All right, we'll get started. Quick note on disclaimers first. Please note that important disclosures, including my personal holdings disclosures, and Morgan Stanley disclosures, all appear as a handout available in the registration area and on the Morgan Stanley public website. I'd like to welcome Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO at The New York Times. Meredith was named CEO back in September 2020, and prior to that was the Chief Operating Officer since June 2017. Meredith, thanks so much for joining us in person. Thank you for having me. Is my mic working? Yeah. I was just saying that, my first investor conference in person as CEO. We're- It's good to be here. We're glad to have you. Yeah, why don't we start with that? I mean, while COVID conditions have certainly improved. Yeah It does seem like we're back in a period of extremely elevated news cycle, given the state of current events and the war in Ukraine. Can you kick us off with what you're seeing on how your audience is engaged with this particular news cycle relative to prior ones? How has The New York Times positioned itself to really provide the greatest value to its consumers during this time? Yeah. Let me say a few things about that. I mean, first, this is the Ukraine story is you know just a horrible, tragic story to see unfold. The Times is sort of built for this kind of story in a number of different ways. You can imagine in a really difficult geopolitical moment like the one we're in, people generally turn to trusted brands. They turn to places like The Times. When the news cycle is like this, we tend to you know see that. When I say we're built for a moment like this, you know, The Times has a number of people in Ukraine now. You know, among them, the woman we just named the second host of The Daily, who happens to be a Russian speaker. Some of you may be listening regularly to The Daily, but we've been broadcasting The Daily from Ukraine because of that. There's all kinds of expertise in the team there. You have people who've kind of studied the region for a long time. You have, on our journalistic staff, you know, former members of the military who served both in a journalistic capacity and in a security capacity. You also have. You're seeing this horrible war be covered in a really multimedia and kind of real-time way, in a way that you haven't previously seen on The Times. One of the things I keep saying to people is now if you wanna follow what's going on in real time all day long, it's like you can open the app, and it almost obviates the need to turn a TV on because there's so much real-time video coverage and audio coverage and multimedia coverage. We're sort of built for that. I'll say, though, and Roland and I were reflecting on a fact that we've been saying this, Roland is our CFO, he's here too. That we've been saying this for some time. The news cycle is always going to ebb and flow. There will be moments when there's a very big story, and then there will be a moment when the tide goes out on that story. I hope it's soon on this one, right? This one is so awful. The Times is increasingly built. We have so much breadth in our coverage. We're kind of built for the next story, wherever it might go. We also have, you know, more and more control with every passing year over the product levers to give people reasons to come back, kind of whatever's happening in the news cycle, and that's the model. It's times like these also where I think about consumer news fatigue and whether or not there's a potential concern there. What gives you the confidence in the general market opportunity and the appetite for consumers to continue to stay following? Yeah. Again, like, the news cycle is gonna ebb and flow. I think the idea of news fatigue as something sort of lasting is probably overplayed. I don't think the world. I mean, we're seeing this in this horrible story in Ukraine. The world is getting more complex. It's getting more geopolitically interconnected. The implications of something like a war for the first time in many, many years in continental Europe, you're seeing that. That is a story on a giant scale, and I think that's increasingly the character of many of the big stories, that the implications are profound, that they're the stories themselves are more complex. They require more context, more ways for people to engage. I'm generally not worried about news fatigue for the reasons I've said, which isn't to say, you know, certainly you hope this story changes. You certainly hope the COVID story changes. It's finally beginning to. The Times is kind of built to cover whatever that next story is, and I hope we'll talk about this. We're also built now increasingly to answer to a number of needs in people's lives, news and beyond news. Yeah. On that point, I mean, you've been broadening out beyond just news. Yep. 2022 has been off to a pretty big start with The Athletic acquisition, and we can't forget about Wordle either. How should we think about your key goals around integration and from a consumer perspective as you're focusing on these bundling initiatives? What does that look like, and what do you hope to accomplish this year? Yeah. I keep telling people I heard from more people when we acquired Wordle than when my son was born, so certainly I hit something there. Listen, we have now for half a dozen years been running a strategy of making journalism worth paying for, and that has really worked and it has really gotten us to this kind of