Which is a great, great thing. My name's Jason Bazinet. I'm the media and entertainment analyst here at Citi, and we're super happy to have Meredith Kopit Levien, who is the CEO of The New York Times, and this is the first time that you've been at this conference.
It is, and you pronounced my name right, so.
Oh, good!
We're off to a good start.
Okay, that's great.
I'm delighted to be here.
I didn't even have to ask Anthony. So, I wanna start with, maybe just a big picture question?
Yeah
B ecause you're on a super interesting journey, I think. But maybe we could just level set for those that maybe aren't in the weeds, and just give us a high-level overview of your strategy.
Yeah.
What is the mission that you're on?
Very, very happy to do that. And I'd like to talk about our strategy, 'cause I think it's pretty simple. We are aiming to be the essential subscription for every curious person who wants to understand and engage with the world, and there are three pillars to how we're trying to go about that. The first one is to be the world's best news destination. The second one is to build and advance market-leading lifestyle products that help people make the most of their lives and passions. And the third pillar is to put those two ideas together in an interconnected product experience and bundle that makes The New York Times indispensable in the daily lives of tens of millions of people, no matter what is going on in the world, in the news, in the Sports calendar, and so forth.
And it's just i t's worth saying that that strategy is grounded in a handful of principles that we established, I've been at the company 11 years, that we established, I want to say, going back close to a decade, that still really matter. And they are that we're a destination or a set of destinations, meaning, we're a place people actually go to and ask for by name. We are worthy of and in pursuit of direct relationships with our customers. We are a subscription business first. That is so obvious now. It wasn't we started this journey many years ago, and that actually powers and enables success in the other revenue streams, in advertising and affiliate and licensing.
Y ou know, lastly, we are making journalism and digital products that are fundamentally worth paying for because of their breadth and depth and differential quality and value. I would say all of that really feels like it's working. We're at, you know, 10.8 million subscribers, I think, as of the most recent public reporting. That puts us well on the path to the next milestone of 15 million. We've got now 45% of our subscribers on the bundle, and that matters because those subscribers retain better, they engage more generally, and obviously, they pay more over time. We're really proving out that being in Sports and Games and recipes and shopping advice.
Mm-hmm
A re funnels to the bundle and news and the whole thing. And, you know, we're engaging people. We actually said on the last earnings call that we had hit another sort of multi-year high for subscriber engagement, so that all feels like it's going really, really well, and I think, you know, most importantly, it's being expressed in the economics and in our-
Mm
Our financial performance. We are. You know, we said in the last call that we are, you know, well on our way to another year of healthy revenue growth and profit growth and margin expansion and healthy free cash flow.
That's great. Can I ask one clarifying question?
Yeah, please.
On the engagement, the record levels of engagement.
Yeah.
Do you measure that just simply as how many hours or people?
That's a great question.
Okay.
We-
Or is it more nuanced?
We look at a lot of things, but when we talk about it publicly, what we're talking about is the percent of subscribers who are on-site-
Okay
On a weekly basis. So you have to, you have to be with us-
Okay
For us to consider you engaged. And there are lots of intricacies that go with that, and we look at it differently in different products. But very broadly, when we say multi-year high, it means, and this is important, even as our subscriber base grows, a higher percentage of them are on-site every week.
Okay. So as buy-siders sort of follow your journey, as you execute on your strategy, I think that it's natural for them to sort of look at what is going on with your ARPUs.
Yeah
And what is going on-
As they should.
Wi th subscribers, right?
Yeah.
So can we just dig a little bit deeper on-
Sure
Tho ose two sort of prongs? So on the ARPU side, you guys, I think, as part of your tactics, not your strategy, have done promotional pricing.
Yep.
A nd if I'm sitting there as an investor, and I'm trying to come up with a forecast two years, three years down the road of, you know, where, where can those ARPUs go, given there's a, some promotional activity sort of happening on the boundary layer for those new customers-
Yeah
Coming in? What advice would you give to your audience?
