NYT CEO Rejects Loss-Leader Model, Demands AI Payment for Content

纽约时报CEO拒绝“亏本引流”模式，要求AI为内容付费 《纽约时报》直接通过核心调查报道创造主要订阅价值，同时借助多产品捆绑与严格的版权维权在AI时代保持财务独立。 Meredith Kopit Levien阐述了《纽约时报》如何从早期数字化冲击下的防御态势，转向以受众直接关系为核心的进攻型增长战略。她驳斥了硬新闻属于“亏本引流品”的观点，强调核心新闻报道依然是主要的价值驱动力，与Wordle、Recipes和The Athletic等生活方式产品并存。Levien还详细说明了该报在编辑部扩张、短视频互动、严格的采编独立性等方面的举措，以及在人工智能领域的立场——倡导获取公允价值授权，同时积极就无偿内容抓取对OpenAI和Perplexity等平台提起诉讼。 《纽约时报》CEO Meredith Kopit Levien 强调，硬核新闻报道并非依赖生活方式产品补贴的“引流赔本品”，新闻业务始终是公司最核心的价值创造引擎与首要资本分配方向。 (10:00) 《纽约时报》的双重股权家族所有制结构保护了编辑独立性不受短期商业利益干扰，同时为管理层推进长期大胆的战略投资提供了充裕的运作空间。 (27:30) 不同于2010年代中期单纯追逐广告收益的视频转型，当下的短视频与社交视频策略旨在通过透明展示报道过程建立受众信任，且不会挤压核心阅读或播客音频习惯。 (30:15) 面对 AI 厂商的内容抓取，《纽约时报》坚持内容授权必须满足许可、出版商控制权与合理价值交换三大标准，并在与亚马逊签约的同时对 OpenAI、微软及 Perplexity 发起了版权诉讼。 (40:00)

The New York Times Company President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien argues that sustaining digital journalism requires financing high-cost, independent reporting through direct subscriber relationships, expanding complementary lifestyle verticals, and enforcing strict compensation boundaries with generative AI developers. Supported by a dual-class family ownership structure, the company prioritizes long-term brand equity and editorial independence over short-term market pressures. Bundle Economics and Long-Term Capital Allocation (10:00) Levien refutes the industry assumption that investigative reporting functions as a loss leader subsidized by lifestyle assets like Wordle, Cooking, or The Athletic. Instead, she asserts that original news reporting remains the company's primary economic engine, receiving first capital allocation priority even during expensive field deployments to conflict zones. To monetize this coverage, the Times employs a tiered pricing strategy starting at an introductory $1 per week, using lower-barrier lifestyle products and introductory discounts to move readers along the demand curve into higher-ARPU multi-product bundles. This strategic horizon is underpinned by the Times' family-controlled corporate structure. Levien notes that dual-class ownership insulates newsroom integrity and gives executive leadership the runway to execute multi-year capital bets without yielding to quarterly stock volatility, drawing parallels to strategic investments made when the stock traded around $6 per share during the early digital transition. Newsroom Scale and Resisting Audience Capture (15:00) Despite competition from independent newsletters and creator platforms, the Times maintains its largest core newsroom in history, employing over 1,000 more journalists than when Levien joined 13 years ago, excluding staff at Wirecutter and The Athletic. Levien attributes this retention to unmatched institutional resources—including specialized editors, legal counsel, graphics teams, and security infrastructure—that support complex field deployments, such as maintaining 70 newsroom staff in Ukraine alongside reporters in Sudan and Myanmar. Addressing the commercial risk of subscription-driven "audience capture," Levien emphasizes that management mandates reporters follow facts regardless of subscriber sentiment. She cites simultaneous protests outside the Times headquarters by opposing political factions as evidence of independent coverage, pointing to internal town halls, an expanded trust and standards team, and rigorous editorial integration at The Athletic as safeguards against insular newsroom bias. Short-Form Video as a Trust Engine (25:00) Levien sharply differentiates the Times' video strategy from the mid-2010s industry "pivot to video," which she characterizes as a cynical monetization effort chasing inflated ad rates without providing genuine consumer value. The current strategy treats video as an additive medium rather than a replacement for written reporting or established audio franchises like The Daily, targeting video-native audiences across YouTube, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. Unlike previous format transitions that provoked newsroom resistance, current reporters have embraced short-form video. Levien explains that having journalists appear on camera to walk through their evidentiary process directly demonstrates reporting independence, demystifying investigative work and serving as a crucial trust-building mechanism for younger demographics. AI Intellectual Property and Newsroom Workflows (40:00) Levien insists that AI model developers must pay fair value for training data, highlighting that the Times spent nearly $2 billion in the prior year producing approximately 500,000 original works of journalism, photography, and video. While the company completed a commercial licensing deal with Amazon, it maintains active copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. Levien outlines three mandatory terms for AI partnerships: explicit permission, publisher control over content display, and fair economic value exchange. Operationally, the Times restricts generative AI to administrative tasks, engineering support, and investigative pattern recognition, keeping core storytelling strictly human-led. The newsroom's dedicated AI initiatives team has deployed machine learning models to parse 3 million pages of unsealed Epstein documents, evaluate satellite imagery of sports courts, and analyze public records during presidential transitions, treating the technology as an analytical force multiplier for reporters. Post-interview reflections question whether the Times' model of re-aggregating news, games, cooking, and sports into a single subscription bundle can be replicated across the broader media industry, or if market dynamics will support only one dominant global aggregator while regional reporting continues to decline.

