listener, the watcher? Understanding. That process requires sensitivity. I think all the time about like the horror of school shootings or, you know, these things need to be – all of this, especially difficult things, need to be translated with kind of sensitivity and judgment and care about the humans that you're writing about for the humans who are taking it in.

47:03So it lands with impact. I think much of that process is human. Now, am I offended by the idea that there are a bunch of things that tech, including generative AI, can do so that we can have more reporting? I'm not offended by that idea at all. Not at all. And the Times is where it is because we're really comfortable that technology is going to help the company have a bigger audience, do things to make the work better if it's used responsibly.

47:46The washer won't start and the laundry's already piled to the ceiling. Hopping on grandappliance.com. Great idea. I heard they have next day delivery. Uh-huh. I'm seeing that too. And they have a bunch of GE options in stock. Oh, that's great. We've always had good luck with GE appliances.

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48:51I, um, I can't stop scratching my downtown. Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown. town, some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful. Can we talk about price elasticity? So I'm very interested in this question because it feels like maybe there's something about information that just makes people reluctant to pay for it sometimes. I've seen people in one breath say like, oh, we don't have any good media left anymore.

49:34And then in the other breath, they'll be like, oh, I don't want to pay for that story. It's a paywall. And it makes no sense to me. And even though we're in this age right now where everyone's talking about the importance of data because of AI, you still have the LLMs who don't want to pay for the underlying data, right? And the content. What have you learned about pricing journalism? You've done so many experiments with the bundle. You must have a lot of information about what people are willing to pay up for and what they're not willing to pay for? Such a good question. I'm gonna spare you the anecdote of my niece asking me to share my New York Times password.

50:07I said, do you know what I do for a living? I think the most important thing to say on that is one of the reasons the Times has, all the subscribers we do, is we never accepted that we had to choose between having a lot of stuff widely available so that people could sample our work and also enough value and gravity in the product so that people would pay. And I just, I don't think that gets said enough. We were early at that. There is so much New York Times today, yesterday, tomorrow, that you can take in if you do not pay us. So much good work and real gravity in the paid experience. And we've been very careful for, I've been working on this more than a decade, to always be kind of calibrating between those two things and never letting the balance tip so much that you are not planting the seeds for the next million subscribers and the million after that and the million after that.

51:05And we've been keenly aware for the better part of a decade that the direction of travel from the platforms will be the more we should be getting more and more of it into our own control. And we've done a lot of that. And it's also part of why the Times has succeeded. As to price, I'm going to say a very basic thing, which is we have a pricing strategy that I'm going to use now business jargon because you said I could. That's meant to get everybody under the demand curve. We think there's a huge market in news and in every one of our lifestyle products. Huge market. We are still early in penetrating that market in news and in every one of our lifestyle products.

51:42And so our pricing strategy is meant to get everybody under the demand curve. And I'll say on one side, it's like international subscriber buying our games product on sale or international prospect coming to pay for games on sale all the way up to someone who has bought a family plan bundle and going to share it with their whole family. There's a lot of room in between there. Our hero product, the best thing we can do is get you to buy our news entitled bundle because that has the most value in it. And at every pass, every opportunity we've had to get people to find more value and then pay more has gone well.

52:26And that is because we have relentlessly made the product more and more and more valuable. And one of the reasons I believe we will keep growing value for shareholders is because our products are literally just inherently, every one of them is getting more valuable every day. And so what does that look like in brass tacks? Most people buy our news and title bundle, which is the whole thing, at a dollar a week. And then over time, they engage. And then over time, they reach a pricing step-up point and they come to a much higher price because they have experienced so much value and they're able to do it.

53:01And that has all gone really, really well.

53:04Tracy Alloway:I have one last question, actually. And I asked earlier about audience capture. This is sort of maybe a business management question. Yeah. Another thing that happens in newsrooms is a newsroom capture. And by that, I mean, for example, I remember several years ago, there were various reports that, for example, you know, lose any given talent, as you mentioned, not the end of the world, but someone might feel bullied. Barry Weiss left the New York Times. There are all these reports of angry Slack messages about things that she was writing or editing. There was the internal backlash that was reported after the Tom Cotton op-ed, I believe in 2020, et cetera.

