Get started. Thanks for joining us today. I'm John Hodulik, the media from the Media and Telecom and Infrastructure team here at UBS Research. And joining us today from The New York Times is CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. Meredith, thanks for being here. Good job on the pronunciation. Thank you. It's two years in a row. Yeah, well done. Thank you. Well done. Thank you. Very happy to be here. So before we get started, a quick reminder that The New York Times management may make forward-looking statements today. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions, which may change over time. Management's actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties that are described in The New York Times 2002 10-K and subsequent filings. I think Anthony owes me a beer after that. Let me know- Well done! Yeah. Well done. Thank you. So to kick us off, it's clear that the strategy you guys laid out is starting to have a positive impact. Can you talk about what's working best, and what you see as the biggest challenges for The New York Times over the next few years? I'm happy to do that. Let me actually start by saying, as a reminder, we have three pillars to our strategy: build and be even more of the world's best news destination, build and keep advancing market-leading lifestyle products that help people make the most of their lives and passions, and put those two things together in an interconnected multi-product bundle that makes the Times relevant in tens of millions of people's daily lives, no matter what's going on in the news cycle. So let me talk about how we're kind of measuring where we are in each of them. On the first one, world's best news destination, I think, you know, in an intense moment for news as we're in now, I think you see it in the work. We're covering so many topics so broadly and so deeply, and I'm sure we'll, we'll get into that. So that's, you know, the obvious evidence, but we're also seeing real continued strong engagement from our subscribers, and we're seeing that even as we grow, even as we cross 10 million subscribers. So I'd say that's, that's really encouraging. On the second pillar, market-leading lifestyle products, so many things I could talk about, but I'll, I'll just mention a couple of them. We continue to see real engagement for games. Tens of millions of people are still playing Wordle every week, and they're doing that even as we do other things that are driving a lot of engagement in games. So we said in our third quarter earnings call that we now have a homegrown game, first one since Wordle, that has 10 million and counting users Connections. So that's a real success. And the rest of the games portfolio is really benefiting from Wordle, bringing so many new people into games. And then we have, I think, made real progress. I expect we'll get into this in detail. In sports, we are super excited about The Athletic. We have big ambitions for it. What you've heard us talk about so far is we're growing audience for it. Very excited about that. We think the journalism is becoming even more widely known, which is quite important, and seeing lots of success there from an engagement standpoint. And then as far as the bundle, I would say that's a place where it's just going better than we expected. More people are choosing to buy the bundle at the point of converting to become a New York Times subscriber, and more, more are choosing to buy it than we expected. It would do better from an engagement and retention standpoint than our news product, and that is, is in fact the case. So overall, going well, I'd say you asked me about what's, what's hard. Right. We're still in a backdrop of an information ecosystem that feels like it's challenged, with platforms sending somewhat less traffic to news, and that means we see less casual news audience. But the reality is, the strategy that I just described to you is designed for that. It's designed to help the Times be resilient to a changing information ecosystem and to whatever's going on in the news environment. So maybe could you tease out sort of why New York Times is having such success when the other public when many other publishers are struggling? I mean, I think, you know, we've been reading about some of the layoffs happening now at The Washington Post. Is it the bundling, is it the news, or what do you think are the main drivers for why you guys seem to be sort of rising above the pack? Yeah. Well, I'll say a couple things there. First, I want to say, I think the opportunity for really high-quality paid digital journalism and recipes and shopping advice and sports journalism and games, it's a big opportunity. We're in a big market. We think there's plenty of room for The Times to keep growing. We have a relatively modest share, even in the leadership position, and plenty of room for others to succeed, and we want to see that. I think a healthy, you know, success across the board is good for everyone, so we certainly want to see it. Why we are succeeding as we are right now, I would point to a few things, and it's really the design. You know, the strategy was designed very intentionally in a few ways. First, I think we made some really big, hard calls in the business 7, 8 years ago, that you're seeing bear fruit now. We answered, like, 4 really big questions in a counter-conventional way at the time. Now they seem obvious, but we said, "We're digital first. We're subscription first