《纽约时报》首席执行官梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱维恩（Meredith Kopit Levien）指出，该报在数字转型与人工智能时代的可持续性，依赖于将高质量独立新闻确立为核心商业引擎，并通过多垂直品类捆绑、长期主义治理架构以及强硬捍卫知识产权来维系高强度的内容投入。 独立新闻经济学与多品类聚合订阅 (10:00) 莱维恩坚决反驳了严肃硬新闻是依靠生活方式内容补贴的“亏损引流品”（loss leader）这一行业论调，强调机构的“第一块钱始终投向独立新闻报道”。以采编投入为例，该报在乌克兰派驻了70名采编人员，并在苏丹、缅甸等高危前线维持实地报道。莱维恩认为，正是此类具有公共利益属性的高成本报道构成了订阅价值的基本盘，采编决策不受单篇报道商业回报的干预。 在商业变现维度，《纽约时报》采取跨垂直领域的再聚合战略，将核心新闻与拼图游戏、烹饪食谱以及收购而来的体育媒体The Athletic整合为综合订阅包。通过1美元/周的体验期定价逐步向全价升级，该报在需求曲线上梯次捕获用户，将一般读者转化为捆绑订阅者。莱维恩指出，媒体扩张的核心在于建立让读者直接访问的日常黏性习惯，而非依赖外部第三方平台的流量导流。 双重股权治理与抵御受众俘获 (27:30) 面对季度财报后的市场波动，莱维恩强调《纽约时报》的家族控制双重股权结构赋予了管理层实施多年期大胆投资的跑道，使公司在历史上股价跌至6美元时仍能坚持转型战略。目前该报核心编辑部拥有员工规模处于历史峰值，较莱维恩13年前加入时净增1000余名记者（未计入The Athletic与Wirecutter团队）。制度化的法律、安全、视觉与编辑支持，成为该机构吸引并留存顶级记者的核心壁垒。 针对订阅制媒体容易迎合读者偏见以避免退订的“受众俘获”（audience capture）风险，莱维恩与主编乔·卡恩（Joe Kahn）、发行人A.G.苏兹伯格（A.G. Sulzberger）推行“带着空笔记本和开放心态”的采编文化。她以总部大楼外经常同时聚集对立立场的抗议群体为例，说明报道从未迎合特定党派预期；消费指南垂直品牌Wirecutter亦严格保持评测独立，拒绝向大型广告商倾斜。 视听战略重塑：以透明度重建受众信任 (30:15) 莱维恩将当前的视频业务与2010年代中期媒体行业失败的“全面转向视频”（pivot to video）进行了鲜明区分。她将当年的热潮定性为追逐短效高额数字广告分成、缺乏受众价值的“犬儒式变现”；当前的视听布局则聚焦于开拓增量市场，瞄准在YouTube、TikTok和Instagram上消费新闻衍生内容的受众，并与《The Daily》等成熟音频产品协同发展。 在采编实践中，推动资深调查记者参与社交短视频并未遭遇以往格式变革时的内部阻力。莱维恩表示，让记者在镜头前展示多月调查的证据链（“holding the receipts”）并拆解报道流程，能够有效去神秘化新闻生产，在年轻受众群体中建立透明度与信任感。 人工智能版权博弈与人机协同边界 (40:00) 在生成式AI领域，莱维恩指出《纽约时报》上一年度投入近20亿美元生产约50万件原创文本、摄影和视频作品，并拥有175年的历史档案。她认为AI模型开发者既然愿意在算力、电力与人才上投入数百上千亿美元，就必须为训练所用的知识产权支付对等报酬。除与亚马逊达成商业许可外，该报已起诉OpenAI、微软及Perplexity侵权，并明确对外合作须满足三大底线：明确授权许可、出版方拥有内容使用完全控制权、以及公允可持续的价值交换。 在新闻编辑部内部，时报成立了AI专项团队，将算法严格定位为辅助人类采编的“效率放大器”。应用场景包括在爱泼斯坦案300万页解密文件公布当夜开发模式识别工具排查线索、梳理内阁提名人公共记录、以及基于航拍图像分析网球场改建为匹克球场的地理数据等。莱维恩坚称，深入现场报道所需的同理心、职业敏感度与道德判断，是AI永远无法替代的人类核心能力。 播客主持人在节目复盘中指出，《纽约时报》通过将破碎的垂直内容重新打包聚合，成功确立了综合性媒体的统治地位；然而这一模式高度依赖极高的采编资本门槛与品牌声誉，在生成式AI和搜索引擎重新解构新闻分发渠道的当下，缺乏多元化变现能力的地方媒体与中小型出版物能否复制该路径，仍是悬而未决的行业难题。

## Background 本期节目由彭博社（Bloomberg）旗下的《Odd Lots》播客于 2026 年 8 月 10 日在全网及 RSS 平台发布。节目简介指出，在过去十年里，《纽约时报》通过收购 The Athletic、Wirecutter 与 Wordle 等标的完成多次自我重塑，如今在人工智能时代，公司一面利用 AI 工具辅助重大调查报道，一面就版权侵权起诉 OpenAI 与 Perplexity；本期特邀《纽约时报》首席执行官兼总裁梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文（Meredith Kopit Levien）深入探讨捆绑包订阅、视频战略转型以及媒体与 AI 共存的理想模式。 ## TL;DR 访谈围绕《纽约时报》从“濒临沉没的泰坦尼克号”逆袭为现代数字媒体巨头的商业逻辑展开。首席执行官梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文坚决否认严肃新闻是“赔本赚吆喝”的说法，强调高质量独立报道是集团最核心的经济价值支柱，并通过构建游戏、烹饪、体育（The Athletic）与导购评测等高黏性垂直矩阵驱动全包捆绑订阅（The Bundle）。针对当下生成式 AI 的冲击，莱文阐述了“起诉维权与商业授权并行”的双轨战略，坚持高品质原创必须获得公平对价与使用掌控权，并强调涉及同理心和道德判断的新闻采写永远必须由人类主导。最后，管理层分享了如何通过家族控股的双重股权结构保障采编独立性，抵御短视资本压力与“受众绑架”，以制度化流程守护媒体公信力。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对话在轻松风趣的叙旧氛围中展开，主持人 Joe Weisenthal 以早年因看衰纸媒而拒绝 DealBook 面试的自嘲开场，随即迅速切入对当代传媒生态的严肃拷问。莱文的回答兼具职业经理人的果决干练与传统报人的理想主义情怀，语调沉着自信、充满底气，在剖析商业飞轮与新闻底线时字字珠玑。节目兼备深度行业洞察与生动的细节交锋，既有对技术浪潮与创作者经济的务实反思，也散发着顶尖媒体掌舵人对长期主义价值的执着信念。 ## Bulletin - `10:00` 《纽约时报》彻底打破“严肃新闻是赔本引流工具”的论调，坚持将商业化赚到的第一块钱投入独立深度报道，新闻本身正是其最核心的经济价值源泉。 - `41:15` 在生成式 AI 冲击下，纽时坚守双轨策略：不仅持续起诉 OpenAI、微软和 Perplexity 侵犯版权，同时划定授权三原则，要求科技公司为高价值语料支付对等对价。 - `25:30` 不同于上一轮追逐展示广告的投机性泡沫，纽时当前的视频战略旨在构建高黏性自主产品形态，通过记者第一人称亮出证据的透明化叙事重构受众信任。 - `53:30` 纽时依托“阶梯式提价”与全景需求曲线策略，通过新闻与生活方式全包捆绑包（Bundle）重塑一站式综合媒体，采编团队规模较13年前净增约1000人。 ## Key takeaways - `04:47` 《纽约时报》完成了从防御纸媒失血到主动进攻的战略拐点，将自身重新定位为全球好奇之人理解与享受世界不可或缺的基础服务。 - `06:20` 商业规模天花板取决于直接寻访的高黏性受众，纽时已从依赖搜索引擎和社交算法的浅层流量转向培养日常访问习惯。 - `10:00` 严肃独立新闻绝非亏本引流工具（loss leader），而是整个媒体商业飞轮运转并创造经济价值的根本支柱。 - `12:35` 前线高危采访与报道规模由采编一线主编自主拍板，商业团队的职责在于构筑财务护城河，让编辑部无需因开销昂贵而妥协退缩。 - `15:15` 在创作者经济与大牌挖角潮下，纽时凭借强大的法务、安保、视觉设计支撑与超级受众规模，构建出个人 IP 无法复制的系统化护城河。 - `23:00` 物色顶尖记者的核心标准是最高水准的报道作品本身，而非单纯追求社交媒体上的网红流量或平台热度。 - `25:30` 记者面对镜头展示调查线索与一手证据的短视频形式，不是娱乐化迎合，而是在假信息泛滥时代重构读者信任的新工具。 - `27:30` 家族控股的双重股权结构赋予管理层抵御华尔街短期季度财报波动的底气，能够专注五年至十年的长期战略押注并确保采编绝对独立。 - `30:00` 媒介形态互不取代，视频业务旨在填补高质量严肃报道在长视频与碎片流中的空白，夺取尚未充分开掘的新增量受众。 - `35:00` 坚决抵制“受众绑架”，新闻报道只追随事实与证据，即便冒犯核心读者偏见或招致两极阵营抗议也绝不妥协立场。 - `41:15` 对 AI 巨头采取诉讼维权与有条件授权并行的双轨制，要求模型开发者必须对等的为新闻语料与创意劳动支付公允回报。 - `44:30` 明确“由人类创造、为了人类”的组织边界，核心调查与报道必须由具备同理心和道德判断的人类主导，AI 退居辅助数据挖掘与提效角色。 - `46:45` 采编团队实战运用 AI 处理海量爱泼斯坦案卷文本聚类、梳理内阁履历及分析网球场改建卫星图，大幅提升深度报道吞吐能力。 - `53:30` 采用阶梯式定价捕获全需求曲线受众，以低门槛试用切入，依靠生活方式垂直品类的高价值留存顺畅引导至全价续订。 - `57:25` 通过全员大会、高规格“信任与标准”团队及青年奖学金制度，从制度层面防范“编辑室俘获”，捍卫客观独立的新闻主义传统。 - `01:00:00` 收购 The Athletic 后保留其独立采编架构并强化审校层级，将体育报道团队扩充至逾550人，实现文化平顺整合与品质提升。 - `01:05:00` 纽时的规模飞轮使其成为新闻优质人才的“买方垄断者”，但其超级捆绑模式或许因极高的门槛而在行业中具备极强的不可复制性。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 赞助商信息与开场：从“泰坦尼克号”到时代赢家，传统媒体与独立写作的身份互换 节目开篇插播了关于盈透证券（Interactive Brokers）接入 ChatGPT 和 Claude 辅助投资研究、联合健康旗下 Optum 推动整合医疗体系以及 4imprint 定制品牌宣传品的商业赞助。随后，主持人 Joe Weisenthal 与 Tracy Alloway 开启了轻松的叙旧闲聊。Joe 再次分享了一段他戏称为“个人传说”的陈年往事：2009 年他在 Business Insider 刚开启第一份全职记者生涯时，曾接到一个来自《纽约时报》（The New York Times）旗下 DealBook 栏目的面试邀约电话。在那个报业哀鸿遍野的时代，时报的股价仅有大约 6 美元每股，年轻气盛且自视代表互联网新浪潮的 Joe 心想：“我为什么要去登上一艘快要沉没的‘泰坦尼克号’？”他断然拒绝了这次机会。 回望这十多年，媒体格局发生了令人咋舌的反转。Tracy 当时还在《金融时报》（Financial Times），她指出《纽约时报》在印刷时代一直是巨无霸般的存在，但后来的演变揭示了两个深层趋势：其一，《纽约时报》不仅彻底撕掉了“泰坦尼克号”的标签，其数字商业化的成功程度几乎无法被夸大；其二，传统媒体与独立媒体的生态位发生了戏剧性的对调。在过去，独立媒体和博主无不将跻身传统大牌媒体视作终极理想；而如今，身处顶级媒体平台的著名记者反而频频看向 Substack 等独立写作平台的高额变现空间，甚至萌生“摆脱机构品牌单干也能发大财”的念头。 与此同时，传统媒体与数字原住民媒体也在加速融合。曾经守旧的传统大报大举布局数字内容、益智游戏、短视频和播客；而当年的独立博主们如今则以严肃、高质量的专业报道见长。两人感叹，要想读懂当下的现代媒体商业模型，《纽约时报》是绕不开的绝对标杆。本期节目的嘉宾正是时任《纽约时报》总裁兼首席执行官（CEO）的 Meredith Kopit Levien。录制时间为 8 月 6 日，刚好在《纽约时报》刚刚公布强劲财报的次日。 --- ### `04:47` 重新定义纽时：“好奇之人不可或缺的服务”与数字转型的攻守易势 当被问及如果今天向外界定义《纽约时报》，它到底是什么时，Meredith Kopit Levien 给出了一个脱离单纯“报纸”范畴的全新界定：“它是全球所有渴望深入理解世界、深度参与世界并享受生活乐趣的好奇之人不可或缺的基础服务（essential service）。” 回顾自己的管理历程，Meredith 已经在《纽约时报》工作了 13 年之久，此前曾担任首席运营官（COO）三到四年，升任 CEO 也已有数年，职业生涯大部分时间都沉浸在新闻媒体行业。Tracy 提到，他们这代记者几乎是在“纸媒已死、媒体消亡”的悲观叙事中入行的。对此 Meredith 回忆道，在她接任 CEO 时，纽时正好走到了一个关键的战略拐点：那场极其艰难、痛苦的数字化转型阵痛期已经熬过去了，公司开始品尝到转型的甜头。在此之前，整个管理层几乎都在打“防御战”——核心焦虑是面对印刷版报纸订阅与广告的断崖式下滑，如何靠数字业务的规模来弥补传统业务的血崩。而在她接管舵轮时，纽时已从防御转向全面进攻，开始更具野心地探索它能为用户、社会和投资者创造出何等独特的价值。 Meredith 总结了自己十余年媒体生涯的最核心经验：一家媒体公司的商业规模与增长天花板，归根结底取决于一件事——你能在多大程度上持续扩大并深度绑定具有极高黏性（engaged）的目标受众，并不断找到下一批愿意深度消费内容的人群。