place of greater ambition. We're still doing that. That's still the strategy. We would express it now in an even more ambitious way, which is to say we wanna be the essential subscription for every curious person who wants to understand and engage deeply with the world around them. We intend to do that three ways. We're gonna continue to build on our lead in news and our aim there is to be the world's, you know, finest destination for big stories, for important news. We are also, though, beginning to build leadership in spaces that go beyond news, and particularly that occupy a lot of time and energy of curious people in their passion areas and in their daily lives. The acquisition of The Athletic was certainly about that, and the acquisition of Wordle was about that. The third prong of that strategy to be the essential subscription, so you lead in news, build leadership in these other spaces, the third prong of it is to put it together in a way, those two things, that make us indispensable every single day to millions and millions more people. That's what we're focused on. Okay. You set new targets too recently for subscriber growth. You've recently spoken also about a bigger TAM, which includes 135 million adults who are interested across your variety of products, including, I believe you said 25 million for paid sports journalism. What gives you confidence in that number? What's the market research that kinda supports that? How should we think about the catalysts path as you try to penetrate- Yeah. grow that market? Let me touch on the target first. We had said in 2019, beginning of 2019, we said 10 million subscriptions by 2025. Obviously, beginning of this year we said we've achieved 10 million subscriptions. The acquisition of The Athletic, you know, put us over the top there. Just to say we would've gotten there, we believe we would've gotten there without buying The Athletic, much faster than we'd originally projected. Now we've set a new target of 15 million subscribers. I say subscriptions versus subscribers. That number 15 million would be larger if it were expressed in subscriptions today. That's the new target by year end, 2027. You referenced we've also updated our sense of what the addressable market is. We've been saying for years now, probably three or four years, we think there are at least 100 million people in the English-speaking world who will pay for a digital news subscription, and there's lots of data out there now that supports that. The Reuters Institute does a study every year that essentially validates that market is forming. I'll say our own experience validates that market is formed. We announced, I think, 1 year ago that we've got over 100 million people have now registered with The New York Times, and that number is still growing. That's how we get to the news number. We've now done this additional research, very deep research that says when you add to news shopping advice with Wirecutter and recipes and games and sports, we think the TAM is at least 135 million people, still in the English-speaking world, with willingness to pay. As I think you referenced, 25 million people just in the United States who say they already pay or are willing to pay for a sports subscription. You asked, I think you asked me about what I think kind of catalyzes penetration there. I'll just remind you know, 10 million subscriptions equates to, as of the end of last year before The Athletic, I think 7.6 million subscribers. It's a huge market. We've got a really low penetration even with The Athletic, so there's a lot of running room. We think the bundle, the idea of harnessing kind of the whole of The New York Times is gonna play, I think, the most catalytic role to getting at that, at that market and getting it at higher penetration. Yeah. Let's talk about the bundle. I mean, as you're increasing your focus on that strategy with your growing suite of subscriptions, what's the right philosophy on the operational focus and approach to cross-pollination? You know, is it something that we think from a marketing perspective you need to shift, or is there something other than that you believe you need to change in your business model to be able to more optimize- Yeah. toward that success? All good questions. I'll say like, you know, the answer is kind of yes to everything you've said, but the big idea here is you harness the whole of The New York Times offering to penetrate that TAM, and that means a few things. I think you're poking at one of these things. You know, I think there are brand implications of that, so we're really focused now on kind of widening the understanding of what is the brand New York Times. New York Times as something that kind of means more to more people. We're running a brand campaign right now that gets at that. It's called Independent Journalism for an Independent Life, but it's focusing on subscribers, and it shows you a collection of headlines from all the stories that are personally relevant to them, real subscribers, real stories, and that gets at sort of the brand meaning more to more people. That's one. The bundle as a merchandising strategy and as a way to unlock more of that market is a big part of that. You know, what that research, the 135 million tells us is largest number of people are still interested in news, but then you've got, you know, different numbers for the different products we believe will unlock a lot more willingness to pay, if it's, you know, news and sports, news and