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(upbeat electronic music) [NIRALI] Welcome to Stanford, AG. [AG] Thank you.
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0:07
It is nice to be back here.
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I was reflecting that the last time I was here was 30 years ago when you guys rejected me.
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So I'm taking this as a measure of vindication.
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(laughter) [NIRALI] Well, we're so happy to have you here today.
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One of the things I learned about you when I was preparing for this interview is that you read the entire physical print New York Times from cover to cover every single day. [AG] Yeah. So that is mostly true.
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So there's this old saying that you can either work at the New York Times or you can read the New York Times, but no one has time to do both.
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And I've been really determined to prove that wrong.
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And that's 'cause I believe really strongly that you're only as good as your product.
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Our product is journalism.
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And I really wanna have my eyes on everything we produce.
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So, it's why I said it's directionally true.
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I, you know, I'm in the app all day long on our newsletters, our podcasts, but I do use print as a sweep-up mechanism to make sure that, like, my eyes have touched every story in the evening. [NIRALI] Okay.
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Well, I took my preparation for this interview very seriously, so I did something I've never done before.
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I put down my phone, I went to the grocery store, and I got a print copy of the New York Times.
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(applause and cheering) And I've gotta say, it's pretty amazing. Fresh newspaper smell.
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You can actually open it up, read the stories while you drink your morning coffee.
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[AG] You're making me feel so old.
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(laughter) [NIRALI] I'm gonna have to try it a bit more often.
1:51
Thank you for the inspiration, AG. [AG] Great.
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All right, well, I'm glad to have opened your horizons a bit.
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(laughter) [NIRALI] In all seriousness.
2:00
[AG] We also have an app. [NIRALI] I know, I know. I'm on the app. I have the app.
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In all seriousness, I commend your dedication.
2:07
And I think that sense of commitment shows up not only in how you read the New York Times, but also in how your family has approached this business for generations.
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And I wanna talk about that today.
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Your great-great-grandfather bought the New York Times in 1896, and it has been overseen by your family ever since.
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This year, the New York Times turns 175 years old, and you represent the fifth generation in your family to lead it.
2:39
What does that mean to you to have that family responsibility to uphold the New York Times' mission for independent journalism?
2:48
[YASH MAHESHWARI] Well, thanks for the question, and I'm very happy to inspire you all with my from the bootstraps story of overcoming all the odds to rise to the pinnacle of American journalism.
3:03
No, look, we believe really strongly in a model of leadership that we call stewardship, right? You use that word.
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And being a steward, you know, is recognizing that you are part of something, and that your part in it is part of a longer journey.
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And that journey started, as you said, you know, 175 years ago.
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Our part of the journey starts in 1896 when my great-great-grandfather purchased the paper.
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He actually was a scrappy entrepreneur at the time.
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And he had a really different vision for what journalism could be in this country.
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It was a time when the press was overtly partisan tied to parties and ideological causes.
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And he had this radical idea that the press should be independent and that it should serve the public alone.
4:03
And that model was really successful.
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He took what was then actually the failing New York Times and turned it into you know, this growing, you know, not yet the number one paper in New York, but on the, on the journey there as one of the most respected papers in the, in the country.
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And when he died, he did an equally remarkable thing, which is he left behind this will that called on his family to do a very specific thing, which is to protect the editorial independence and integrity of the New York Times and to ensure it remains a fearless newspaper and unselfishly devoted to the American public.
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And if it sounds like I've memorized that, it's 'cause I've memorized it.
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I have it taped above my computer as sort of a North Star for me and my work.
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And, you know, that starts in a will.
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[AG] It ends up in a trust.
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But that direction is such a gift because it has allowed the family to think about things like independence, integrity, devotion to the public as we have each taken our turn stewarding this enterprise.
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And it's something we're really proud of.
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And my great-grandmother had this line, "No big heads," and it was repeated just constantly.
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And it was a way of saying, "We are here to serve this institution.
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The institution is in no way here to serve us."
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It will never reflect our personal politics.
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It will never advance our personal ambitions and goals, you know.
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And we view that service as, like, one of the great privileges of our lifetime. [NIRALI] Yeah.
5:50
I can feel your dedication.
5:52
[AG] Sorry if that all sounds corny, but it really is true.
5:54
[NIRALI] I can feel your dedication to the service here.
5:57
And I'm wondering was it just always assumed that you would end up working for the New York Times?
6:05
[AG] So, no one believes me when I say this.
6:07
I mean, literally no one.
6:08
And none of you will either.
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But look, the vast majority of people in my family, we have about 100 people in the family, will never work a day at the New York Times.
6:17
And they are just, you know, they feel like their contribution is giving the leadership at the Times, which very intimidatingly includes three of my board members in the front row, if I look nervously down there throughout this, they feel like their job is to give the leadership at the Times room to run and to make the right long-term decision.
6:42
I thought I was gonna be in that group, and that really didn't change until college, not at Stanford when my favorite professor was a journalism professor, a great investigative reporter who worked at the local paper.
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And she called me after I graduated and said, you know, "I've set up an internship for you at the Journal, and I want you to do it."
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And I said, "Tracey, you know I have no interest in going into journalism."
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And she said, "I know you say that, but I think you'd like it.
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I think you'd be good at it, and I think you should try it.
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And if you don't like it, you'll have the answer to a question you'll never wonder.
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But I really think you should give it a shot."
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I did, and she knew what I didn't know, which is being a reporter is the most fun an adult is allowed to have at work.