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 纽约时报转型阶段对比 accDescr: 展示纽时从早期的防御期向当下的扩张期演进的战略逻辑 subgraph Defense ["早期防御阶段"] D1["印刷版收入与订阅断崖式下滑"] --> D2["核心目标：数字业务规模弥补纸媒失血"] D2 --> D3["被动应对互联网冲击，力保生存"] end subgraph Offense ["进攻与扩张阶段（Meredith 时期）"] O1["完成数字化底座重构"] --> O2["跨品类生活方式与优质新闻矩阵"] O2 --> O3["核心动力：扩大并沉淀高黏性自留地受众"] O3 --> O4["全方位价值创造（读者 / 社会 / 股东）"] end Defense --> Offense ``` --- ### `06:20` 纽时的底层主线：从新闻到游戏、烹饪与 The Athletic 体育的“习惯养成” Joe 顺着受众黏性的逻辑指出，自己早年在 Business Insider 经历过严重依赖 Google News 和 Facebook 社交算法分发流量的年代，虽然点击量（clicks）看起来很漂亮，但那些随时可能流失的点击绝不是真正属于自己的忠实读者。他进一步提出疑问：如今的《纽约时报》不仅是新闻机构，还是热门益智游戏的开发者（自研与收购并重，包括风靡全网的 Wordle 等），同时拥有巨大的美食食谱品牌（NYT Cooking），把这些庞杂业务统领在同一个母品牌下的“底层主线（through line）”究竟是什么？ Meredith 明确回应，这条贯穿始终的主线就在于：**坚持打造最高品质的独立新闻报道，同时构建细分领域领先的生活方式产品矩阵**。这些产品必须优秀到足以让用户心甘情愿按图索骥、直接输入网址或打开 App 访问（direct access），并在此过程中培养起不可替代的日常使用习惯（habituation）。在虚假信息与算法噪音充斥的时代，世界各地有无数充满好奇心的人渴望获得毫不妥协、真实可信且值得投入时间的优质内容，这构成了《纽约时报》的品牌承诺基石。 幽默的是，Meredith 敏锐地指出 Joe 在列举版块时漏掉了重要的一块拼图：“大家总是津津乐道我们的游戏，也经常提起食谱，但你刚才没有提到体育——别忘了，我们收购 The Athletic 已经整整四年了。”Tracy 随即自嘲接话，坦言自己订了纽时但还没加钱升级到全家桶捆绑包（Bundle），不过平时完全不关注体育的她，在最近的世界杯期间却不断在信息流里被 The Athletic 极高水准的深度报道所震撼，以至于产生了强烈的“错失恐惧（FOMO）”。Meredith 当即笑着借机“推销”，表示接下来必须好好和 Tracy 聊聊订阅捆绑包的定价与升级策略。 - **核心品牌愿景**：成为全球好奇受众理解与享受世界“不可或缺的服务”。 - **受众增长哲学**：放弃依靠搜索引擎或社交平台的被动浅层流量，转向建立让用户直接寻访（direct habit-forming）的高黏性受众。 - **业务矩阵支柱**：除了独立时政调查新闻，还涵盖 NYT Games（游戏）、NYT Cooking（烹饪）以及收购满四年的 The Athletic（体育报道）。 ### `10:00` 品牌承诺与打破“严肃新闻是赔本赚吆喝”的神话 面对《纽约时报》（The New York Times）旗下日益多元的产品矩阵，首席执行官兼总裁梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文（Meredith Kopit Levien）首先明确了贯穿整个品牌的核心承诺：为受众提供高质量、独立且值得信赖的信息，并以优雅、赏心悦目且高效利用读者时间的方式呈现，从而让人们变得更聪明、更全面。这种逻辑同样延伸至生活方式与垂直领域——以《The Athletic》为例，其使命是帮助体育迷更好地享受热爱。莱文幽默地自嘲是“一个既悲伤又遗憾的纽约喷气机队（New York Jets）死忠粉”，自己日常不仅读、看，还收听《The Athletic》，正是为了搞明白这支让她挂念的球队究竟发生了什么。 随着全套订阅捆绑包（The Bundle）成为推动用户扩张与商业成功的关键引擎，主持人抛出了核心疑问：当基础依然是严肃新闻时，CEO 如何在资本配置中进行权衡？究竟是重金挖掘明星记者、投资严肃报道，还是收购一款让人欲罢不能的新益智游戏，抑或开辟极具潜力的新垂直频道？莱文斩钉截铁地表示，整个机构最重要的底线，就是不服务于任何单方利益、纯粹为公众服务以帮助大家理解世界。“在这里赚到的第一块钱，永远都会投向高质量的独立新闻报道，毋庸置疑，绝无例外（The first dollar in the place goes to the high quality independent news journalism, period, hard stop）。” 莱文特别打破了长期笼罩在传媒行业上空的一种流行论调——即认为严肃独立的硬核新闻纯粹是出于崇高使命而不得不做的“赔本赚吆喝”（loss leader），媒体真正赚钱靠的是益智游戏或体育。“我想彻底终结这种说法，这完全不是事实。”她强调，《纽约时报》不会根据点击率或视频播放量来决定报道方向。许多公众日常可能根本不会主动关注缅甸和苏丹旷日持久的残酷内战，也不知道埃博拉病毒在刚果民主共和国（DRC）的蔓延机制与以往有何不同，但时报的职责就是揭示这些真相。订阅的根本承诺在于：不仅提供受众自认为想看的内容，还要将注意力引向那些至关重要、公众可能尚未意识到自己感兴趣的事物。在宏观层面上，高质量独立新闻本身就是时报创造经济价值最核心的源泉。 - **品牌核心承诺**：提供独立、可信、优雅呈现的信息，使用户理解世界并提升认知广度。 - **垂直领域标杆**：《The Athletic》定位于全网顶尖的体育新闻体验；Puzzles（游戏板块）则被打造为让聪明人每天变得更聪明的最高水准脑力游戏集合。 - **反直觉的商业逻辑**：严肃硬核新闻绝非补贴性质的亏损引流工具，而是整个商业飞轮运转并带来经济价值的根本支柱。 --- ### `12:35` 资源分配哲学：让编辑部不必为高昂的报道成本发愁 虽然《纽约时报》立志在进军的每一个领域（无论是体育垂直领域还是益智解谜）都成为绝对的市场领导者，但在媒体普遍面临资源约束的现实下，如何平衡社交媒体数字编辑、前线调查记者与游戏设计师之间的预算分配？莱文揭示了《纽约时报》运转良好背后的权力划分机制：真正决定报道投入的并非管理层，而是深入一线的采编人员。 例如在旷日持久的俄乌战争中，去年《纽约时报》轮流派往乌克兰前线的采编人员多达约 70 人。派出多少记者的决定权完全掌握在编辑与记者手中，这一层级的决策往往甚至不需要总编辑（Executive Editor）介入，而是由国际新闻主编以及更接近前线实况的核心编辑拍板。 莱文将自己的职责清晰界定为“后勤与经济护城河的构筑者”。她直言，像派遣顶级多媒体记者德克兰·沃尔什（Declan Walsh）以最高安全规格深入刚果民主共和国的埃博拉疫区，成本极其高昂。商业管理团队的使命，就是让公司在财务上保持强大与成功，以至于任何采编主管在判断某件事公众必须知道时，绝不需要因为“这趟差旅开销太庞大”或“战争打了好几年读者已经疲劳”而退缩妥协。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 纽约时报资源分配与编辑独立性架构 accDescr: 展示管理层负责商业成功以赋能编辑自主权并支撑高成本前线采编的闭环机制 subgraph Business ["商业经营层面 (CEO & 管理层)"] A["多产品矩阵与订阅变现"] --> B["确保充裕资金与财务造血能力"] end subgraph Independence ["防火墙机制"] B --> C["经济保障：无需为报道成本退缩"] end subgraph Editorial ["采编决策层面 (国际主编 & 前线记者)"] C --> D["自主决定前线报道规模"] D --> E["乌克兰前线派驻（年均约70人进出）"] D --> F["高危疫区/战地报道（如刚果（金）埃博拉）"] end ``` --- ### `15:15` 创作者经济与电视挖角潮下，纽约时报的“球衣前后双重价值”人才观 随着媒体行业人才流动加剧，主持人提到了业内近期的标志性离职现象，例如知名专栏作家罗斯·杜塞特（Ross Douthat）转战 CBS《60分钟》（*60 Minutes*）、播客《Hard Fork》联合主持人凯文·罗斯（Kevin Roose）等人的动态；同时指出传统报业与电视新闻（如 CNBC 主播）之间巨大的薪酬鸿沟，以及 Substack 等创作者平台让明星记者轻点鼠标就能自立门户的现状。面对大牌明星人才（Capital-T Talent）去留的博弈，时报如何建立吸引并留住顶尖人才的护城河？ 莱文首先对离开的同仁表达了极高的赞誉与真诚祝福，随后用一组硬核事实作为回应：目前的《纽约时报》拥有其历史上规模最为庞大的记者团队，即使剔除《The Athletic》与消费导购网站《Wirecutter》的独立团队，母报新闻编辑部的人数也比她 13 年前加入时多出了约 1000 人。“我们喜欢明星，我们希望制造明星、培育明星，并支持他们做出职业生涯中最棒的作品。” 在莱文看来，《纽约时报》拥有其他平台无法比拟的人才支撑生态圈。顶级记者来到这里，是为了在职业黄金期与同行中最优秀的同行并肩作战： - 调查记者乔纳森·斯旺（Jonathan Swan，近期与玛吉·哈伯曼合著关于特朗普新任期内幕的重磅专著）加入时报的初衷，正是为了与报道白宫最出色的记者团队协作。 - 知名评论家埃兹拉·克莱恩（Ezra Klein）的高水准输出，很大程度上得益于其编辑亚伦·雷蒂卡（Aaron Retica）以及背后庞大的专业后盾——包括法务团队、在记者遭遇阻力与威胁时提供贴身保护的安全专家，以及顶尖的视觉图表设计师和摄影记者。 - 时报拥有其他独立平台无法企及的超级受众规模，外来大牌记者无论此前名气多大，入职后都会对其作品引发的巨大影响力感到震撼。 莱文用了一个形象的体育隐喻总结时报的人才主张：这里吸引的是那些同时执着于“球衣胸前印着的团队名字，和背后印着的个人姓名（both the name on the front of the jersey and the one on the back of the jersey）”，并且深谙二者相辅相成价值的杰出人才。尽管这种机构平台模式不一定适合所有人，但伴随着时报大举进军视频等全新领域，这一核心价值主张将历久弥新。 - **新闻编辑室规模**：较 13 年前净增约 1000 名记者，采编力量达到历史最高峰值。 - **全方位支撑系统**：法务抗辩、前线安保、视觉设计、专业主编构成了个人 IP 在独立创作者平台上无法复制的系统化护城河。 - **战略延展**：明确将全力推进视频业务扩张，并愿意倾尽资源延揽和支持全球最卓越的新闻采编人才。 ### `20:00` 支撑全球一线报道的商业模式与人才愿景 在谈到《纽约时报》遍布全球的新闻网络时，首席执行官梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文（Meredith Kopit Levien）指出，时报在乌克兰前线常驻着 70 名采编人员，同时在苏丹、缅甸等动荡局势的前沿也派驻了记者。这些记者有的早已名满天下，有的对读者来说仍是陌生的名字。莱文强调，作为商业运营的掌舵人，她的核心使命是让《纽约时报》的商业模式能够以持久、可持续的方式支撑起这样庞大且昂贵的新闻采编体系。她的目标极为坚定：要让时报始终成为全球最顶尖记者心向往之、并且能够长久留驻的地方。 - **前线派驻规模**：仅在乌克兰一地，时报就维持着多达 70 人的实地报道团队，并在苏丹、缅甸等全球冲突热点保持深度现场报道。 - **商业与采编定位**：以稳健、长期的商业运作保障高成本严肃新闻的生存空间，致力于成为全球顶级新闻人才的终极归宿。 --- ### `23:00` 独立平台与社交媒体：顶级记者的寻觅与专业门槛 随着媒介生态的演变，主持人提出疑问：在 Substack、TikTok、X（前 Twitter）等独立创作者平台与社交网络大行其道的今天，时报在物色顶尖新闻人才时，是否会像当下许多机构那样更多转向这些“独立创作者”平台。莱文对此作出了非常务实而清醒的回应。她回顾道，在过去十年乃至更长时间里，时报大举扩充了新闻与评论采编团队，这也是驱动公司经济成功的关键支柱。然而，时报搜寻人才的唯一标准是“最好的报道作品”以及“这些杰出报道背后的人”。 莱文直言，作为一名媒体受众，在传统新闻机构之外，其实很难看到源源不断涌现的严肃新闻调查。虽然独立平台上不乏观点表达，但真正符合专业标准的新闻采掘极为稀缺。时报物色人才的核心，是看对方能否在高度严谨的职业规范下独立工作。只有认同并能够践行严格的新闻独立性标准的人，才能真正融入时报并在其中蓬勃发展。 - **引才核心准则**：紧盯最高水准的报道作品本身，而非单纯追求社交媒体上的网红流量或平台热度。 - **独立性红线**：严守传统新闻采编的专业伦理，要求记者在不受外部商业或政治利益妥协的独立标准下开展调查报道。 --- ### `25:30` 拥抱“小话筒”短视频：用镜头重构读者信任与报道透明度 话题转向视频内容创作时，主持人抛出了一个颇具画面感且尖锐的场景：一位在时报深耕多年的资深调查记者刚刚完成了一篇重磅报道，转头就被社交团队要求手里攥着一个迷你小话筒、对着一部 iPhone 在 90 秒内把复杂选题讲清楚，专供 Instagram Reels 或短视频用户消费。老派记者面对这种要求究竟是觉得被“降格”而心生抗拒，还是乐在其中？ 莱文笑着打破了这种刻板印象。她坦言，在自己供职时报的 13 年历程中，确实经历过管理层推动某项转型而遭遇采编团队强烈抵触的时刻，但“短视频绝非如此”。恰恰相反，整个编辑部展现出了异乎寻常的兴奋感。这背后的根本逻辑在于：短视频并不是浮于表面的娱乐化迎合，而是一种全新的信任构建机制。 当记者走入镜头，用通俗易懂的语言向受众拆解“独家信源从何而来”、“调查是如何层层抽丝剥茧完成的”，甚至在镜头前直接展示手中掌握的核心文件与“证据底牌”（holding the receipts）时，这个过程变得极具感染力。它以最直观的方式向公众展现了什么是真正的新闻采写——由专业人士奔赴现场、挖掘未曝光的事实。这不仅极大地激发了公众的兴趣，更在假信息泛滥的时代生动展示了独立调查新闻的不可替代性。 - **透明度带来信任**：通过第一人称的记者视角镜头，公开幕后采编流程，将“如何拿到内幕”转化为建立公信力的工具。 - **新闻本质的重塑**：镜头前亮出的证据与抽丝剥茧的调查过程，让读者清晰感知到严肃新闻与一般网络快讯之间的专业鸿沟。 --- ### `27:30` 告别流量骗局：新时期的视频 ROI 与家族控股的“长期主义” 针对资本市场的担忧，主持人指出，《纽约时报》的股价整体表现强劲，但在最近两个季度财报发布后均出现了小幅抛售，市场对高昂的视频制作成本与商业回报（ROI）存有焦虑。五到十年前媒体行业那场轰轰烈烈却最终破裂的“全面转向视频”（Pivot to Video）风潮仍让人心有余悸。 莱文对此进行了深刻剖析。她指出，当年的视频狂潮之所以迅速破灭，是因为那纯粹是“赤裸裸掠夺展示类广告美元的投机行为”（a naked attempt to go get ad dollars）。而时报今天的视频战略完全不同：目标是在数百万既有文字读者的基础上，通过视频形式吸引并沉淀数以百万计的深度观看受众，形成全方位的日常媒介黏性。 谈及公司估值与季度股价波动，莱文动情地表示自己拥有“全媒体行业最好的一份工作”。时报虽然是一家上市公司，但拥有奥克斯-苏兹贝格（Ochs-Sulzberger）家族控股的双重股权结构。这种控制权架构确立了两大不可动摇的基石： 1. **确保采编独立**：新闻报道只服务于公众利益，甚至不向时报自身的商业利益妥协。 2. **践行长期主义**：赋予管理层“放长线钓大鱼”的底气，能够做出大规模、雄心勃勃的长期押注，并给予足够的资金、资源和时间让其生根发芽。 莱文还打趣地提及了主持人早年错过加入《纽约时报》旗下 DealBook 栏目的轶事（当时时报股价仅为 6 美元上下，如今由安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金掌舵的团队极其成功）。她总结道，时报的全部商业价值，皆源于围绕高价值用户所做出的少数几次审慎而果敢的长期战略投入。每一个季度的稳健增长，都在强化“卓越报道—用户订阅—收入盈利—反哺采编”的飞轮效应。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 纽约时报长期主义增长飞轮 accDescr: 展示家族控股架构如何保护采编独立并支撑长期战略投资，最终形成商业与使命正向循环的架构图。 subgraph Governance["治理基石"] A["家族控股双重股权结构"] end subgraph Strategy["核心战略落地"] B["抵御短期财报波动<br/>坚持长期资本投入"] C["坚守采编绝对独立<br/>不为商业利益妥协"] D["大胆押注多元媒介形态<br/>(视频/音频/垂直订阅)"] end subgraph BusinessFlywheel["价值创造飞轮"] E["高品质深度采编<br/>与全方位受众触达"] F["提升用户黏性与订阅规模"] G["营收与营业利润持续提升"] end A --> B A --> C B & C --> D D --> E E --> F F --> G G -.->|"资本反哺采编与技术"| B ``` - **视频战略本质的区别**：上一轮行业泡沫是追逐第三方平台广告分成，本轮时报视频布局旨在构建自主高黏性产品形态，做大整体订阅与沉浸生态。 - **家族控制权的双重红利**：既作为阻隔商业与政治干预的“防火墙”，也是抵御华尔街短视季度指标、专注五年至十年周期复利增长的战略定海神针。 ### `30:00` 昔日“转向视频”的广告冲动与当下用户消费习惯的重构 主持人与梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文（Meredith Kopit Levien）探讨了媒体行业多年来饱受争议的“转向视频（Pivot to Video）”热潮。主持人指出，最初的转型是一场赤裸裸的投机行为——媒体机构为了追逐视频广告的高溢价而蜂拥而上；而如今行业大谈“受众黏性与读者参与度”，但许多用户在日常生活中并不习惯看视频新闻或视频播客，更多人依然依赖纯音频收听或文字阅读。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Media Consumption Modes accDescr: 读者在阅读、听力与视频之间不同的媒介消费分工 subgraph Core["原有存量市场"] Text["文字阅读<br/>（深度新闻、网站与App）"] Audio["音频播客<br/>（如 The Daily、自动朗读）"] end subgraph Expansion["全新增量空间"] Video["视频生态<br/>（YouTube长视频、TikTok/Reels碎片流）"] Audience["新闻延伸与泛娱乐受众<br/>（数以百万计的日常高频用户）"] end Core -.->|"媒介形式不相互取代"| Video Video --> Audience ``` 对此，莱文从《纽约时报》经历的多次技术变迁（从纸媒到数字端、从网页到移动端、再到音频）中提炼出核心认知：新媒介的出现从不会彻底杀死旧媒介。无论是跑步时习惯听文章自动语音朗读的硬核受众，还是《The Daily》这种现象级纯音频节目，忠实的听众和读者始终稳固。然而，市场上存在着一个极为庞大的群体——他们或是仍守在电视前看新闻的传统观众，或是在 YouTube 观看长视频、在 TikTok/Instagram 上被动刷着具有时事关联的泛娱乐内容。莱文直言，早期的视频转型是一场“不顾能否吸引数百万人真实参与的犬儒式抢钱把戏”，而当下的战略则是为了填补高质量严肃报道在视频领域的空白，做一款每天能有数百万人深度参与的规模化产品。 - **音频的持久生命力**：《纽约时报》的大多数播客已开发出视频版本，但旗舰节目《The Daily》依然维持纯音频形态，其热度与商业表现依然是“庞然巨兽”级别。 - **差异化市场定位**：视频业务并非文字与音频的替代品，而是《纽约时报》尚未充分开掘的新领地与巨大白区（White Space）。 - **受众行为划分**：一部分人在碎片化信息流中被动接收“泛新闻/时事相关内容”，另一部分人则在 YouTube 上专门检索深度长视频，两个切面均有极大的市场份额可夺取。 --- ### `35:00` 抵制受众绑架与新闻独立性的商业底气 针对主持人提出关于“受众绑架（Audience Capture）”与读者意识形态筛选的犀利提问——如果受众偏向高学历、自由派，真实但令人不适的报道是否会冒犯核心订户，导致受众流向更极端的细分媒体——莱文给出了极为坚定的回应。她强调，《纽约时报》的全量读者群体结构其实非常接近大众全貌，比起“自由派（Liberal）”，她更愿意用“求知欲强、受过良好教育、思想开放（Open-minded）”来形容受众。 莱文直言，新闻机构的底线是“追随事实，无论事实引向何方”，哪怕结论彻底颠覆公众的固有认知。她生动地提到，有时抗议人群会堵在时报大楼门前，甚至出现政治立场完全对立的双方在同一天抗议《纽约时报》的情况：“两边都觉得我们的报道是在摧毁他们的事业，但这恰恰证明我们做对了。”面对充斥着 AI 生成垃圾信息（Slop）、假新闻和来源不明谣言的互联网环境，受众真正渴望的是确凿的真相、公平透明的调查过程以及无可争议的证据（“Show the receipts”）。 - **抵制“受众绑架”**：新闻报道绝不迎合读者偏见，即便揭露的真相会让受众感到被冒犯或愤怒，也绝不退让妥协。 - **跨品类的独立原则**： - **核心新闻**：不设立设立场前提，用事实和证据说话。 - **体育板块**：为真正热爱体育的球迷服务，不受外部利益左右。 - **消费测评（Wirecutter）**：坚持独立测试标准；哪怕某款床垫背后有巨额广告投放，如果测评员认定另一款更舒适，就必须如实披露。 - **价值创造的核心主张**：追求真相与坚守独立性不仅是为社会创造公共价值，长期来看更是最具经济价值的商业壁垒。 --- ### `38:00` 商业资讯：AI 动态定价冲击特价机票 & 医疗系统数字化转型 节目穿插了彭博科技快报（Bloomberg Tech Minute）与商业资讯： - **航空公司部署 AI 实时动态定价**：达美航空（Delta）与维珍航空（Virgin Atlantic）等航司正引入机器学习模型，通过实时分析历史预订模式、座位库存、季节趋势以及竞对运力变动等多重变量，缩短调价窗口。这种技术的普及在帮航司挖掘更多收入潜力的同时，也正在消除过去依赖时间差刷出“白菜价”机票的空间——热门繁忙航线的票价或将进一步走高，而低需求航线可能获得更低优惠。 - **Optum 的医疗系统一体化**：探讨了美国医疗体系在处方续药、就诊流程繁琐上的痛点，介绍了医疗健康企业 Optum 如何利用数据和底层技术打通患者护理与药房服务环节，提升整体医疗效率。 ### `41:15` 诉讼与授权：纽约时报在 AI 时代的价值底线 随着媒体行业刚在数字化转型的浪潮中站稳脚跟，生成式人工智能（AI）便作为全新的巨大挑战接踵而至。面对这波浪潮，各大新闻机构采取了截然不同的应对策略：部分媒体探索按使用量计费（usage-based fees），而《纽约时报》（The New York Times）则展现出兼具进攻与合作的双轨路线。公司一方面与亚马逊（Amazon）达成了授权合作协议；另一方面，则对 OpenAI 与微软（Microsoft）提起了旷日持久的诉讼（至今已持续近两到三年），并在去年 12 月正式起诉了 AI 搜索新贵 Perplexity。 首席执行官梅雷迪斯·科皮特·莱维恩（Meredith Kopit Levien）明确阐述了这一立场的底层逻辑：新闻生产是一项极其昂贵且高度依赖人力创造的工程。《纽约时报》去年在内容生产上投入了近 20 亿美元，产出约 50 万件涵盖特写报道、摄影和视频的原创表达作品，这种积累在 175 年的办报历史中汇聚成了无与伦比的高质量语料库。这些成果对社会、公众以及大语言模型（LLM）而言都具备极高价值。诉讼的核心目的，在于坚决抵制科技公司“偷窃资产、未经许可及任何控制权擅自使用，并打造出直接竞争产品”的行为。莱维恩指出，理想的授权交易必须满足三项严苛前提，纽约时报愿在合理条件下敞开谈判大门： 1. **战略持续性**：必须与出版商及优质内容生产者的可持续增长战略保持一致。 2. **明确的许可与控制权**：媒体必须对作品的所有潜在使用场景拥有清晰的授权范围与掌控力。 3. **公平可持续的价值交换**：科技公司在算力、电力和顶尖人才上动辄豪掷数百上千亿美元，对于作为模型基石的“数据”——即高品质的独立新闻与创意劳动——必须支付对等的公允对价。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 纽约时报应对生成式 AI 的双轨战略 accDescr: 展示纽约时报面对 AI 公司的诉讼维权与商业授权三大原则 subgraph Defense["维权行动：坚决反击侵权"] A["起诉 OpenAI 与微软 (历时近3年)"] B["起诉 Perplexity (去年12月)"] end subgraph Principles["授权前提：三大核心标准"] C["1. 契合商业可持续战略"] D["2. 保留明确授权与完全控制权"] E["3. 获得对等公平的经济价值回报"] end Defense --> G["保护 175 年新闻资产与 20 亿美元年投入"] Principles --> F["与科技巨头开展商业合作 (如亚马逊协议)"] ``` --- ### `44:30` 算力消耗与“人类主导”的创意边界 在各大企业高管与董事会层面，AI 的“Token 消耗量”（token consumption）以及向各部门调配大模型的预算分配，正在成为类似“人力 headcount”一样的标准管理议题。莱维恩证实，纽时已向产品开发与市场营销部门大范围推广了 AI 编程与辅助工具，并在编辑部内设立了规模庞大的“AI 倡议团队”（AI initiatives team）。但面对未来资本支出的预测，她保持着审慎态度，认为行业目前仍处于观察工具能力的阶段，尚无人能给出确切的长远定论。 在组织定位上，莱维恩划定了不可动摇的红线：纽约时报是一家“由人类创造、为了人类”（by humans for humans）的创意公司。虽然 AI 能够显著提升效率和生产力，但核心的高品质独立新闻报道必须坚持“人类主导”（human led）。目前纽约时报拥有近 1,000 名数字产品开发人员，以及约 3,000 名专注采编与内容创作的专业团队；只要公司持续健康发展，内容创作团队的规模仍将继续扩张，机器不会取代人类的价值判断与深度调查。 - 纽约时报团队规模：约 1,000 名数字化产品研发人员，约 3,000 名记者与内容创作者。 - 战略定调：坚持新闻核心业务由人类主导，工具退居辅助、增强效率的角色。 --- ### `46:45` 编辑部实战：AI 在调查报道与数据挖掘中的应用 纽约时报并非将 AI 拒之门外，而是在新闻采编中探索出了一整套切实落地的赋能案例。最典型的一役发生在“爱泼斯坦案卷档案”（Epstein files）公开之时：数百万页（约 300 万页）的文件在一个周五晚间集中解密，新闻采编面临巨大的信息吞吐压力。AI 倡议团队迅速构建了专用的工具链，利用算法对海量文本进行模式搜索、特征聚类和关联筛查，记者们藉此能够快速验证线索、提出深度质询，并在随后的工作周内以惊人的速度推出了高质量的重磅报道。 莱维恩还列举了一系列利用 AI 解锁新报道形式的生动范例： - **公共履历审核**：在政权交接与内阁提名期间（例如特朗普重返白宫组阁时），AI 工具被用于高速梳理候选人庞杂的历史公开记录。 - **舆论溯源调查**：在演员西德妮·斯威尼（Sydney Sweeney）引发的牛仔裤广告争议中，社交媒体普遍盛传是“左翼人士被激怒（the libs are outraged）”，而纽时记者通过 AI 分析海量舆情数据，证实该话题最初其实是右翼阵营主动建构与推波助澜的产物。 - **影像识别分析**：在追踪新兴体育潮流时，纽时利用计算机视觉 AI 自动扫描分析现有的网球场航拍卫星图，精确统计出有多少场地已被改建为匹克球场（pickleball courts）。 - **内容多语言化与无障碍**：开展早期自动化语音翻译与内容本地化实验，为未来技术成熟后扩大全球覆盖做储备。 --- ### `49:15` 重新定义“报道”：无法被机器替代的情感与道德重负 针对媒体人亨利·布洛吉特（Henry Blodget）此前在节目中提出的观点——报社历史上曾存在“前线调查采风者”与“后方文字撰写者”的明确分工，未来是否可由前线记者带回数据交由 AI 自动成稿？莱维恩对此给出了深切的反思与坚决的回应。她并不单纯讨论工作流是否“令人反感”，而是直指新闻业本质的核心底线。 “新闻业的基石是报道（reporting）。”莱维恩强调，报道绝非机械性的“输入数据并输出段落”。它意味着记者亲自奔赴事件现场——无论是美好盛事，还是残酷可怖的惨剧发生地；它是遵循严格的专业规范去接触有血有肉的人、挖掘隐秘的信息；更关键的是，它需要极其细腻的敏感度、同理心与道德判断，将其转化为读者、听众和观众能够感同身受的“理解”。在面对校园枪击案这般惨痛的人间悲剧时，将现场见闻转化为文字绝非冰冷的算法代笔所能胜任，这一过程所承载的情感分量与人类良知，是任何 AI 都无法复制的。 ### `50:00` 人性化报道与科技的平衡 在谈及涉及枪击案等重大或艰难事件的报道时，梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文（Meredith Kopit Levien）强调，这类报道必须怀揣极大的敏感度、判断力以及对当事人和读者的同理心去呈现，“所有艰难的新闻都需要带着敏感、判断力以及对笔下之人和读者的关怀来进行转化，唯有如此才能产生真正的触动与影响力”。在她看来，这一创作核心在很大程度上必须由人类完成。然而，这并不意味着她抗拒技术。她明确表示，自己对利用技术（包括生成式 AI）来解放生产力、赋能更多深度报道的想法完全不感到反感，“《纽约时报》之所以能走到今天，正是因为我们坚信：只要负责任地使用技术，它就能帮助公司拓展受众规模、让报道工作变得更加出色”。 ### `50:40` 中场商业资讯与播客广告 本段对话中穿插了一节商业资讯与品牌赞助播报： - **彭博科技速报（Bloomberg Tech Minute）**：卡罗尔·马瑟（Carol Masser）报道指出，从达美航空（Delta）到维珍大西洋航空（Virgin Atlantic），全球各大航空公司正在全面引入人工智能与机器学习模型，实时权衡数十种变量以动态调整机票价格。算法通过分析历史订票趋势、座位库存、季节规律并追踪竞对航司运力，压缩了过去旅客能够捡漏低价票的价差空间，使得热门航线票价水涨船高，但同时也可能降低淡季非热门航线的出行成本。本节由 ChatGPT（现已推出 ChatGPT Work 及 Work Mode 模式）赞助播出。 - **医疗健康与品牌定制广告**：联合健康集团旗下的 Optum 介绍了其如何利用数据与数字化平台打通基层医疗、处方药房、心理健康及居家护理服务，从而减少医生的繁琐事务性工作并降低患者药费开支；定制促销礼品平台 4imprint 则推介了其无起版费、快周转与“360度保障”的定制服装与周边服务。 ### `53:30` 新闻定价艺术与全需求曲线的捕获 播客随后切入新闻业的核心商业难题——价格弹性。主持人指出，大众在信息消费上往往存在矛盾心态：人们一边抱怨如今缺乏高质量的优质媒体，另一边遇到付费墙又百般抗拒，就连研发大语言模型的 AI 公司也极力规避为底层数据和内容付费。被问及在经历多年捆绑销售实验后悟出了怎样的定价规律时，莱文打趣道自己甚至被外甥女索要过《纽约时报》的登录密码，她当时反问：“你到底知不知道我是靠什么谋生的？” 谈及商业策略，莱文指出《纽约时报》拥有庞大订户群体的根本原因，在于他们从不认为必须在“广泛开放内容让用户试读体验”与“打造足够厚重的高价值付费壁垒”之间二选一。在过去十年中，管理团队始终精细平衡这两端，既留有足够的免费阅读空间来为下一次获取“下一个百万订户”播撒种子，又持续增强付费产品的价值引力。而在定价模型上，《纽约时报》奉行的是一种旨在覆盖“需求曲线（demand curve）下所有人”的全景策略：从低价促销期购入单项游戏产品（Games）的国际用户，到全价订购全家桶套餐并与家人共享的高价值订户，其间拥有广阔的分层空间。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 纽约时报订户价值递进与转化漏斗 accDescr: 展示纽约时报从低门槛引流到高价值捆绑包的阶梯式定价转化路径 subgraph Acquisition["获客引流阶段"] A["开放采样体验<br>高质量免费内容"] B["单品促销低门槛切入<br>如 Games / 国际特惠"] end subgraph Conversion["核心转化机制"] C["核心旗舰产品（Hero Product）<br>新闻与生活方式全包捆绑包"] D["促销试用阶段<br>每周 1 美元"] end subgraph Expansion["长期价值留存"] E["深度互动与习惯养成<br>体验 Wirecutter / Cooking / Athletic 等高价值"] F["台阶式提价（Step-up Pricing）<br>全价续订或家庭共享计划"] end A --> C B --> C C --> D D --> E E --> F ``` - **核心产品形态**：时报将包含新闻与全部生活方式产品的全包捆绑包（News Entitled Bundle）视为最高价值的“英雄产品（Hero Product）”。 - **转化与提价路径**：多数新订户通常以“每周 1 美元”的超低优惠价进入全包套餐；随着日常使用频次与互动深度增加，产品价值得到充分感知，订户会在预设的提价台阶（Pricing step-up point）顺畅过渡到更高的常规价格。 ### `57:25` 应对“编辑室俘获”：坚守独立新闻主义底线 主持人提出了一个尖锐的内部管理问题——“编辑室俘获（Newsroom Capture）”。主持人列举了近年来《纽约时报》内部的数起震荡，例如知名专栏作者巴里·韦斯（Bari Weiss）辞职并公开指控在内部因观点不同遭遇霸凌和 Slack 激烈攻击，以及 2020 年刊登参议员汤姆·科顿（Tom Cotton）有关派兵平息骚乱的客座评论文章后引发的内部大反弹。面对意识形态激化对客观编辑目标的潜在冲击，管理层如何捍卫报道使命？ 莱文分别从高维原则与战术落地两个层面作出了回应： - **核心新闻理念**：她表示，任何加入《纽约时报》的人都必须深刻理解何为“独立新闻（Independent Journalism）”，即“怀着开放的心态和空白的采访本（an open mind and an empty notebook）去追踪每一篇报道”。 - **管理层高度协同**：她为公司领导层为此倾注的心血感到自豪，包括她本人、她盛赞的执行总编乔·卡恩（Joe Kahn），以及被她誉为当代新闻独立性最高权威的董事长兼发行人 A.G. 索尔兹伯格（A.G. Sulzberger）。管理层将坚守独立新闻确立为全报社文化中不可动摇的准则。 - **管理机制与沟通变革**：在具体战术上，报社改变了沟通模式。莱文回忆，在自己接任 CEO 之前，《纽约时报》历史上几乎从不举办全员大会（Town Hall），甚至第一次破例召开全员大会只是为了在疫情初期通知员工回家办公，而如今这已成为推动文化对齐与透明沟通的重要抓手。 ### `01:00:00` 新闻独立性把控与收购 The Athletic 的文化整合 梅雷迪思·科皮特·莱文（Meredith Kopit Levien）详细介绍了《纽约时报》内部如何通过制度化建设来守护新闻独立性，防止陷入“受众绑架”（audience capture）。公司如今每月都会举办数千人参加的全员大会，展示并复盘那些令团队自豪的新闻报道及其成稿过程。同时，时报建立了全行业规模最大的“信任与标准”（Trust and Standards）团队，其人员编制远超五六年前；该团队不断在内部公开普及评判新闻水准的规范（“what good looks like”）。在人才培养方面，时报设立了多项培育计划，例如针对密西西比州和巴尔的摩等地的本地调查报道奖学金（Local Investigative Journalism Fellowship），以此为全行业培育下一代专业记者。 随后，主持人特雷西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）打趣提到自己还没有订阅 The Athletic，莱文立刻笑着表示要送她一份礼物订阅或劝她直接升级成时报全包捆绑包（The Bundle）。随后话题切入对 The Athletic 的收购整合。The Athletic 原本拥有约 450 名采编人员，业务团队规模极小，其早期模式是将全美各大体育名城的优秀地方跑口记者招致麾下。莱文透露，当初不少人担忧两家风格迥异的新闻机构会出现严重的文化冲突，甚至有记者在收购之初在社媒上戏谑：“妈，我现在给《纽约时报》打工了。”但实际整合过程极为平顺，如今该编辑部规模已扩大了约 100 人。 为了在保留独立特色的同时注入时报品质，时报请来了前《华盛顿邮报》高管史蒂文·金斯伯格（Steven Ginsburg）负责采编，并大幅强化了 The Athletic 原本薄弱的编辑审校层级（editing layer）。在管理架构上，The Athletic 保持独立新闻机构定位，由出版人戴维·佩皮奇（David Perpich，家族成员）直接向莱文汇报，完全独立于时报原有的核心新闻编辑部运作。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: The Athletic 与纽约时报的管理整合架构 accDescr: 展示 The Athletic 在保持独立运作的同时融入纽约时报业务与标准的层级关系 subgraph NYT["《纽约时报》集团管理层"] CEO["集团 CEO: Meredith Kopit Levien"] Pub["The Athletic 出版人: David Perpich"] CEO --> Pub end subgraph Athletic["The Athletic 独立新闻采编部"] Editor["总编辑: Steven Ginsburg<br/>(前华盛顿邮报高管)"] Layer["强化编辑与审校层级 (Editing Layer)"] Reporters["超 550 名体育报道记者"] Pub --> Editor Editor --> Layer Layer --> Reporters end subgraph Support["集团赋能与标准"] Standards["信任与标准体系 (Trust & Standards)"] Standards -. 规范指导.-> Athletic end ``` - **全员文化沉淀**：通过数千人规模的月度全员会，回溯标杆报道的采写历程，巩固新闻立身之本。 - **审校与人才升级**：The Athletic 记者规模从收购初期的约 450 人扩充至超 550 人，并由史蒂文·金斯伯格搭建了更为坚实的深度编辑流程。 - **外部收购的严苛门槛**：莱文表示时报目前的投资回报率（ROI）门槛极高，对非内生性扩张（inorganic addition）非常挑剔与克制；同时强调时报自身的内生研发能力同样强大，例如低价收购的 Wordle 之外的所有热门游戏均由内部自主开发，当前的大规模视频布局也是依托内部既有人才驱动。 --- ### `01:05:00` 访谈总结与关于传统媒体生态困境的延伸探讨 访谈结束、莱文离开后，主持人乔·威森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）与特雷西·阿洛威就媒体行业的结构性变局展开了深度复盘。乔指出，The Athletic 最初的壮大是通过在各大城市重金挖角优质跑口名记（例如在圣路易斯挖走报道红雀队的明星记者），而《纽约时报》依靠自身强劲的数字化与商业化飞轮，几乎成为了新闻行业优秀人才的“买方垄断者”（monopsony buyer）。过去地方报纸（如《达拉斯晨报》）驻白宫记者的卓越人选最终流向时报；如今在互联网规模效应下，绝大多数地方媒体已无法维持白宫记者站的成本，受众转向全国性头部媒体，地方与垂直媒体的生存空间遭到极度挤压。 