as a business." We said, "We have to be a destination, something people come to and ask for by name." We said we were in the business of scaling direct relationships, and we've been doing those things and sort of asserting those ideas in our business now for more than half a dozen years. And so that's the first reason I think we're seeing success that is bearing fruit and the foundation of the chapter of our strategy we're in now. The second one is we have invested continuously in our journalism, I think to the benefit of its kind of differential value to the consumer, and also now in games, and recipes, and sports journalism, and shopping advice. And I think that's allowed us to, you know, build products that are, in fact, more valuable. And then third, in the, the chapter of the strategy that we're in now, I would say we have a model that is designed to harness demand for a consumer, wherever that demand is. In any given day, or week, or month, or year of someone's life, we're gonna be interesting to you because the news might be particularly interesting. Hopefully, we're always interesting because of that, but also because we have games you want to play, and there are times a year you're gonna cook more, or shop more, or pay more attention to the teams and leagues you cover. So I would say that's the strategy. That's all the strategy at work. That makes sense. Follow-up to that, I mean, you said that you hope the best for all these other sort of similar or companies in sort of- It's not just that I hope for the best. I think the world society needs- Right. Right. Everybody in the journalism business benefits from a healthy information ecosystem. Right. Agreed. Okay, so, you've provided investors with two key sort of midterm financial targets. Yeah. The 15 million subs by 2027, and the 9% to 12% annual growth in adjusted. How are you tracking towards these goals, and how do you and the team balance sort of profitability versus growth and- Yeah. Good, good question. Look, we feel really confident about our strategy, and we feel excited about the progress we've made and are continuing to make toward the target. So we, we feel really good about where we are. And on the question of sort of balancing short term, medium term, long term, I would say, I think at this point, we have a really good track record of making big, long-term decisions. Decisions that are meant to do really big value creation in the long term, that also benefit the short and medium term. That, you know, because you're on the path to that very strong long term, you're actually creating value in the short and medium term. And, you know, on, on the... To what degree do you have to trade them off? I think we've shown that we can kind of do all of it at the same time, and when you know, if forced to choose bigger long-term value creation or do something that, you know, wins you the short term, we're gonna choose the former, but I think we show that that we're creating value the whole way through. Gotcha. And when you think about the growth path, you've said that the trajectory could be nonlinear. Yeah. Does that suggest you could have a spike in growth during what was maybe what we're in now, like, an intense news cycle or you know, how should we think of that? Yeah. Okay. I think that's a great question, and I would say the model, the multi-product portfolio, the strategy, the model is designed to harness an uptick in demand, however that uptick in demand might come. It could come from the news cycle, could come from a moment in the sports calendar or any of the other... You know, for any other reasons, you know, time of year where people cook a lot. So that's really the model at work. The reason we talk so much about nonlinearity is because in any given, you know, in any given quarter, there are any number of puts and takes happening from the decisions we make around price, to the consumer, to the platform dynamics, to the actual calendar of things happening in the world. So that's why we've been careful to say, "Don't, don't expect the growth to be linear." At the same time, I hope what you're getting from what I'm describing is that we have real confidence that we've got a lot of growth levers sort of in the model, and a lot of different ways we expect to grow from here. Right. You know, obviously, Gaza is a big part of the news cycle now and driving a lot... I would imagine, driving a lot of the engagement. And obviously, this presents real challenges for the New York Times and, especially for the people on the ground. Yeah. Which is, you know, it's hard to imagine. But, how do you think about covering a conflict like we see today in Gaza, you know, in a world where many people under the age of thirty, you know, you guys are... Like you said, it's sort of digital first. So it's a subscription business. There's a lot of focus on getting the story out as quickly as possible. You know, and again, this is a world where a lot of people under thirty, like my kids, are getting their news, for better or worse, from social media, from TikTok. How does that affect how you both operate on the ground in a situation like this and run the business in general? Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me talk about that in absolute terms, what do we do to cover a war, and then in relative terms, because I think you're asking me what do we do in the context of an environment where many, many people are on TikTok and- Right ... other platforms. Look, in absolute terms, I think that it's important to say when there's geopolitical conflict at the kind of consequential level we're seeing it now, with the Israel-Hamas war, and even with, you know, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and we're now coming on two years- Right ... of war there. I think the Times work is even more vital, and we're proving that out in a lot of ways. We have now dozens of journalists on the ground. You asked me how we're covering it. We have dozens of journalists on the ground in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Egypt, in Lebanon. They have produced that. That group of people has produced more than 1,000 pieces of journalism since the Hamas attack on October seventh. They've done it, to your question about TikTok, they've done it in a wide variety of formats. A huge number of those pieces of journalism have been video, they've been multimedia. They're not just kind of traditional articles, they've been visual investigations. The objective here is to bring people understanding in as kind of comprehensive and fair a way, and full a way possible, every day, every week, for as long as the conflict is going on. I'll say two more things. The Times has, like, a century of expertise. We've got a newsroom of a couple thousand people now, and we've got a century of expertise covering the region. You have people like Tom Friedman, columnist, who's worked for The New York Times, I think, coming on five decades. He has. His work has never been more relevant. His expertise covering the Middle East has never been more relevant than it is today. And so I would say what I've just described, the work, is the work of independent journalism. Every story doesn't just sort of take a day to play out. I'd say that the best way for people to experience the Times now is follow us on that story for the day, for the package of coverage, for the week. It's many, many of these stories take a while to play out, and we think, you know, in a world, to go now to relative terms, where many people are getting their information from TikTok or any platform, what the Times does, what other outlets of independent journalism do, is even more relevant. And we're, we make it our business to say, "How do we do it in a way, format-wise, style-wise, voice-wise, where we, we can be relevant to a generation of people who are also on TikTok? It sounds like you sort of flood the zone, right? I mean, thousands pieces of- That's the, it's the best way to describe it. Then do it on with different genres as well. Not just print- Certainly ... but with all kinds of video and any kind of... Just so you could appeal to the broadest swath of people. So when you get so with an event like what's going on in Gaza, do you, is there a... I'm sure it doesn't reach to your level, but other people say, "Hey, we need more videos. We need more, you know, social media entry. We need more," you know, I guess it's called X now, "X entry." You know, is that something that, you know, where you're, you're adjusting from just, "Let's just get the articles out," to "Let's make sure we have a sort of complete package of- Yeah. Let me, let me say, I think you're pushing here on how do we think about innovating in the journalism itself and the way the consumer experiences it. We think about that in terms of our format. We think about it in terms of the style of work we do. We think about it in terms of the voice and format. I already told you that a huge swath of those 1,100 pieces of journalism that we've produced, something like that, huge swath of them are video or multimedia. I'll give you an example. We have a Paris bureau chief named Roger Cohen. Roger Cohen has spent three or four decades covering geopolitical conflict. He's got a lot of experience in the Middle East, similar to Tom, Tom Friedman. Roger Cohen lands in Tel Aviv. You know, this is, this is a guy who's worked for a long time in journalism. He lands in Tel Aviv a couple of days after the initial Hamas attack. What is the first thing he does? He makes a TikTok that describes to the world what is he seeing, what is he experiencing when he comes out of Ben Gurion Airport. And what does that do? That is showing TikTok, what is the- how is the New- what is a New York Times expert doing here? But also, it's, it's a signal of what you're going to get when you, you come back to our site. So we are also, format-wise, one of the ways we've covered the war in Israel, particularly, is through visual investigations, where we take something like the Gaza hospital bombing, and we have an investigations team who works with user-generated and other video to say what really happened here, and gives a comprehensive portrayal of it. Outside of war, but in that same spirit, I'll tell you now, when we put a big piece of enterprise journalism or an investigation that our reporters have worked on for months and months and months out, we'll put it out on the homepage of The Times, and we'll put it out now with a video trailer where the journalist is saying, "I've just completed this investigation. It's a couple of minutes. Let me tell you about it." And either you're getting the summary that's there, or it says, or it makes you want to go and actually read the investigation. So Megan Twohey, who's the journalist of Harvey Weinstein fame- Oh, right. Sure ... she said, just did a big story on Kanye West and Adidas and their relationship. And we put that story out on the site, and you get a quick video of Megan explaining it to you, and you say, "Do I wanna read it or not?" So we do that, you know, lots and lots of format innovation. I would add to it, our voice is evolving on The Times. If you read The Morning newsletter, it's much- that David Leonhardt, the author of The Morning, is talking to you in a much more casual way than you're used to in a typical, you know, text news article. And I would add, if you listen to our podcasts, or engage- I was gonna go with a podcast. ... with our audio app, you're hearing reporters who are talking about their work and the host talking about their work in a different style, in a way that I think allows you to build a more intimate relationship. So we're constantly thinking about how we do that in the work to engage more people, and I think it's bearing out in our delivery of the strategy. Makes sense.... So along with that change in sort of the technology, AI is a topic that's come up a couple of times here today. I mean, is AI a friend or foe to The New York Times and, or maybe to the news business in general? Yeah. Listen, we are really excited about all the opportunity that we think AI will, you know, is presenting, will, will continue to present. I would say there, there are three things we're very, very focused on right now. Put this in your kind of friend category. You said friend or, or foe. Right. We think that what I just described to you, the sort of scale of human beings with expertise, doing trustworthy journalism with boots on the ground in places where conflict is unfolding in real time. You know, the Times is doing that at a huge scale in news, and we also make recipes that human beings make and taste with expertise. And we give you shopping advice from products tested by human beings and so forth. We think the value of that against a backdrop of lots and lots of synthetic information, sort of in the information ecosystem, what we do is only gonna become more valuable. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is we have a lot of optimism that generative AI will help us make our journalism, you know, in potentially really efficient ways, that much more accessible to millions and millions more people. And I could talk at length about that, but we think it'll allow us to get in front of many more people, get our work in front of many, many more people. And will also likely make some of our business processes, and even some of the aspects of journalism that don't require a reporter, an editor, deep expertise, more efficient, so that we can invest even more in the journalism. So that's the second thing we see. The third thing I would say is, you have to imagine we are thinking very, very deeply about how valuable our intellectual property is. We have an enormous amount of intellectual property, and we're thinking hard about what is the right manifestation of that value as the internet evolves around generative AI. Gotcha. So, you know, thus far in the presentation, we've talked a lot about the bundle and the broader sort of portfolio of products like games, sports, and cooking. How do you look at these categories? And, you know, we talked about sort of events like we're seeing in Gaza, for instance- Yep ... drives subscribers and engagement. Do you look at these genres as a sort of way to retain these customers, or are they themselves also another sort of driver of growth? I would say, you know, yes, and certainly having a multi-product portfolio, we believe widens the TAM, widens our, you know, the number of people for whom The Times should be relevant, as a product portfolio, one. Two, it helps people convert. We give you more reasons to actually be willing to pay. I think I've already said, bundle subscribers engage more and retain better, so we believe it helps people stay longer. And then I'll add another thing, which we've been talking more actively about, which is, in an evolving information ecosystem, it also gives us multiple funnels, multiple ways to just bring people into the Times that are in sort of different, at different stages of maturity, and that's a really positive thing, even as the information ecosystem changes for our, our long-term growth. Gotcha. Turning to the economics of the digital subscription business. Yeah. First of all, how do you measure engagement, and how has it been trending? And then can you talk a little bit about churn in that business? You know, I follow a number of companies that have digital, you know, from Netflix, who we just saw, to other smaller providers, and the churn is obviously a huge value driver. So how do you sort of manage that, and how would you say that your churn compares to some of these others? Yeah. Sorry. So, measure engagement, we are intensely focused on two things. One, the percent of subscribers who are on our site or our apps, same thing, you know, who are on our destinations on a weekly basis. We are really pleased with how we're doing there. We actually said in the last call that subscriber engagement was at a, I think, close to a three-year high, maybe at a three-year high. So that's, that's the first thing we look at: Can we get you to come every single week, and ideally, multiple times a week? Second thing we look at in terms of engagement is, can we get you to use two or more of the products in our portfolio on a weekly basis? This one is newer and quite important. If we can get you to do that, the likelihood that you will stay longer and pay more over time is greater. So... And we've got lots of ways to stimulate cross-product engagement. A lot of what we're doing in our product work is getting you to do that. You drop on, you know, to play Wordle. Can we get you to read a news story after that? You come, you know, to see who made the college bowls, who's playing in the Rose Bowl, one of my teams, and hopefully, we can get you to play a game after that. So those are the things we're focused on, and I would say broadly, really pleased with weekly engagement of subscribers and hard at work and making very good progress on two plus engagement. On churn, I'd say we feel really good about where we are. You know, the bundle is designed to be more retaining, and we've seen that play out because we have many more ways to engage you, and we think we've got lots of room to keep as we bring new subscribers in, even as we grow the base, to keep churn to a very manageable level. This is a place where I'd say we've made a lot of progress, particularly in the last few years. In churn management. Yeah, churn management by engagement management. Right. Got it.... So how does your, your scale and subscription news help you sort of manage churn and the overall value of the bundle? Yeah. You're pushing on economics there, and I'll just say our largest and most important growing revenue stream, digital subscriptions, is also our most durable. And having those two things kind of both be the case, that's quite important to the economics. And I think we've got, you know, we've got sort of a system going. I won't use the word flywheel, but it's close to that, where we, you know, we are at a scale now where we've got people who, as they experience more value, we can bring up in price, either through interim to higher prices or directly to higher prices, because there is so much value there, and we've got lots of levers to get them to experience that. What that means for us, so you've got, again, big kind of durable, growing revenue stream in subscriptions. What it means is, in an environment where the cost of capital is high, and where we want to keep investing into the things that constitute our moat, even as we're building a larger and more profitable company, we can do that because we're producing a lot of free cash flow. Got it. You mentioned ARPU. Your overall ARPU is going up, but if you look at the categories of subs, the bundle sub-ARPU is actually going down. So if you could talk a little bit about the drivers there? Yeah. Then, you know, when can bundle ARPU stabilize? The important thing to watch here on ARPU is blended digital ARPU. Is it going up year-over-year? That it has been, and it is our plan for it to continue to go up. That's actually the thing to watch. What happens to bundle ARPU, specifically, when we are really pushing as many people as we can to buy the bundle, is a function of how much new growth we're getting. So the much more important thing to watch is that blended ARPU. And we've got, you know, I just described to you a long track record of bringing people in at promotional prices and then stepping them up over time. I'd say, I think you may be poking at this: we also have a track record of demonstrating that we have pricing power, right? You know, a few years ago, we did our first, in many years, price increase to new subs. That did better than we expected it to do. This year, I think we started last year, we've been raising prices on tenured, certain cohorts of tenured news subs. We've got a lot of data about engagement that helps us do that, in a really responsible way, and similar on, on games and cooking. So I would say, in general, we feel very good about our value-based pricing strategy and that we're sort of moving through all of the components in an effective way. Got it. So maybe turning to the advertising side of the business. Your range of guidance is a bit wider- Wide and more Q than normal. Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about the visibility in the ad market and what you're seeing from marketers, and whether or not the strong engagement that you spoke of can help offset an uncertain ad- Yeah - backdrop? Let me tell you- You're not the only ones, by the way. We've had some other media- Totally. It's not that. Yeah. Totally. We've been watching what everybody's saying all day. Okay. Let me just say two things, kind of at a high level, not direct answers to your question, but both relevant. Highly engaged subscribers is like the high-octane gas the whole model runs on. So, like, there is no more important sort of input to the business, you know, other than the quality of the products, and one is a function of the other. So I do want to acknowledge that because you poked at that. And secondly, we have an ad business that really benefits from that high-octane subscriber engagement. We've got a giant number of people who are registered with The New York Times and whose data we can use in privacy-forward ways, and we have a premium environment with a small number of ads on a page, big canvases, with lots of first-party data. The ads work. So we really believe in our ad strategy, and we think it's, you know, it has a very bright future, particularly as we extend our ad products beyond news to sports and games and, you know, potentially more to recipes and shopping advice. So let me say that first. On the quarter, why the wide guide? It has been an uncertain macroeconomic