Meredith Kopit Levien

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I've had a lot of space, so I was told the problem, and then given the space to figure out how to solve it. That makes me tick, and I work very hard to do that for the people who work around me and for me.

Sam Saperstein:

Welcome to the Women on the Move podcast from JPMorgan Chase. I'm Sam Saperstein. Women on the Move is a global initiative designed to empower female employees, clients, and consumers, to build their careers, grow their businesses, and improve their financial health. Each episode will feature successful and inspiring women who are breaking the mold. They're sharing their career journeys and leadership lessons, talking about their professional and personal goals, and making a difference in the lives of others. This season, I'm taking you to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where I caught up with many of the women who inspire me every day.

Sam Saperstein:

Today, I'm speaking with a woman who's leading the digital transformation of one of the most iconic news companies. Meredith Kopit Levien is chief operating officer and executive vice president of The New York Times Company. Meredith originally joined The Times in 2013, and was chief revenue officer before being named COO. Under her leadership, The Times has expanded its global reach to over 5 million subscribers, reaching a new audience through its interactive reporting and digital strategy. Meredith and I discussed new trends in journalism, diversity in the newsroom, and the importance of building strong relationships inside and outside of work. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Sam Saperstein:

Meredith, it's so great to have you here on our Women on the Move podcast.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I'm so happy to be here, and I'm so proud of you that you're doing this.

Sam Saperstein:

Oh, thank you.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

And I hear lots of my friends have been on the show.

Sam Saperstein:

Well, we have had some all stars, and it is so great to now have you on here. So let's talk about your job at The New York Times, COO of The New York Times company. Tell us what that means. What do you do on a day-to-day basis?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Oh, that's a good question. I think the easiest way I would describe the work that the teams that I work with and I do, is everything we can to make millions more people spend much more time with quality, original independent journalism. And that means making sure that our digital experiences are as addictive as the journalism itself, and that they help you get to understanding, help you follow something you're interested in, help you follow something you didn't know you were interested in. So we spend a lot of time on that, and it's really good work. It's like the great privilege of my professional life that I get to work at The New York Times, and that I get to do that work at The New York Times, and I know that people who work around me feel the same way.

Sam Saperstein:

Well, it is such a longstanding institution, and so important in the world of news. I've been reading The Times since I was 16 years old, so I mean it's been-

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Me too.

Sam Saperstein:

Right?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Me too.

Sam Saperstein:

- a friend of mine, almost, for so long. To take it into a new era though, what you have done is so important for this institution. What was that like when you had to really push things into the digital world?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

It's hard for me to talk about what I've done there without talking about what happened before I came, because that played such a huge role in what I was able to do. I think the thing that's made the biggest difference in The Times' ability to kind of get over the hump of digital transformation, and I think we've just kind of gotten over the hump, it's still hard, still lots of problems to solve, but I think we're over the hump, that the single biggest reason we were able to do that, was that there was always investment in the journalism.

Sam Saperstein:

So you've been online for a long time, have a great digital app. When I noticed there was a real difference and an experience, and I think we talked about this, was when I read the story after the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, and it wasn't only a story that told you what happened, but through pictures, and through layers, where you got to see every layer of the church burning, and then the text would come up over. It was so different and so interesting, and I really got to understand the story in a much more nuanced way than I ever had. That was new to me. That was in a completely different experience.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah.

Sam Saperstein:

So talk about how you're building those things with all those layers?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I would say one of the things that our newsroom excels at particularly, is visual and interactive journalism. So journalism where we can actually get you almost a presence, where you feel like you can... In the case of Notre Dame, it was like you had a 360 view of how it had been constructed, what the different layers were when they were built, and so you could understand the devastation of this fire and how close the world came to losing Notre Dame entirely. There's a very large team in the newsroom of The New York Times, and that does visual and interactive journalism. I think they're the best in the world at what they do, and it's a very big area of continued investment and focus for The Times.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

If you look at some of the biggest topics that we're covering now, like climate, we're here in Davos, there's a lot of discussion about the environment and environmental sustainability. One of the ways that The Times is covering the environment differently, is we're bringing it to life through visual journalism and interactive journalism. We did this incredible feature, I want to say a year, year and a half ago about melting glaciers and the implications of that, and it was all done in this unbelievable visual way, and I think it was all made through drone photography, and you were just able to see-

Sam Saperstein:

That's fascinating.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

- the melting glaciers in a way you couldn't. So it brings you understanding.