两位主持人进一步探讨了“一站式媒体”（One-stop shop）的解体与重塑。过去传统媒体的中心化分发被互联网彻底打散成各类垂直小众孤岛（Silos），读者被分散到各个细分领域。而《纽约时报》通过将新闻、智力游戏、烹饪食谱（NYT Cooking）、导购评测（Wirecutter）以及 The Athletic 聚合在统一订阅包下，似乎重新证明了“一站式综合生活媒体”依然可行。但乔与特雷西同时质疑，这一模式是否具备普适性——也许整个英语世界仅仅只能容纳得下一家这种规模的超级综合媒体；此外，随着社会舆论进一步极化，这批受过良好教育、心智开放的受众未来究竟是能长期保持稳固，还是会不可避免地退守到只符合自身意识形态的“回音室”中，仍是行业未解的巨大悬念。 - **媒体买方垄断**：时报利用规模与资本优势网罗了全行业最拔尖的记者，加速了传统地方大报核心报道职能（如白宫驻点报道）的消亡。 - **垂直细分与超级聚合的博弈**：互联网打破了原有一张报纸读所有的格局，但时报逆向通过捆绑包（Bundle）重组垂直领域，打造出数字时代的超级门户。 - **模式可复制性的质疑**：主持人们认为时报的成功仅能证明“时报自己能行”，其他传统媒体几乎无法复制其综合矩阵的生态飞轮。 - **商业广告与播客信息**：节目尾声播放了 Odd Lots 的社群与收听渠道指引，并插入了包括 Optum 全方位医疗、4imprint 定制礼品及 Wise 跨境金融服务的播客赞助广告。 ## Notable quotes > `04:47` It is an essential service for all curious people around the world who want to deeply understand and engage with the world, and also enjoy it. — Meredith Kopit Levien > `10:00` The first dollar in the place goes to the high quality independent news journalism, period, hard stop. — Meredith Kopit Levien > `10:00` I want to kill that idea. It is simply not true. — Meredith Kopit Levien > `15:15` We like stars. We want to make stars, we want to cultivate stars, and we want to help stars do the best work of their lives. — Meredith Kopit Levien > `15:15` both the name on the front of the jersey and the one on the back of the jersey — Meredith Kopit Levien > `27:30` a naked attempt to go get ad dollars — Meredith Kopit Levien > `35:00` 两边都觉得我们的报道是在摧毁他们的事业，但这恰恰证明我们做对了。 — Meredith Kopit Levien > `44:30` by humans for humans — Meredith Kopit Levien > `49:15` 新闻业的基石是报道（reporting）。 — Meredith Kopit Levien > `50:00` 所有艰难的新闻都需要带着敏感、判断力以及对笔下之人和读者的关怀来进行转化，唯有如此才能产生真正的触动与影响力 — Meredith Kopit Levien > `57:25` an open mind and an empty notebook — Meredith Kopit Levien > `01:00:00` 妈，我现在给《纽约时报》打工了。 — The Athletic 采编记者 ## Mentioned 纽约时报 (The New York Times), Meredith Kopit Levien, Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, DealBook, The Athletic, Wirecutter, NYT Cooking, NYT Games, Wordle, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Amazon, ChatGPT, Claude, Substack, The Daily, Declan Walsh, Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Ezra Klein, Aaron Retica, Ross Douthat, Kevin Roose, Hard Fork, Henry Blodget, Steven Ginsburg, David Perpich, Joe Kahn, A.G. Sulzberger, Bari Weiss, Tom Cotton, Sydney Sweeney, Optum, 4imprint, Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic, Wise ## Video description <p>In the last decade, the <em>New York Times</em> has remade itself many times over. It has done that through acquisitions (The Athletic, Wirecutter, and the ever-popular Wordle) and by navigating all the different challenges that have emerged in the digital age and now the age of AI. Its video operation, for instance, has grown exponentially in the last few years. And they've used AI tools in their reporting, namely in several pieces they did on the Epstein Files. At the same time, the company is also suing the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity for copyright infringement. To understand the modern media landscape, you really do have to understand the <em>Times</em>, so today we speak with The New York Times Company's CEO and president, Meredith Kopit Levien. We talk to her about how to run a media business without seeing the news itself as a loss leader, the NYT's evolving bundle strategy, how the paper retains talent, why the current pivot to video is different from the first one, and the ideal set-up for AI companies and media properties to co-exist.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> [Source](https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/8a94442e-5a74-4fa2-8b8d-ae27003a8d6b/f7ff667e-d517-457f-b745-b49f0150c4e6/audio.mp3?in_playlist=982f5071-765c-403d-969d-ae27003a8d83)

[4:47] Meredith Kopit Levien: It is an essential service for all curious people around the world who want to deeply understand and engage with the world, and also enjoy it. [10:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: The first dollar in the place goes to the high quality independent news journalism, period, hard stop. [10:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: I want to kill that idea. It is simply not true. [15:15] Meredith Kopit Levien: We like stars. We want to make stars, we want to cultivate stars, and we want to help stars do the best work of their lives. [15:15] Meredith Kopit Levien: both the name on the front of the jersey and the one on the back of the jersey [27:30] Meredith Kopit Levien: a naked attempt to go get ad dollars [35:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: 两边都觉得我们的报道是在摧毁他们的事业，但这恰恰证明我们做对了。 [44:30] Meredith Kopit Levien: by humans for humans [49:15] Meredith Kopit Levien: 新闻业的基石是报道（reporting）。 [50:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: 所有艰难的新闻都需要带着敏感、判断力以及对笔下之人和读者的关怀来进行转化，唯有如此才能产生真正的触动与影响力 [57:25] Meredith Kopit Levien: an open mind and an empty notebook [60:00] The Athletic 采编记者: 妈，我现在给《纽约时报》打工了。

[5:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: the essential service for curious people everywhere who want to understand and engage more deeply with and enjoy the world. [10:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: the first dollar in the place goes to the high quality independent news journalism, period, hard stop. [25:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: 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. [27:30] Meredith Kopit Levien: Why does that control structure exist? Two reasons. One, keep the journalism independent and in service to nobody's interest but the public... And two, it allows us to play a long game. 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. [34:00] Meredith Kopit Levien: 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... When you've angered both sides, that's how you know you've done your job.

