Meredith, tell us why Nicholas is wrong.

I'm going to tell you what The Times is doing.

And let me start by saying a few things are true here at the same time.

The Times turns 175 next week.

So we have seen lots and lots of eras of profound technological change.

And I think the Times has sort of faced them all ultimately with the belief that we should be harnessing technology to make our journalism richer, to have it land with audiences with even greater impact to tell stories we wouldn't otherwise be able to tell.

And I'm confident through this and whatever the next great technological changes that we will keep doing that.

is a ceiling at some point here?

Yeah

... to most things.

I listen to a lot.

I actually listen to automated voice of our articles most mornings while I'm running so that I'm, I'm caught up on what's on the, the homepage of The Times.

I would regard this effort in video, at least at The Times, as following a belief, and I think there's just clear evidence that it's there, that there is, there's a huge amount of people who read And listen, and we're getting a lot of those people, by the way, still running room left there.

But we have-- we are doing really well with a lot of those people.

And then there's a giant audience of people who watch, and they watch, what do they watch? Some watch news.

... you've tread the line

How do you look at the environment right now and what's changed for the Times, for example? 'Cause you're one of the few that succeed at this.

I mean, listen, I say whatever success we've had means we've lived to fight another day, right, on behalf of journalism in the, in the public's interest and our business and the industry.

Um, the core of our strategy for a very long time has been to do high quality news journalism and make lifestyle products that are so goddamn good that people seek them out and ask for them by name, and form a habit with them, make, like, real room for them in their lives, and love them so much they do them with the people they love, their friends and family.

That is the big idea here, and I would say there were a few things that we decided, like, a long, long time ago that are still playing out now and really helping the Times succeed.

Like, one through eight on a list of 10 is we just kept investing in the journalism.

I've been at the Times 13 years.

I think there were about 1,300 people in the newsroom when I got there, something like that, more than a decade ago.

Phew.

Aren't you guys the perfect enemy, and that is you don't get along and form coalitions?

coalitions?So many questions in there.

Um, l- and th-- yeah, no, no, let me, let me try and get at at least a few of them.

I-- The, the first thing I wanna say is I think everyone running a, a business doing high quality independent journalism, doing original journalism, um, thinks of the other companies doing that sort of first as, um, as in the same pursuit and thinks about protecting that, that pursuit.

And, and I wanna say as it relates to the, um, enforcement of our intellectual property rights, um, we, you know, we have, um, taken the actions we've taken, uh, to benefit The Times, but we've also taken them because we think we've got a really strong, um, we, we've got a really strong story in terms of how much intellectual property we have, how long we've been doing it, how much of it is copywritten, um, and we, we think that that, um, is quite important to how, um, how things go from here.

And we thought we had a big opportunity to do something here that was important for The Times, but also important for journalism more broadly and, and important for society, um, in terms of, you know, there being a, a continuously sustainable model for high quality independent journalism.

And by the way, over time, probably important for the LLMs because the LLMs need high quality information sort of coursing through their, their, um, their models as well for the models to actually be, be good.

At some point, you're gonna have to have a board deck that says, "This is how we get to fifteen million in the next five to seven years." What are the areas and what type of new types of content do you think will drive incremental subscriptions?

I mean, to be and to be perceived as.

It, it, it's a great question.

Let me, let me say it this way.

I think, look, we are living in a time of low trust, um, in a tribalized and deeply polarized country where it is very easy for people, for any of us, to kind of retreat to our ideological place or to, to get most of our media in, in a filter bubble.

Um, and, no doubt, The Times takes its lumps from ideological camps and particularly from people who have an entrenched worldview who do not want that worldview challenged.

Um, no doubt.

But I wanna tell you, I'm, I'm out all over the country, I talk to liberals, I talk to conservatives, I talk to leaders, I ta- I talk to people who are just living their lives, and the universal thing I hear from people that gives me enormous hope for the country and for journalism, people...... believe there needs to be a shared fact base.

Mm-hmm.

But tell me what you think the, the true values of institutionalism are for, for modern creators, um, that you've seen, uh, across all the products in your portfolio.

Yeah.

I, I get asked all the time, do you think, um, you know, it, it must be hard for the Times as like a big hunk and institution to have an audience, to be relevant, to feel relevant when there are so many individual voices that now are, are drawing giant audiences.

And what I wanna say is, um, we are for all high quality independent journalism growing.

We have long said, you know, the, we, we are trying to help make and support and develop a market where people pay for high quality independent journalism.

Individual people pay, platforms pay.

Anybody who gets value from that work pays, and I think the more of, more high quality journalism that people engage with and run into in their lives, the better.

Mm

(laughs)

... really valuable intellectual property, journalism, other kinds of, of content and, um, you know, a, a giant corpus of copyright-protected content.

Um, I'm gonna say, just like stepping back broadly, we, you, every other media company here operates in an ecosystem shaped by, um, in most cases, very big tech companies.

And The Times has a really long track record of doing two things, I think, pretty well.

One is finding the right kind of partnerships and commercial agreements where they make sense for our, our business and our brand and our, our long-term strategy, and I think we also have a good track record.

You know, we didn't always do it at speed but, but, um, I think we've gotten it right more than we haven't.

Good track record of sort of harnessing technology to make the report better, you know, to make the journalism richer, um, richer, broader, and to make it accessible to many more people.

Jonathan Swan, yep.