Sam Saperstein:

Right, with new technology.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah.

Sam Saperstein:

Couldn't have done before. So what does that mean in terms of the skillset you now need at The Times to do all this work? How has that changed in the recent past?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah. One of the biggest areas of investment in the last few years has been for journalists who work in audio, audio producers. The Daily didn't exist three years ago and today, it's been downloaded a billion times, and is listened to by 2 million people everyday, most of whom never read a newspaper as a habit, most of whom were under 40.

Sam Saperstein:

So they were not reading The Times in the past.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

The Daily is reaching a much younger audience than The New York Times traditionally reached, certainly when it was largely a paper, but even younger than our digital audience. And we've got a team of close to 50 people now who make The Daily and make our other audio journalism, and that was not a discipline that we were working in. It's really interesting actually, in audio in particular, it's a relatively new discipline in journalism broadly, not just at The New York Times. So there's a lot of taking people who've done another kind of journalism and teaching them how to do audio journalism.

Sam Saperstein:

That's really interesting.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

That's been fun, but that's the case in visual and interactive, which I just talked about, it's certainly the case in video. Video journalism is a much bigger part of the report today, and I would say in the last couple of years, than it's been... We couldn't have the report that we have now without being able to show a lot of what's going on in the world. So it's just a much more varied skillset. I would say, equally interesting on the business side, the center of the business organization at The New York Times now is a digital product organization. So we hired more than a hundred net new engineers last year. We'll do the same thing again this year. We're hiring many people in product management, and digital design, data science, data analytics. Five years ago, we had nowhere near that number of people, and that's the central business engine.

Sam Saperstein:

So with all these investments, you're really driving so many more subscribers and particularly, paid subscribers.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yep. In January, we made three big announcements at The Times. We were essentially running a strategy that began in 2015, which was centered on being a subscription business first, and we said then that we intended to double our digital revenue in a five year time horizon, and we actually ended up doing that in four years.

Sam Saperstein:

Congratulations. Fantastic.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So we just crossed that milestone. We also in 2019, just crossed the 5 million subscriptions milestone, and a huge part of that was we did just over a million net new subscription additions in 2019. So the growth is accelerating, which is a good sign for the model. We've said publicly we want to be at 10 million, so we're halfway there. I would say we see that more as a milestone, and not an end state.

Sam Saperstein:

Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yep. No, you're setting the goals then ever farther.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah.

Sam Saperstein:

This is great.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

When I got to the company a decade ago, so a little before I got to the company, two thirds of the company's revenue was advertising, A third of it was from subscriptions and other businesses. Today, two thirds of the company's revenue is coming from subscription.

Sam Saperstein:

That is a big change.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So well over a billion dollars in subscription revenue at The Times.

Sam Saperstein:

Oh my goodness. Wow. Now through that, those new subscribers, are you reaching different segments of people? Are you reaching people in different geographies, ages, socioeconomic groups? How has that changed?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I mean, with a much larger subscriber base, obviously, we have a much more varied audience. I'll go back to my point about The Daily. If you look at all the places people come to The Times on a daily basis, so a couple million of them read The Daily every day. We have millions of people who get our morning briefing newsletter every day. We have millions of people who go to our app every day. That audience over the last five years has gotten much larger, it's gotten more female, it's gotten younger, and it's gotten more varied in terms of where people come from, both in the United States and around the world. The audience for The New York Times now is more than a third from outside the United States. We're actually growing subscriptions, digital subscriptions faster outside the United States.

Sam Saperstein:

Wow. That's amazing.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So our intention is to be one of the big global news providers of independent and original journalism, and so we see our audience as-

Sam Saperstein:

It's needed.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

-as a global one.

Sam Saperstein:

So let's talk about reaching women. You're reaching more women, as you said.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah.

Sam Saperstein:

What do you think the coverage itself, and perhaps more of a focus on gender issues has done to help you reach more women?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

There are a number of things to say about that. One is there has absolutely been a focus in the newsroom in building a more diverse team. We hired, I don't have the number for 2019. I know in 2018, we hired something on the order of 100, 110 net new journalists of the newsroom, and keeps getting bigger, and of those, 70% of them were women and people of color, many of them were young people, Millennials or Gen Z. So we are hard at work broadening the population of The New York Times newsroom, and we're doing that as we get bigger, and it's certainly a big area of focus. And I would say having a more diverse newsroom improves equality in the report.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

One of the most vivid examples of that is, I don't think the two Times stories that played a very big role in ushering in the Me Too movement would've happened without the women behind those stories. So Emily Steel, and she had a male partner, Mike Schmidt, on Bill O'Reilly's story. I don't think we got to the main or the first source in that Bill O'Reilly story without Emily Steel building a relationship with her, and I don't think we would've gotten to Ashley Judd and all the people, the women who went on the record with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about Harvey Weinstein, had those women not been pursuing them and building relationships.

Sam Saperstein:

Yes.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So I think diversity in the work of journalism has a big impact in equality and the presentation of journalism.

Sam Saperstein:

So as you and your teams think about steering The Times toward a more digital world, how do you think about changed management and really taking a very old established institution into a new direction?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah. Well, before I tell you what I think the business side team has done, let me just say broadly the sort of layup we had coming into the work we're doing now. For all of the era of digital, in good times and in bad times, the one thing that's been consistent at The New York Times, is that the first available dollar for anything, goes to the journalism, and I would say that has made the biggest difference in The Times being able to get over the chasm of changing the business model, of becoming a digital first business.

Sam Saperstein:

And do you think that's because your staff continues to see the investment from the importance you put in journalism first and foremost?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I think it's because we make a product that's worth paying for, and that is worth paying for, even in the presence of free alternatives, and we make a product that has real meaning and value in people's lives, and I think that is the case for any company in transformation. First, you have to know what you're trying to do, what your mission is, and then you have to do that really, really well. And I think it's been very well understood at The Times that we're in the business of seeking truth and giving people the opportunity for understanding, and the key in our business for doing that is to invest in the journalism.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So in terms of digital transformation and change, I would say there were two really big pivots that have already happened in the business, and one that we're in the middle of. The first one was obviously printed digital. By the time I showed up on the scene, I remember asking Mark Thompson, the CEO and my boss who hired me, "I don't want to come to try and save the newspaper ad business, because I think that's only going in one direction," and he said, We're in the business of trying to find a sustainable model for journalism, not newspapers," and that's been true the whole way through. So there was never any kind of protection of the paper as the thing, it was always protection of the sustainability of the journalism, so we've been able to make the printed digital transition. And by the way, our print product is still beloved by consumers, and a very profitable and healthy product, but we understand what its ultimate trajectory will be.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

The second big transition, and this one was culturally hard, and profoundly important to getting to The Times where it is today. 10 years ago, we were a business that brought in two thirds of its revenue from advertising. Today, we are a business that brings in two thirds of its revenue from subscriptions. So calling, we are a subscription business first. We are in the business first of doing something for consumers. Really, really important to be able to accelerate digital growth for the company. And by the way, in the end, good for the ad business as well.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

And then the third big change, the one we're right in the middle of, is making the digital product of The New York Times an even better engine of the business, of what makes people form a habit with The New York Times, and ultimately, buy a subscription and stay, what that has been, we had spent years getting really good at marketing, at becoming a brand and selling subscriptions. But the truth is, we've got 150 million people who come to The Times every month, tens of millions. Every week, they're coming to us from Google, or from Facebook, or some kind of private message, or from some other source. How do we actually use the fact that they've landed on our product, to turn them into somebody who has a habit with The Times, who's next time, going to come directly to The Times? And we are right in the middle of that big change and transformation, and I would say that will define the next inflection point for the Times.