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It's just this magical blend of spending half your day learning, like being out in the world, talking to the most interesting people and going to the most interesting places and getting, like, right all the way into the most interesting issues.
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No two days are the same.
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You're just learning all the time.
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And then this, the other half of your day is teaching. [NIRALI] Mm. [AG] Right?
7:56
'Cause you're constantly thinking, okay, like what did that all mean? How do I make it clear?
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How do I make it interesting?
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And it's this very solitary, creative pursuit.
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And that blend was just infectious.
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And so, I spent the next few years as a local reporter at various spots around the country, Providence or not Providence, actually Narragansett, Rhode Island, tiny little town in the smallest state, where I was a town reporter, and then went out to Oregon, and then eventually to New York, and then to Kansas City.
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And it was just such a valuable experience, and I think it shaped a lot of what I think about leadership, but also really widened my aperture for this country and the diversity of experience and views, and hopes and fears in the country.
8:45
And if you don't mind, I'll tell one story 'cause I actually think it's a useful example of like just how those early jobs, how much they matter later, even if the scale is different.
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So when I was covering Narragansett, Rhode Island, I got a, you know, sort of this, stumbled upon this big story, which is the Narragansett Lions Club, right?
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So stop the presses already.
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The Narragansett Lions Club, which actually was the power center in the community.
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It's where all the business leaders were.
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It's where the local elected officials were.
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They didn't accept women, and they were one of the only Lions Club in America not to accept women.
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And so, I started working the story, and at some point, the head of the Lions Club storms into my little office and, in front of my colleagues, starts sweet-talking me.
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"You know, you're a great reporter.
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I really wanna help you out.
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like, the story's gonna make that all hard.
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You know, maybe you could pull back on the story.
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I've got a bunch of other great stories I can help you with."
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And when that doesn't work, starts threatening and eventually says, "I'm gonna personally organize an ad boycott of the Providence Journal, and it's gonna cost you guys millions of dollars.
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Your bosses are gonna be furious.
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you're gonna lose your job."
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And of course we publish 'cause, you know, sweet-talking and threats don't work.
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And you know, two months later, women are in, getting invited into the Lions Club. But why do I say that?
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'Cause what I've just described is exactly what happens when it's a titan of Silicon Valley calling, or exactly what happens when it's a foreign leader, or exactly what happens when it's the president of the United States.
10:18
It's just a different scale. [NIRALI] Yeah.
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So you built your foundation in local news. [AG] Yeah.
10:24
[NIRALI] And in 2009, you become a New York Times employee for the first time.
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You walk into the newsroom.
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It's your first day as the publisher's son.
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How did people treat you?
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How did you approach building credibility and earning respect? [AG] Yeah.
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Yeah, I thought a lot about it.
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I mean, it was a pretty humbling thing to come into the Times.
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I mean, just the level of journalistic talent there is so extraordinary, and I had no illusions that I was as strong as, you know, many of the people I'd be, most of the people I'd be working alongside.
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And so I really thought a lot about how to come in, and you know, I basically set a few rules for myself.
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The first was accept any assignment, no matter how terrible.
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And there were so many terrible assignments 'cause they all the editors realized that when they had a terrible idea other people wouldn't do, they could bring it to me then.
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I volunteered for the Sunday shift, volunteered for holidays eventually volunteered for the Kansas City job that no one seemed to want.
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They were crazy not to want it.
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I made really clear that I would never go around hierarchy, right?
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That like, it was my editor was my editor, and he could talk to his editor and then I really worked hard to make it clear that I valued candor and developmental feedback because I mean, you can just imagine, like, you know, at that point I'm a little south of 30.
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I'm way too young in my career to have now be on my own with everything I've learned.
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It's like, you know, the great thing about being a young person entering a great newsroom is the ability to learn from people.
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So, I had to, like, really hammer home to people, like, you know, and ask very intentionally, like, "What did I do wrong in this story?"
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"What could I have done better?"
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You know, "Any advice on other, another voice I could've used?"
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So, you know, I was described in the press as having the temperament of an overeager intern.
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(Host laughing) And I think that was probably right.
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[NIRALI] So early days it's about putting in the hard work, getting feedback, respecting the hierarchy. I want to jump to 2013. [AG] Yep.
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[NIRALI] And for everyone here in the audience today, in 2013, The New York Times's print subscribers are still outnumbering their digital subscribers.
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You're now leading the push that kickstarts The New York Times's digital transformation.
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Can you tell us about how you went about developing bold, innovative ideas for a more digital New York Times? [AG] Yeah.
13:10
So, I was such terrible casting for this.
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I, you know, I wasn't on social media, as has been embarrassingly revealed.
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I read the print newspaper.
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You know, I text like a grandpa, you know, with one finger and you know, and I had been doing my reporting, you know, not on digital ideas, you know, just heads down, you're sort of not thinking about the broader business context.
13:42
But I'm asked to lead this effort, and I turn to basically the only tool in my toolbox, right?
13:49
It's like the thing I've spent my entire career building, which is, I turn to reporting.
13:54
And reporting is really well-suited for something like this, it turns out, because a big part of it is figuring out what your questions are and not being embarrassed if they're dumb, finding smarter people than you on a subject, explicitly trying to find people who disagree being super skeptical of conventional wisdom and then trying to pull the patterns out of everything that you've accumulated, right?
14:23
And when I did all that, it became abundantly clear to me that the assignment I had been given was all wrong, right?
14:33
'Cause the assignment was to build a, was to come up with an idea for a digital product, right, that would enhance The New York Times portfolio in some way.
14:45
But the pattern wasn't that we lacked for ideas in the organization.
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It was that the ideas were systematically being suppressed inside.
14:56
The New York Times, that that our most innovative, creative digital thinkers were actually being treated as second-class citizens.
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And when I say that, like, I'm not saying that, like, in an abstract way. Like, I found out.
15:08
I was irate when I found it out.
15:10
I was talking to one guy who was viewed as, like, one of our essential digital leaders, and he told me he'd been denied business cards because the newsroom at the time didn't want people to think that he was a full member of The New York Times, right?
15:28
They thought it'd be bad for the brand, right?
15:31
And so people like that were going to our competitors, right, places like BuzzFeed and Fox and VICE, and they, those competitors were completely ascendant.
15:41
They were, many of them had already overtaken us in digital audience.
15:44
You know, we had 170-year head start here and we were already losing ground.
15:51
And then there's this business context in the background that, again, I'd been sort of blissfully unaware of as I'd just done my work as a journalist.
15:59
You know, we had gone from 12,000 to 3,500 employees in the course of a decade or less.
16:07
We had built this brand new headquarters and within two years had to sell it and rent back the space.
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Our print business was accounting for something like 80% of our revenue still when I wrote the innovation report, maybe even more, and was, you know, hemorrhaging money.
16:25
And the digital business was not growing anywhere near fast enough.
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And so it was this just, you know, that, so you had this context and then us basically doing everything we could to hold the people and the ideas at who could help us meet this moment at arm's length. And they were leaving.
16:45
They were voting with their feet.
16:47
And so, you know, what I decided is that instead of building a digital product, we had to spark a meaningful cultural shift.
16:57
And the way we did that, again, I don't have that many skills.
17:00
You know, I'm a journalist, so like I wrote, I wrote, and I wrote a 100-page memo.
17:05
And I remember saying to the team that I was working with on it: "Our goal here is, with this memo, is to kill the status quo as a place of refuge and to shift the conversation inside the Times from, should we change, whether to change, to how to change."
17:22
'cause whether to change is an incredibly unproductive conversation.
17:25
How to change, you always win, right?
17:27
Because it's just like everything's firing.
17:29
Everyone understands that, like, you're not gonna be able to stand still. [INTERVIEWER] Yeah.
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And I wanna put this into perspective for the audience because I know for some of you here, it may seem obvious.
17:40
Like, of course they need to change because that's The New York Times that we all experience today.
17:44
But in the moment, this was really challenging for the organization.
17:47
[AG] Classic innovator's dilemma.
17:48
Like, we were best in class, yeah, at the time.
17:50
[INTERVIEWER] So what were some of the hardest sells, and how did you persuade people?
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[AG] So I write this 100-page memo.
18:00
The biggest thought in it was I didn't want anything that people could argue about.
18:05
I didn't want, like, a ton of good ideas.
18:07
I wanted a handful of completely ironclad ideas.
18:11
And when I say a handful, I mean a handful.
18:13
So there's basically four or five, I can't remember now, core arguments.
18:19
One, we need to introduce data into the newsroom so that our journalists are aware of how people are finding and engaging with their work.
18:29
You know, two, we need the people who write the stories to talk to the people who design the website.
18:35
And if that sounds crazy, they weren't talking.
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They weren't allowed to talk in our enterprise.
18:41
You know, a third one was, we need to work as hard to get our work in front of an audience in the digital era as we did in the print era.
18:53
And think about how insanely far we went in the print era, right?
18:57
We, like, had printing presses and we printed it out and we put it on trucks and we drove those trucks to your town and then we handed it to kids on bikes and they biked it to your house.
19:06
But we were doing none of those things.
19:09
So this is all very cloak and dagger, a 100-page memo, I print out eight copies of it.
19:15
I hand deliver eight copies to the eight people that the editor had told me she wanted to see it.
19:20
And then, a couple of weeks later, the whole thing is published in full on BuzzFeed, the very, you know, website we had, you know, warned was overtaking us, under a headline, New York Times in Chaos.
19:34
And it was, I thought it was, I thought I'd done immeasurable damage to the institution.
19:42
I mean, truly immeasurable damage to the institution, right?
19:45
Like, all this dirty laundry out there, 'cause to make a case like that you gotta say the tough stuff.
19:50
The lawyers were worried you know, and it ended up being the single best thing that happened to our transformation.
19:57
And I'll, can I say a bit on why? [YASH MAHESHWARI] Yeah.
20:01
[AG] 'Cause I think it's actually useful.
20:03
So, I run into, later the day that it's published on BuzzFeed, I run into one of our oldest investigative reporters, best investigative reporters, a guy named David Barstow.
20:14
Four-time Pulitzer winner part of the team that got Trump's taxes.
20:18
I mean, a really incredible guy, but exactly the type of guy who you would think would read a Case for Change and say, 'Uh-uh.' You know? And I run into him.
20:28
He's an investigative reporter so he's an intimidating guy.
20:31
And he looks at me and he says, 'I read that report of yours.'
20:34
And I said, 'What did you think?'
20:36
And he's like, 'I was sure I was gonna hate it.' [YASH MAHESHWARI] Oh. [AG] I was like, 'And?'
20:40
And he's like, 'Well, if you were here at, like, a lot's gotta change,' and I was like, 'I don't think anything needs to change, I think we're doing just fine, I think you got me 90% of the way there.' [YASH MAHESHWARI] Wow.
20:52
[AG] And I was like, 'Wow.'
20:53
And he said, 'But that 10% that 10% is full of my, like, deepest fears and anxieties.' Right?
21:01
Like, "Are you gonna destroy the journalism?
21:03
Are you gonna ruin the mission, abandon the mission?
21:06
Am I gonna be rendered irrelevant?"
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And the only thing that kept me going through those fears and anxieties was that I knew you And I knew other people on your team.
21:18
And I kept thinking, 'I bet they have a good answer to this.'
21:21
And so here's my advice to you.
21:23
Go and hear every fear and anxiety in the newsroom and and give them their answers. And so I did that.
21:32
I set up a 90-minute meeting with every person in the newsroom, groups of no more than 50.
21:39
We had 1300 people, so it gives you a sense of how long that took.
21:42
And, you know, did a little bit of a spiel at the beginning, but mostly just hearing the questions, the concerns.
21:48
And increasingly, like you could feel the energy building, the ideas, the creativity, the positivity.
21:56
And to me, like, there's a handful of lessons there that I think, that I hope will be useful for all of you.
22:01
One, communication is item six on every leader's list and you never get to item six. Right?
22:09
'cause one through five self-repopulates, right?
22:12
And you need to push it all the way to the top, especially if you're facing real challenge or going through a period of real transformation.
22:21
Two, most leaders have this inclination to hide the problem from their staffs.
22:29
And they do that not 'cause they're bad people.
22:31
They actually do it like, in this, like, sort of misguided, like, parental instinct, almost like hiding problems with family finances from the kids, you know?
22:40
They wanna be able to say, "Don't worry about that. We got this.
22:44
Everything's gonna be good."
22:45
And most people are pretty damn smart, and certainly reporters are pretty damn skeptical.
22:50
Like, everyone in the organization knew that we were facing real challenges, but we weren't talking about those challenges directly, and we were still talking about the need to change, right?
23:02
So, like, why do you need to change if everything's going just great?
23:05
And so I have come to really believe that you have to share the problem.
23:10
Like, like, find those really crushing statistics about your own company's performance that you want to avert your own eyes from and now share that to say, "This is gonna be really hard and we don't have all the answers, and, but we're gonna need to try a bunch of things.
23:27
Some of it's not gonna work, and I need your patience."
23:30
And once you do that, it actually unlocks the third thing, which is, the best ideas flow upward in an organization.
23:39
And that's not to say no leader has ever had good ideas.
23:42
But if you're running an organization of any size, there are way more ideas down there that are bottled up than you could come up with yourself.
23:52
And once you share the problem, it's much easier for people to contribute.
23:59
And then I'll just say one last thing, which is people fetishize change.
24:06
And if you wanna get a proud culture, right, a legacy culture, a mission-driven culture to buy into change, you need to be really clear about what is not changing.
24:19
'Cause if everything can change, you have no reason for being.
24:22
Younger, hungrier folks should come and displace you.
24:26
But if you can articulate the thing that's not gonna change, for us it was original, reported journalism, right?
24:34
Like without fear or favor.
24:37
And if you can say that, say all of this change is in service of this enduring thing that we all signed up for then all of a sudden, people will give themselves a different level of sort of emotional buy-in to sign up for the ride. Yeah.
24:54
[YASH MAHESHWARI] These are great learnings and lessons.
24:57
[NIRALI] And I know this period of time built enormous trust in your leadership because in 2016, you were announced as deputy publisher. [AG] Against all odds. Yeah.
25:05
(laughing) [NIRALI] Putting you in a position to eventually succeed your father as publisher.
25:12
And I want to talk about and acknowledge the timing of that. [AG] Yeah.
25:17
[NIRALI] Because you become Deputy Publisher just two weeks before President Trump is elected. [AG] Yeah.
25:22
[NIRALI] President Trump has repeatedly labeled the New York Times as fake news and the enemy of the people.
25:30
How did you deal with that dynamic in real time as a new leader? [AG] Yeah.
25:38
Yeah, so I get named to this job and literally, like this is literally true, the people who give me the news that I'm gonna be stepping in as the next publisher tell me, "You only have one job for the rest of your career.
25:52
And it may be impossible, which is to find a sustainable business model to support the expensive work of quality journalism in the digital era."
26:03
And, and Trump's election basically announces the arrival of like another suite of challenges.
26:13
And you know, and I think they're actually, they're broader-based than, just Trump, but it announces the arrival of a moment that is marked with well, probably the most significant anti-press moment we've had in this country in a century, right?
26:30
Marked by growing distrust of the media, increasing attacks on the rights and legitimacy, and safety of journalists, growing polarization and tribalism, where people are getting stuck in their echo chambers and very intolerant of anything that challenges what they want to believe.
26:49
And Trump isn't responsible for all of that, but he was a big force as he came in with this incendiary anti-press rhetoric, you know, calling us the enemy of the people in a, you know, not just fake news, not just the failing New York Times, but enemy of the people, and eventually scaling that to accusing us publicly of treason, a crime that the federal government is charged with prosecuting, and that carries the death penalty.
27:13
And so a big part of my job has been positioning the company to be not just economically resilient, right, and, you know, technologically resilient, but to be resilient in terms of our ability to do this important fearless journalism in this much more combustible environment.
27:35
So things like, you know, we immediately invested significantly in expanding our Washington operations, probably two to three times larger than it was at the beginning of the Trump era.
27:47
We 5Xed our investment in investigative reporting, 5Xed.
27:52
Um, we 10Xed our spend on safety and security and press freedom work um, which is a, a statistic I'm quite sobered by.
28:03
Gives you a sense of how much the environment shifted.
28:06
And then for myself, it became clear that a big part of my job would be to talk about the media and its importance and the values that I think should be guiding it in these periods of pressure.
28:23
And that ranges from, you know, writing a long essay in the Washington Post before this most recent election saying, "The Trump administration has been studying very overtly the anti-press playbook that has been put into place in eroding democracies like Hungary and India and Turkey and and that playbook is really clear.
28:46
And here are the lessons we can learn from the experience of journalists in those countries about how the press has been systematically attacked and eventually mostly dismantled or gutted.
28:57
And here are what the effects on civil society that would have."
29:02
And that work, you know, allowed us to prepare, but also allowed us to help the rest of the industry prepare for what would come.
29:11
Um, you know, I'm, I'm sorry to say that a lot of the industry didn't exactly use that, that, that, that time well.
29:19
Um, but it also meant going to the White House and, you know, and challenging the president directly on his anti-press rhetoric.
29:28
You know, and you know, there, my message is, you know, is not, you know, I want it to be very explicit, like I want no favors.
29:38
Like, you are free to attack The New York Times by name.
29:41
You are free to attack me by name. We're the big boys. We can take it.
29:46
But I want you to understand that this anti-press push that you've been making is being greedily embraced by aspiring strongmen all over the world who are, have just been looking for any excuse to crack down on free expression and the free press in their countries, you know, the pesky questions of independent journalists.
30:07
And, you know, and saying to the president, you know, 'I believe this is really dangerous.
30:12
I believe that people will die and be jailed.'
30:15
And sure enough, you know, I look back at when I said that to now, and the world has gotten more dangerous than ever for journalists.
30:23
So, you know, that is sort of the posture that we've had to approach.
30:33
At the same time, I'm also needing to remind everyone that, you know, yes, we're really proud that in a moment when a lot of the press has become nervous about reporting critically on this administration, that we're an institution that has built the single biggest body of accountability reporting ever produced by a single news organization on a single subject, on Donald Trump, right? And we're proud of that.
31:01
But we're nobody's opposition, right?
31:03
Just like as we're no one's cheerleader, we're not part of any, we are independent and the same complaints that President Trump has had about the press, you know, many of them, you know, we heard from Joe Biden every time we reported on questions about his age and fitness.
31:18
He became the first president in a century not to sit down with the New York Times for a single interview because he was so upset about his coverage.
31:25
So, when you put all that together, a big part of my job is just to give the staff, again, the resources to do their work, but also the confidence that we have their back to do that hard work in such an incendiary environment and volatile environment.
31:41
[YASH MAHESHWARI] Absolutely.
31:42
I wanna bring this to current events, because this dynamic is still ongoing.
31:48
Just when you think about the last month or so, The Times is suing the Pentagon over restricting freedom of the press.
31:54
And last week, your team sat down with President Trump for a rare, unprecedented two-hour-long interview.
32:01
So when you think about this dynamic over the past decade, what have you learned?
32:06
Are there things that you understand now that you just couldn't have in 2016?
32:13
[AG] Boy, that's a great one.
32:14
And you didn't even mention that he become the first sitting president to sue a U. S. news organization.
32:20
He sued us for the third time. So yes, lots of fronts. What have we learned?
32:29
I mean, I think the most important thing is we have to tune out the cheers and the jeers.
32:35
And like, cheers are just as dangerous as the jeers, right?
32:38
You've got everyone sort of baiting you to join a side.
32:43
And we really believe that our model of journalism is independence.
32:48
We believe that that is the single highest value to the American public, right?
32:53
Not every institution in American life needs to be independent, but America needs some independent institutions.
33:00
And, you know, and I've, I've really come to believe that, like, you know, if you look at, like, the core role of the press, seek the truth, help people understand the world, hold power to account.
33:14
Now map that to some of the, like, the pathologies of this era, misinformation.
33:21
What's the antidote to misinformation? It's truth. It's fact.
33:28
Polarization and tribalism.
33:29
What's the antidote to that? Right? It's understanding. Elite impunity, right?
33:39
What's the antidote to that? Accountability.
33:41
And so, I just, you know, I think our message is we just need to keep our head down and just keep doing the work.
33:49
Follow the facts where they lead, approach every story with an open mind, an empty notebook, but also be completely unafraid to push through the pressure that we're gonna get from powerful forces to bring that to the public.
34:04
[YASH MAHESHWARI] Absolutely.
34:05
I wanna touch on another challenge to your business, AI.
34:09
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Perplexity for copyright infringement, essentially arguing that AI companies are free riding on your journalism.
34:18
Can you tell us a little bit about what's at stake in those cases? [AG] Yeah.
34:23
As you may guess, I'm a little bit limited in how I can talk about a ongoing lawsuit.
34:29
But let me say first and foremost, you know, because we are in the center of Silicon Valley, this is not the New York Times being anti-innovation and this is not the New York Times being anti-AI, right?
34:42
Like, we don't think that the future can be held at arm's length. Like, AI is here.
34:47
It's only gonna become bigger.
34:48
It's obviously the next great wave of transformation that society is gonna see.
34:53
And every lesson of my tenure has been that you win by embracing technological shift and finding opportunity for within them.
35:06
Now that said, that doesn't mean that you get a license to steal our stuff.
35:09
(laughing) And there's only really three ingredients to great AI.
35:19
There's the talent, the people who write the algorithms.
35:22
And Silicon Valley is spending, you know, not just millions, not just hundred millions, but billions of dollars on that talent.
35:32
There is the chips, and data centers, and electricity that makes it run.