Yeah, great, great question. Let me, let me just explain-
Sure
The pricing strategy. We talk about it as, as being value-based pricing, and the idea is we bring the vast majority of people into becoming a subscriber at a promotional price. That's true for the bundle, it's true for the non- you know, the other products, the standalone products. And as they engage more over time, we get them to step up to interim and full prices, and we have now been at this for, like, four or five years.
Mm.
We're very good at it. We have very sophisticated data science that helps us make a decision at the individual subscriber level, based on their engagement. When do we ask you to go up, and how much do we-
Mm
W e ask you, to go up to? So that's-
Mm.
The reality is, you know, just think about it from the consumer's perspective, as they are realizing more value, they're willing to pay more because they're, you know, they're engaging more-
Mm
A nd they pay more. And that's, you know, really working. You asked, what should investors be tracking?
Mm-hmm.
What we have a lot of conviction around what we're aiming for, and we believe investors should be watching, and have conviction around, is that we can grow ARPU on a year-on-year basis modestly-
Mm
B ut year on year, over time. And I would say, there are three things giving us real confidence in that, this year, so right now. One is we have a very large number of cohorts this year who came in on a promotional price for the bundle and have to step up in price. That's just going really well, so that's one. Two, that level of engagement, as I said, is really, really high-
Mm
F or subscribers, and that is a leading indicator of retention and willingness to pay more over time, and three, and this is the one that I feel like we don't talk about enough-
Mm
T he products are fundamentally, every single one of our products is fundamentally getting more valuable over time, and so, you know, there's just more there. Like, take Games, there's just more there. There are more Games-
Mm
T here are more things that are worth paying for, but that's true in every single product.
So when you say there's more there in terms of your product, you're just saying that there's just more content there because of the investments that you've made in years past or most past?
There's literally more you...
Okay.
There are more Games you can play. There is more coverage and more formats.
Okay
Of more news stories, and the features around all the things we do, news journalism, Sports journalism, recipe, shopping, advice, Games, the features are getting better as we go. So, you know, we just launched. If you play Connections, we just launched something called the Connections Companion, which now will tell you, how'd you do relative to everybody else-
Mm
A nd how might you play better tomorrow? Every bit of the product set has features on a regular basis that are getting better.
It's very interesting. So, I think it was in 2022, I think that was the year, when you really began to focus on bundles-
Yep.
Right?
Yep.
And, um-
We've been building toward that for a very long time, but we sort of made a public assertion-
Okay
I think at the beginning of 2022, I'm losing track of my years, that we were, you know, that was a really important part of the strategy.
Okay. When I think I have this right. When I look at your disclosures, your bundled ARPUs have generally-
Yep
B een falling, but the single product, services that you have, like news, have generally been rising.
Yeah.
Can you just talk about-
Particularly news. Yeah.
Okay. Can you just talk a little bit about?
Yes
W hat is causing this dichotomy to occur?
Yeah
I n the ARPU?
I'd say that's all kind of what we expect to happen. That's the strategy working. So on the bundle, we decided, some time ago now, let's call it, you know, it was started in 2022, but a year ago, that we would make the bundle the product that most people were directed to buy and make it compelling to most people to buy. So we brought the bundle to a promotional price, and that, of course, had a very positive effect on getting people to buy the bundle. But it, you know, is fundamentally and strategically dilutive to ARPU on the bundle.
Mm.
I'll just remind you, bundle, you know, bundle subscribers, ultimately, over time-
Mm
P ay the most, engage best, retain best. The opposite has happened in news, again, by design. We actually, and this doesn't get talked about very much, we stopped marketing news only. So it's very difficult if you just want to buy news, very difficult to do that. We don't actively market it, and we haven't actively marketed it, I want to say, for roughly a year now.
Mm-hmm.
And so what that means is, if you are a news subscriber, two things are true. One, you are very likely to be tenured, which means you've been subject to some number of price increases, and two, you're not on a promotion.
Okay.
So that sort of explains the difference, and I would just say, if you think about that across all of our products, you can regard us as sort of having an always on, what can we do to tilt people into it as a more rational choice to buy the bundle?
Yeah.
Because that is the product where we can get them to engage best, which translates into retention and better monetization over time.
That's great. All sounds very sophisticated and deliberate. It's good.
You know, there's something of real value to having a long-term strategy grounded in very long-term principles and having, you know, a team-
Yeah
A n executive team that's been together for a long time.
That's great.
Yeah.
Can we shift now from pricing and?
Yeah
T alk a more about, marketing and gross adds?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay. So, on the marketing funnel, you've talked a lot about the marketing funnel.
Yeah.
You've noted you have 150 million registered users, and what is it? Is it 15 million email accounts? Is that-
So, so let-
Okay.
Let me clarify on both of those.
Okay.
150 million registrations and growing.
And growing.
We talked about how they're growing, and the 15 million number is now actually 17 million-
Oh!
and it's not people who get email from us. That number is far larger.
Okay.
It is people who open and read. Seventeen million people open and read-
Your email
A New York Times email every week. So not who gets it, a much bigger number, but open and read, and the biggest one in all that is The Morning. And that is a giant number of people who, every day, read The Morning. And I'll just say on that 17 million, we don't have 17 million subscribers yet. One day, but we don't have them yet. So there are a lot of prospects building a habit with The New York Times in that pool.
So how do I mean, can you just describe sort of what you-
Yeah
As you talk about these numbers and these various buckets, what is the process that's sort of going on?
Yeah. Yeah, it's great.
As you look at those as potential customers.
Let me talk about registered users. We launched, like, an official registration model for the Times, I think, in 2018 or 2019, so, you know, like five years ago, maybe six. And the idea was, can we get a manifestation of that direct relationship that we can call on again and again? And it has really worked for us. Let me say a few things about how and why. The first one is, one of the things I've been talking about for 18 months, maybe two years now, is there is enormous pressure for all content publishers on the internet, from the big platforms that control the information ecosystem and their traffic patterns. There's been enormous pressure on that for a long time. I've talked about that publicly for a long time. The fact that we have 150 million-
Mm
R egistrations and growing builds real resilience to that. Means we've got an audience that we can go and get and say, "Hey, come back, come back, because we've got content that you don't know we have, or a promotion," or any number of reasons we can bring you back to site. That is really, really valuable one. Two, we are still growing registered users, and I wanna say we've got a news funnel, where registered users are still growing. We've got a Sports funnel that is, we are just building, and we are in the very early days of where we can grow registered users. Games has been a gangbusters part of the kind of grow new registered users. I think you have to be registered to follow your stats and streaks-
Mm
I n our Games. You know, who doesn't want that? If you play, and you play regularly, you're gonna follow your stats and streaks, so lots of examples like that, and so forth. Cooking, even Wirecutter, are all really valuable to growing registrations. Then, once you've registered, why does it matter? First, it matters because you have more access to content or features, like I just described in Games.
Same is true across all the products, and you are therefore more likely to form a habit. Once you form that habit, you are therefore more likely to convert, and a registered user converts much, you know, is much more likely to convert to be a paying subscriber. So it gives us a real place to focus than a non-registered user. And I'll give you two more. You know, the bundle thesis and the expanded portfolio thesis is, we're gonna interest you in something.
Mm.
Maybe we got you as a registered user in Sports-
Yeah
B ut in fact, you wanna follow what is happening at really close range in the presidential election.
Mm.
We can call you to action around that. We can interest you around that. It's also really valuable to us because we have this giant base of registered users who've told us a lot about themselves, whose first-party data we can use for advertising in privacy-forward ways, and that's been a big, kind of empowering feature of our ad business.
Okay.
So it's all really working.
That's great.
And growing.