Sam Saperstein:

Right. And are you looking at that as a new customer experience, a new way people would interact and find things?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

It's partly that we think that news is kind of best experienced when someone has a relationship with the provider of that news. So there's a lot of effort at The Times now to drive direct relationships through our experience, get people to download our app, get them to give us their email address, get them to register and log in when they're with us, so that we can make the experience more relevant for them. So there's that piece of it. There's the business piece of it, which is most of the experience people have with The New York Times now is a digital experience. There's like a million, two million people who experience the paper every week. There's 50 times that who experience us digitally every week. So we are competing with the best digital products out there, in terms of the way we deliver that experience. So from a business perspective, the big changes, we've got to get as good at making the software through which people find and experience journalism, as the big tech companies are, and that's hard work.

Sam Saperstein:

But it's amazing to think about it as becoming a technology company, in essence, not only a journalism and (inaudible)

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah. I would say we're a journalism company who has to be great at technology to keep scaling our business, and technology is at the center of the business growth of The New York Times.

Sam Saperstein:

So tell us about your career journey before you got to The New York Times. So speaking of advertising, way back in the day, you did work in that squarely.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yes.

Sam Saperstein:

And I would just love to hear about your journey.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah. I have not worked at a lot of places, and I've spent most, now I think I can say the majority of my working years in publishing business, and I've worked for what I would say were great brands in publishing, and just great people. I spent a decade of my career working in two different businesses for a man named David Bradley, who is the co-owner now of The Atlantic, was the sole owner when I worked for him. Much of what I learned about how to be effective in business came from working for David Bradley, seeing how David Bradley works. So that just shaped my career in profound ways.

Sam Saperstein:

He has a way of spotting talent.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I would say the big lesson of my career is there is nothing more important than the talent. When you're coming up in your career, there's nothing more important than who you're working with, alongside who you work for, and when you're in a position to hire and see that teams are well-led, there's nothing more important than that, and I learned that in spending the first 10 years of my career working largely for him. I had five and a half years at Forbes. Great experience there and I worked for great boss there, and I have had an incredible boss and mentor, and sponsor in Mark Thompson at The Times. And so, I would just say I've had the privilege of getting to work on great brands.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I also worked in a space I was really passionate about. I've just been a lifelong lover of independent journalism, so getting to do work on the business side of something I loved was really important to me. And then I would say, in terms of the people that I worked for, I think the thing that I was most lucky about is I was given big, meaty problems to solve. And you know what? I wasn't always great at solving them, but I was given long enough to sort of figure it out or find the right people around me, so that a group of us could figure it out.

Sam Saperstein:

So with that in mind, you had people behind you who were helping steer you, or if you made mistakes, they were behind you and supporting you. How do you translate those learnings into the people that you now manage and support and bring up?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I didn't mention, a really important mentor I had for much of the time that I worked for David Bradley, I worked for a woman named Elizabeth Keffer, and the whole time I worked for Elizabeth, I worked directly for her for most of those years. I always felt like I was important to her. I always felt like my development, my success, how I got better and better at, particularly things I wasn't good at, it really mattered to her and I took a lot from that. I don't know if I always do it well, but I have certainly tried to carry that into the people around me.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

The other thing I would say is I just, for whatever reason, I felt like I, certainly in the last six, seven, eight, maybe even 10 years, I've had a lot of space, so I was told the problem, and then given the space to figure out how to solve it, and I really appreciated that. That makes me tick, and I work very hard to do that for the people who work around me and for me. I don't know if I always get it right, but I'm very conscious of, am sending the problem over in a clear way, and am I actually giving this leader the full chance to solve it, or this group of people the full chance to solve it? So I would say I've been well-led that way, and I work hard to try and lead well that way.

