S9E2: A.G. Sulzberger Is Tuning Out the Cheers and the Jeers

19:32Amira Weeks:So I write this 100-page memo. The biggest thought in it was I didn't want anything that people could argue about. I didn't want a ton of good ideas. I wanted a handful of completely ironclad ideas. And when I say a handful, I mean a handful. So there's basically four or five, I can't remember now, core arguments. One, we need to introduce data into the newsroom so that our journalists are aware of how people are finding engaging with their work. You know, two, we need the people who write the stories to talk to the people who design the website. And if that sounds crazy they weren't talking they weren't allowed to talk in our in our enterprise um um you know um you know a third one was um uh we need to work as hard to get our work in front of an audience in the digital year as we did in the print year and think about how insanely far we went in the print year all right we like had printing presses and we printed it out and we put it on trucks and we drove those trucks to your town and then we handed the kids on bikes and they biked it to your house.

20:42Amira Weeks:But we were doing none of those things. So this is all very cloak and dagger. 100-page memo. I print out eight copies of it. I hand deliver eight copies to the eight people that the editor had told me she wanted to see it. And then a couple of weeks later, the whole thing is published in full on BuzzFeed. The very website we had warned was overtaking us under a headline New York Times in chaos um and um and it was I I thought it was I thought I'd done immeasurable damage to the institution I mean truly immeasurable damage to the institution right like all this dirty laundry out there because to make a case like that you got to say the tough stuff um the lawyers were worried um you know and it ended up being the single best thing that happened to our transformation.

21:33Amira Weeks:And I'll, can I say a bit on why? Because I think it's actually useful. So I run into, later the day that it's published on BuzzFeed, I run into one of our oldest investigative reporters and best investigative reporters, a guy named David Barstow, four-time Pulitzer winners, part of the team that got Trump's taxes. I mean, a really incredible guy, but exactly the type of guy who you would think would read a case for change and say uh-uh you know and I run into him he's an intimidating he's an investigative reporter so he's an intimidating guy and he looks at me and he says I read that report of yours and I said what do you think and he's like I was sure I was gonna hate it I was like and and he's like well um I if you were here at like a lot's gotta change and I was like I don't think anything needs to change I think we're doing just fine I think he got me 90 of the way there and I I was like, wow.

22:29Amira Weeks:And he said, but that 10%, that 10 % is full of my deepest fears and anxieties. Are you going to destroy the journalism? Are you going to ruin the mission, abandon the mission? Am I going to be rendered irrelevant? And the only thing that kept me going through those fears and anxieties was that I knew you and I knew other people on your team. And I kept thinking, I bet they have a good answer to this. And so here's my advice. to you, go and hear every fear and anxiety in the newsroom and give them their answers. And so I did that. I set up a 90-minute meeting with every person in the newsroom, groups of no more than 50.

23:15Amira Weeks:We had 1 ,300 people, so it gives you a sense of how long that took. And, you know, did a little bit of a spiel at the beginning, but mostly just hearing the questions, the concerns. And increasingly, you could feel the energy building the ideas, the creativity, the positivity. And to me, there's a handful of lessons there that I hope will be useful for all of you. One, communication is item six on every leader's list. And you never get to item six. Because one through five self-repopulates. And you need to push it all the way to the top. especially if you are facing real challenge or going through a period of real transformation.

23:58Amira Weeks:Two, most leaders have this inclination to hide the problem from their staffs. And they do that not because they're bad people. They actually do it in this sort of misguided parental instinct, almost like hiding problems with family finances from the kids. They want to be able to say, don't worry. Don't worry about that. We got this. Everything's going to be good. And most people are pretty damn smart. And certainly reporters are pretty damn skeptical. Like everyone in the organization knew that we were facing real challenges, but we weren't talking about those challenges directly. And we were still talking about the need to change.

24:37Amira Weeks:Right. So like, why do you need to change if everything's going just great? and um and so i i have come to really believe that you have to share the problem like like find those really crushing statistics about your own company's performance that you want to avert your own eyes from and now share that to say this is going to be really hard and we don't have all the answers and but we're going to need to try a bunch of things some of it's not going to work and i need your patience. And once you do that, it actually unlocks the third thing, which is the best ideas flow upward in an organization.