53:43Tracy Alloway:From a management perspective, how do you maintain the sort of truth mission or sort of the open-minded mission and balance the risk of ideological or sort of certain motivations within the newsroom that might potentially cut against sort of high-level editorial goals? Yeah. Let me give like a high-level answer to that and then maybe a more tactical one. At a high level, what I would say is everybody who comes to the New York Times has to understand what it means to do independent journalism. And that means pursuing every story with an open mind and an empty notebook. I feel silly saying that to you.

54:27You guys are journalists, but like, you know what I mean. And the thing that I feel incredibly proud of is how much time and effort and energy the leadership of the place, myself, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, who's amazing, the chairman and publisher, A.G. Solzberger, who I think is the foremost authority on this in the world, just how much time and effort and energy. We have invested, the leaders who work for us have invested in just making that an unequivocal through line to the culture at the New York Times. We do an, so now here's the tactical work. What does that look like? We never did town halls before I was the CEO.

55:07I think the first one we ever did was like to tell people to go home for the pandemic. You know what I mean? And now we do like a monthly all company meeting, a couple thousand people come. It's amazing. and we show journalism we're proud of and we talk about how that journalism came to be. We have unbelievable sort of resources and development for journalists and for the whole place on what does independence look like? What does it look like in practice? We have a trust and standards team that is absolutely the largest in the industry and much, much bigger than it was, say five or six years ago.

55:45And that team is constantly sort of asserting itself both publicly and within the company to just educate people on what good looks like. There's a lot of like, this is what good looks like. And I think all of that just plays a huge role in people knowing sort of how not to imagine we're doing audience capture the way you asked before. And then I'm going to say the more tactical thing, which is a lot of this is about who becomes a journalist, right? So we also have these really important development programs for talent in the newsroom today and for talent outside. We've got a local investigative journalism fellowship where we've got people in Mississippi and Baltimore and other places.

56:27So we are also trying to develop the next generation of journalists who enjoys that. I'm really passionate about that one. Sorry to go so long. No, no, it was good. Can I ask one more question? Yeah. I feel bad about saying I don't have access to The Athletic. So I'm going to ask an athletic question. I'm going to get you a gift subscription. Thank you. Or maybe gift you the button. You I'm going to upgrade to the bundle today. You should. When Infantino is ousted from FIFA. I'm going to wait. Like, Schadenfreude will drive me to that coverage. That is a good story. Okay. When you acquired The Athletic, so this was an independent newsroom with, like, its own culture and its own ways of doing things.

57:04So I'm really curious just from a cultural perspective what that integration was like and what you learned from them versus what they perhaps learned from you. That's a great question. So we acquired like a giant newsroom with a tiny little business team, which was super interesting because I personally have like led big business teams. It's about 450 journalists. And most of those people, not all of them, but a lot of them came from the local newspaper ecosystem. So the founders of The Athletic had gone and sort of scooped up the best beat reporters in big cities, big sports cities all over the country.

57:44And there was somebody posted something on social media. It's not exactly this, but it was the equivalent of, look, an athletic journalist when we acquired it. Look, mom, now I work for The New York Times. So I would just say we expected like this very difficult cultural thing. And I've done other very difficult cultural things at the New York Times. This was not that. This was not that at all. It is a pleasure to own them. The newsroom is now probably 100 people bigger. We hired the guy who was like the number two or three editor at the Washington Post. His name is Steven Giddensburg, I think now, three and a half, almost four years ago.

58:20He's a killer. He's so good. He's so talented. And he was both a sports guy and a serious journalist with serious newsroom chops. and I think it's going swimmingly. And he has done quite a bit. One of the things we've done there is added a much more substantial, the athletic was good. We wouldn't have bought it, but we've added a much more substantial layer of editing. They did not have a lot of editors. New York Times is very edited. So we've added this layer of editing and we've kept them independent. You know, they are, it is its own. Both as a brand, we want to build the brand, the athletic, and it's an independent newsroom.

59:00It works to its own rhythms, to its own leadership. It works for a publisher, a guy named David Perpich, who's amazing. He's a family member. He works for me. So it is like set apart from the newsroom in The New York Times. And it's working really well. Given it's working well, would you consider making a similar acquisition, similar sized acquisition? I, oh my gosh, I learned so much from The Athletic. And what I would say is we love the spaces we are in. They're big spaces with a lot of running room. I don't rule out that there's another space or that there's something we can add in a space that we're in.