And growing. When I was looking in your annual filings, you only give this number once a year. If I've done the math correctly, you spend about 5% of your revenues on external marketing, right? So-
By which you mean just,
Yep
P aid media.
Paid media.
So that-
That's right
T hat, that's specifically paid media.
That's right. And, my question is, what is it when you spend money on that? Is it that you're trying to get more registered users? Or-
It's a great question.
Is that more we're further down in the conversion funnel?
Yeah. It's a great, great question. I actually think the most important thing to say about that 5%, whatever the % is, is the vast majority of subscription starts at The New York Times do not come from paid marketing.
Mm.
They do not come from paid media. They come from the product itself as the primary kind of engine of the business, and by that, I mean people who land on a story page because they come from search or social, or a friend sent it to them, or they land on the homepage, or they, you know, go to one of our apps. So the product itself is the primary and the most important engine of demand, and we're constantly working to make that a better and better engine of demand. So that, that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is, the better that product works, the more efficient the registration-
Mm
A nd conversion engine, you know, the better the marketing works.
Yeah.
Right? That's, that's obvious, and then, as it relates to paid media, specifically, two things: We are incredibly focused on the ROI-
Mm
O f paid media, and we take a very data-driven approach, and you should imagine we're using very sophisticated data science to say, "How do we find these customers? Where do we actually need or benefit from paying to get them?" And then, the third thing. And by the way, that makes us, you know, generally more efficient over time. The third thing to say is the expansion of the portfolio, so big in Sports now, big in Games, big in Cooking, and so forth, that just gives us more ways to target people in that paid media. And the bundle has brought a lot of efficiency to the paid media program. So I'd say those three things, sort of product itself is the main engine of demand-
Yeah
V ery ROI focused on the money we do spend. It is largely, it's not entirely, but it is largely to drive starts, not registrations, to drive starts.
Get visits.
Sometimes it ends up-
Mm
D riving registrations or to move sentiment in a particular way on the brand. And then sort of, I would basically think of all of that as a system that works together, product itself, you know, ROI-driven, bundle, and expanded portfolio.
Okay, that's great. I can't prove this because I couldn't find anything in your old disclosures, but I would imagine, when you were a print-only business-
Yeah
T hat the vast, vast majority of your customers were in the Tri-state area.
Yeah.
Maybe you had, you know, a few-
True
S old in LA or some in London or whatever,
Majority. I don't know how vast, but definitely majority.
Definitely majority. But now, as I look at some of the numbers you've given, and maybe you can share these, it feels like when you think about where your customers are coming from, it is-
Yeah
It is certainly the Continental United States, and even outside the United States.
Yep.
Is that fair?
Definitely. So I would say, as we went from being a newspaper that reached, probably at its peak, two million paying customers, couple million, to, you know, digital business that has 50 to 100 million people every week, obviously, domestically and internationally, we've just gotten much more diverse.
Mm.
We've gotten more international, and we've gotten kinda more diverse within that. I would say the audience diversity, to me, is most interesting. This is true domestically and internationally, when you think about the fact that we are now operating in very big spaces, and we are aiming and we have big ambitions in all of those spaces. We see real growth potential for audience and for subscription in all of those spaces. So in news, you know, through format innovation and our-
Mm
S ort of preparedness to cover the stories wherever they go, and every year, that means you're adding to particular beats, or you're adding beats in full cloth. 'Cause the stories are changing through that and through kind of relentless format innovation, making the journalism more, you know, video-forward, or so that you can listen to it, or so that it can be translated into multiple languages, which we think Gen AI will be able to help us do. That gives us the potential to have that audience be even more diverse, to go back to your question. But then I would say, you know, we're aiming big in Sports, and Games, and Cooking, and shopping advice, and so think of diversity of audience, you know, we're not just reaching a news consumer now, or aiming to reach, who's gonna read.
They might watch, or listen, or want to watch, or listen, or read in another language, right?
Mm.
We aren't just aiming for news consumers. We want NFL fans and Premier League fans, and so forth. You know, we are deeply interested in reaching people who wanna make something of a high quality, that is also simple for dinner every night, and so on, and so forth.
Okay.
So it's a much rounder pursuit in terms of who we're looking for-
Okay
I n audience.
When we read about, in the press, cutbacks, that, let's say, you know, local newspapers-
Yeah
A re making, or we read about, you know, difficulties that maybe some of your competitors might be having, that are perceived as competitors in the traditional newspaper sense-
Yeah
I s that relevant? I mean, do you pay attention to those things, or you just, you're on your mission, you're executing, and it doesn't really matter what the competition is doing?
Yeah, that's a good, good question. Let me say two things about it. First, we are, like, absolutely rooting for the success of all quality, original, independent journalism outlets.
Right.
The Journal, The Post-
Mm
L ocal newspapers, we are rooting for them. I wanna say it is a better market, it is a better ecosystem, it is a better country, it is a better world, when there are thriving independent news organizations. And I'll just give you the investor part of that: When more people are running into high-quality news, and making a habit for it, of it, more people are gonna pay for it.
Yeah.
I wanna say that. By the way, our publisher has a very important op-ed in The Washington Post today that everybody should read about sort of independent, the threats to political threats to independent journalism. That's the first thing to say. I wanna say on local news, we are, you know, it has been devastating to the country and the world what has happened to local news. To your point, our intense focus is on and we have been strategically at this now for more than a decade is to very deliberately build reasons to be essential in the lives of millions more people, tens of millions more people, and to meet as many news and life needs as we possibly can. I would say, you know, rather than think of, like, the demise of a competitor or local-
Mm-hmm
A s a tailwind, we are intensely focused on building our own tailwind.
Mm
By investing into the breadth, and depth, and quality, and candidly, the sort of range of things our product can do in people's lives, and I think that's really working, and I think when you see the Times kinda break away from competitors, and we also think building on that lead is really important, it is a result of that long-term strategy and very deliberate investment.
Okay, so you've been consistent about that point for a while. So I went back and looked, and in 2013, you had 1,300 employees-
Yes, journalists.
Focused on journalism.
Yeah, yeah.
In 2023, it was 2,700.
Yeah.
So I guess I have a question here. I'm assuming that this isn't a static number.
Yeah.
that 2,700 is
Like, is that enough?
That's enough.
Are we done?
Right.
Right.
This is more-
Right
S ort of iterative, where the more success you have-
Yeah
T he more you invest.
Yeah.
Is that the right-
Yeah.
Way to-
So, let me say a few things about that. First, I've been at the Times 11 years. The thing I'm most proud of is that we are building a larger and more profitable company, and that we have twice as many journalists. And I wanna say those two things are entirely connected, right? We have twice as many journalists, and that is enabling us to build a larger and more profitable company. And I wanna just say, because some would look—if this was a room full of reporters, they would say, "Oh, but you bought The Athletic. That's a lot of Sports journalists-
Yeah.
And a lot of product reviewers with Wirecutter. Even if you stripped those out, the core news and opinion newsroom of The New York Times is much bigger than it was when I got there. And why does that matter? Investing into the breadth, the depth, the quality, the differential value, the format innovation of our journalism is the most value-creating thing we can do, hard stop. And I would say the track of our business over the last few years is the best evidence there is of that. And there are a couple of things to think about as it relates to that investment. One, because of our lead, and by the way, we are trying to build on that lead, a little bit of money goes a long way.
Because of the way the platform works and everything I just described to you about the sort of, you know, the efficiency of, you know, we can bring new products onto the platform, we can bring new journalists, and you don't have to invest a huge amount to see a real benefit to revenue growth, to profit.
That's helpful. I wanna-
We're gonna keep investing.
I think -
B ecause it's the most value-creating thing we can do.
Understood. This is another sort of investment point, but I think a little bit different. And candidly, as someone relatively new to The New York Times, I got a little bit confused. But when I was looking through your financials.