25:14Amira Weeks:And that's not to say no leader has ever had good ideas. But if you're running an organization of any size, there are way more ideas down there that are bottled up than you could come up with yourself. And once you share the problem, it's much easier for people to contribute and then I'll just say one last thing which is people fetishize change and if you want to get a proud culture right a legacy culture a mission driven culture to buy into change you need to be really clear about what is not changing because if everything can change you have no reason for being younger hungrier folks should come and displace you.

26:02Amira Weeks:But if you can articulate the thing that's not going to change, for us, it was original, independent, reported journalism, right? Like, without fear or favor. And if you can say that, say all of this change is in service of this enduring thing that we all signed up for, then all of a sudden, people will give themselves a different level of sort of emotional buy-in to sign up for the ride.

26:30A.G. Sulzberger:These are great learnings and lessons. And I know this period of time built enormous trust in your leadership because in 2016, you were announced as deputy publisher.

26:40Amira Weeks:Against all odds.

26:42A.G. Sulzberger:Putting you in a position to eventually succeed your father as publisher. And I want to talk about and acknowledge the timing of that because you become deputy publisher just two weeks before President Trump is elected. President Trump has repeatedly labeled the New York Times as fake news and the enemy of the people. How did you deal with that dynamic in real time as a new leader? Yeah.

27:14Amira Weeks:Yeah. So so I get named to this job and literally like this is this is literally true. The people who give me the news that I'm going to be stepping in as the next publisher tell me. you only have one job for the rest of your career and it may be impossible which is to find a sustainable business model to support the expensive work of quality journalism in the digital era and and trump's election basically announces the arrival of like another suite of of challenges and you know and I think I think they're actually they're broader based than than just Trump but it it announces the arrival of of a a moment that is marked with uh well probably the most significant anti-press moment we've had in this country in that century right marked by growing distrust of the media um increasing attacks on the rights and legitimacy and safety of journalists um growing polarization and tribalism, where people are getting stuck in their echo chambers and very intolerant of anything that challenges what they want to believe.

28:25Amira Weeks:And Trump isn't responsible for all of that. But he was a big force as he came in with this incendiary anti-press rhetoric, you know, calling us the enemy of the people, you know, not just fake news, not just the failing New York Times, but enemy of the people, and eventually scaling that to accusing us publicly of treason, a crime that the federal government is charged with prosecuting and that carries the death penalty. And so a big part of my job has been positioning the company to be not just economically resilient, right, and, you know, technologically resilient, but to be resilient in terms of our ability to do this important fearless journalism in this much more combustible environment.

29:12Amira Weeks:So things like, you know, we immediately invested significantly in expanding our Washington operations, probably two to three times larger than it was at the beginning of the Trump era. We 5X'd our investment in investigative reporting, 5X'd. We 10X'd our spend on safety and security and press freedom work, which is a statistic I'm quite sobered by. It gives you a sense of how much the environment shifted. And then for myself, it became clear that a big part of my job would be to talk about the media and its importance and the values that I think should be guiding it in these periods of pressure.

29:59Amira Weeks:And that ranges from, you know, writing a long essay in the Washington Post before this most recent election saying, the Trump administration has has been studying very overtly the anti-press playbook that has been put into place in eroding democracies like Hungary and India and Turkey. And that playbook is really clear. And here are the lessons we can learn from the experience of journalists in those countries about how the press has been systematically attacked and eventually mostly dismantled or gutted. And here are what the effects on civil society that would have. And that work, you know, allowed us to prepare, but also allowed us to help the rest of the industry prepare for what would come.

30:48Amira Weeks:You know, I'm sorry to say that a lot of the industry didn't exactly use that time well. But it also meant going to the White House and, you know, and challenging the president directly on his anti-press rhetoric, you know. And, you know, there my message is, you know, is not, you know, I want it to be very explicit. Like, I want no favors. Like, you are free to attack the New York Times by name. You are free to attack me by name. We're the big boys. We can take it. But I want you to understand that this anti-press push that you've been making is being greedily embraced by aspiring strong men all over the world who have just been looking for any excuse to crack down on free expression and the free press in their countries, you know, the pesky questions of independent journalists.

31:43Amira Weeks:And, you know, and saying to the president, you know, I believe this is really dangerous. I believe that people will die and be jailed. And sure enough, you know, I look back at when I said that to now and the world has gotten more dangerous than ever for journalists. So, you know, so that's, you know, that is sort of the posture that we've had to, you know, approach. At the same time, I'm also needing to remind everyone that, you know, yes, we're really proud that in a moment when a lot of the press has become nervous about reporting critically on this administration, that we're an institution that has built the single biggest body of accountability reporting ever produced by a single news organization on a single subject on Donald Trump, right?

32:34Amira Weeks:And we're proud of that. But we're nobody's opposition, right? Just like we're no one's cheerleader. We're not part of any, we are independent. And the same complaints that President Trump has had about the press, you know, many of them, you know, we heard from Joe Biden every time we reported on questions about his age and fitness. He became the first president in a century not to sit down with the New York Times for a single interview because he was so upset about his coverage. So when you put all that together, a big part of my job is just to give the staff, again, the resources to do their work, but also the confidence that we have their back to do that hard work in such an incendiary environment and volatile environment.

33:17A.G. Sulzberger:Absolutely. I want to bring this to current events because this dynamic is still ongoing. just when you think about the last month or so. The Times is suing the Pentagon over restricting freedom of the press. And last week, your team sat down with President Trump for a rare, unprecedented two-hour-long interview. So when you think about this dynamic over the past decade, what have you learned? Are there things that you understand now that you just couldn't have in 2016?

33:48Amira Weeks:Boy, that's a great one. And you didn't even mention that he's become the first sitting president to sue a U.S. news organization. He sued us for the third time. So yes, lots of fronts. What have we learned? I mean, I think the most important thing is we have to tune out the cheers and the jeers. Cheers are just as dangerous as the jeers, right? You've got everyone sort of baiting you to join a side. And we really believe that our model of journalism is is independence we believe that that is the single highest value to the to the american public right not every institution american life needs to be independent but america needs some independent institutions um and you know and i've i've really come to believe that like you know if you look at like the core role of the press seek the truth help people understand the world hold power to account now map that to some of the like the the pathologies of this era misinformation what's the antidote to misinformation it's it's truth it's fact um polarization and tribalism what's the antidote to that right it's understanding elite impunity right um um what's the antidote to that accountability and so i just you know i i think our our message is we just need to keep our head down and and just keep doing the work follow the facts where they lead approach every story with an open mind an empty notebook but also be completely unafraid to um you know to push through the pressure that we're going to get from powerful forces to bring that to the public.

35:44A.G. Sulzberger:We'll be back after this.

35:50Amira Weeks:Are you looking for fresh perspectives on how we live, work, and lead? If Then, a podcast from Stanford Graduate School of Business delivers research-based insights

36:00A.G. Sulzberger:to help you navigate a rapidly changing world.

36:03Amira Weeks:Just as you would exercise, just as you would worry about your diet, You ought to worry about the place where you work. The trust ultimately has to be with the government, but the government then on its part has to create accountability for all people.

36:15A.G. Sulzberger:These things have real consequences for the welfare of countries and the people that live in them. Join me, Kevin Kuhl, for If Then, a podcast from Stanford GSB, where we explore the forces transforming business and society today. Find If Then on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:48A.G. Sulzberger:I want to touch on another challenge to your business, AI. The New York Times is suing open AI in perplexity for copyright infringement, essentially arguing that AI companies are free riding on your journalism. Can you tell us a little bit about what's at stake in those cases?

37:05Amira Weeks:Yeah, yeah. As you may guess, I'm a little bit limited in how I can talk about an ongoing lawsuit. But let me say first and foremost, because we are in the center of Silicon Valley, this is not the New York Times being anti-innovation. And this is not the New York Times being anti-AI, right? Like, we don't think that the future can be held at arm's length. Like, AI is here. It's only become bigger. It's obviously the next great wave of transformation that society is going to see. And every lesson of my tenure has been that you win by embracing technological shift and finding opportunity within them.

37:49Amira Weeks:Now, that said, it doesn't mean that you get a license to steal our stuff.

37:56Amira Weeks:And there's only really three ingredients to great AI. right it's there's the talent the people who write the algorithms right and silicon valley is spending you know not just millions not just hundred millions but billions of dollars on that talent um there is the you know chips and you know data centers and um electricity that you know that makes it run um and silicon valley is spending not just millions not just billions but hundreds of billions of dollars on that. And then there's data. And there's another word for data. It's called copyrighted content. And the data powers the algorithms. And when we get to that third part of the equation, Silicon Valley says, you know, disproportionately, we couldn't possibly pay.