35:42
And Silicon Valley's spending not just millions, not just billions, but hundreds of billions of dollars on that.
35:49
And then there's data, and there's another word for data.
35:52
It's called copyrighted content.
35:55
And the data powers the algorithms.
36:01
And when we get to that third part of the equation, Silicon Valley says disproportionately "We couldn't possibly pay. We couldn't afford it.
36:14
And if you made us, China's gonna win."
36:16
And I just don't think that's true.
36:19
We're talking about the richest and most powerful companies in the history of humanity.
36:25
[YASH MAHESHWARI] So, so what do you think a fair relationship between AI companies and journalism looks like?
36:29
[AG] Yeah, look, I think the principle here, and it's not just a principle that applies to journalism, right?
36:35
It's the same principle applies to the people making movies, to people making music, writing books, doing academic research, making video games.
36:46
The principle is if you are spending a lot of time and money to create intellectual property, you have the legal right to determine where and how that's used and to set a market value on it.
37:03
And that is just how the American system works.
37:06
And that's not, like, a novel principle.
37:08
It's in the Constitution, in fact and that's all, that's all we're pushing for.
37:14
We think that it's really important to recognize that this is that intellectual property has value And that the laws protecting it need to be respected.
37:26
And let me just say one last thing.
37:28
If that were not to happen, all of the industries I've just listed would collapse, right?
37:33
You know, it's in the same way that if the companies making the AI.
37:40
Algorithms were able to march into the Nvidia factories and just take the chips and say, like, "I'm sorry, I gotta take 'em, otherwise China," it wouldn't, hold there either.
37:53
And that would not just be bad for our industries, it'd be bad for our country.
37:58
It's a big source of American success and power.
38:02
But it would also be bad for the AI, right?
38:05
Among other things, AI needs it counts on journalists like the journalists at the New York Times out there finding the facts that have not yet been reported, and so have not yet been input into these algorithms.
38:19
[EMAN HARIB] Thank you for your perspective on that.
38:21
I know this is a space a lot of people in the audience are closely watching, and I want to focus on the audience for a bit. [AG] Great.
38:29
[EMAN HARIB] There's a lot of people in this audience who are gonna go on to highly influential roles in business, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, roles that come with a lot more interaction with reporters and the press. What do you think?
38:46
Why do you think high-quality journalism should matter to business leaders?
38:51
And not just for its impact on preserving democracy, but also for its impact on business outcomes? [AG] Great.
39:00
I love that, and I'm very happy to have the opportunity to talk to all of this hostage audience about this.
39:08
Look, I think there's a few things.
39:11
First and foremost, basically almost every successful business leader that I've encountered is a really avid reader of the news, right?
39:24
And many of them are among the most avid readers I've ever encountered, right?
39:28
Like, I cannot tell you how many of the names, you know, top names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and elsewhere, names that you would all know, you know, have told me the same story about needing to read between three to six papers before they show up at their office each day, right?
39:44
And that's because, you know, I think less successful business leaders are often sort of myopically focused on their own little challenge, right?
39:53
And it's really valuable to know about the rest of the world and to spot the opportunities and patterns there, right?
39:59
Like, if you're gonna navigate the world right now, you really wanna understand how Washington works and what's going on with tariffs and, and, and so much more. So that's one.
40:11
Two, it has become increasingly fashionable for politicians and business leaders to publicly attack press coverage and the integrity of the people, the journalists who make it.
40:27
I think you'd all be surprised by how many of those people at the same time recognize that journalists really are trying their trustworthy journalists like you'd find at the Times or the Journal or the Post or other you know, or Bloomberg or the Wires are really just trying to get the story as full and fair and accurate as possible.
40:53
And so a lot of those business leaders, even the ones who are griping in public, are engaging in sometimes publicly and sometimes in private and have determined that that has real value in helping journalists produce the fullest and fairest version of a story that they or their companies are central figures in.
41:15
And the third thing I would say is the part of journalism that drives business leaders the craziest is accountability journalism.
41:25
It's investigative journalism, right?
41:27
It's the journalism that looks at your mistakes and missteps and sometimes misconduct.
41:33
And the thing that I'd urge people to remember there is that as irritating as the role of journalists can be there and as pesky as our questions can be and as hard as it can make your lives in the moment, the integrity of the systems we all rely on, not just democracy, but capitalism and markets, rely on the type of transparency and accountability that the press provides, right?
42:04
You know, you look at the Enrons, right, of the world or Elizabeth Holmes, right?
42:11
And, you know, the work of the press helps save investors money and allows, you know, from throwing good money after bad and helps create a culture of accountability where business leaders can make deals with confidence, right?
42:28
You know and work with each other with confidence.
42:33
So I think of this as a system, and the role of journalists in that system isn't always fun, but I do think it's really important [NIRALI] Great to hear from an expert in the field on that.
42:46
[AG] And I say that as someone who's been on both sides of it, yeah.
42:49
[NIRALI] I wanna turn it to our audience now.
42:51
We have some student questions prepared. [YASH MAHESHWARI] Great. Hi.
42:58
I'm Yash Maheshwari, MBA '1, class of 2027. I had a question.
43:03
The times now makes more from subscription-like games and cooking versus some news categories.
43:10
This hints that the future of journalism might be funded by things which are not journalism.
43:16
So when you are pitching this strategy to Pulitzer, visit, winning journalists who have dedicated their lives to investigative reporting, what do you actually say to them?
43:25
As in, how do you actually solve the problem of getting people and supporting their mission and values, and balancing that what the business model demands? Thank you.
