YouSaid · the spoken record

Roger Lynch

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65
first
2026-06-11
most recent
2026-06-11
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1
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podcast

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  1. “So, overall, the business is profitable, which wasn't always the case. Increasing profitability, revenue is basically where it was in 2021. If you were a public company, people would be very upset with you, but you're not a public company. You're owned by the New House family is sort of flat revenue and increasing profitability. Is that what they want out of this company?”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Very strong local culture and local fashion. So there's not a one size fits all for any of our brands. You have to adjust your assumptions based on that brand and the local markets. So I do feel like we have largely got it right and the results have been take our largest brand Vogue. It has grown every year that I've been at the company and its profitability continues to grow. Its reach grows and it's more successful than it's ever been under my tenure.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Well, the first thing I would say is I'll never be someone who just admits that everything we've done is perfect and is right. I think you can always learn in what I told our teams when we made all the editorial changes now four or five years ago. The first thing I told them was assume we got it wrong. Go figure out where we got it wrong and let's make adjustments. But don't assume we got everything right and wait till we learn a lesson a year from now. Figure it out now. Figure out what we got wrong, what adjustments we need to make. And there'll always be that we'll always be making adjustments to try to figure it out. And some of those adjustments, you know, it's different brand by brand. If you take a brand like Wired, technology is more global, the interests, the factors that influence our lives through technology is more global in nature. Something like Vogue, there's an element of global fashion, but then local markets, whether it's Japan, China, India.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “The way they want to consume it. And by the way, some of your employees still tell me that this culture, the former culture, is important and by globalizing things and sort of consolidating brands globally and having shared resources for some of these companies, that you're missing out on what makes a particular title unique and how they do speak to their core audience and whether it's geographic or demographic. And that mushing this stuff together has been a detriment, even though you're going to say it's successful.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Outside of the country, and the reverse is true, which is we have a huge audience from France or Italy going to our sites elsewhere around the country. It's because they are interested in it. We're just not organized in a way to present the content to them the way they want to consume it.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “And when I first joined, I started looking at the data about where our visitors were coming from each of our websites. And there was something that really struck me, which is wherever you went around the world and you looked at the date of our websites, about 40% of the traffic was coming from outside of that country. So, you know, on my first listening tour three or four weeks into joining Cotty Nast, you know, I'm meeting with editors around the world. And I heard sort of a similar story, which is, you know, oh, audiences in Italy only care about Italian culture and content. They don't care about what happens or same as France. And I'd always ask, well, then explain this. 40% of the traffic to the sites here come from.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “They were. They were very, very protective. But what I came in and looked at is like, okay, I can understand why in a print magazine business why that was a successful strategy. But the world has changed. The opportunity for us going forward is really about connecting with audiences in new and different ways using technology, certainly. And also audiences have changed, maybe is in part because of technology, but if you just look at how cosmopolitan people have become in terms of their content consumption when some of the most popular shows you may watch come out of Sweden or Korea or Israel, wherever.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “There was so much internal competition, we had no time to focus on external. Even every country around the world where we operate, we're a very global company operated completely independently from each other. And you know what? That, I think, was probably a good strategy for many, many decades. It made Candy Nass into a very large, successful global publishing.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “With attendant controversy, and that's okay. That's okay. Zoom out a little bit and just talk about Konde. Well, I had the distinct advantage of not knowing anything about the business and not having grown up in the publishing industry. So it enabled me to come in and question everything. And the first thing I questioned was how we were structured. We were structured, you know, first as two separate companies. There was an international business with its own CEO and a U.S. business. And they really acted like competitors in every way possible, including the editors competing with each other.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez were sponsors and curators of the event. This event's always been tied to extreme wealth. You've always had benefactors working with you on this project. Were you surprised at the blowback controversy you got from the Bezos' involvement? Well, I mean, to be clear, their involvement was in support of the Met Museum and the Custom Institute and the money that they gave went to the museum. So look, I think there's a lot of reasons you can criticize extreme wealth. And, you know, people will criticize. But to actually criticize them for donating money to a cultural institution, to me was a bit off base. But were you surprised this is going to be a regular feature going forward as long as you're working on this? You're going to have people like the Bezos who want to be involved and they're going to pony up a lot of money. Will that give you any pause? Like, oh, do I want to deal with this? Or are you okay saying, yeah, these things come?”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Increasing the quality and the creativity of the output around it. I think then what compounds on that is that the intrigue around this event just seems to grow every year. And yes, you mentioned this year there's some controversy. That's fine. That's actually good. Let's spell out the controversy.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Surpasses our goals, and we finish the Met and we go, How could we ever do anything like that? And then it grows another 50 or 60% the following year. So, you know, last year, I don't know, we had a little over 2 billion total video views of the content we produce around the Met. This year it was 3.1 billion, another 50-something percent increase year over year. Does that tell you you're getting better at making the content or is there an is this audience getting bigger for this stuff? You know, I think that in the earlier years for me when I joined, I think we had a lot of room to improve in the content that we created around the event itself. The event itself was spectacular, but how Cond ⁇ Nast covered it and created content around it, there was opportunity for improvement on that. And I think we have done a, I think the team has done a fantastic job really.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Dollars and cents event for you as well. Is that the most important thing? Is the reception it gets online most important? How do you measure it? Look, that event in particular, it's different for each event. For that event in particular, it starts with event, right? That is a fundraiser. And this year was immensely successful for the Costume Institute and the Met and also the inauguration of the Condium Nest Galleries that we did the ribbon cutting for the morning of the Metcala. From an audience standpoint, every year”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Create cultural moments. So, you know, events has been a strategy for us, as it is for many media companies, but for us, our events are really around creating cultural moments that really break through the zeitgeist and search algorithms and whatever's happening in sort of the headwinds of the media industry, nothing holds back big cultural moments like them at Gala. How do you measure success for a big cultural moment? At some point, you're a business, so you're trying to make money from it. You're also raising money for the Met, but it's a big.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Channel with Peter Kafka. That is me. Today we are talking about running the last remaining magazine CEO, Roger Lincoln. And Lynch only used the word magazine. Azy thinks of Kande, which for decades was the Magazine publisher probably still Brands that shows up all kinds of places on the web, obviously. Mega glamorous met. Conversation Ask Welcome to channels. Thank you, Peter. Good to see you For you. It is, yes. I think it's right, and I think it also showcases what we do best, which is.”

    2026-06-11 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch on AI, the Met Gala & his secret succession plan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT