The Long View: Interview with Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO of the New York Times Company

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Cold OPEN: … “I used to describe the strategy of the company a decade ago as five words, basically make something worth paying (for). In our case, make journalism worth paying for, and do that against a backdrop of free and less expensive alternatives.”

“The Angle” Music

Eric Veiel

Welcome back to The Angle from T. Rowe Price, a podcast for curious investors. I'm Eric Veiel, head of global investments and chief investment officer here at T Rowe Price Associates. In these special episodes of The Angle, I'll be talking to CEOs and industry leaders as we pull back the curtain on what it takes to lead a company in today's fast paced and ever-changing business landscape. Each episode features candid conversations, real world insights, inspiring stories of success, and hopefully a little fun.

In this episode, I'm joined by Meredith Kopit Levien, who is president and CEO of The New York Times Company. Meredith is at the helm of one of the oldest and most established newspaper organizations in the world. She joined The Times in 2013, and has served as chief operating officer, chief revenue officer, as well as head of advertising prior to becoming the CEO in September of 2020, a position from which she has led the company on a transformation into the digital world. Welcome to The Angle Meredith. It's great to have you here.

Meredith Kopit Levien

I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Eric Veiel

So the New York Times is truly a fascinating company and business case study really. I guess when any company's over 175 years old, it will have seen major change. But maybe no industry has changed as much as the newspaper business. I think we can probably agree on that. Daily circulation peaked at over 60 million. Now it's probably somewhere below 20 million by industry estimates.

Meredith Kopit Levien / Eric Veiel

For the newspaper industry.

For just the newspaper part. In America. Exactly. Yep, yep.

Eric Veiel

You know, to personalize this a bit, my first job when I was 12 years old was delivering newspapers and, when my kids were 12 years old, that job didn't even exist in our area anymore. So, it's been through a lot of change. But through this, The New York Times has really reinvented itself.

In 2019, the firm set a goal to get to 10 million subscriptions, and it met that ahead of schedules. Congratulations. And now you've stated a goal to get to 15 million subscribers by 2027. Tell us a little bit about that transformation, how you succeeded so far in an industry that's, you know, really become a bit of a headwind in terms of the overall trends.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah. Happy to be here. Happy to start by talking about that. I think the, the, first thing to say, just to set context, is that we are probably at the tail end of a wholesale transformation of the, what we used to call the newspaper business. Obviously it's, it's, you know, anyone doing high quality independent journalism but a wholesale transformation of the market.

It's probably taken 25 years, and I think we are, somewhere between the tail end of that transformation and the very sort of rapid and dramatic beginning of the next transformation, which, which I hope we get to talk about. If, if I had to boil it down to kind of two things that, have really underpinned the story of why The Times is where it is today, through that, very significant market transformation. It’s one, having a really clear strategy, for a lot of that time and actually mostly the second half of that 25 years, having, you know, staring hard at the tough questions and coming up with really sharp answer answers to them and then sticking to them. So that's,  that's the first thing. And then the second thing. And not every company gets to do this. And it's such an important part of our story, really giving it the time to play out, giving ourselves the time, to see that our answers to those tough questions were the right ones. And if you'll humor me, I'll sort of tick off. What do I mean by clear strategy and sharp answers.

Eric Veiel

Yes please. Please tell us a little bit about that strategy and how you've ended up.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Happy. Happy to do that. The, the, I used to describe the strategy of the company a decade ago as five words - basically make something worth paying (for). In our case, make journalism worth paying for, and do that against a backdrop of free and less expensive alternatives. So, the, the, core idea here is that we make highly valuable and really differentiated journalism that is valuable and relevant to people at great scale. And I'll say it at greater and greater scale. And do that, do that, you know, no matter what is happening as, as the market is transforming around you. And one of the ways I think we've been able to do that is, you know, in good times and bad times at the New York Times, the first dollar of investment goes to the quality and originality and independence of the journalism, of the products and to the digital product experience. So that's, that's kind of the, the most important thing that we've done over that last, you know, dozen years or so, to, to make the strategy work.