games, you know, cooking and games. There's a lot of value there. I would just say, there's a whole kind of programming aspect to this that we're just at the dawn of unlocking. If you go to our homepage now, even with all that's going on in the world, the top of that homepage is dominated, of course, as it should be by Ukraine. If you scroll down on the desktop or in the apps, presented a little differently in both places, you're gonna see a carousel of recipes, and you're gonna see shopping advice. At the bottom of the app you're gonna see, I think, today there are four games at the bottom of the app. There might even be five. Wordle is not there yet. You know, so we've got these surfaces, the homepages, the morning, even the daily. We've got all these surfaces now where we can sort of program recipes and shopping advice and sports information, and all of that is meant to unlock kind of this broader value proposition. You've also spoken about some newer initiatives around Audm and a kids how-to product. Yeah. How should we think about the outer reaches of what makes sense as a distinct subscription versus a part of your core product like, you know, wellness or parenting? Do you think this distinction matters less over time? Are you interested in other genres where you think that this playbook of creating these distinct brands that are separate makes sense longer term? Yeah. It's a good question. I would say both of the things you're poking at are important. One is, we've got a pretty full plate now. I don't rule out that there will be other genres or spaces where we say we wanna add to the bundle, but right now, you know, we've got some big products, The Athletic, Games, Cooking, each have more than 1 million subscriptions as of today, and we intend. You know, they're in big spaces that occupy a lot of time from curious people, and that's the focus. Just as an example, we put a beta out for a parenting product, I wanna say two or three years ago, and we ultimately said, "You know, there's a real audience here. There's real engagement. In fact, while we were doing this beta, our ambitions got a lot bigger on cooking games, and we said the space for a new product has to be pretty big for us to say it's gonna be an independent product that can stand as part of a bundle. We moved parenting into the core and said it's a newsletter and it's a desk and it's thriving as that. You referenced the investment we've made in a beta for audio, and that was grounded in an acquisition we made a couple years ago of a read-aloud audio app called Audm. We also have a beta coming for a kids how-to app. I'll say very candidly, it remains to be seen will those things ultimately become products in their own right that we market as part of the bundle, or will they become just part of the engagement strategy of the broader New York Times? To your sharp question, I in some cases there, I'm not sure the distinction matters. What we're looking for is how do you engage this much larger group of people to get to 15 million subscribers and then ultimately beyond that. Okay. As you focus on that increased bundling, how does that impact your pricing and promotional strategies, you know, both on a standalone product basis as well as you using discounts to enhance the all access bundle? Yeah. What's your thinking around how the evolution of pricing will impact your broader consumer adoption? Yeah. I'll talk about that. Let me first say, I think one of the attractive things about our business is that we believe given where we are in the penetration journey, big TAM, low penetration, and given where we are, I just described to you a bunch of places where we're investing in value. We believe we can grow volume and grow revenue kind of, and you know, volume and ARPU at the same time. I think that's unusual, and that's a big part of the bet. You're gonna hear us talk more and more about subscriber ARPU and its importance even while we're trying to grow volume. To your question about how to think about promotional pricing strategies for the bundle, we've been using promotional pricing as long as I've been. I've been at The Times eight and a half years. I think we've always been pricing promotionally. We've had different price points. In, I wanna say 2018, we started using a pretty aggressive discount of $1 a week for news, and that has really worked. We now have like three or four years of building a model where we can use a promotional price to bring someone in. The very act of getting them to subscribe helps them engage. Then we have a lot of machine learning and other know-how now about how do you get them to engage, and then ultimately, how do you determine do you step them up to an interim price or do you bring them all the way up to a full price? We wouldn't continue to use promotional pricing if that wasn't working really, really well, and you can assume we're gonna do the same. The characteristic of what we do on the bundle will be like what we've done in news. By the way, we just started doing it on Cooking as a standalone product, and we're quite excited about that. It's gonna look like that. Ultimately, the bet is a bundle is a higher value product with higher lifetime value. Right. I wanted to go back on the refining of the customer journey. Yeah which you know just talked about. How should we think about the incremental work that you're doing there? 