38:56Amira Weeks:We couldn't afford it. And if you made us, China's going to win. And I just don't think that's true. We're talking about the richest and most powerful companies in the history of humanity.

39:08A.G. Sulzberger:So what do you think a fair relationship between AI companies and journalism looks like?

39:13Amira Weeks:Yeah. Look, I think the principle here, and it's not just a principle that applies to journalism, right? It's the same principle applies to the people making movies, to people making music, writing books, doing academic research, making video games. The principle is, you know, if you are spending a lot of time and money to create intellectual property, you have the legal right to determine where and how that's used and to set a market value on it. And that is just how the American system works. And that's not like a novel principle. It's in the Constitution, in fact. And that's all we're pushing for.

39:58Amira Weeks:We think that it's really important to recognize that intellectual property has value and that the laws protecting it need to be respected. And let me just say one last thing. if that were not to happen all of the industries i've just listed would collapse right you know it's you know in the same way that you know if you know if the the companies making the algorithms were able to march into the nvidia factories and just take the chips and say like i'm sorry i got to take them otherwise china um uh it wouldn't it wouldn't hold uh there either And that would not just be bad for our industries. It would be bad for our country.

40:41Amira Weeks:It's a big source of American success and power. But it would also be bad for the AI, right? Among other things, AI needs accounts on journalists like the journalists at the New York Times out there finding the facts that have not yet been reported and so have not yet been input into these algorithms.

41:02A.G. Sulzberger:Thank you for your perspective on that. I know this is a space a lot of people in the audience are closely watching, and I want to focus on the audience for a bit. There's a lot of people in this audience who are going to go on to highly influential roles in business. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, roles that come with a lot more interaction with reporters and the press. um what do you think why do you think high quality journalism should matter to business leaders and not just for its impact on preserving democracy but also for its impact on business

41:41Amira Weeks:outcomes great um i love that and i'm very happy happy to have the opportunity to talk to all of this hostage audience about about this um um look uh i think there's a few things first and foremost basically almost every successful business leader that I've encountered is a really avid reader of the news, right? And many of them are among the most avid readers I've ever encountered, right? Like, I cannot tell you how many of the names, you know, top names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and elsewhere names that you would all know, you know, have told me the same story about needing to read between three to six papers before they show up at their office each day, right?

42:28Amira Weeks:And that's because, you know, I think less successful business leaders are often sort of myopically focused on their own little challenge, right? And it's really valuable to know about the rest of the world and to spot the opportunities and patterns there, right? Like, if you're going to navigate the world right now, you really want to understand how Washington works and what's going on with tariffs and and and so much more um um so that's one two it has become increasingly fashionable for politicians and business leaders to um to publicly attack uh uh press coverage and the integrity of the people the journalists who who make it i think you'd all be surprised by how many of those people at the same time recognize that journalists really are trying, they're trustworthy journalists, like you'd find at the Times or the Journal or the Post or, you know, Bloomberg or the Wires, are really just trying to get the story as full and fair and accurate as possible.

43:36Amira Weeks:And so a lot of those business leaders, even the ones who are griping in public are engaging, sometimes publicly and sometimes in private, and have determined that that has real value in helping journalists produce the fullest and fairest version of a story that they or their companies are central figures in. And the third thing I would say is the part of journalism that drives business leaders the craziest is accountability journalism. It's investigative journalism, right? It's a journalism that looks at your mistakes and missteps and sometimes misconduct. And the thing that I'd urge people to remember there is that as irritating as the role of journalists can be there and as pesky as our questions can be and as hard as it can make your lives in the moment, the integrity of the systems we all rely on, not just democracy, but capitalism and markets rely on the type of transparency and accountability that the press provides, right?

44:47Amira Weeks:You know, you look at the Enrons, right, of the world or Elizabeth Holmes, right? And, you know, the work of the press helps save investors money and allows, you know, from throwing bad, you know, good money after bad and helps create a culture of accountability where business leaders can make deals with confidence, right? And work with each other with confidence. So I think of this as a system and the role of journalists in that system isn't always fun, but I do think it's really important.