On business model, we said, at a time when we made the vast majority of our money, and even more in terms of our profits from print, we said we've got to be a digital business first. That one less contrarian, more obvious, but hard at that point. Second, one much more contrarian. As we said, despite the fact that we've got this huge and highly profitable ad business, we've got to be a subscription business first, which means we push every decision sort of first through the filter of - is this good for retail consumers? And then, we, we, have these things that I call the three D’s, that have been, in the ether at The Times for all this time. We have to be in the business of doing direct relationships. So having direct relationships, being able to grow, direct relationships, being worthy of direct relationships. And we called that at a time when a lot of, of journalism was sort of programing for the internet. We said, we actually have to be doing this because we're in a relationship with a retail human being on the other, other side of it.

Second thing we said was, we've got to have most of those relationships manifest on our destinations. We need to actually bring people to us, to our apps, our websites, our home pages. That was a really contrarian call a decade ago, and a lot of it was, how do you get a big audience on Facebook? How do you get around teens and all these other places?

And then the third thing we said in this one is, so they're all still present today, but this one really underpins the current chapter of our strategy. And that's the we have to be a daily habit. We've got to be something that's so good, so valuable to people at scale that tens of millions of people aren't just going to come. They're not just going to drop on drop on a page of The New York Times, but they're going to come back the next day, and the day after that, because you're doing something really important in their lives. And I would say to you, those themes were present a dozen years ago, and those themes are just as present today. And that's a huge part of why we've gotten where we've gotten.

Eric Veiel

So, interestingly, the name of one of your most popular podcasts is The Daily. So one of your three Ds, I'm interested if that's actually how that name came about.

Meredith Kopit Levien

You know, I don't think anyone's ever asked me that. And I, I think the idea, nobody named that because of the business, you know, the business aim of being more valuable on a daily basis to people. But I do think the name came from the idea that most of, of, country, most of society should have some shared sense every day of this is a really big thing happening right now. And I think that’s where the name came from.

Eric Veiel

That's interesting. So maybe a little bit on the one of the points you made in there is that in, in transitioning from more of an ad-based revenue model to a subscription based revenue model to make it worth paying for, how did that change the content that you were creating, and how did you communicate that to a team of writers and reporters and journalists who are, you know, pretty set and probably how they were doing their craft?

Meredith Kopit Levien

I would say, it didn't change the idea of what we were making at all. And in fact, it's a pretty virtuous thing to be able to say to a journalist, we want you entirely focused on having a really wide audience for your work because of the quality and the importance of the work, because the independence of the journalism, because the way the journalism is done, that is. Who doesn't want to sign right for that? If you're a journalist, you want a huge audience.

I'll say I was the head of advertising. That was my first job at the time. I came there to run the ad business and sort of not so long into my tenure, we were staring at this decision. Can we tell the company in the world, ads are kind of a secondary endeavor at the New York Times.

Eric Veiel

You had to make yourself a little bit irrelevant.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Hard thing to do. And let me be clear, our ad business today is far more relevant. I have so much more confidence in its ability to be a sustainable and growing business because it runs on the same high-octane gas that the subscription business runs on, and that is being valuable and relevant in a daily way to tens of millions of people. And to have that number of people keep growing and to have them keep getting more engaged. So that's, that's a pretty virtuous thing, too. Let me let me make one more note in there, too. I can't if you're asking me this, but it's pretty important to say that the work we do at the New York Times, high quality, independent journalism that is about the pursuit of truth, wherever it may lead, is really best done without imagining that you're chasing any particular audience, but rather it's best done with the idea that everyone in society benefits from a shared understanding of the truth, from a shared fact base. So, you know that there's sort of an idea in subscription business-first journalism that maybe you have some kind of audience capture that might in some way make you make different journalistic choices. And that couldn't be further from the case and from the truth at the New York Times. We are pursuing the truth wherever it may lead, even when that is, to uncomfortable places, and places that, you know, some portion of the audience or another may not want to hear.

Eric Veiel

You know, it's interesting. One of the questions I was going to ask you was sort of, how do you reach parts of the, the market that maybe aren't naturally going to, you know, think about you as a source of the truth? So maybe talk a little bit about how you've expanded the offering from just news and are now reaching more people and what the ultimate plan is to, to, cross-sell. It's funny, some people, when I was talking to them about getting ready to do this, the first thing they brought up was games, right? And others brought up cooking. So there's, there's obviously The Athletic, there's lots of interesting things happening here.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah. Well, let me let me take that in two parts. What you're referring to is the idea that today The Times as an enterprise, as a portfolio of, you know, five high-quality products in very, very big spaces that a lot of people care about. Obviously, news journalism broadly defined, I'll come back to that. But also now sports journalism, recipes, shopping advice with our Wirecutter product and games, and there is no doubt that the fact that we are able to answer to more than a news need, in in millions of people, tens of millions of people's daily lives, makes us have a much bigger impact opportunity for the journalism, for everything we do, and a much bigger business opportunity. That is just unequivocally true. And it's been a big part of the growth story of The New York Times, and we're really proud of that, and you know that the the short thing I've said for a few years now since we've owned Wordle is it is just as likely for somebody to come to the New York Times to read a news story today about the, the, tariffs around steel and aluminum with China and then go play a game as it is the other way around. So, the fact that people come to us to play our games is just a wonderful opportunity to say, hey, are you also, aware of all the other things happening in the world today?

Eric Veiel

It’s, it's fun to think about different ways that industries overlap. And one of the things that we try to do on the investment side is look for patterns. And I was talking to one of our, now retired, value portfolio managers who, when he was here, actually owned New York Times in his portfolio. And we were talking about industries when they start to lose capacity or the supply goes down, that can actually be okay if it's a shrinking industry. As long as you're with the leading companies because there can be some benefits that accrue to those that are left standing, maybe have more pricing power, or maybe their supply of input has gone down. As the news business has changed and frankly, the number of dailies has gone down by so much. How is that helped you and how has that hurt you?

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah. Well, let me say first, we take no joy in that sort of demise of high-quality independent journalism at any level, whether that's at a local level where we've seen where I think that's been most kind of devastating by market transformation, or regionally, or nationally or globally. It's just not that's not good for society. It's not good for the world. And I don't think it's particularly good for, for, journalism for any number of reasons that that we can talk about.

At the same time, there is no doubt that as The Times, which has pursued its own very clear strategy for more than a decade now that I've just described to you, there is no doubt that we've been able to, sort of chart her own own path and, to make room for ourselves. This is the work we're trying to do in people's lives in lots of different ways. A bigger news way, more people caring about the news journalism that we do, but also in all these other areas that I've talked about. And so we have a lot of confidence that because we've been able to chart our own path, that, the opportunity is bigger today than it's ever, ever been.

Eric Veiel

You know, one of the things that's, always interesting for us to think about in our business on the investment side is demographics. How do you think about the demographics of your subscribers and the people that that come and come to you? And what's the trend there?

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah, that's, that's, a great question. Well, the absolute pursuit here for the New York Times is to, you know, mean a lot more to a lot more people. And so it is assumed in our pursuit of, of our strategy, being essential to more people that that is going to happen across, you know, every decile of life. If you want to be valuable to society at large, to a lot more people, you can't just be for a particular age cohort of people. I think that's always been the case, in, in news. And I think there are myriad examples, in The Times and by the way, in other high quality news outlets where format innovation is helping us do that, or variety within the news product broadly defined, or the, the, portfolio of other products we make is, is, helping us do that.

On the format innovation side, that you mentioned The Daily at the beginning of this discussion, The Daily is now, gosh, like nine years old, I think 8 or 9 years old. And when we produced it initially, it was this extraordinary, you know, we, we, we were so pleasantly surprised that it was this extraordinary entree into a new audience. The audience was much younger, actually much more female than the kind of or reading audience of, of, The New York Times. And it was a real unlock to say you've got this different format. It's not someone reading you the headlines. It's generally one big story a day that takes you right behind the scenes of that story. And it's it's presented in a very conversational and intimate way. And, oh, by the way, that can attract a different audience. And that was a real bellwether for us to say, we we can keep doing this. Now, you know, I think one out of three visitors last year to our home pages, watched video when they when they did that, on on any given day now you will most likely see one or more reporters describing their stories and describing a really topical issue to you. So I would say format innovation really gives us a way to do that and not just on our own platform.

I'll say one more thing. Everyone plays our games. Yeah, I can give you so many anecdotes of like, my 13 year-old son and my 83 year-old mother and their debate about, you know, who got to the answer faster and why.

Eric Veiel

It's, it's become a part of all of our lives. And, in a good way. It's actually I've watched it bring, generations together. I have to stop here and ask you, though, most importantly, what is your Wordle starting word?

Meredith Kopit Levien

I, you know, I have such a boring one. I feel like someone told me this very early, and I still use it. And everybody knows I use it. So when I share my score, they know what letters I've chosen. I use audio.

Eric Veiel

Oh, interesting. Trying to get all the vowels. So my wife and I have, recently, about a year ago, actually switched our style. And so we actually start with a different word every day and that word has to kind of involve something that you're feeling or doing. And so, you know, today there's a big snowstorm coming. So today I haven't done it yet. I'll probably start with snowy, today. Or I could start with super because the Super Bowl is just on.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Okay, so my take on that is what you're not doing is empowering your friends and family who share Wordle with you to, you know, actually get a jump on you when you send them your score because they know your word, change it up every day.

Eric Veiel

That's right. They won't know.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Keep playing. Well, by the way, tens of millions of people do. And its not just  Wordle. They play connections. They play Strand's, they play the many. It's great.

Eric Veiel

Well, it was not lost on me, during the Super Bowl that there was an ad for The Athletic, but then tried to link it to connections, which I played three, every day. Connections, the mini and Wordle. And I thought, oh, now they're going to try to get me on a fourth here because I'm going to have to try the The Athletic.

Meredith Kopit Levien

I would I would say it's still the third. It's connections made specifically for sports fans. We are so excited about it. And it's just the beginning of a mash up of what. Imagine all the interesting things we can do from The Athletic with with sports and games. Yeah, I'm super excited about.

Eric Veiel

Let's spend a minute on The Athletic. I did read an article where after you had, made the acquisition, you said, you know, a lot of things about why you did it. And then I really love sports. But obviously there's more to it than than loving sports. Tell us a little bit about how that came about and how you've folded it into the family.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Well, we, we watched them, you know, from, from their birth. We watched them very closely. And I would say to the extent a company could be built in the image of another company, I think their founders, who were terrific and we loved working with, would have said they watched the times very closely for for a lot of what they did, and they watched newspaper journalism very closely for a lot of what they did. So it was a really, really good fit. I, I like to say they're, you know, you could, The Athletic could go one of two ways for the New York Times. It could be another product that we add to the bundle where, you know, we buy, business that has a million subscribers and we sort of optimize it from there. And if that is what we were to have ended up doing, that would have been such a missed opportunity.

In in contrast, the thing we're really trying to do is to fundamentally change the opportunity size for the New York Times as an enterprise by, you know, taking the world's eye. I believe, you know, preeminent provider of news journalism on a global scale and becoming the world's preeminent provider of sports journalism on a global scale.

And I think there's like a chocolate and peanut butter thing to news and sports, you know, throughout history, you reference in the conversation, 60 million American households getting a newspaper. They were getting their news and sports together. So we think it's a really great combination. We think the market for people who are big fans and just want to be better fans, they want to enjoy the experience of being a fan more. They want to be an insider. We think the market, for for that is huge.

We just had our first, first couple quarters where The Athletic was profitable, which is sort of on or early as far as the schedule. We'd said that would be the case. But far more importantly, we're in the early days of building a product that every sports fan everywhere knows about. So the focus now is build audience, build engagement, build daily habit, and build much, much more brand awareness for The Athletic.

Eric Veiel

And there'll be connections to connections.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah. Well said.

Eric Veiel

So, I'm going to pivot a little bit here. I think every business leader, is really, has to assess artificial intelligence as both an opportunity and a threat. Certainly, in your world, it's there. Maybe let's start a little bit with the threat and we'll, we'll, we'll end on a take it to a more positive note after that. But yeah, you know, are you worried about how artificial intelligence is potentially using your content or could disrupt what you're doing? How do you think about it?

Meredith Kopit Levien

Let me start by saying there is no doubt in my mind that expertly produced professional journalism by human beings, reporters, who are on the ground in places where important things are happening, making sense of those things with expertise, and by seeing for themselves and by talking to people. And editors who know how to assign the right stories and help bring that information in, you know, help translate that into understanding for people. The need for that is not going anywhere. And AI is not going to replace in any way the sort of foundation of that. I do think, and I'm sure we'll talk about this. There's so much AI and technology generally can do to make it easier to do that work and to make it more efficient to do that work and to make that work much more accessible to people all over the world through language and other things.

But the first and most important thing to say that the, the, the art of, you know, making journalism as a means for people to get understanding, it's just a fundamentally human endeavor, and it requires professionals and experts and kind of human to human work. And I'm I'm super clear on that and long on the value creation potential with that for society and for The New York Times as a company.

I have talked now for probably two years, maybe even a little longer than that publicly about the fact that we, The Times, and every other publisher exists in an ecosystem controlled by very large companies that play a massive role in how audience finds their way. To the New York Times, I told you about, you know, destination director relationship, daily habit. That is our answer to getting much more of that business in our control. But there is no doubt that the behavior of the big tech platforms before AI, and now with AI, so ChatGPT, Googles AI overviews. There is no doubt that that has some impact on, you know, just the amount of audience that goes to a publisher and how they go and what they go for.

I think The times is incredibly well positioned because of our focus on having these really rich destinations, and years of getting people to come to them. A lot more running room ahead, and all the direct relationships we have with people where we can actually call them back to action when, you know, come to us when a big news event happens, that that really helps us. But there is no doubt it will change the construct of how people get to things.

Eric Veiel

Maybe on the on the positive or the opportunities side are there. What are the ways that you're thinking about it? From from that perspective within the organization.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Sure. I mean, we you know, we've been using AI even before generative AI and and now, aspects of generative AI to: 1. personalize the experience more. So there's, you know, so much of The Times is still most people are getting the same experience. And, we, you know, getting getting you some corpus of things that everybody should see, plus what you're most engaged by and interested in really matters. AI will help us do that.

You know you can now listen to the majority of the New York Times in our app, in an automated voice that is all AI powered. I'm super excited about that. I'm a runner. I listen to a lot of The Times now. It's like a time hack for me that I can run and just hear stories be be read to me. On the monetization side, we have a great tool in our ad business called Brand Match, where we're using AI to open up the full corpus of of Times content to say there may be other and better places that match this marketer's targeting interest that the sort of traditional methods would not, you know, would not help us find. So that's great.

And then we use AI, sort of throughout the customer journey to, to drive engagement, to get to the, to to make sure someone has enough time, to form a habit in that journey before we ask them to pay. And we use AI to understand, you know, what's the best next thing that we want that customer to do? Or that reader, that listener or watcher to do, so that they can actually experience more of the value of the New York Times. And I think if our journalists were here, they would say, the idea that AI can help, you know, comb through a big trove of public documents, when you're trying to sort out something that happened, there's no doubt in my mind there's lots of efficiency.

Eric Veiel

Yeah. Our analysts find, right. Find the same thing. Thing there. How about on the, translation side? You know, I notice I can now click. Not that I can read it, but there's a there's a Chinese option. There's a Spanish option. Is AI generating that translation for you or is there is.

Meredith Kopit Levien

A lot of our translation? Today is is human done. We've just done a pretty sizable experiment on augmenting human Spanish translation with AI is very, very fruitful. I'll say. I think there's still some last mile issues on tech. I think the pace of technological progress here is going to be very fast. I always said, you know, you'll there will be a moment where you'll be able to listen to The Times, experience The Times in so many languages. But, you know, we're not going to hire people to do that at the time. We'll do that. And I think we're getting there. I think that is absolutely a big upside potential for The Times, over time. I think it remains to be seen how quickly the tech will be there, but we have our eye on that. Absolutely.

Eric Veiel

Great. If you don't mind, I'd like to pivot a little bit to your, you know, personal journey as a leader and spend a little bit of time on some, some leadership topics. You know, when you look back on your almost 12 years, with The Times, what do you attribute your success to in this role, as you've navigated from, as you said, the EVP of advertising at a company now where advertising has less of the revenue as it was.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Much less. About a fifth now.

Eric Veiel

Right.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Great business, but but much less. Yeah.

Eric Veiel

All the way through to to your current role as CEO.

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah. That's that's a fun question. If you'll forgive me, I'm going to bring up running one more time. I will say everything I think about running. I think about work, which is the most fun runs and the ones you do best on your own and with other people. Where you go long and you take the hill. I always, say I have a running partner who? I always say that to. Can you go long and can we do hills today? And I would say my own journey at the New York Times has been so much about the privilege of working for a company that has gone long, and that can go long because of its control structure. It's a huge part, of why that control structure is there to protect the independence of the journalism, which ultimately is about protecting the quality of the journalism.

And that's been a huge part of how we've been able to create value. We have and, you know, in dark moments, even early my tenure, when I got to The Times we were doing buyouts in the newsroom and kind of buyouts everywhere and I think we all thought we would have a smaller newsroom than we have today. Today, we have the largest newsroom in history and the number of journalists working at the New York Times today, I think, is twice what it was when I, when I got there. But but the, the privilege of getting to help be a part of shaping a strategy and then ultimately delivering on that strategy where the ownership structure allows for the right decisions to be made and played out for a long time horizon, has just been a huge part of my own story, and and the story of The Times, and it's made me think for leaders, so much of what you have to do is to say, how do I get the time and the money to do the right things by this product and business, to let the real value creation happen? And that is what has happened at The Times. And then on just a very personal level, it's all been hills. I've gotten to run lots of hills. You know, the ad business was a big hill I presided over, you know, the probably steepest arc of, print decline. And, you know, in advertising that we had had up until that point. And so it was like, how do you move really rapidly to build a valuable business on the other side of that? And that can subsist without that? And I learned so much from that. So.

Eric Veiel

So we've all made mistakes. Can you give me an example? Can you give me an example of a mistake you've made in either in business or in any other way that, that mattered to you and then what you took away from it and helped you as either a leader or just as a person?

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah. I mean, I would say I, you know, besides, you have to have the time to make something work and you've got to play a long game. The other, you know, two great lessons I've learned in business, largely from maybe not getting it right other places or not getting it right in the moment are there are no substitutes for a really great product, and you have to take care of that first.

And if you don't have that, it doesn't matter how good the business is in the moment, it will not be great if you don't have a great product that is valuable to people and at great scale. And related to that, I think lots. It's it's very tantalizing to make short-term decisions that, will put a lot of money or profit in your pocket, in the moment. And I want to say, when you run a media company, particularly in those years where we were really trying to say subscription business first and we mean it. There were lots of tantalizing things that came our way. And I told you, I came into the company as head of advertising. I'm like a deeply commercial person and really learning to get belief myself in the idea that; it's all got to go to building a really engaging consumer product, and then the money will come. And by the way, the money that comes will be, you know, more money at a greater margin because you've fundamentally built something that can sustain. I think I've learned the most in my career from that, and I think it's a formula that just keeps repeating.

It doesn't mean there aren't practical things you do. Right, to, to keep growing, but you got to be doing it with that long term thing in mind. And for The Times, it's like audience and engagement at great and growing scale. And if we can't do that, the rest of the business doesn't work. When we do that, and I think we are doing that, our imagination for how much you know, more of the New York Times can be and during people's lives is awesome.

Eric Veiel

So this is a stressful job, I am sure. You clearly run a lot, and I'm sure that helps you decompress. So is there anything besides running that you do? And if not, when you're running, besides The Times and maybe The Angle from T Rowe Price. What are you listening to?

Meredith Kopit Levien

Yeah, I'll say the older I get, the more I realize, anyone is better at whatever it is they're trying to do if they have a more varied experience. I have a great kid. He's 13 years old. His name is JJ, and the more time I spend with him, the better I am at everything in my life. I feel more satisfied. I get so much out of just being near him and watching him. I'm trying to get him to be a runner. He's not there yet. One day maybe he'll he'll run with me. And I would say another thing that has really helped me in my role of The Times, but it's about kind of my own personal interest.

You know, a lot of the answers to what's happening in the world. Once you establish a set of principles at a company, ours is, you know, independent journalism's most important thing we do that's I'm going to color everything. But so many of the other answers are about how things are unfolding in the world around you. So in the outside world. So I've, you know, as a CEO with a meaty job, I've had to work very hard to, like, also not be doing it so many hours a day that I'm not out connecting with other people who do other things, who come at the media ecosystem or the sports landscape very differently. I think it's really important to understand culture and how people engage with culture and how culture is formed. So I try and spend a lot of time, not as much as I should, but I have to be really deliberate to make sure my life is also filled with travel and cultural experiences and lots, lots of time with other people.

Eric Veiel

It's so important. I actually tell people a lot that, you know, one of the advantages I think T Rowe Price has is that the majority of our analysts aren't in the major money center of New York. Where you can kind of get caught up in that, that small sort of echo chamber in there, you know, kind of in a real world place and around about seeing companies, whether they're in the Midwest, the West Coast or globally. And I think that really matters.

Meredith Kopit Levien

And let me say that, too, about our journalists and our editors, and the people who are making our recipes, and our games, and writing our shopping advice. And doing our sports journalism. As we have really substantially grown that footprint of people doing that work. We have also grown, you know, the number of places they are, and we have more reporters in more parts of the country than at any other point, and more parts of the world than at any other point. And I think that's really important too for The Times products to reflect kind of the full country and world we live in and be of value well beyond, you know, my SL a train that I'm taking, you know, every week.

Eric Veiel

Very good. Meredith, it's been so great to have you. Thank you for coming to Baltimore. Spending some time with us. And, really appreciate you being on The Angle.

Meredith Kopit Levien

What a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Eric Veiel

Again, I'm Eric Veiel. Thank you for listening to The Angle. We look forward to your company on future episodes. You can find more information about this and other topics on our website. Please rate and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. The Angle. Better questions, better insights. Only from T Rowe Price.

Disclaimer (at the end of podcast)

This podcast episode was recorded in February 2025 and is for general information and educational purposes only.  Outside the United States, it is for investment professional use only.  It is not intended to be used by persons in jurisdictions which prohibit or restrict distribution of the material herein. 

The podcast does not give advice or recommendations of any nature; or constitute an offer or solicitation to sell or buy any security in any jurisdiction. Prospective investors should seek independent legal, financial, and tax advice before making any investment decision. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.  All investments are subject to risk, including the possible loss of principal.

Discussions relating to specific securities are informational only, are not recommendations, and may or may not have been held in any T. Rowe Price portfolio. There should be no assumption that the securities were or will be profitable. T. Rowe Price is not affiliated with any company discussed. Some T. Rowe Price portfolios are invested in the New York Times Company.

The views contained are those of the speakers as of the date of the recording and are subject to change without notice. These views may differ from those of other T. Rowe Price associates and/or affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable but not guaranteed.

This podcast is copyright by T. Rowe Price, 2025.

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