'Cause I think you mentioned in 3Q that you benefited from some tighter restrictions around the paywall, but then, you know, in 4Q some of that eased. Can you share with us any lessons that you have taken away from some of that? Yeah tinkering and experimenting and how, you know So, so- How does that refine that? Yeah. Totally. One of my big lessons, I kinda came up through the ad and the subscription business. One of my big lessons on the subscription business is, like, early on, we would think, like, we're gonna run out of room to optimize the journey. You know, we're gonna run out of room to protect the funnel. It hasn't happened yet, and particularly as we widen the value proposition, widen the product set, I think there's always room to do more optimization. What I think you're referring to is, early last year we said we were arriving at a phase where we were getting ready, and I think that in the second quarter and into the third quarter, to unleash a number of new optimizations to the model, in kind of two buckets. Bucket one was using machine learning in a more sophisticated way to say, "When do you ask people to pay? When do you intervene? How much engagement do they need before you try and convert them?" Then also some new product interventions around how you delineate between that which is available to everyone and that which is only available to subscribers. Both of the things I just described involved interventions that sort of tightened or restricted access a little bit more. We put a bunch of those optimizations out. They all really worked. What we described, if you remember, we had a very strong third quarter, particularly in news, and we described that what we would do from there, as we would normally do, was kind of calibrate the gearing so that we weren't just getting a lot of conversion, but we were also continuing to build the top and the middle of the funnel. As we did that, and we tried to describe, you never do it quite perfectly, that that's how we were thinking about the fourth quarter, and in fact, it played out exactly as we suggested it would. You're gonna see us, particularly now as we have multiple products, a bundle, multiple funnels, you're gonna see us doing those kind of calibrations and gearing on a regular basis. A similar question for The Athletic, and putting aside the content side of the equation for a moment, what part of The Athletic's customer journey and subscriber management practices can The New York Times apply its own learnings to fuel greater growth than it? Yeah Could have on a stand-alone basis? All of it. One of the great things about The Athletic, different space obviously, but the fundamentals of the subscription business and ultimately the ad business, we believe is there, just looks so much like our current business. We've got, you know, I think we've been doing this, like, twice as long as they've been doing it in subscriptions, many years longer in advertising. You know, what do the character of those interventions look like? You know, The Athletic has a pretty tight paywall today, and one of the things that's done a lot to drive the growth in The Times, we've grown, I think we've grown subscriptions sixfold in the last half dozen years like as long as The Athletic's been alive. One of the ways we've done that is we've really widened the distribution of Times journalism. We've opened up the funnel and widened the audience. We intend to do that with The Athletic. That is a know-how thing. It's also a technology thing, so we're very prepared to do that. We also have been doing a lot of work on having a deliberate customer journey and sort of a deliberate management of people through a funnel on The New York Times. That's the most prominent thing you would recognize that we've done there. In 2019, we launched a registration model for The Times. The Athletic doesn't have that in a big way today, so you can assume we're gonna do something similar on The Athletic, and there are all kinds of optimizations that come with that registration model, including using email newsletters and commercial emails, a much bigger lever. There's a ton we've learned on The Times about how to re-engage people. You know, a user who may have come once but not come back, how do you re-engage them? We're very prepared to do that. Then of course, there's the whole arsenal of things around selling The Athletic to current Times subscribers, using The Athletic as a retention tool, for The Times, selling The Times to current Athletic subscribers. We've talked about the fact that the overlap today is quite modest between the two properties, so you know, upselling, cross-selling, bundling. There's just a lot we cannot unlock there, and we've been experimenting with that with news, Cooking, crosswords now for some time. Then finally, it shouldn't go without saying, big ad opportunity, and I think the character of that business should look similar to ours. You mentioned leveraging email marketing to kind of do that cross-selling, and also down to, like, real estate landing space. Yep You can kind of orient. Is there any other clear opportunities where you can communicate effectively to one set of subscribers and promote it to another? Yeah. I mean, there are so many. We have so many programming surfaces in news. Those are the biggest ones with the widest audience. In the standalone products. Sort of endless opportunity. What I'll say is we're pretty early in doing it, so there's a lot of optimization room there. The one that just happened this week. It's not an Athletic example, but this week, this past week, you know, a couple weeks