43:37
[AG] That's a great question. Thank you for that.
43:40
So, I mean, first, what I should say is, you know, back in our newspaper days, you know, newspapers played many more roles than just giving the news, right?
43:52
So this is gonna blow some of your minds, the younger people in the audience, but this is true. Ask your teachers.
45:47
History, and I'm really grateful for how hard we have scrapped to find solutions, even if they're just piece mill and just part of the solution to make the place more sustainable. [HELEN CASHMAN] Hi. I'm Helen Cashman.
46:03
[AG] Are you all sitting next to each other? [YASH MAHESHWARI] Yes.
46:05
[AG] Okay, okay All right.
46:06
(audience laughing) [HELEN CASHMAN] Makes it easy to find us. I'm Helen Cashman.
46:10
I'm an MBA student in the class of 2026.
46:13
So the median age of a New York Times subscriber is estimated to be about 43 years of age, which is younger than many peer publications.
46:22
How did you go about diversifying your subscriber base to attract younger readers?
46:27
And then, how are you further thinking about diversifying going forward, both across age, but geography, to avoid any form of concentration risk? [AG] Yeah. That's great.
46:38
So, you know, on the young people thing, I'm struck again and again by how many people in my industry think the way to get young people is to like, you know, repeat their rad memes, you know, and you know, and echo like whatever their, like cool new terms are and it's almost like a theory that if you like imitate and patronize, you'll be able to win their hearts and I just think that, like, young people see just through that.
47:16
And so our model has been really different, which is like we wanna be authentic to who we are, right?
47:23
And like among the factors of who we are is like we are the place that is willing to tell you a boring but important story that isn't trending in any of your social media platforms, right?
47:37
We're like the whole world's, you know, talking about We're gonna be the one who's like, "Have you guys heard about what's happening in Sudan?" You know?
47:47
"It's getting pretty bad out there, and we went to the front lines.
47:51
We want to tell you why you should care."
47:54
So being authentic to ourselves and never patronizing, but also, I think a big part of our success in the digital environment is being authentic to the mediums we're on.
48:03
And so when we started The Daily, which is the leading news podcast in America, the tone, it feels quintessentially like The Times.
48:12
It's that sort of boring but important story made as interesting as humanly possible that doesn't condescend in any way.
48:22
But it also feels so authentic to the medium, right?
48:25
Which is, it's much more informal, right?
48:29
You know, there's a lot much more of expressing sort of uncertainty, and the limitations of what we know.
48:35
And I actually think that getting good at that platform has made us better at writing, too, as a result.
48:42
So I think that that posture, right, respect your audience's intelligence, stay true to yourselves, but embrace the opportunity and the tonal, you know, opportunities that come with new, you know, whether it's video or audio, or anything else.
48:58
I think that's been our key thing.
49:00
Looking forward, you know, it's really maybe the most remarkable story of The Times.
49:09
You know, a generation ago, our audience base was basically limited to people in the New York City metropolitan area because it was a physical product, And today we've got readers in every country on earth, we have more subscribers in California than we do in New York, and Texas, and Florida are next on the list, they're coming right on up.
49:32
We're growing fastest in the South and the Midwest.
49:36
We've got millions of subscribers abroad.
49:38
Like, none of that would have been possible.
49:40
And as that's happened, we've diversified in every way, whether it's like racial and gender, or socioeconomic and political, so you know, it's part of the magic, you know, of the internet, right?
49:54
Is that you can really reach so many more people.
49:58
And the more we go into more of these different channels, the more comfortable we are that we don't need to reach them all with all of them.
50:05
Like, we're happy with someone who has just a relationship with The Daily or even just with the newspaper. [NIRALI] Hi. I'm Nirali, an MBA too.
50:15
I'm an avid reader of The New York Times, and I'm also an avid scroller of Twitter.
50:20
So I'm curious, we're seeing now how top journalists can also monetize their journalism through platforms such as Substack and Twitter, what do you think is the enduring value prop of The New York Times, both for journalists and for our readers themselves?
50:34
[AG] That's a great question, and something we think a lot about.
50:39
So The Times has never been the place, never, where a star could get the most money or the biggest platform, the biggest spotlight, right?
50:51
That's all, historically that was TV, you know?
50:54
Now it's either TV or being like the biggest fish in the smaller pond, or maybe start a podcast, or a substack, or something like that, right?
51:03
If you just wanna maximize the spotlight.
51:07
The thing about the Times is we are the place to come to do the best and most impactful work of your career, and that is our differentiator.
51:17
And we still pay very well, and we pay our stars very well.
51:21
And but part of what not paying top of market for you know, a handful of players allows us to do is to have the world's, the country's largest investigations operation, or to have a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, even after all these years, you know, of conflict and post-conflict, right?
51:43
We had 50 journalists on the ground last year in Ukraine.
51:46
You can't do that if you are just putting all that money behind a handful of big names.
51:51
But those big names tend to come to us, and they tend to stay because they really, really value the things we can do, so we can lift up their work.
52:00
So we just have the best editors, and not just the best editors, but we have the best lawyers and the best security apparatus.
52:07
And so if you wanna tell a story that's gonna involve risk, going into you know, into Gaza, going into Sudan, going into Myanmar, if you wanna tell a story that may involve risk of the President of the United States suing you by name, right? We can help. And we give you time.
52:28
We give you the ability to tell that story, not just one way, but to tell it in audio, in video, in multimedia.
52:36
And then we give you the opportunity to put that in front of an audience that is completely unmatched in its combination of size, engagement, and influence.