[0:00] What if you could use AI to research your investment portfolio and ask, find profitable mid-cap energy companies with growing cash flow? Which AI infrastructure stocks appear undervalued? Or rank stock opportunities based on valuation, growth, and risk? With interactive brokers, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to your investment portfolio to research investments, analyze your holdings, and uncover potential undervalued opportunities. AI accelerates the research. You can make every investment decision. Open and fund an interactive broker's account in minutes at ibkr.com slash invest. Restrictions apply. AI integrations provided by third parties. IBKR does not verify content generated by AI platforms. Healthcare doesn't always work great. If you've ever waited on a refill or couldn't schedule an appointment, you get it. That's the kind of stuff Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else. So healthcare is connected, not complicated. What's that look like? Cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person, how you need it. Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Learn more at business Whatever your goal trade show giveaways client gifts or team gear 4imprint has the promo products to match With thousands of options from apparel and drinkware to tech and totes, it's easy to find the right fit for your brand and budget with standout choices at every price point. And with their 360 degree guarantee, you can be 4imprint certain your order will show up just right, right on time. Explore more at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, 4certain. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, I think I've mentioned this story once or twice on the podcast. I repeat things as I get older You repeat the lore There are new listeners who haven't heard it before In 2009 when I was in Business Insider My first real journalism job I got a call from someone I don't remember who Someone asked me Would you be interested in coming in for an interview At Dealbook Part of the New York Times And at the time I was just like what Why would I want to board the Titanic? The stock was at $6 a share. Old print media. I was like part of the internet, et cetera. I was like, no, I didn't. I was like, no, why would I want to do that? I'm part of a new thing. I think this is a very old traditional media versus new media divide. around that time, I guess I would have been at the FT already. And the New York Times kind of looms very large in print media, to put it mildly. So there are two things that I when I think about that moment that really stand out and how different we are 17 years later, something like that. One is the New York Times was certainly not the Titanic. And it's done extraordinarily well since then, you know, can't almost can't overstate how much it's reversed. But two, there's something else, which I think is interesting, which is that maybe at the time, those of us sort of doing independent media, et cetera, like maybe it's like, oh, the goal is to reach a brand like the New York Times. Whereas these days, one of the things that arises is people who are at big platforms and publications like the New York Times might look and see how lucrative independent media is and be tempted to like oh do I need the label Do I need the platform anymore I could make a ton of money on Substack or something like that Lots of spin outs of journalists going independent for sure The other thing I was thinking of is just the melding of digital and print media, right? Because it feels like both sides look a lot more like each other than they used to. So you have the old school print publications that have gone big on digital, including games, video, podcasts, all that good stuff. Meanwhile, a lot of the independent writers, the bloggers, are now known for producing very high quality content and journalism. So it's kind of like everyone's come together. Yeah, this is a big fusion. Anyway, to understand contemporary media business, we have to understand the New York Times. Clearly, just like a huge winner. There's melding of all different kinds of businesses under what at one point was, quote, a newspaper. I'm just excited for the media navel gazer. That's right. We love that. Anyway, I'm very excited to say we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Meredith Kopit-Levian. She is the president and CEO of The New York Times. She just reported earnings yesterday. We were recording this August 6th. Meredith, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. I'm delighted to be here. Fan of the show. New fan, but fan of the show. Thank you. Love to hear it. [5:00] The New York Times, you know, because at one point someone would have said, oh, it's the newspaper. If someone says to you, what is the New York Times? What is it? I think the New York Times is the essential service for curious people everywhere who want to understand and engage more deeply with and enjoy the world. When you first took on the CEO position, what would you have described as your biggest challenge at a place like the New York Times? Because again, Joe and I have come up of age in the journalism business during a very turbulent time when all we heard was death of the media, death of the media, death of the media. Most of what many of us are still alive. Yeah. What a fun question. So I've been I've been in this job CEO for six years, but I was the chief operating officer for let's call it three or four years before that. And then I had a couple of commercial jobs at the Times before that. And I would say, as I was coming into the role of CEO, we were beginning to get to the point where it felt like the really hard arc of digital transformation was like we were doing that. We had done that and we were finding success with it And I would say like this really hard period of playing defense you know how do we deal with the fact that we got a newspaper business a print business that's declining rapidly? And how do we get to enough scale in our digital business to make up for what we're losing in digital? So that's like around my own transition of role, we were beginning to transition from playing defense to thinking more ambitiously about what is all that the New York Times can be and do as a force for value creation for its users, for society, for investors. So to me, my own transition kind of came at a time where we were beginning to say, how do we think even more ambitiously about it? And then I'll just say that in all the time that I've been there. So I've been there 13 years. And this is true. I came from two other media companies. So I spent the better part of my career working in and around journalism and media. The big lesson I've learned is that how and how much you can grow your media business is like first and always a question of how and how much you can grow the engaged audience for your work Grow it sustain it grow it more find the next group of people And so I would say I regarded the job coming into it as how do we find that next tranche of growth of engagement for our work? Yeah, I remember when I was a business insider, you know, we get a lot more, a lot of traffic from Google News, a lot of traffic from Facebook. And I remember even thinking about the time. It's like, that's great. Clicks are great. But that's not your, that's not a real audience if they're not coming to you directly. But I want to ask one more sort of like big picture question because I think that might inform some of the more specific questions we ask. But OK, so now The New York Times is a news publication, but it's also a games developer. You've purchased games. You've developed in-house games. It's obviously a major food media recipe brand. What is the through line here such that all of these different things fit under a brand called The New York Times? Yeah. We do high quality independent news journalism and make market leading lifestyle products that are so good that they are to your point worthy of being sought out by name come to directly formed a habit with I sure there a bit habituating to you and that that can happen at real scale because the world is filled with curious people who want uncompromised information. They want to engage with media that is trustworthy and true and worthwhile, you know, worthy of their time. And I think that's what our broad brand promises. I'm always so curious. People always mention games and often they mention recipes. You did not mention sports. If I was listening closely, we're four years into owning The Athletic. I was going to say this was the first year there was some athletic content that was popping up in my feed. I don't have an upgraded New York Times subscription. I do have a sub. I'm so sorry. I don't have the upgraded version. We're going to You have to unpack what that means. This was the first time. Well, I do want to talk to you about price elasticity of news. But this was the first time I ever felt that I was missing out on sports content as a sort of non-sports consumer. But, you know, the World Cup was going on and I kept seeing the athletic pushing out these really good stories. And I was like, I need to read this. Yeah. So we'll have to talk about you upgrading to the bundle where you can experience all things. [10:00] of the New York Times, but I think to a large degree, you're asking me what's the brand promise that cuts across all of it. It's that we are going to bring you high quality, independent, trustworthy information, and we're going to present it to you in a way that is elegant, in many cases, enjoyable, that makes good use of your time. And that's going to add understanding to your life. That's going to make you smarter. That's going to make you more well-rounded person. And in the case of our lifestyle products, Athletic is a good example of this. What are we doing for the Athletic? We're helping you be a better fan, like enjoy your fandom more. I'm a sad and sorry New York Jets fan. I read the Athletic. I watch the Athletic. I listen to it so that I understand what is happening with this team I care so deeply about. And we're going to do that in every dimension of the times. So, I mean, the bundle has clearly been a big factor in the subs expansion and the success of the overall company. And then at the same time, you have emphasized over and over again that the foundation is high quality content it high quality journalism and information for curious people I really curious as the CEO of the company how do you evaluate between making for instance a star journalist hire investing in the journalism versus buying a new game that everyone is going to be addicted to or starting some new vertical that has the potential to be very interesting? Yeah, so many good questions in there. Let me start by saying the sort of core of the brand promise. The most important thing for us to get right is we're going to help you understand the world. And we're going to do that in a way that is in service to nobody's interest but the public. And one of the most important reasons, the most important reason the New York Times has had all the success, whatever success it's had over the last number of years is because the first dollar in the place goes to the high quality independent news journalism, period, hard stop. And I think there's an idea in the world, and this idea has been around for a long time, that sort of hardcore independent news journalism, particularly about serious topics as a loss leader you do it because you have to do it you do it for the mission But in fact An organization like the New York Times makes its money from games or sports I want to put that to bed It just not true at all We are going to cover the world at the judgment of our editors in a way that gets people the most important information they need to know I think most people are not aware or thinking on a regular basis about the fact that there are brutal multi-year civil wars in Myanmar and Sudan. Most people do not know how and why Ebola is spreading differently in the DRC right now than in the previous Ebola epidemic. It is our job to tell you that. We're not telling you that because we think those stories are going to get more clicks or more video views. to your point. And we're going to cover it, whether we think it's going to get all the attention it needs or not. But the promise, the broad promise, when someone buys a subscription to the New York Times is we're going to do that. We're not just going to give you what you think you already want. We're also going to direct your attention to things that matter that you may not know you're interested in yet. So I just I want to say, when I think about where do we invest? How do we allocate our capital How do we think about resource at the company The most economically value creating thing we do kind of writ large is high quality independent news journalism Now make no mistake we want to be or already are the unequivocal market leader in every other space we plan to. So we want The Athletic to be the single best place you can experience sports journalism if you are a fan of any team really we cover and we cover most of them, right? And we want our puzzles. I think we've already achieved this and we want to achieve it even more to be the best sort of collection of high quality games that a smart person would play that make you smarter every day. I think we've achieved that and we intend to keep growing that. So I understand that, but how does that actually factor into resource decisions, resource allocation? Because all media companies are in some sense resource constrained. You have to decide, am I going to get like a digital editor who's really good at social? Am I going to get a reporter? Am I going to get a new game designer? Yeah. And all of that. One of the things that makes the model of the times work so well is who gets to decide how many people we have on the ground in Ukraine. I think we had 70 last year in and out. So five years into a grinding war, the editor gets to decide, the journalist gets to decide. Often that actually happens below the level of executive editor. [15:00] It's the international editor, and it's the people even closer to what is happening in Ukraine, in Russia. So my job is to make sure the company is economically successful enough that no journalistic leader has to say, can we afford to send Declan Walsh, who's an incredible multimedia journalist, in DRC. Don't know if he's there today, but he's been there very recently. it's very expensive to send someone into the Ebola zone as safely as possible. My job is to make sure that no editorial leader who is saying we need to cover this because the public needs to know it has to say, but that feels really expensive or this war has been going on for many years. People already know enough about it. My job is to see that we are economically viable enough that Nobody ever has to say that. Not just viable, but successful. Right. Let's talk talent and journalists accumulation for a second. There have been some notable departures from the New York Times. Ross Douthat, a star columnist, is going over to 60 Minutes. The co of Hard Fork are leaving One of the things with a lot of traditional news organizations for one thing even before digital the pay scales for example between a sort of typical newspaper and just even TV are really weird and they really wide And so you could have a great columnist who's making a fraction of like what a CNBC anchor makes or something like that. Now you have this new thing where people like the infrastructure to build out many individual newsrooms is very easy. Click of a button, have your own little newsroom on Substack or something like that. How do you think about essentially making the case to existing capital T talent? I hate that word, but it's the word people in media use to either stay at The New York Times or to come to The New York Times in the first place. Yeah. Let me start by saying, first of all, Ross Douthat is awesome. I loved his show. He's been a columnist at times for a long time. Loved his show. I think I've listened to most of the episodes. Kevin Roos, tech reporter, awesome. I wish those guys well. I think they'll be successful and I look forward to seeing it. We have the largest collection of journalists we ever had in our history by miles and miles and miles And even if you don count The Athletic and our Wirecutter Newsroom largest collection we had in our history There are like a thousand more journalists in the New York Times newsroom today than when I got there 13 years ago and the most talented And there are a lot of stars We love having stars We want to make stars We want to nurture stars And we want them to do their best, best work. I think the Times has a model. It's maybe different from others' model that goes something like this. The best journalists in their career at the top of their game, coming to do the best work of their careers, supported by the best editors, the best partners. If you ask Jonathan Swan, who just co-wrote a book, big book with Maggie Haberman about the first year of the second Trump administration, if you ask him why he came, he said he will tell you he came to the Times because he wanted to work with the other best journalists there was covering the White House. If you ask Ezra Klein what makes his work so good at the Times, he will He will give a lot of credit in part to Aaron Redica, his editor, and an incredible support system around them. Lawyers, security people, people who will help stand up for your work when you're covering difficult topics and others don't want that information to get out. And the best graphics people the best photographers people who will make that help you make the work that you make the best it can possibly be And then what the other differentiator at the Times for a really really big audience I can tell you that when somebody comes in from the outside to the Times, even if they're well known to begin with, the thing I always hear from them is, wow, it's different to publish a story in the New York Times and in whatever format in terms of audience. I think our proposition is about people who really talented people who are obsessed with both the name on the front of the jersey and the one on the back of the jersey and understand the benefit of both. I'm not sure that's for everybody. I accept the fact that it's not for everybody. Our model always evolves at the margins in anything we're doing because the world evolves. But I think the core thing I've just described will endure. I think it will endure. And unequivocally, we're making a very big push, an ambitious push into video. Yeah. Unequivocally, we want to have the best journalistic talent on earth and we're going to do what it takes to have them. I'm going to say one other thing which I think does not get a lot of play. I get asked all the time, you know, will you have a television construct? How do you pay? We have stars. We nurture them. They're doing great at the times. [20:00] And we also have the 70 people on the ground in Ukraine who I referenced. And we also have people in Sudan and Myanmar and some of their names, you know, right? Some of their names you don't know. And the ability for the model of The New York Times, I run the business, the ability for the model to accommodate all of that in an enduring and sustainable way is incredibly important. But make no mistake, we want to be the place the best journalists can. And stay. What if you could use AI to research your investment portfolio and ask, find profitable mid-cap energy companies with growing cash flow? Which AI infrastructure stocks appear undervalued? Or rank stock opportunities based on valuation, growth, and risk? With Interactive Brokers, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to your investment portfolio to research investments, analyze your holdings, and uncover potential undervalued opportunities. AI accelerates the research You can make every investment decision Open and fund an interactive broker account in minutes at ibkr slash invest Restrictions apply AI integrations provided by third parties IBKR does not verify content generated by AI platforms. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Globetrotters hunting for airfare bargains are in for a rude awakening as the days of stumbling across a cheap seat on a popular flight could soon disappear. Bloomberg's Juan Ha reports that airlines from Delta to Virgin Atlantic are adopting artificial intelligence to change seat prices more quickly by weighing dozens of variables in real time, helping capture more revenue while shrinking pricing gaps that once allowed travelers to find bargain fares. Machine learning models can more accurately forecast demand by analyzing historical booking patterns, seat inventory, and seasonal trends, while also continuously tracking competitors' fares and capacity changes to update prices in near real time. The technology could lead to higher fares on busy routes as airlines pack flights closer to capacity, but may also result in lower fares on off-peak and lower-demand routes. That the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChachiPT Put ChachiPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects Get started at ChatGPT today by selecting Work Mode available on Plus and Pro Plans Let's talk about health care for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day. They're a health care company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected, not complicated, for patients and providers. Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients and those prescriptions optum is working to bring costs down save patients money and make it easier to get refills little by little optum is helping make health care work as one for everyone head to business to see how i do want to ask you more questions about video because that of interest to us as well And we are on video I think Yes we on video Everyone doing video nowadays Pivot to video. But just on the sort of independent journalist idea, do you find yourself sourcing more, again, talent? I'm doing air quotes on a podcast, but hopefully people on video can see me do them from independent platforms or from social media itself. So for instance, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter slash X, maybe sub stacks, things like that in a way that you weren't doing, say, 10 or 20 years ago? Meaning when somebody is hired into one of our newsrooms. Let me answer the question in a way that reflects what I know to be the case. We're going out and looking for the best work and the best people behind the best work. And right now, and again, I'll say I'm very proud of the fact, and I think it's quite important to our economic success, that we've hired so many news journalists, news and opinion journalists over the last decade plus. We are looking for best work and we are looking for people who are able to and want to do that work in an independent way following a set of really rigorous professional standards. Where that presents is in any number of places, I will say, [25:00] 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. 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 in 90 seconds for an Instagram Reels person. Do they like that? Or are they like, come on. 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, first of all, the quality of those videos is very high. Not everyone is perfect, but the quality is high. And 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. What 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 journalist 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? One other question. So the stock overall New York Times has done very well but I believe the last two quarters including yesterday earnings announcement is sold off a bit after earnings And there is this anxiety about essentially I think video you know video production is costly And this is not five or 10 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. And this is about, can you build a audience of millions of people to come watch in addition to reading? Can you walk through a little bit more of that video ROI and how it works. Let me first address your sort of push on where 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. And then you want to give those things time to play out And I want to tell you what I 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, we 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 deal book. What a shame that you didn't come. That team is killing it, continues to kill it. And Ross 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 there are. [30:00] 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 yeah 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. Most 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 is 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. I'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 is 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? Some 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 referring to on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram is that and we see an enormous opportunity to feed that audience's interest. And 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. And 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. Listen, I ran our commercial business. 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 We want to do things at a scale of millions of people engaging with it every day, and I see that opportunity in video. 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, okay, 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. And people worry about it's like, OK, you have this audience and there's two risks that arise. is like one is you might have the good reporting might involve things that offend the audience, et cetera, 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 of and [35:00] 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. Open 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. When 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 going to tell it that way when we have the evidence that that what happened And 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. We'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. That 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 You know it we Wirecutter our product review site I 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. So 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. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Globetrotters hunting for airfare bargains are in for a rude awakening as the days of stumbling across a cheap seat on a popular flight could soon disappear. Bloomberg Juan Ha reports that airlines from Delta to Virgin Atlantic are adopting artificial intelligence to change seat prices more quickly by weighing dozens of variables in real time helping capture more revenue while shrinking pricing gaps that once allowed travelers to find bargain fares. Machine learning models can more accurately forecast demand by analyzing historical booking patterns, seat inventory, and seasonal trends, while also continuously tracking competitors' fares and capacity changes to update prices in near real time. The technology could lead to higher fares on busy routes as airlines pack flights closer to capacity, but may also result in lower fares on off-peak and lower-demand routes. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com today by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone. That's exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day. They're a healthcare company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system so care is connected [40:00] not complicated, for patients and providers. Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. Technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients. And those prescriptions? Optum is working to bring costs down, save patients money, and make it easier to get refills. Little by little, Optum is helping make healthcare work as one for everyone. Head to business.optum.com to see how. Whether you're planning a big tech event, launching a new campaign, or just stocking up on team gear, finding the right promotional products makes all the difference. 4imprint offers thousands of options, from on-trend apparel and premium drinkware to tech, totes, and giveaways, so you can find the right fit for any audience, purpose, or budget. You can customize it all, your logo, your message, your look, and many items come with no setup charge to help you save. And if you're really watching the bottom line, you'll find standout choices at every price point so you can make a real impact while staying on budget. Plus you get expert help fast turnaround times and their 360 degree guarantee So you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive on time and look exactly right Whatever your goal 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint.com. 4imprint. 4certain. 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. 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. And 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 done a deal We have also sued three companies We 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. And 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 I 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. 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. Everyone 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 [45:00] about like 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? And 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 saying otherwise probably doesn really know yet I think we all in a period of seeing what can the tools do And you know we got close to a thousand people doing digital product development in New York Times and 3000 journalists and people making content content the 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 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, 3 million pages of documents. And 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 a use of AI And we got a whole team in the newsroom that 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 like 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. So 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 like to just show right but like i've just given you like a range of of of things and to make the work more accessible i automated voice translation we had an early experiment in translation the tech will get better i see real opportunity when the tech gets better 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. 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. Reporting, 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. 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. [50:00] 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. So 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 bigger audience do things to make the work better. If it's used responsibly. This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Now with ChatGPT work. I'm Carol Masser. Globetrotters hunting for airfare bargains are in for a rude awakening as the days of stumbling across a cheap seat on a popular flight could soon disappear Bloomberg Juan Ha reports that airlines from Delta to Virgin Atlantic are adopting artificial intelligence to change seat prices more quickly by weighing dozens of variables in real time, helping capture more revenue while shrinking pricing gaps that once allowed travelers to find bargain fares. Machine learning models can more accurately forecast demand by analyzing historical booking patterns, seat inventory, and seasonal trends, while also continuously tracking competitors' fares and capacity changes to update prices in near real time. The technology could lead to higher fares on busy routes as airlines pack flights closer to capacity, but may also result in lower fares on off-peak and lower-demand routes. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com today by selecting Work Mode. available on Plus and Pro Plans. Let's talk about healthcare for a second. It doesn't always work the way people expect it to. If you've ever waited on a prescription refill or had a hard time getting the care you needed, you know the feeling. The system should just work better for everyone That exactly what the people at Optum are trying to do every day They a healthcare company linking patient care and pharmacy services and using data and technology to drive the whole system So care is connected, not complicated for patients and providers. Things like making it easier to get care that looks at the whole person, from primary care doctors to mental health support and even in-home care, and then using technology to make sure they all work together. technology designed to help doctors spend less time on busy work and more time with their patients and those prescriptions optum is working to bring costs down save patients money and make it easier to get refills little by little optum is helping make health care work as one for everyone head to business.optum.com to see how whether you're planning a big tech event launching a new campaign or just stocking up on team gear finding the right promotional products makes all the difference 4imprint offers thousands of options, from on-trend apparel and premium drinkware to tech, totes, and giveaways, so you can find the right fit for any audience, purpose, or budget. You can customize it all, your logo, your message, your look, and many items come with no setup charge to help you save. And if you really watching the bottom line you find standout choices at every price point so you can make a real impact while staying on budget Plus you get expert help fast turnaround times and their 360 guarantee So you can be 4imprint certain your order will arrive on time and look exactly right. Whatever your goal, 4imprint makes it easy to find your perfect promo match. Explore the possibilities today at 4imprint.com. 4imprint, 4certain. 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. And 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 going to spare you the anecdote of my niece asking me to share my New York Times password. I said, do you know what I do for a living? I think the most important thing is that I'm going to do. I'm going to do a lot of money. I'm going to do [55:00] 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. And 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. 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 going to use now business jargon because you said I could That meant to get everybody under the demand curve We think there 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. And 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 we 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. And 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've experienced so much value and they're able to do it. And that has all gone really, really well. I have one last question, actually. And I asked earlier about audience capture. This is sort of maybe a business management question. 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 or 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. From a management perspective how do you maintain the sort of 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. You 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 of the New York Times. We do a, so now here's the tactical. What does that look like? We never did town halls before I was the CEO. I think the first one we ever did was like to tell people to go home for the fan. [60:00] 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. And that team is constantly sort of asserting itself publicly 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 got a local investigative journalism fellowship where we got people in Mississippi and Baltimore and other places So 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's 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 give you the bundle. You know what? I'm going to take out this. You're going to upgrade to the bundle today. You should. when when infantino is ousted from fufa no wait like schadenfreude i will drive 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 so i'm really curious just from a cultural perspective what that integration was like yeah 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 And 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 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 journal 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's name is steven ginsburg i think now three and a half almost four years ago he'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 very edited. So we've added this layer of editing, and we've kept them independent You know they are it is its own we both as a brand we want to build the brand The Athletic and it an independent newsroom It works to its own rhythms to its own leadership It works for a publisher, a guy named David Perpich, who's amazing, is a family member. He works for me. So it is 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 to 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. I would say to people who think about our economics listening, the bar is really high for return on investment. So we're 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. In games, you mentioned at the very beginning, we acquired Wordle for a little bit less money than we acquired The Athletic for. [65:00] Being funny there. We acquired Wordle. We built all the other games. Right? So we are also very, very focused on investing in organically. Meredith Copit-Livian, thank you so much for coming on. What a pleasure. Lots of fun. Thank you so much, Meredith. That was great. 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 was like Craigslist has uncovered it, uncutted the classifieds business, right? Or Google News and now AI, et cetera. 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 etc 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 as White House coverage. Are you feeling wistful about the deal book offer? 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 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 sort of the thing that you reading Whereas now because of the internet everything has broken into like little verticals little silos Everyone has their area of expertise If you 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. I guess what I would say is the New York Times has proven that the New York Times can do it. Yeah. The question to I mean, the 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 puzzle every. Yeah, I'm sure there was the Kansas City Star had a crossword. Maybe it still does. They all had crossword puzzles. So it 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. Absolutely. All right. We could go on. We could go on. But people listen to the episodes. All right. Shall we leave it there? 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 CarmenArmond, And 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 and 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 all. [70:00] review on your favorite podcast platform. And 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. Thank you. not complicated What that look like Cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person how you need it Optum is helping make health care work as one for everyone Learn more at business.optum.com. Whatever your goal, trade show giveaways, client gifts, or team gear, 4imprint has the promo products to match. With thousands of options, from apparel and drinkware to tech and totes, it's easy to find the right fit for your brand and budget with standout choices at every price point. 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