Nieman Foundation at Harvard
What’s the life cycle of change for a modern news organization? How about 18 months?
“We are finding that about once every 18 months, there’s some new big strategy statement,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson told me this week after the announcement of a digital reorganization that included the promotion of CRO Meredith Kopit Levien to EVP and COO, and the elimination of Kinsey Wilson’s EVP of product and technology position.
“I think this is probably my third digital reorganization, and I haven’t been here five years yet,” Thompson said. “We are constantly course-correcting, adjusting as we make progress. A new opportunity and a new shape becomes possible, and we move to the new one. This won’t be the end of it: Everything is moving, our audience is moving, technology is moving, and we are working hard to make sure the organization is moving too.”
Levien is the Times’ first chief operating officer since Janet Robinson held that position in 2004. In her time as CRO, she focused on transforming the Times’ ad business with high-profile ventures like the T Brand Studio.
Then she drilled further into the Times’ already successful digital business. She and Clay Fisher, the Times’ SVP of consumer marketing and revenue, are credited inside the building with professionalizing what had been a “paywall experiment.” The Times led a movement that normalized reader subscriptions for digital news.
In the shuffle, Kinsey Wilson, a pivotal figure in legacy-to-digital transformations at USA Today and NPR before the Times — leaves his full-time position as the Times’ editor for innovation and strategy and EVP, product and technology; that role is being eliminated. For now, he’ll stay on in a less-defined role.
Today, the Times has a lot of confidence. It has more than three million print and digital subscribers and has been adding new digital subscriptions at the rate of almost 100,000 a month for six months.
Thompson is placing most of the business side in Levien’s hands, though he retains direct responsibility for “data” and “technology.” The COO title positions Levien, 46, as a potential successor to Thompson, 59.
I talked to Thompson and Levien about succession, about the key reasons for this restructuring, and about how the company looks at Thompson’s 10-million-subscriber march.
Meredith and I both agreed in 2013 that advertising essentially had to be reinvented in the company. Everyone said that was true of print advertising, but it was even more true of our digital advertising. We just had to think about it in an entirely fresh way.
I also felt, though, that we had to move from the classic newspaper circulation department to a state-of-the-art digital marketing operation, and I thought Meredith was the perfect partner to work on that. We threw in the creation of brand marketing efforts and brought David Rubin in from Pinterest.
We’re looking at where the consumer is going, what they are seeking from the experience, before we define our our structure, our product…[We want] the person on the other end of the journalism, who is making a habit of our products, to be at the center of every decision that we make. We want to make it easier and better for them to engage more and more with journalism.
If you like the core experience of New York Times journalism, we want to make it more relevant to different kinds of audiences and other countries. We want to help the newsroom make it more multimedia. That’s one way of increasing the value we get from engaged readers and building the number of engaged readers.
There are also very interesting questions about adding features and enhancement, in the way that the crossword product and the Cooking app do.
We’re always deciding whether these should be separate, freestanding apps, standalone products — or whether they should be things that we bundle into different portfolios of value, driving different levels of subscription monetization. We have to have a richer product set when we think about how to monetize the user.
You plan to launch Cooking as a paid product in a month or so. Is it possible that by the beginning of 2019 — 18 months from now — you might have three additional paid products? Is that in the ballpark?
We’re also very interested in whether there are opportunities for us in over-the-top television. We love the idea of a suite of additional products. The combination of our crossword product with our core product, in terms of encouraging some subscribers to pay more for the Times, is extremely encouraging.
For the first time in the history of the company, and arguably for one of the first times in the history of legacy media, we have the beginnings of a fundamentally integrated approach — where we don’t just have an audience strategy and a journalism strategy and a product strategy and an advertising strategy and a subscription strategy, but we have a strategy that has all of those elements.
Kinsey Wilson has done a fantastic job for us. His vision, his insight, his contacts, his instincts about what I sometimes call the ergonomics of digital, are vital. He’s still helping us with our digital vision, and I’m going to be working more closely with him over the next nine months than I’ve probably done in the past few years.
I hope that our newsroom will have close, direct relationships with Meredith and some of the key colleagues in operations. We don’t need an intermediary, a sort of marriage counselor, because of the progress we’ve made. It can be very direct and practical now.
The New York Times is now 21 years into the digital story. It launched its website in 1996. Even if everything goes well, if you’re talking about transitioning over to a fully digital New York Times, I expect we’ll be printing The New York Times for at least another 10 years.
This is a long story. It’s the application of innovation, the courage to make significant changes, making sure you’ve got the right talent and the right studies in place, and excellent implementation over years, to make sure the Times is a successful, flourishing, digital company.
It’s a really long game, and we’re up for it.
