YouSaid · the spoken record

Meredith Kopit Levien

lines on the record: 71
first: 2023-03-23
most recent: 2023-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And our job is one, to obsessively focus on getting people to come to our destination and build a direct relationship with us, register with us, give us your email address, let us show up in your inbox. We've got something like 15 million people who get an email from the New York Times. The number of people who read the morning, which is our awesome morning newsletters, like five or six million people. I don't mean who are signed up for it. I mean who read it every day. So like to me, that's a destination experience you've asked, you've invited us into your inbox and you open it every day. So we are obsessively focused on that. And when I talk about the product itself, doing a lot of the work to drive subscriptions, which I described to you before, it's to get more people to come directly, to ask for us by name, to sort of, you know, have us on the first part of the home screen of their phone, download.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said that pretty overtly, and they closed the Facebook news tab or shuttered that effort. That was an overt. We are going to send less traffic to news. And I would say that is kind of broadly deemphasis on news or particular kinds of news. We feel that. Second thing, which you're poking at, which I think is also a real force that we feel, which is the sort of broad platform ecosystem pointing more to video. And I want to say the times, you know, we are not a linear television company. We are not, you know, video wasn't sort of what we did for a living. The report itself on the New York Times now is, I think, incredibly multimedia and successful in a multimedia way. I mean, I don't have to tell you that. And I think we've done a really good job of having, you know, be. Showing people things in addition to”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are all the right questions. And what I would say is we are keenly aware that we're operating in an ecosystem where the dynamics of what the business jargon would be our subscription funnel. Not entirely controlled by us. And what you're poking at is something we've talked about a lot, which is there are kind of three things going on in the ecosystem. One is the platforms are generally, we have felt pointing to news less. I mean, Facebook.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I think my first answer to that is that for more than half a dozen years, we have asserted the times has to be a destination, has to be something people go to directly, ask for by name, you know, choose to have a direct relationship with. That has been a principle of our business like subscription first is a principle of our business. It's been a really important principle of our business. We're also keenly aware that we live in an ecosystem. We operate in an ecosystem that to your point is quite dynamic and often dynamic because of things that are entirely out of our control. And so a lot of our work is about not to be repetitive with what I said before, but once you drop there from Google or Facebook or Twitter or any number of other places.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A destination. That's the word I would use. It's a destination that a lot of people come to, and we've got to use their experience on that destination and a really purposeful way to make it a really compelling thing to stay longer, ultimately pay. And over time, pay more because you're getting more value out of it.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To stay and do more or to come back again and do more. That's what if I were to say what is like the most work on the business side of the enterprise going to, it's that. And I'll just to contrast that from something you asked me before, you know, six or seven years ago, I would say we were much more focused on the kind of straightforwardly commercial things. What is the price of our subscription and how much do we discount it on promotion? We still do that. We're still thinking about that. But that is kind of the majority of the effort goes to how do we get you to engage.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a lot of people did that, and then you drop on Wordle, you land on our Wordle page, you play Wordle, can we get you to play the next game? Maybe that's spelling B. And then you play spelling B and you realize, oh, this is a subscriber product, can we compel you to buy a subscription to that? Or you play Wordle and you see on that Wordle page, there's an incredible story of what happened in banking this week. And maybe I should go read that. So a lot of our work is to get you to come in for one thing, show you that there is an enormous amount of other value there across news and everything we do in the core news report, which is well beyond news and recipes and shopping advice and games and sports journalism. How do we get you to know there's all this other stuff there? And how do we interest you to?”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's like the most important thing to the place, like the single most important thing is of those 50 to 100 million people who come on average every week, how many of them can we get to engage repeatedly? That is true for subscribers. That is true for prospective subscribers. So that's, if there's like one thing that we are more obsessed with commercially than anything else, it's can we be interesting enough and compelling enough to get you to come more times a week, to get you to come more times a day, to get you to read the next thing or listen to the next thing or watch the next thing. And, you know, of late, a lot of our focus is if you come, let's say you go to Google search and type in Wordle. I think Wordle was the most Google search term last year.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's in the zone of what I'm talking about, and maybe I'll step back and say it in a slightly different way, but with very similar meaning, 50 to 100 million people come to the New York Times on average on a weekly basis. We've got 9.6 million subscribers. So many, many, many of the people who come are prospective subscribers. And to your point, they land there from Google search or from a social media platform or because their friend sent them an email of a story or a WhatsApp message or any number of ways once they land there, the most likely thing to get them to subscribe is our ability through the combination of software and journalism.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of engagement or as a customer. That's how most of them sign up. So I'd say five, six years ago did a pretty radical reorganization of the digital center of the company to function more like what you see in the kind of fast scaling tech world, which is cross-functional teams made up of lots and lots of disciplines who work together on objectives as opposed to a kind of top-down planning organization.