ago, we migrated Wordle onto the domain of The Times, much to Twitter's, whatever is the opposite of delight. That happened, and then last week, on that Wordle page, we actually got up pretty quickly. There's a menu now, so like a little, the hamburger menu. You see the other games, so you can play Spelling Bee, you can play Vertex and Tiles, I think you can play them, obviously play crosswords. Below it, you can go to The Athletic, you can go to Wirecutter, you can go to Cooking, you can go to news, and so forth. I think, like, that's the beginning of the promise of all of this stuff. Got it. My score transferred just fine. Yes, I guess. I got my first two guess tries, so I was pretty happy with that. We kept saying, like, the standard answer was just refresh the page. It's not that hard. Refresh. For The Athletic, going back to that. Yeah. I mean, you charted a path to reach accretion over the next four years. Yeah Even while investing behind more content and more data analytics. Where do you see the most opportunities to gain additional operating leverage to get you to that target over that period? Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing to say is that The Athletic inside the family of The New York Times is just a much more valuable proposition, not least because of the enormous, you know, audience and programming opportunity we open up for them. I try and make people see that in the easiest way I see. I say, literally just go to the homepage and look at what we do for Cooking and imagine a version of that for The Athletic, and there's just tons of running room under the surface there too to use The Times to widen the distribution. That's a big part of it. If I were to say more technically, it is, you know, how do you get to leverage? We acquired The Athletic because ultimately we wanna accelerate our strategy, and we wanna build a larger and more profitable New York Times Company, and we will get there through all the things I've just described to you on subscriptions, individual Athletic subscriptions, more people buying The Times because we own The Athletic, more people buying The Athletic because it's part of The New York Times and a bundle. We're gonna get there through advertising, and I would say today, The Athletic's ad business is tiny. It's, you know, it's podcasts and a little bit of video. You know, they basically don't have display advertising. We've got a huge thing to unlock there in terms of value and potential for revenue in the first-party data products that we've built at The Times for advertisers and the canvases, and even that is, you know, we'll open up new categories of advertising. We'll open up more inventory of advertising. We just, you know, we've already got this great channel to a bunch of marketers, so we're really excited about that. I'll say one other thing, which I don't think we've been asked about a lot. You know, The Athletic is a whole media company, and so I would just assume all the ways that The Times as a media company with, you know, with proprietary original IP in a space a lot of people care about, all the ways that we can make money, even beyond subscriptions and advertising, likely apply to The Athletic. The last little thing I'll say is we did not buy The Athletic because we thought cost synergies were the main thing, but that doesn't mean we won't find them and find more efficiencies as we go. Great. I wanna squeeze one last one in and maybe open it up for a question in the audience if there is one, so you can raise your hand. Maybe one from me just on margins. Touching- Yeah On margins. When you talk about investing behind the opportunity ahead, how should we consider the investment priorities on what's needed to retain a market leadership in news relative to all the exciting opportunities that you're kind of building out with these other services like Cooking and Games and The Athletic? Yeah. Let me make a precursory comment, which is we are endeavoring to build a larger and more profitable company, and we believe you know the path from 10 million subscriptions to 15 million subscribers moves us more in that direction. We have gotten to where we've gotten, I think, different from many of our competitors, first and foremost because the first dollar in the place always goes to the differential value and quality of the journalism of the news report, and we're gonna continue to invest in that, I think, in a differential way versus anything else. I think we're in a position because it's the biggest driver, has been the biggest driver of the business, and we think it will continue to be directly or indirectly the biggest driver of the business. That said, we are in a position now because of all the investments that have been made over a long time horizon. There's a lot of value across our product set to be unlocked, and that's what we're focusing on. You'll see us, you know, make investments here and there, Wordle as something that's additive to our Games portfolio or just some of the features in the Cooking app about how to use a recipe. The message for this room is we'll keep investing, and we're in a position now to do it across the product set, but there is a lot of value already there, and our work in this period, a lot of it is about unlocking that value for users. Great. Thank you so much. I think we're out of time unless there's one last question to squeeze in. Meredith, thank you so much for your time. Pleasure to be here. I appreciate it. In person. Thank you.