NYT CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Running a Media Brand in the Age of AI

Meredith Kopit Levien has been CEO of the New York Times for six years and at the company for thirteen years total. She frames the Times as an essential service for curious people, with a brand promise built on trustworthy, independently produced content spanning news, games, recipes, and sports.

Levien rejects the idea that hard news is a loss leader subsidized by lighter products. She says the first dollar in the company goes to high-quality independent journalism and that this work is the most economically value-creating thing the Times does. The newsroom is the largest in company history, with approximately a thousand more journalists than when she joined, not counting the Athletic and Wirecutter newsrooms. The Times deployed roughly seventy journalists in and out of Ukraine last year and maintains reporters in Sudan and Myanmar. Levien defines her role as keeping the company economically healthy enough that no editor ever has to decline a coverage decision on cost grounds, and she says deployment decisions are made by editors without CEO involvement.

The Times is making what Levien calls a very big and ambitious push into video, targeting audiences who currently consume news-adjacent content on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. She distinguishes this from the earlier industry pivot to video, which she characterizes as a cynical attempt to capture advertising dollars without genuine audience demand, and says the Times did not meaningfully participate in that wave. The current strategy is framed as expansion into a white space for high-quality journalistic video, not a replacement for reading or audio. The Daily podcast remains audio-only and continues to perform well. The stock sold off after the last two quarters including the most recent earnings announcement, reflecting investor anxiety about the costs of the video investment, but Levien argues that making great things takes time and resource.

The Times has sued OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. The OpenAI and Microsoft suit has been running approximately two and a half to three years, and the Perplexity suit was filed last December. All three suits allege that AI companies used Times content without permission, without control, and built competing products. Levien argues that companies spending tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars on talent, compute, and power should be paying sufficient value for the high-quality journalism and creative work they use as training data. She says any acceptable licensing deal requires clear permission, control over all uses, and a fair value exchange. The Times has separately done a licensing deal with Amazon for use of its content by large language models, while some other media organizations have pursued usage-based fee arrangements with AI companies instead.

The Times spent close to two billion dollars last year producing approximately half a million works of content, drawing on roughly 175 years of accumulated work. The company has nearly a thousand people in digital product development and three thousand journalists and content creators. Internally, the Times designates high-quality journalism as human-led while using AI to improve efficiency in supporting tasks. Practical applications have included a tool to comb approximately three million pages of Epstein files for patterns, AI analysis of public records on Trump cabinet appointees, determining that the Sidney Sweeney jeans controversy originated on the right rather than the left, and sorting aerial imagery to quantify how many tennis courts had been converted to pickleball courts. Levien acknowledges that no executive can yet give a credible answer on long-term token spend or AI headcount impact because the industry is still in an evaluation period.

The Times has spent close to a decade shifting distribution away from platforms toward its own controlled channels. The pricing strategy is designed to get everybody under the demand curve, with most subscribers starting the news-entitled bundle at one dollar a week before stepping up to a much higher price. Levien says every opportunity to move subscribers to higher-priced tiers has gone well. The Athletic had roughly 450 journalists at acquisition, had very few editors, and has grown by about 100 people since, with a substantially larger editing layer added after the Times hired a senior editor from the Washington Post to lead the newsroom.

Joe Weisenthal argues the Times has effectively become a monopsony buyer of great talent in the news business and that local outlets have largely lost the ability to maintain dedicated reporters as a result. He raises the possibility that there may be room for only one such destination in the English-speaking world and flags uncertainty about whether the educated, curious audience the Times depends on will eventually splinter toward ideologically or interest-specific content.