45:25A.G. Sulzberger:Great to hear from an expert in the field on that. And I say that as someone who's been on both sides of it. Yeah. I want to turn it to our audience now, we have some student questions prepared. Great. Hi. I'm Yash Maheshwari, MBA one class of 2027. I had a question. The Times now makes more from subscription like games and cooking versus some news categories. This says that the future of journalism might be funded by things which are not journalism. So when you're pitching this strategy to Pulser-winning journalists who have dedicated their lives to investigative reporting, what do you actually say to them?

46:08A.G. Sulzberger:As in, how do you actually solve the problem of getting people and supporting their mission and values and balancing that with what the business model demands? Thank you.

46:19Amira Weeks:That's a great question. Thank you for that. um so i mean first what i should say is you know the the you know back in our newspaper days you know newspapers played many more roles than just giving the news right so this is this is to blow some of your minds the younger people in the audience but this is true ask your teachers um uh it used to be that the newspaper is the only way that you could find out who won yesterday's game, how your stock was performing. This is a weird one. What was on TV, you found out from the newspaper. And even what the weather is today, whether you should take an umbrella, you would get from the front page of the newspaper.

47:04Amira Weeks:And so that was all unbundled by the internet. And much of what we're trying to do now is to, and what we were left with was just the news, right? And I almost think of us as like, we became like a health food restaurant, right? And, you know, it's like someone stole the cocktail menu and then the wine list, and now there's no dessert because we're sugar-free, right? And it's really helpful to have all those other things to like round the edges of the report. So what we're trying to find is a modern bundle, and we're really proud that we've got the category leading cooking app, the category leading product review site Wirecutter.

47:49Amira Weeks:We now have the largest newsroom of sports journalists on earth with The Athletic. And then I'm guessing you've all heard a wordle. So that has really rounded the edges. What it actually hasn't done is it hasn't taken over. The news continues to be the main source of engagement and revenue, whether it's ad revenue or subscription revenue, it is still the sort of the beating sun of our solar system. And so we really value those other things, but they haven't displaced the news. And as far as what do I say to that investigative reporter, he likes Wordle too. So it's, you know, people at the Times have seen what's happened elsewhere in the industry and are really grateful for how hard we've scrapped to find solutions, even if they're just piecemeal and just part of the solution to make the place more sustainable.

48:45A.G. Sulzberger:Hi, I'm Helen Cashman.

48:46Amira Weeks:Are you all sitting next to each other? Yes. Okay, okay, all right.

48:50A.G. Sulzberger:Makes it easy to find us. I'm Helen Cashman. I'm an MBA student in the class of 2026. So the median age of a New York Times subscriber is estimated to be about 43 years of age, which is younger than many peer publications. How did you go about diversifying your subscriber base to attract younger readers? And then how are you further thinking about diversifying going forward, both across age but geography to avoid any form of concentration risk? Yeah.

49:19Amira Weeks:Oh, that's great. So, you know, on the young people thing, I'm struck again and again by how many people in my industry think the way to get young people is to like you know repeat their rad memes you know and and you know you know and echo like whatever their like cool new terms are and and and it's like it's almost like a theory that if you like imitate and patronize you'll you'll be able to win their hearts. And I just think that like young people just see through that. And so our model has been really different, which is like, we want to be authentic to who we are, right? And like among the factors of who we are is like, we are the place that is willing to tell you the boring but important story that isn't trending on any of your social media platforms, right?

50:19Amira Weeks:We're like, the whole world's, you know, talking about two celebrities, we're going to be the one who's like, have you guys heard about what's happening in Sudan? You know, it's getting pretty bad out there. And we went to the front lines. We want to tell you why you should care. So being authentic to ourselves and never patronizing. But also, I think a big part of our success in the digital environment is being authentic to the mediums we're on. And so when we started The Daily, which is the leading news podcast in America, the tone, it feels quintessentially like The Times. It's that sort of boring but important story made as interesting as humanly possible that doesn't condescend in any way.

51:04Amira Weeks:But it also feels so authentic to the medium, right, which is it's much more informal, right? It's, you know, there's a lot much more of expressing sort of uncertainty and the limitations of what we know. And I actually think that getting good at that platform has made us better at writing, too, as a result. So I think that that posture, right, respect your audience's intelligence, stay true to yourselves, but embrace the opportunity and the tonal, you know, opportunities that come with new, you know, whether it's video or audio or anything else. I think that's been our key thing. Looking forward, you know, it's really maybe the most remarkable story of the times.