52:50
And so many times those great reporters, they're not just alerting the world to a problem.
52:56
They're letting the world solve that problem, and you compare that to like, you know, if you are doing an email newsletter, you know, at best you've got tens of thousands of people reading you.
53:10
Almost all of them already agreed with you.
53:12
That's why they signed up.
53:15
You have to give them three stories a week, otherwise, your business model collapses.
53:20
And if you ever tell them something they don't wanna hear, your viability is just like completely gutted.
53:26
And so, you know, just to like use a metaphor that might resonate here, there have always been players and teams that care about the name on the front of the jersey, right?
53:37
That's like, it's just the team approach, right?
53:40
And then there's the places that's just the name on the back of the jersey.
53:43
It's like that's the star approach.
53:45
We wanna be the place that's the whole jersey, right?
53:48
Which is a way of saying, and I say this as a Knicks fan and maybe, and we might have brighter days ahead of us, but we wanna be the Golden State Warriors, right?
53:55
Like we wanna be the place that has the perfect match between a great team with a great culture that lifts people up and a place where a star wants to spend a whole career.
54:07
[INTERVIEWER] Thank you to my classmates for those really thoughtful questions. [AG] Those were great.
54:11
[INTERVIEWER] Okay, AG, we're gonna wrap it up with a View from the top tradition, rapid fire questions. [AG] Oh no.
54:16
[INTERVIEWER] Are you ready? [AG] Sure.
54:18
All right, so you can tell I'm not good at rapid fire but I will try.
54:20
[INTERVIEWER] Okay, hopefully not too hard.
54:23
What is the New York Times game that you most enjoy playing? [AG] Connections.
54:27
[INTERVIEWER] Okay, I like that one too. [AG] Yeah, yeah.
54:29
[INTERVIEWER] What is the most overrated thing about New York?
54:33
(audience laughing) [AG] Get me in trouble here. You know what?
54:38
I think the notion that New Yorkers are mean. We're not mean. We're busy.
54:44
We're just really busy, and if you could just get us out of our busyness, I think you'll find us to be like a very nice, thoughtful, engaging group of people. [INTERVIEWER] Okay.
54:53
Do you have thoughts on the most underrated thing about New York?
54:59
[AG] I should probably say Times Square 'cause it's named after us, but I cannot bring myself to do it even as a loyalist. You know what?
55:10
People love to hate on the subway, but I just think it's a miracle.
55:14
It's like everyone else in America spends all their life in cars and, you know, New York you get everywhere much faster, get to see the full breadth of the city, and you get to multitask the whole time. So, subways. [INTERVIEWER] Okay.
55:27
(audience laughting) Cheers for the subway.
55:32
Outside of The New York Times, what is the journalism outlet that you most enjoy reading?
55:40
[AG] I'm one of those annoying leaders who's like, "Every day I must read all these publications."
55:44
So, I subscribe to a dozen organizations.
55:50
I probably spend the most time with the Journal.
55:54
I think they've done a nice job under Almar and Emma.
55:59
But it pales in comparison to the amount of time I spend with the Times, and I, I like to think we're best in class on every front, so.
56:06
(audience laughing) [INTERVIEWER] Will your kids work at The New York Times?
56:11
[AG] That's a big, you heard gasps in the audience, it's a loaded question.
56:14
(audience laughing) What I would say, my kids are really young.
56:21
They're really young, they're seven and three.
56:24
And what I would say to them is, "The Times is a really special place, and as a family we're really lucky to get to be in service of it and its mission.
56:37
But that doesn't mean that you have to work there, and I'd much rather you find the thing that you love and are passionate about, you know?
56:45
Just as long as it's something that you work hard at and does some good in the world."
56:51
[INTERVIEWER] I have one final question for you.
56:52
It's not exactly rapid fire. [AG] Okay.
56:56
[INTERVIEWER] What is the legacy that you hope to leave for the next New York Times publisher?
57:02
[AG] You know, actually, that one, I've thought a lot about it, and so it's, you know, when I got this job and I was trying to think about, like, "What's the marker that I've occupied it well, right?
57:17
That I've proven worthy of it?"
57:25
Our tenures tend to be really long, they tend to be, like, 20 and 30 years, so it's like you couldn't like set like some like quantitative goal, and I realized it was just deceptively simple, it's can you hand off the organization in stronger position than it was handed to you, right?
57:43
Can you hand it off journalistically stronger?
57:47
stronger as a business, with a stronger culture?
57:51
And if you can do that, you know, going back to that word stewardship, right?
57:55
Like, that's the definition of stewardship that you've positioned it for the next leg of its journey, and, you know, as its temporary sort of guardian, you know, you occupied it well.
58:07
Now, I should say to that, it's extremely earning, early innings, you know, it's going well.
58:12
But it's early innings, but I always think about this conversation I had with this Japanese businessman.
58:17
I was at this lunch, and the host comes over and says, "I sat the two of you next to each other 'cause you both run family businesses," and I said, "Oh, I, you know, I'm publisher of the Times, fifth generation," and I asked about him.
58:32
And he said he ran a company called Kikkoman, and he started to explain, and I said, "I am well-acquainted with your soy sauce, I have purchased many bottles of it over the years. God bless you."
58:46
And "And what generation are you?" And he said, "18." Wow.
58:52
And that's what good looks like.
58:55
And so we are still very early in this journey.
58:58
Well, I love that as a way to wrap it up. Thank you so much, AG. Oh, thank you.
59:03
It's been a real pleasure. (audience applause)