Sam Saperstein:

That's fantastic that that's a conscious effort on your behalf to do that. I think some people have habits that are hard to break. They might be a micromanager, for example, the opposite of what you're talking about, but the fact that you've observed, and really were able to flourish under a different system and brought that to your own folks, I think is really remarkable.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I can say without a doubt, when I came up through a particular business, it was much harder not to micromanage. When you know where all the levers are in that business, it's very hard when you're leading it to not say, "Well, I know how to do that. Let me tell you how to do it." So that is a conscious effort. The more my job became moving across to other businesses and saying, "Can we get the right structure in place? Can we match strategy, structure, operating model, and people?" When that became my job, it's much easier to give people the space, because the reality is, I don't know how to solve the problems.

Sam Saperstein:

Yeah. Who had the answers?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

They do, they do.

Sam Saperstein:

Right, right. But you trusted them to do that with you, which is great. I think I will disclose here that you and I also have a personal relationship.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

We're friends in real life. We're school mom friends.

Sam Saperstein:

We're school mom friends. Our kids went to school for one year together.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yes.

Sam Saperstein:

That really was it. But I remember the first time meeting you, we were both at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yep, watching our kids play basketball.

Sam Saperstein:

Probably badly, because they were three years old at the time, and I remember looking over-

Meredith Kopit Levien:

My son would be upset if I didn't say he's really good now.

Sam Saperstein:

I'm sure he's so much better now, but they couldn't even reach the net back then.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

That's right, that's right.

Sam Saperstein:

And it's funny, when we discovered that our kids were actually in the same class, and then it almost became a standing date.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

We did, we had a Sunday morning date, yeah.

Sam Saperstein:

When we were able to at least enjoy that time. But having seen you in action now in different settings, I see how you really develop these friendships with other professional women that are very important to you, as not only people to enjoy time with, but people who will support you, and you know they have your back, I hope you do. But talk about that, and what is the role of these other professional women friends in your life?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

I've been working two and a half decades now. That's still a struggle, and I would say one of the things that I am most focused on, is trying to be a loving and effective and listening parent, and also an effective leader of leaders and I don't always get that right, and I would just say that takes up a lot of my mental energy trying to do both of those things. And that brings me to the answer to the other question, which is I don't know that I would even have the language to talk about that or be comfortable talking about it, if I didn't have a community of other women who were doing the same thing. We might be officially the second generation of women who are able to go out and have very full careers, and also fight to be good spouses and parents.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

And so, I have found it incredibly helpful to have a community of women who I can say, "How do you do this? In practical terms, how do you do it? In sort of emotional terms, how do you do it?" It's been really effective. I also want to say, particularly in the last few years, there have just been some women who I have watched really push for more equality in places where there isn't enough of it, and I admire those women so much, and I want to make sure I'm doing my part. One of them is Shelley Zalis.

Sam Saperstein:

Yes.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

We are recording this in her lounge at Davos, where there still aren't enough women. There certainly weren't enough women the first year I came. I could come to the Equality Lounge that first year, when there wasn't enough on my calendar to feel like I had a great purpose being here, and women like Shelley have just made the forums for women to support other women, and I would say increasingly, I've just learned how to do my job better from exchanging with women like that. We hosted a dinner last night with about 40 women. You were there.

Sam Saperstein:

Yes.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

We had the CEO of Williams Sonoma, and we had Pat Russo, the chair of the HPE Board, and so many other incredible women, and it was actually a group of women talking about business problems, and talking about how leadership has to change, because the conditions in which we work change, and so that's just been a huge part of what's made me enjoy my work in the last decade, and also it's made me better at it.