51:50um we you know a generation ago our audience base was basically limited to people in the

51:59Amira Weeks:new york city metropolitan area because it was a physical product and today we've got readers in every country on earth um we have more subscribers in california than we do in new york and texas and florida are next on the list coming right on up um we're growing fastest in the south and the Midwest. We've got millions of subscribers abroad. Like none of that would have been possible. And as that's happened, we've diversified in every way, whether it's like racial and gender or socioeconomic and political. So, you know, it's part of the magic of, you know, of the internet, right, is that you can really reach so many more people.

52:40Amira Weeks:And the more we go into more of these different channels, the more comfortable we are that we don't need to reach them all with all of Like we're happy with someone who has just a relationship with the Daily or even just with the newspaper.

52:56A.G. Sulzberger:Hi, I'm Nirali and MBA2. I'm an avid reader of the New York Times and I'm also an avid scroller of Twitter. So I'm curious, we're seeing now how top journalists can also monetize their journalism through platforms such as Substack and Twitter. What do you think is the enduring value prop of the New York Times, both for journalists and for readers themselves?

53:16Amira Weeks:That's a great question and something we think a lot about. So the Times has never been the place, never, where a star could get the most money or the biggest platform, the biggest spotlight, right?

53:34Amira Weeks:Historically, that was TV. Now it's either TV or being like the biggest fish in a smaller pond or maybe start a podcast or a sub stack or something like that, right? If you just want to maximize the spotlight. The thing about the times is we are the place to come to do the best and most impactful work of your career. And that is our differentiator. And we still pay very well. And we pay our stars very well. But part of what not paying top of market for a handful of players allows us to do is to have the country's largest investigations operation or to have a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, even after all these years of conflict and post-conflict.

54:26Amira Weeks:We had 50 journalists on the ground last year in Ukraine. You can't do that if you are just putting all that money behind a handful of big names. But those big names tend to come to us and they tend to stay because they really, really value the things we can do. So we can lift up their work. So we just have the best editors. And not just the best editors, but we have the best lawyers and the best security apparatus. And so if you want to tell a story that's going to involve risk, going into Gaza, going into Sudan, going into Myanmar, If you want to tell a story that may involve risk of the president of the United States suing you by name, right, we can help.

55:08And we give you time.

55:11Amira Weeks:We give you the ability to tell that story not just one way, but to tell it in audio and video and multimedia. and then we get give you the opportunity to put that in front of an audience that is completely unmatched in its combination of size engagement and influence and so so many times those great reporters they're not just alerting the world to a problem they're letting the world solve that problem. And you compare that to like, you know, if you are doing an email newsletter, you know, at best, you've got tens of thousands of people reading you. Almost all of them already agreed with you. That's why they signed up.

55:57Amira Weeks:You have to give them three stories a week. Otherwise, your business model collapses. And if you ever tell them something they don't want to hear, your viability is just like completely gutted. And so, you know, I just to like use a metaphor that might resonate here. There have always been players and teams that care about the name on the front of the jersey, right? That's like, it's just the team approach, right? And then there's the places, it's just the name on the back of the jersey. It's like, that's the star approach. We want to be the place that's the whole jersey, right? Which is a way of saying, and I say this as a Knicks fan, and maybe, we might have brighter days ahead of us, but we want to be the Golden State Warriors, right?

56:38Amira Weeks:We want to be the place that has the perfect match between a great team with a great culture that lifts people up and a place where a star wants to spend a whole career.

56:49A.G. Sulzberger:Thank you to my classmates for those really thoughtful questions. Those are great. Okay, G, we're going to wrap it up with a view from the top tradition. Rapid fire questions. Oh, no. Are you ready?

57:00Amira Weeks:Sure.

57:00A.G. Sulzberger:You can tell I'm not good at rapid fire, but I will try. Okay, hopefully not too hard. What is the New York Times game that you most enjoy playing? Oh, Connections. Okay, I like that one too. What is the most overrated thing about New York?

57:18Amira Weeks:Getting me in trouble here. You know what? I think the notion that New Yorkers are mean. We're not mean, we're busy. We're just really busy. And if you can just get us out of our busyness, I think you'll find us to be like a very nice, thoughtful, engaging group of people. Okay.