59:35I would say to people who think about our economics listening, the bar is really high for return on investment. So we're a very discerning, thoughtful enterprise when we consider inorganic addition. But I certainly don't rule it out. And I would say we also have a good track record. People never ask me about this. making our own stuff. The push in video we're making now, we are making. It is largely with people who are already at the times. We're adding capability later. And games, you mentioned at the very beginning, we acquired Wordle for a little bit less money than we acquired The Athletic for being funny there.

1:00:13We acquired Wordle. We built all the other games, right? So we are also very, very focused on investing in organically.

1:00:22Tracy Alloway:Meredith Copet-Livian, thank you so much for What a pleasure. Lots of fun. Thank you so much, Meredith. That was great.

1:00:43Tracy Alloway:Tracy, that was a lot of fun. We could talk forever about media stuff because we're in it. Media people can talk about media stuff forever. We didn't get into this, but one thing that Meredith said at the end when she was talking about The Athletic, and it built its model by sort of hiring a lot of the star reporters. You know, it's like they'll hire the star reporter in St. Louis to cover the St. Louis Cardinals or something like that. In media in general, there's all this anxiety about 20 years ago. It's like Craigslist has uncovered it, uncutted the classifieds business, right? Or Google News and now AI, et cetera.

1:01:18Tracy Alloway:The New York Times, with its success, has become the sort of like, yeah, like the monopsony buyer of great talent in the news business, et cetera. And I always think like imagine several years ago, like if you were the White House reporter at the Dallas Morning News, if you're great, maybe you end up at the New York Times. And does the, you know, all these other like local news outlets, do they still, most of them don't anymore, have, say, a White House reporter because they're competing on the Internet scale with The New York Times. Like, I'll just read The New York Times' White House coverage.

1:01:53Are you feeling wistful about the deal book offer?

1:01:56Tracy Alloway:No, I just think it's interesting. Like, you know, here's this one company that's really thriving. Yeah. And at the same time, it's like, well, there's all these other newspapers that can't replicate it or can't do that because like it would be redundant. There's great or it's very difficult for them to. This is what I was thinking. So it it feels like what when we talk about problems in traditional media, like, OK, a lot of it is a distribution problem. A lot of it is a sort of fracturing of the one stop shop media outlet. So, you know, it used to be that you turn on one cable news channel. almost everyone is watching it or you pick up you know one newspaper whether it's your local paper or a national newspaper and you read that and that's sort of the thing that you're reading whereas now because of the internet everything has broken into like little verticals little silos everyone has their area of expertise if you're really big into football chances are you might not be reading a newspaper on a daily basis you're probably reading some sort of sports football publication exactly and i think like to some extent the new york times has kind of proved that you can still be a one-stop shop as you accumulate all these different verticals and put them under one house.

1:03:06Tracy Alloway:I guess what I would say is the New York Times has proven that the New York Times can do it. The New York Times can do it. Yeah. The question to, I mean, the bigger question for media is like, are there any lessons from the New York Times that actually could apply to any other publication. And I think that is either no or very wide open to say the least. But, you know. It may be that there's only room for like one one-stop shop of content. Because like the one-stop shop, it's like it's not weird at all for newspapers to have games. They had games forever, right? They had crossword puzzles. Every, you know, I'm sure there was the Kansas City Star had a crossword puzzle.

1:03:44Tracy Alloway:Maybe it still does. They all had crossword puzzles. So it's like the idea of recipes and games and news all going together is in some sense the most normal thing in the world. The question is, okay, how durable, A, can there only be room for one maybe in the English speaking world? And then how durable and big is that audience? Again, of Meredith used open, the educated, curious, open-minded cohort. Yeah. How durable, how many of them are there versus eventually do they slowly splinter and seek out news that is more ideologically satisfying to all of them. Ideologically satisfying or just satisfying to their own particular interests.

1:04:30Absolutely. All right. We could go on. We could go on, but people listen to the episodes. All right. Shall we leave it there?

1:04:36Tracy Alloway:Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter in all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these things 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we take a little bit of time to navel gaze the media, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

1:05:14And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

1:06:07We'll see you next time.

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