Sam Saperstein:

It was so special last night I think, to have those conversations around just the business issues everybody faces all the time, but to hear probably different perspectives that we might not always hear, and then get to know people personally, which is always a really nice thing to do.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

It was great, and it's worth saying, we could do that in rooms with men, too.

Sam Saperstein:

Yes, of course.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Both of us do that in plenty of great forums in our jobs. The point of gathering the women here is there really still aren't enough women, as all the groups of women and people of color here focus together on how do we make [inaudible 00:26:03] a more diverse place, how do we make business a more diverse place? I think that has real impact.

Sam Saperstein:

Yeah. And the relationships extend beyond this.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah, absolutely.

Sam Saperstein:

So it's not just this week, but going back to our workplaces, our different cities, the connections that we can still make.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah.

Sam Saperstein:

So I think people would really like to know, how does the page one meeting go down at The Times? How do you decide what stories people are going to see first?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So five years ago, even six years ago, when I got to The Times, that really was the meeting where a few dozen people sat around, people with extraordinary judgment and expertise sat around and were able to say, "What are the half dozen, eight, nine most important stories of the moment? What is their relative importance?" Just that idea of kind of being able to order the world that way, I don't think that has lost its value in journalism. The front page of a newspaper and what it does for each day and time, may not have as many users anymore, but the idea of what it was meant to do, doesn't change.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

The meeting itself has evolved so that now it's, okay, what are the most important stories? How do they relate to each other, and then how do they express themselves in audio? How do they express themselves on the home page of our app? How do they express themselves on social media? What is actually worth going to the weekly for our television shows? So to me, there is still this really big idea in a twice day gathering of the top of the newsroom, to say, "What's the agenda? What's the story agenda?" but the way it finds expression is much more varied.

Sam Saperstein:

So when I used to read a hard paper, I knew the lead story was the most important all the way on the right, and then I could read the one all the way on the left. When you're in a digital app, how do you know?

Meredith Kopit Levien:

That's my favorite question. So I think that is one of the profound questions of journalism today. That is a huge problem that I expect many in journalism are trying to solve, and we are working actively on. It's not been replicated anywhere in the desktop or in digital, or certainly, on a mobile device, how do you do relative importance? And that the idea of a phone screen, you're very constrained by space, so at best, you can show a few things at once, and oh, by the way, you can update that all day long.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So what you're seeing now, if you're a regular user of The New York Times, as we are experimenting much more aggressively with how often that home screen changes, we are experimenting very aggressively this week with the impeachment hearings happening, with live journalism. So how do we bring you into a story as it's happening now, and you will see us over the next few years continue to get better and better, and more deliberate at how we program our mobile surface, in the way that there's been a century and a half of being deliberate about how we program that newspaper service.

Sam Saperstein:

Well, for right now, my strategy is just, I read most popular, but then I go back to today's paper, and I made sure I haven't missed something that might not have been popular, but it's still interesting for me to read.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

Yeah. And look, I think we're in a moment where habits are still being formed, and I think we've got a lot of opportunity to create a set of design cues and a set of UX patterns on a phone that get at how does one story relate to another? How does a group of stories relate? How do we signal what is news versus what is opinion? What should be presented visually on the surface of the app, versus you actually click into something and see it? Those are all questions we're actively working on.

Sam Saperstein:

Well, I look forward to seeing how you're going to solve them, and I know you will. So thank you, Meredith. It is always a pleasure to see you.

Meredith Kopit Levien:

So nice to be here. Thanks so much.

Sam Saperstein:

Thanks to Meredith Kopit Levien for joining me at Davos to discuss her work at The New York Times. Thank you for joining us today. The mission of Women on the Move is to help women in their professional and personal lives. Our goal is to introduce you to people with great ideas, inspiring stories, and a passion to make a difference. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, and subscribe, so you won't miss any others. Thank you to our partners at The Female Quotient and Magnet Media for helping us tell these stories. For JPMorgan Chase's Women on the Move, I'm Sam Saperstein.