57:36A.G. Sulzberger:Do you have thoughts on the most underrated thing about New York?

57:42Amira Weeks:I should probably say Times Square because it's named after us, but I cannot bring myself to do it even as a loyalist. You know what? People love to hate on the subway, but I just think it's a miracle. It's like everyone else in America spends all their life in cars. And, you know, in New York, you get everywhere much faster. You get to see the full breadth of the city and you get to multitask the whole time. So subways. OK.

58:12A.G. Sulzberger:Cheers for the subway. Outside of the New York Times, what is the journalism outlet that you most enjoy reading?

58:22Amira Weeks:um i'm one of those annoying leaders who's like every day i must read all these publications so i i i subscribe to a dozen organizations um um i probably spend the most time um with the journal i think they've done a nice job under almar and um and emma um but it pales in comparison to uh the amount of time i spend with the times and i like to think we're best in class on every front Will your kids work at the New York Times? You heard gasps in the audience. It's a loaded question.

59:02Amira Weeks:What I would say, my kids are really young. They're really young. They're 7 '3". And what I would say to them is the Times is a really special place. And as a family, we're really lucky to get to be in service of it. and its mission. But that doesn't mean that you have to work there. And I'd much rather you find the thing that you love and are passionate about, you know, just as long as it's something that you work hard at and does some good in the world.

59:33A.G. Sulzberger:I have one final question for you. It's not exactly rapid fire. Okay. What is the legacy that you hope to leave for the next New York Times

59:42Amira Weeks:publisher you know actually that one i've thought a lot about it and so um it's you know when i got this job and i was trying to think about like what's the marker that i've i've i've done i've occupied it well right that i've proven worthy of it um uh

1:00:08Amira Weeks:our 10 years tend to be really long they tend to be like 20 and 30 years so it's like you couldn't like set like a some like quantitative goal and i realized it was just deceptively simple it's can you hand off the organization in stronger position than it was handed to you right can you can you hand it off journalistically stronger stronger as a business with a stronger culture. And if you can do that, going back to that word stewardship, that's the definition of stewardship, that you've positioned it for the next leg of its journey. And as its temporary guardian, you occupied it well. Now, I should say to that, it's extremely early innings.

1:00:54Amira Weeks:It's going well, but it's early innings. But I always think about this conversation I had with this Japanese businessman. I was at this lunch, and the host comes over and says, I sat the two of you next to each other because you both run family businesses. And I said, oh, I'm publisher of the Times, fifth generation. And I asked about him. And he said he ran a company called Kikaman. He started to explain. And I said, I am well acquainted with your soy sauce. I have purchased many bottles of over the years. God bless you. And what generation are you? And he said, 18. Wow. And that's what good looks like.

1:01:37Amira Weeks:And so we are still very early in this journey.

1:01:41A.G. Sulzberger:Well, I love that. It's a way to wrap it up. Thank you so much, A.G. Oh, thank you. Truly, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

1:01:55A.G. Sulzberger:I think we have a lot to talk about. I think so too. That was a fabulous interview. I want to start with whether to change versus how to change. What did you take away from AG's really rather remarkable case study of the Times' digital transformation? I think the main thing I was left thinking afterwards was this idea of being so clear about what should not change. And I think that kind of sounds like a simple thing, but there's a lot of companies when, you know, revenue goes down or, you know, you face challenges, people think, let's change everything. And so I think it is really powerful to crystallize what is the one thing that cannot change and then feel free to change everything else in service of that.

1:02:43A.G. Sulzberger:Simple things somehow can be so complex to actually implement. Communication is always item six needs to be number one. When you think about the tangible outcomes, like growing this 5X or convincing this customer, and I think something I really appreciate about the GSB curriculum is that we focus on those things, but we also focus on kind of the soft skill aspects of it. So when he made that point, you know, communication is usually number six, it made me think back to all of the things I've been learning here over the past year or so and how I really feel like there's an emphasis here on making communication not number six, like communication is everything.

1:03:23A.G. Sulzberger:So I think that was just a really powerful reminder.

1:03:26Amira Weeks:At roughly the halfway mark, you asked a very incisive question. It was super well placed, too.