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had a marketing team and an engineering team and a product team and a like a subscription sales team and five or six years ago a lot of the work that I and the team of leaders around me worked on was to say how do we actually transform this organization for the business that we are, which is a fast growing direct-to-consumer scaling digital business with a giant product development engine of growth, right? But most of the growth in New York Times subscriptions comes from people landing on our site and taking through the journey.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of those people are in sales, maybe a little, maybe a third, but many, you've got many makers and creative people. We've got really world-class creative studio. It's part of our ad organization. And then we've got the corporate functions, which are sort of considered on the business side. But obviously, support the whole of the organization, finance, HR, legal comms, and so forth. I would say my job, so before I've been CEO for about two and a half years, I was COO for three and a half years. Before that in my job there was really about getting the sort of digital center of the company to operate in the most effective way. And there, that was about, I'll go back to your word legacy. That was about taking sort of a structure of legacy company where you had these sort of silo.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Software through which people find and experience our journalism and our recipes and our games and our product reviews and so forth, that's a pretty big team. We call it XFUN. It's the cross-functional digital product development organization. We've got a marketing organization. You know, the Times over the last half dozen years has come to take its brand sort of even more seriously as a propellant to growth. So we've got a pretty sizable marketing organization that helps people understand where does the brand sit in people's lives, what does it mean. How does that relate to our product? We've got an advertising organization. We've got, we're super proud of the ad business we've built. We intend for that business over the medium long term digitally to be a growth driver for the company. And we've got probably 350, 400 person ad team. That's full stack team. You've got everybody says sales. I always say that's like a core.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great, great question. So the first thing to say, we're public, we're a controlled public company as a public company. We actually report in two segments, the New York Times group, which is kind of everything except the athletic. And then we report the athletic separately. So the athletic is sort of its own entity, very connected, obviously, to the mothership. And part of our bundle, which I hope we'll get a chance to talk about, but the athletic is separate. Wire cutter is kind of run as its own thing, it's not reported as a separate segment, but it's got a different business model. Largely, it's an affiliate business. And then we've got sort of three other, what I would call business side groups. There is a fairly large cross-functional digital product development organization, which is made up probably an order of the number of people, of engineers who work on the”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's a split that I'm really interested in, right? There's the newsroom, which is in that part of the structure, which the heritage structure, you might call it, and everyone kind of understands it, right? There's executive editor, the newsroom's really protected. Then you've got a few thousand other people that are distributed amongst things like wirecutter athletic games crosswords. There's another chunk, right? There's sales, there's product, there's all that other stuff.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, game's team is not in the newsroom. Athletic is separate from the newsroom wirecutter. We've got a large staff of really amazing folks doing editorial work on product reviews, which we think we do better than anybody else and are quite excited about. And then you've got lots and lots of people making recipes for our cooking app and writing about food.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it's somewhere in the neighborhood of close to a couple thousand in what we would call the newsroom of news and opinion journalism, the core report, in addition to that, we acquired the athletic 13, 14 months ago, which is another close to 500 somewhere in that neighborhood. Sports journalists covering the major teams and leagues in the United States and in European football. And then obviously we've got a games app, we've got games makers. They're not.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, good to have a legacy, good to be unique. Listen, I'll give you two levels of structure, but like the one I think you're poking at that I'll kind of proudly say is there are 5,800 people at the New York Times. There's somewhere along the lines of a couple thousand people in the newsroom for the core report and they don't work for me. They work for an executive editor who works for a chairman and publisher. I also work for that chairman and publisher. And that structure has been around for a very, very long time. And it is there to protect the quality and independence of the journalism. And I have often said, I think, a story that doesn't get”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super fun and interesting questions. You use the word weird for our structure, I think I would say pretty unique, special. I'd be more. I put a little more positive judgment.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Legacy is an awesome word. It's great to have a legacy, the legacy of this place is the highest quality journalism, globally at scale that there can be in continuing to raise the bar for what that is across topics and formats and the number of people we can attract. So the first thing to say is that's why I came. I came because I love the mission of what the New York Times does. That's why I'm here still here almost a decade later. And my journey to CEO was just getting to do kind of more and more on the business side of the New York Times to support this incredible mission of bringing understanding to the world, truth and understanding at scale and to see that there's a sustainable model for continuing to do that and to see that that can be a great business.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I came to the Times almost 10 years ago. So I joined in 2013 as head of advertising. And at the time, everybody used the word legacy in front of the word media and like implied a negative thing. And I used to think like, legacy is such a good word. Like everyone wants a legacy. Like, shouldn't a company want a legacy? And so I love that you're, you know, if there was a moment where people would say like, it's a heritage media company. Like that sounds better.”
2023-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How to play the long game, with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT