Okay, we're gonna get started. My name is David Karnovsky. I cover media, entertainment, and advertising at J.P. Morgan. Very happy to have back at the conference, Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO of The New York Times. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you. So you frequently refer to The New York Times as the essential subscription product for someone wanting to understand and engage the world. At the core of that is journalism, but increasingly, it's also sports, cooking, games, and more. How do you see the Times brand and position with consumers evolving as you push into non-news spaces? Yeah, that's a great place to start. You're asking a question about the brand. I'll say I think The New York Times always endeavored to be the world's best news destination, but also to mean more to people. And I think if you go back in time, and maybe some of you still have this habit, but if you think about what the Sunday New York Times did, you know, it was- Right world-class news journalism, but it was also exposure into culture and your passion areas and whole, you know, variety of lifestyle topics and games and recipes and, and so forth. And I think what technology and digital transformation have allowed us to do with the essential subscription strategy is to make the experiences of news journalism and now also recipes and shopping advice and, and sports journalism and games, that much more engaging, and it's also allowed us to really broaden, obviously, the distribution of all of those things. So I think it's not just today about meaning more, but it's about meaning more to many more people. That's fundamentally what the essential subscription strategy and its three pillars, leading in news, building market-leading lifestyle products, and putting that together in a bundle are all about. I would say what that does for the business, what the sort of question you're asking, widening the brand means, makes the business more resilient. And I think it does that in two ways. You know, it makes us more valuable to huge numbers of consumers, no matter what is going on in the news world or in the sports world, and, you know, whether it's cooking, certain cooking seasons or, or not. And I think that the more valuable we are to consumers at scale makes our secondary revenue streams, that much, you know, better and poised for growth. So advertising, affiliate, and licensing all get better from that as well. All right. That's a great overview. At earnings, you highlighted subscribers are spending more time with your products than at any period since the pandemic. I don't think we would say the news cycle is abnormally elevated, at least relative to what you saw during COVID. So what's driving that greater time spend? Yeah. I mean, I will say it's still pretty- It's still pretty elevated. Interesting time — Yeah, yeah. No, no, no in the world. That's why I said not overly. Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah. And we did. To your point, we did say that, in the first quarter, we were at, I think, a three-year high. So basically for subscriber engagement, which is the highest we've seen since the pandemic. But it's still a really interesting time, obviously, in technology and the environment and geopolitics and politics and so forth. It's. I'd put what's driving the high subscriber engagement in two buckets. Both are grounded in continued investment into really distinctive products. On the news side, you know, we have invested relentlessly and with a lot of purpose into coverage so that we're doing beat reporting and, you know, even more expansive and modern ways, and we have more enterprise and investigative reporting. Our live journalism is better, so the coverage itself is getting broader and deeper. The formats for our news journalism are getting more varied. The two examples I would say, if you're users of the Times that hopefully you've seen, for folks in the room, we now have much more reporter sort of camera-facing vertical videos. So if you've got a reporter, Maggie Haberman, covering the Trump trial, you'll now see her or some of the other reporters describing what they're seeing. In addition to, you know, text articles, they'll give you a camera-facing video about what they're doing. We've added a lot more audio to the report in lots of different ways, and we're just generally making the report more accessible through those formats. Also, you know, you're gonna increasingly hear us talk about using AI to make the report more accessible, and we've got some experiments there already. Right now, you can listen to a lot of the Times in automated voice, which makes the report more accessible. So all of that, I would say, is good for subscriber engagement. And then, of course, in addition to that, we've also invested in the other areas of the portfolio. You know, games, you can very obviously see the addition of new games, helping to drive subscriber engagement, but you could look at each of the other products and point to new things that weren't there six months or a year ago and so forth. One factor we talked about last year, and even prior to that, was the challenge of non-subscriber traffic, especially as the platforms de-emphasized news. Yeah. Maybe you could talk to the actions you took to widen the funnel and maintain the connection with the casual audiences as opposed to the subscribers. Yeah. If I go back to your first question and say, what's the just kind of reduced down human language version of the essential subscription strategy, I think it's actually the best answer to this question, which is: We are endeavoring to make products so good and so valuable to, you know, great numbers of people, that they are going to ask for them by name and seek them out and find them and form a relationship with them, develop a habit around them, however the information ecosystem evolves. That's sort of the point. That's what we're trying to do. And we made, you know, a couple of very big calls very early on in the journey, like 8, 9 years ago, that are really paying off now and helping build resilience in the business, even against a really complicated time for audience. One of them is, we said we had to have direct relationships, and we manifested that most directly 5 or 6 years ago, when we launched a registration model for The Times. We now have something like 150 million registrations. And by the way, continued investment in our news product and the non-news products is allowing that number to keep growing, and the non-news, news products can add to that. We use those registrations to be in regular touch with people. We have, you know, more than 15 million people who read, not get, but read an email newsletter from The Times every week, and that number is growing, and the portfolio of newsletters is getting, you know, broader and more valuable. We also made a decision very early on in this strategic journey, again, 8, 9 years ago, where we said we had to be a destination. We wanted to be in news and now in sports, in recipes, and in games. We wanted to be an app that you would go to, and we've strongly encouraged, particularly in news and games, people to download and use our apps. And when they do that, we have more ways to be in touch with them. We can alert them when something happens, we can alert them when a new game is published or a new piece of news comes out, and you'll see us do that increasingly. And by the way, The Athletic app is on a journey, and that's gonna keep getting better and better, and you'll hear us increasingly talk about that. I think historically with NYT, there was a focus from investors on news cycles, and the idea was you could add— Yeah Large cohorts of subs around elections or periods when there was a consistent live story, like the pandemic. How much do these cycles still matter to you in terms of hitting your goal or your long-term goal of 15 million subs? Yeah. I would say the strategy has been very intentionally designed to harness demand wherever it comes from, in news or sports or cooking or games or shopping advice. In news specifically, I would point to what I said earlier about really continuous and very deliberate investment to drive engagement around big news topics wherever that story goes, in kind of broadening and deepening the coverage and that format innovation I referred to, and continuously making the report more accessible. You're asking about elections specifically. I'll say, you know, today versus four years ago, all of those things are kind of richer and better, and in addition to that, we've got a more substantial polling operation, plays a bigger role than it did four years ago. You know, in this particular election, the candidates are quite well known to us, so we're able to produce more journalism about how they will govern and what's at stake. So I feel really good about our preparedness on the journalism front to meet that demand wherever it goes. I would also say, because you're asking about sort of storylines and the path to 15 million, I think we're very well prepared to harness demand and news on any story, including the election. And we also have these other products, games and sports in particular, that are in pretty early stages of the journey in terms of being able to add, so you know, play a role in bringing new subscribers into the Times ecosystem. Well, let's touch upon games as it relates to engagement then. So, I think the stat you gave last earnings call, tens of millions of weekly users for Connections and Wordles. For both of them now, yes. For both each? Yes. Okay. And there's a new hit. I think it's still in beta. Strands. Strands. Maybe talk to the progression there, right? So how do the success of games grow the total audience, grow the total engagement? Yeah. I mean, the first thing to say is, with games, we just have a product people really, really love, and we know they love it because we see the very strong user engagement. And even, you know, we acquired Wordle, and then we were able to produce Connections as a homegrown hit. Strands is newer in the journey, but homegrown, and I, you know, feels like it's on the path. We'll see, but on the path to being a hit. And all of that is able to point great attention to the games we already had, which are great. So, you know, we had this great game, Spelling Bee, which is behind the paywall, that acquiring Wordle helped us, you know, direct people to it. So I would break it down for you in two ways. I would talk about audience, and I would talk about engagement. In terms of audience, tens of millions of people come, and they play Wordle and Connections. So they play a free game, and when they play that free game, we then have the chance. That's, by the way, first, a funnel for us. It's a source of audience, source of prospects in a fairly complicated time for audience, which we're incredibly excited about. And increasingly, people ask for those games by name, so they do that in search, or they do that, you know, an app store search, that's a great, you know, wonderful kind of flourishing funnel for us. And then we can show them other things that are behind a paywall. We can show them Spelling Bee, we can show them news, we can ask them to buy. We actually just launched, you know, Spelling Bee past puzzles last year, a big hit with subscribers. We just, I think, a week or two ago, launched Wordle archives, so Wordle past puzzles as a subscriber benefit. So you come to play a free game, but there's all this stuff behind the paywall that could be of interest to you to compel you to buy a game. And then we are adding-compel you to buy games, by the way, or the bundle. We are adding new features regularly that engage people. So whether it's if you play a game, you probably care about your stats and streaks, you know, that plays a role in engagement and bringing you back. We have forums for regular game players that bring you back. I would add, we have lots of opportunities in the moment in those funnels to ask you to buy the whole thing, ask you to buy the bundle, and if you don't buy it, then we have lots of opportunities later to market it to you. Got it. I want to shift over to the bundle. You recently disclosed around 4.5 million bundle or multi-product subs. Yep. Some portion of those are $1-a-week subs that you brought on for 6- or 12-month promos. Maybe you can discuss a bit what you've observed as these cohorts reach their expiration periods. You know, to the extent someone is not just engaging with news, but they're also looking at cooking or games, what does that mean in terms of their churn, willingness to pay a higher price? Yeah. Let me, let me say a couple of things about that. The first one we've said for a while, but it's worth reminding people here. To the extent we can get you to engage in more than one product, and it's usually news plus something else, that is a great signal for we have levers to get you to engage more, we have levers to get you to retain longer, we have levers to get you to pay more over time. So that's sort of the broader game we're playing, and it's why we talk about subscriber engagement so much and the strength of the prospect funnels, particularly in the new areas of the portfolio. The other thing I'll say is, we have long asserted that we believe on the strength of that engagement and also the distinctiveness of the products, that we have real pricing power. And when we've used that pricing power, when we've leveraged it, you know, throughout our history, the results thus far have been quite good. So, you know, we continue to believe that price is a lever we have in sort of both, both the ways you're asking about it. On the cohorts you're referring to specifically, so bundle subscribers who will be up this year either because they came in on a 12-month promotion or a 6-month promotion to go up in price, it's early. This is a very big year for that. So far, we really like what we see, and we have, you know, many more people who will come to the transition to higher price moment. So far, so good. We're very encouraged by it, and that all gives us a lot of confidence that, you know, the objective we have out there, which is for modest increases year on year to ARPU, that we're very well positioned for that. Okay, maybe staying on the subject. So at earnings, you talked to increasing confidence around raising single product pricing- Yep. Over time. For context, you raised prices on your core news product, I think it was in 2020. Yep. Then again last year on all your single products. Last year w e raised prices on News, Games, and Cooking. Right. Okay. Tenured subscribers. So should we view your comments as a shift at all, and that you could use pricing, you know, on the single products as a more regular growth driver from here, and the long-term guide is modest ARPU expansion, right? So should we think of kind of outright price increases or maybe graduating promo subs as the sort of primary mechanism to realize that? I think you can take from what we said, we have a lot of confidence in what we've got out there, which is modest increases to ARPU, and that it's gonna come from both of those things, and we sort of see it all as a system. But, you know, some portion of it will come from people who come in and buy the bundle, and over time, we transition to higher, higher prices, either in one or a few goes. And I think given the distinctiveness of the products and the fact that we are continually adding value to them, I think we've got pricing power sort of across the board, in the single products. Got it. I want to talk, sports. So increasing- I want to talk sports, too, but I don't want to talk about the Knicks. No, me neither. Really disappointing. Very. Unexpected- Unex— For me. Yeah. Unexpected. No, me too. It was devastating. So increasing brand awareness and engagement has been a goal of yours since the acquisition? Yeah. I've actually personally enjoyed your live game blogs on The Athletic, followed that yesterday. Maybe you can discuss more, some of the ways you're driving more time spent here. How do major events also play into that? Yes. Like, is the Olympics a big boost? Oh, all good questions. I'll just remind you, we've got really big ambitions for The Athletic. We wanna do in sports what we've done in news, which is build a, you know, world-class market-leading destination, in this case, for sports fans. And we are early, but we feel like we're well on our way to that. How do we do that from a coverage standpoint? You know, when we acquired The Athletic, it was awesome at covering teams, teams and leagues, but really for fans of particular teams. We're still gonna be awesome at that. We're very focused on that, and I would say that's getting even more sort of polished and edited and intentional and deliberate. What we are adding in addition to that, and you're referring to this, is doing even more to own and dominate the sports news day. So kind of like the Times dominates the news, news- Yeah Today, The Athletic aspires to really be the place you go just to know everything important that's happening in sports. And I would say real investment into the live game moment is playing a role in that and more to come there. And then we also. You know, we've got a giant team of journalists on The Athletic. It's 500+ people just in the sports newsroom. That is very, very big, and that puts us in a very strong position to swarm the big story in sports wherever it's coming from. So incredibly focused on that from a coverage standpoint. I'll say, though, you're asking me kind of about brand and making people aware of it. When we acquired The Athletic, it had 1 million subscribers. Very few people beyond that even knew it existed. So we are also doing, still doing quite a bit of work to open up its hard paywall, reduce the friction, give people reasons to engage and come back. That live game moment and the sort of owning the sports news day is part of that, and we'll get better and better at that as we apply, you know, the sophisticated Times technology to do that. The last thing I'll say, and this is new and different this year, we now, at The Athletic, is the major source of daily sports news in two big places. It's the major source of daily sports news on The New York Times. Right. That's new, relatively new. And we also did this deal with Apple News Plus. The Athletic is the major source of expansive daily sports news on Apple News Plus, and both of those things should go a long way to helping people know it's there. So logical follow-up to the engagement and awareness question for The Athletic would be advertising. As background, I don't think beyond podcasting, you even had ads prior to late 2022. What's the reaction from marketers to putting inventory out there? It's really good. It's good. We're, we're excited about the ad business for The Athletic. We got ads on the site, I want to say, in the fall of 2022, so display ads. We did have a podcast business. By the way, podcasts will continue to be important at The Athletic. We're tweaking the portfolio, kind of in the spirit of some of the things we've done with The New York Times podcast portfolio. But Athletic is really working in advertising in a handful of ways. One, it's just bringing new advertisers to the broader portfolio. So, you know, think beer and consumer packaged goods, like sports drinks and betting and apparel, things that wouldn't have necessarily advertised with the Times. Two, we're getting more share of wallet from Times advertisers that have multiple products or brands that may not have put them all in the Times. There's now another, you know, another source of targeting. It's a green field, so, you know, there's a lot of interest from advertisers, and sports in The Athletic is new, so we can do some new and different innovative things. For example, you know, we've expanded women's sports coverage and early on, had a lot of marketer interest in sponsoring that and underpinning that. And then I would say we're gonna take all the things that make Times advertising really efficacious and really work like first-party data. That will come online this fall at The Athletic. So we're quite optimistic about The Athletic's ad business. And as we grow brand awareness, that makes marketers more interested, and as we grow audience, it's not perfectly linear, but that makes the ad business have the opportunity to be bigger. Following up on extending your ad product with Games, right? Yeah. Tens of millions of users, so obviously a lot of engagement sitting outside the sub base. Yeah. What opportunity do you see with the advertising there? What's also the right format or marketer for Games? Yeah. I'd say similar to The Athletic, what we have on Games, so, you know, more share of wallet from the marketers we have, or marketers even just saying, "I wanna be over there because that's really hot. You've got a lot of audience." And we see a real opportunity to bring in new and different kinds of advertisers. If we look at the new advertisers to Games so far, it's a lot of consumer brands that may not have spent or spent as much with the Times. And then I would say over time, today, the ad products look quite similar to the ad products on the Times, but we've done some really cool things with sponsorships, you know, because of the nature of Games, and that's very compelling for marketers. But I think over time, we'll have the opportunity to experiment with new ad formats that we don't necessarily have in a big way on the Times. So I would just say both Athletic and Games present, you know, big, new potential areas of growth for advertising that we're excited about. Great! Maybe, stepping back and covering the ad market more generally at earnings. I think you said there was a pickup in demand so far in Q2. You know, how much of that is driven by the broader market versus actions you're taking? And then your guide, I think, is for high single-digit digital growth. That's not like the wide range we've seen in some prior quarters to that. Is it - does that mean you have less volatility that you're basically seeing at the moment? I would. Let me start on the second part of your question. I would say we have more visibility for Q2 as of, you know, the time that we reported earnings, and that sort of additional visibility reflected, you know, in the second quarter, some pickup in demand and also some confidence about our ad products. I think the broader thing to say is, you know, we've continued to feel some amount of marketer news avoidance. We talked about that. Yeah. in the— you know, in the last quarter, but we do have a lot of confidence that we have a lot of very compelling supply coming online in games and sports and also in news. And I will say that news itself is quite a broad thing at the Times. One of the things I highlighted at earnings was our continued investment within, you know, what we consider news, but in science-backed health and wellness coverage, which, you know, is very appealing to consumers and also to marketers as a space. So I would say we are broadly optimistic about our ad business, even if visibility for the second part of the year remains limited. For the medium and long term, we're broadly optimistic. Okay. Other revenue, that's a catchall for— Yes. A number of items that's consistently outperformed at least our model for several quarters. A big part of that seems to be Wirecutter. Yeah. Maybe can you walk through some of the growth drivers there, better SEO, Apple, more categories? I mean, it strikes me there's still some large product areas, cars, credit cards, right? Like that- Yeah. Maybe they could get into. Let me talk for just a second about other revenue. What we've said about other revenues, specifically, we expect growth in Wirecutter and licensing this year, so just want to anchor in that. And Wirecutter has just been, you know, a great and consistent source of revenue growth. And we expect it to continue to be for a handful of reasons. One, I don't know, you know, never say never on cars and sort of bigger ticket items, but we do feel like in an ROI-positive way, we can continue to invest into coverage of the kinds of products we already cover, but in more spaces in a way that will drive growth, and we're doing that. I think I mentioned that in my prepared remarks on the earnings call. And also, we're doing a lot of the things we're doing on the broader Times that we think will drive growth at Wirecutter. We're using our direct relationships to use email to expose people in sort of big shopping moments to things they would be interested in. We're doing format expansion in a way that engages people differently. And as I just said about The Athletic, we now have Wirecutter featured pretty prominently on the Times core surface, and it will also be part of Apple News. So just broadening awareness for it, we think is gonna play a role in its growth. I complained to Will in the past that I couldn't find Wirecutter on the app, in the— Now you can. Oh, okay. So it's in there. Now you can. All right. I stand corrected. On the web homepage. So, also— Let me make one more comment about that, particularly in moments where it's high shopping time and people are thinking about shopping. Got it. Also within others, your licensing business, when we look across the news landscape, we have seen, including recently, a number of competitors, you could call it, like, news adjacent, reach agreements with AI platforms. So how do you think about the opportunity of, of licensing your content there? Yeah. Well, let me make the most important point first, which is we produce an enormous amount of high-value intellectual property. We have done that for 172 years, much of which is copyright protected, and we continue to produce fresh, new IP at real scale every single day. And we think that will continue to be of great value to everyone, and the primary source of our value creation. In terms of what we're seeing out in the world, I think we're seeing that, you know, to some degree, the LLMs have willingness to recognize value of that content and pay publishers for content. We think that's generally a positive signal. I'll say we are prepared, given the enormity of value we have, to enforce our rights around our own IP, you know, in whatever way that takes. We also have a real track record of doing deals with big tech companies when we feel like those deals are consistent with our business strategy and honor our IP rights and have fair value exchange in them. Maybe staying on the AI topic, presumably there's a number of use cases across your platforms. You touched on a couple earlier. Yeah. Like audio conversion, but maybe mass translation as well, ad targeting. What excites you from a product perspective? Yeah, I mean, the first thing that excites me. Let Let me just say very broadly, we think AI used in, you know, in lawful ways could produce, you know, a real increase in access to our journalism and the ways we can engage people with our journalism. So we are incredibly excited about it. We also believe that what we do, you know, at real scale, human-made news journalism and human made and tasted recipes and product testing, shopping advice and puzzles, and sports journalism. I think that's only gonna get more valuable in the world we're headed into. The four places where we feel particularly excited about experiments that are, like, in the world now, I'll mention, but it's early. This is just the beginning. We've got a lot of kind of time and energy and our best and brightest people focusing on this. One is language translation. So we've got an experiment we've had out for you know, a little bit of time now. It's relatively modest in scale, but you can see the implications of it if it goes well, where we are trying to augment Spanish language translation of the Times, augment the work of humans. We really like what we see so far. It's early. The tech is early, it's all early, but like what we see so far there, and you can imagine that across languages. I'll say a little more about the audio experiment that I mentioned, and by the way, we have multiple audio experiments going on, kind of at any time, on the Times, in our core app and in our audio app. But what we've done with generative AI is it. You can now a portion of our audience can now listen to great swaths of the Times. Most of our content, except the live journalism and except opinion, I think magazine may be excerpted. You can just listen to it, and I would just say, keep telling people I'm a runner, and so, you know, I can just, like, hit the play button on an article, and I can consume vastly more. Yeah Times journalism than I used to be able to do. So that's a second experiment we're quite optimistic about. We've got an ad experiment that is in test right now. We'll go to market in the third quarter called BrandMatch, where we are able to take the whole corpus of New York Times' digital content and match what marketers are trying to accomplish, so match their targeting priorities to that. That sits in addition to, and almost like above, what we can do with first-party data at the user level. So we, we see big potential there, and that's something that'll come online this year, and if it works, it'll get better and better over time. And then I would say, in the journalism itself, using generative AI to do things like pore through, you know, vast reams of public documents— Right. Or to track things. You know, there was that story, I think, like, a year ago on the Chinese spy balloon. We actually used AI to track that in a very profound way. So I would say it can help augment what humans are doing in the course of journalism. And just— That's all just at the beginning. Just two follow-ups. You said augment Spanish translations, so you're doing a little bit of that now. This would just be more articles, and then audio conversion, is it a generic voice? Is it the- It's an automated— Author. It's an automated voice. So there is another audio experiment where you can listen to reporter reads, both in the core app and of course, you can listen to our podcast or in the audio app. But the thing I'm referring to is listening to the text, New York Times- Right Articles as written today in an automated voice. Okay. Got about two minutes left. Let me just cover expenses. So you recently guided to 4%-5% adjusted cost growth for the second quarter. Spoke more broadly to a disciplined investment from here. Where are you focused from a resource perspective? Is there opportunity to kind of reallocate from— Yeah. Areas? I would say we've got a very good track record now of sort of asserting our cost discipline and pretty relentlessly reallocating resources on a regular basis to areas of highest impact. And what we've been very focused on is cost discipline, so that we can continue to invest in the areas that drive the most value creation, which are our journalism across all the domains we now play, and the digital product experiences and underlying tech that help people find and experience that. And I think we're doing quite a good job of that, and we, you know, remain on track this year for AIB and AOP margin growth and to continue to deliver healthy, free cash flow. We also remain on track for the midterm targets we've put out, and we're doing that while investing in these things that we believe will really drive medium and long-term further value creation. Okay, maybe a final one. So New York Times, now prominent news, sports, game, shopping, lifestyle. Any other verticals you see an opportunity in? Yeah, listen, we never say never, but the bar is really high. We really love the portfolio we have, and I would say we still have great running room in that portfolio within particularly News and Games and sports. You know, I've talked about where we're still investing in News. The world's certainly not gonna get less interesting, and formats are gonna keep making that more accessible and interesting. People in Games and sports, early days. And, you know, we think we've got real growth levers there to further realize. So I don't—a nd Cooking and Wirecutter, too. So I don't rule out that there's another space, but— I'd— Certainly, you know, the strategy is currently contemplated. You know, we really like what we have and see a lot of running room within it, and the bar is very, very high for anything else. All right, great. One there. Thanks so much. Right on.