1:03:32A.G. Sulzberger:I'm paraphrasing, but essentially it was what have you learned from a decade of covering President Donald Trump? What did you learn about how AG thinks about covering President Donald Trump? One of the stories he told in the interview was about the Narragansett Lions Club and essentially how powerful people in that organization didn't want him to say certain things in his reporting job. And I was just struck by how many similarities there were between that story and the challenges that he faced later in his life dealing with President Trump and pressure that may have also been applied in that situation.

1:04:08A.G. Sulzberger:And it just made me think like these are values, elements of character, elements of leadership that were present all throughout his journey, not only in the element of pressure or criticism he faced from like, you know, the president of the United States. And so I think what I learned about how AG thinks about covering President Trump is that it's not President Trump specific. It's like how he thinks about being a reporter and being a journalist in general. His job is not to be to be liked or to be praised. It's to be an independent journalist, to uphold that mission. And that's how he sees it.

1:04:47A.G. Sulzberger:So I think just that thread throughout the interview is something that appeared to me and was like a takeaway. that I have. Yeah, I think it's like, there's something else he said, maybe a little bit later on, the integrity of the systems we all rely on democracy, capitalism markets depends on the accountability and transparency that the press provides. Absolutely. I think it's a fundamental organization in our democracy. It helps uphold democracy. At least I believe that. So it's also great to hear that from, you know, the chairman and publisher of the New York Times.

1:05:26Amira Weeks:Everyone's on the same page, pun intended.

1:05:28A.G. Sulzberger:Yeah, yes, exactly. Let's talk a little bit about AI. I'm going to quote him directly. There's another word for data. It's called copyrighted content. Any thoughts there? I mean, so before GSB, I worked at Netflix in the entertainment industry. And so I think that that hits home as somebody who spent three years of their career in entertainment, you know, people are putting their blood, sweat, and tears into producing information that AI can use into producing creative works. That's the data that's feeding the models in some of these cases. And so I'm on the side that people deserve credit for that.

1:06:05A.G. Sulzberger:I think on a more personal note, you spoke to him about the times being a family business, going from stewardship at the beginning to stewardship at the end. And what did you learn from his answers about his relationship to the institution? When I hear him talk about what stewardship means to him and what that mission passed down through generations mean to him, I could hear in his voice and I just see such a deep sense of duty to the organization. And I think someone can be an amazing leader, a principled leader, but it doesn't negate the fact that it is a family business and that's part of the reason that they're in their position.

1:06:46A.G. Sulzberger:And I was really impressed with his self-awareness about that piece of the conversation, his ability to poke fun at it, but also the hard work, the never saying no that he had to put in. So it's great to hear from somebody who, despite having those privileges, still puts in the work and still makes transformation an impact in his role. So recognizing that leadership is something one learns, not something that one has necessarily been born with or inherited. Yeah, those leadership capabilities and traits, you have to work on them. And you can inherit maybe some pieces of leadership. But in order to be a really like transformational and respected leader, I think those are things that you have to work on.

1:07:30A.G. Sulzberger:Excellent. So from the subscriber model to the modern bundle, AG had a lot to say about the business of the news.

1:07:38Amira Weeks:Was there anything that stuck out for you?

1:07:41A.G. Sulzberger:The news has changed a lot since I was a kid. We used to get the Oakland Press delivered to our house. Even while the business model has had to change to support the core of what they're doing, the core of what they're doing is the same. And so I think that's another piece on this point of transformation or what's the one thing that doesn't change and how they've adapted the business model so much. but it's in service of the mission. You know, if Connections and Wordle can finance independent journalism, so be it. We're all for it. Yeah, we're all for it. Amira, this was fantastic. Thank you so much.

1:08:19A.G. Sulzberger:No problem.

1:08:24A.G. Sulzberger:You've been listening to View from the Top, the podcast, a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business. This interview was conducted by me, Amira Weeks, of the MBA class of 2026. Michael McDowell is our managing producer, and Michael Riley edited and mixed this episode. Special thanks to Liz Walker. View from the Top is the Dean's premier speaker series. It was started in 1978 and is supported in part by the F. Kirk Brunnen Speaker Series Fund. During interviews led by students, leaders from around the world share insights on effective leadership, core values, and lessons learned along the way.

1:09:00A.G. Sulzberger:You can find more episodes of View from the Top on our website, gsb.stanford.edu slash business-podcasts. Don't forget to rate and subscribe and follow us on social media at Stanford GSB. And see you next time on View From The Top.