environment for a year now, more than a year. I think we all feel that, and we've seen that in our own sort of ability to call it from quarter to quarter. So we widened the guide because of that. You add a second sort of deeply geopolitically consequential war to that, and that brings even more uncertainty to ads. And then we have had two particular sort of one pressure point, one big uncertainty point. Print is the big uncertainty point. It is really hard to call until it happens, how print is going to go. And podcasts, which we believe in, long term, very much, it's been a volatile market, particularly for us, in our news podcast. So for all those reasons, it felt appropriate to say, you know, a broad range of things, of outcomes could occur here. Gotcha. So maybe a couple more topics. First, sports. The Athletic shows particular strength year-over-year growth, and I think you said you grew audience at The Athletic. Yeah. Could you just discuss your ambitions as it relates to sports journalism? And then how would you define success? Is it profitability? Is it audience, or- Yeah ... yeah, what's the strategy? We have really big ambitions here. I'll answer how we define success first. We want to be the most important brand in global sports journalism for the teams and leagues we cover, and we want every fan of those teams and leagues that we cover to know what The Athletic is and to engage with us. So we are, you know, imagine, you know, a globally dominant brand in news that is a standard bearer wanting to do the same in sports. That's the ambition in sports, and we are, you know, it's early days. We couldn't be more excited that we acquired The Athletic, and we are very, very excited about the progress that we're making to what I just described. On economics, we were really forthcoming at the point of acquisition about how we thought that trajectory would go. Acquired a business that was losing money, we said it was gonna lose less, kind of with each passing year until 2025, and we are on track, and in some instances, running even a little bit ahead of that economically with The Athletic. And there are two things that I would say we are especially excited about: quality of the journalism. We hired a killer editor. The Athletic already had an amazing team. We've added to that team, and they're getting even more relevant on the big sports topics. I would say if you did care about college football, you probably knew The Athletic was around, you know, this past weekend, and for the last, this last stretch. So journalistically, we're very excited about what they're doing, but with much more to come and much more sort of audience and awareness to build. And advertising, it's been a green field and going very, very well. Like I said, lastly, on games, basically. Obviously, big success with Wordle, a homegrown success with Connections. Are you playing? I'm not, actually. I'm, like, the only one- You are the only one. But, obviously, this seems like an interesting area. How... Again, I guess same question for The Athletic. I mean, with The Athletic, I mean, how big could this get? I mean, it would—how important is it to the overall- Yeah ... strategy? And then, you know, again, you show success on an organic basis and on a sort of acquisition basis. I mean, how should we think of you guys- Yeah ... evolving the business going forward? Look, we picked these spaces, sports and games, and to some degree, cooking and shopping advice, but particularly sports and games, because they are giant spaces where people spend an enormous amount of time and passion and energy, and you're seeing us execute against really, really big ambitions. I'd say in both, particularly in sports, it's early days. In games, you know, we bought Wordle. Wordle is this magical hit. What it has been is a really consistent, amazing driver of tens of millions of people coming to The Times on a regular basis, and a megaphone to all the other things we're doing, a megaphone to the other games, and a megaphone to the rest of The New York Times, and we intend to keep bearing down on that. Even before we launched Connections, which everyone should play, tell everybody about, and it's awesome. It's a big hit. It's awesome. We made it ourselves and scaling fast. Even before that, what happened with Games is it was, you know, it was this megaphone to say: We have Spelling Bee, and we have Tiles, and we have Vertex, and we have The Mini. And so it brought new audiences to all those games, which are these incredibly high quality, kind of unique, sticky experiences that are like nothing else out there. So you can imagine we're going to be doing more of that. To the extent you're asking me, are there other spaces? Right. Are there other things we should be doing? I'll leave you with, we are very excited about the portfolio we have. We think it's broad. We think each of our products plays in a space where there's a lot of running room. I want to say, news, we are so long on the world, just needing more and more of what we do over time. News cycle will ebb and flow, demand will ebb and flow, but over the long arc, we think news is... People are only going to need more of it. So we love the portfolio we have. We're very focused on executing really well and ambitiously against it. We don't rule out there will be other spaces like that. That's great, Meredith. I I think we should, we should leave it there. Thank you very much. Thank you. Nice to be here.