Mm-hmm.
In 2019, your product development costs were half the size of sales and marketing.
Mm-hmm.
Today, they're of the same size. What in the world is product development cost-
Yeah, yeah
F or-
Great
A newspaper company?
Yeah. We have a lot of people-
Okay
W orking on product development. That is so by design and so deliberate, and if I were to give a theme to it, it's the idea that the product itself is the primary engine of the business. So again, you land on a story page, you come to Wordle, you are following the US Open on The Athletic. What-- what happens when you get there is the most important work we can do to get you to pay, stay, stay longer, pay more, get your friends to pay, right? That's the first thing. So what is product development and tech investment doing? I'll take it, like, down the funnel. First, it is helping us bring, you know, more of the right people into the ecosystem, who may ultimately buy, and it's helping us do that through format innovation, right? So you can now...
My favorite feature we have launched this year is you can now, because of Gen AI, listen to the majority of Times journalism. I'm a runner, and I get up in the morning now, and I, like, literally just listen to the most important articles on the homepage. So before my day starts, I have, you know, I have listened to it, and that's being read by a Gen AI voice.
Mm.
It's an automated voice. So, and there are lots of examples. You know, we are so much better now, and this is tech investment as well as journalism investment-
Mm
B ut helping you follow a live or developing a breaking news story, and I could give myriad other examples of format innovation, but it's making the report far more accessible-
Okay
O ne. Two, we're making the report far more engaging. We're making the whole thing far more engaging. So, you know, now Maggie Haberman has a big story to tell about what happened in the Trump campaign last night. She's gonna. You're gonna get a written story. You might also get bits from her in a live and developing way, and you might get Maggie Haberman giving you a video that just teases that story or just gives you enough of it. Like, you may just wanna watch it.
Mm-hmm
Quickly and not read the whole thing. So I would say lots of that investment is going to subscriber engagement. I've told you all the reasons, but that matters. And then, lots of that tech investment is going into data science to make sure we know, when we have you, what's the right time to ask you to pay?
Mm.
How do we do it? What message should we show you? When do we ask you to come up in price? Once you've come up in price, how do we make sure you stay engaged? So all-
Yeah
O f that is where that-
That makes sense.
T hat money is going.
That makes sense. I'm gonna shift gears again on you to advertising.
Yeah, yeah.
So on the digital side, I can't prove this, but I would suspect that most of your digital advertising revenue comes from the news product today. But how would you characterize what initiatives you're pursuing, both on the bundled side or into individual services-
Yeah
L ike The Athletic-
Yeah
O r even Games, for that matter?
Yeah, fair assumption.
Okay.
Majority of our, you know, ad revenue is still driven by things that happen-
Yeah
Y ou know, in and around news, and that's a big part of the proposition. I would say, generally, the thing we are doing in news, we are also now extending out across the whole portfolio, and that is, and we've been at this for years, premium ad canvases, not too many of them, that have first-party data appended to them, that I've described to you, in privacy-forward ways. Those ads really work.
Mm.
Marketers buy them again and again because they work, and we are extending those ads across the whole, every bit of the portfolio, actually. Even Cooking, Wirecutter, which are much smaller than Sports and Games, Wirecutter got ads this year.
Mm.
We are extending the products out across the portfolio. We are super optimistic about Sports and Games. There's just a lot of marketer interest in Sports.
Mm.
I think we've been, you know, very pleased to see that. Lots of marketer interest, and we're just at the beginning there. We actually are just this fall bringing first-party data to The Athletic advertising, so you know, that feels like a real potential growth lever. In Games, this one, I think it's stunning, we do not yet have ads in the Games, so we are, you know, bringing ads in, into the Games app. We're obviously gonna do that in very careful and deliberate ways, given what a great subscription driver Games is. But we just see running room in all directions there, and I'd say all that makes us, you know, the proposition to a marketer is very strong from the Times. We've got this wide product set that-
Yeah
T ouches culture in myriad ways, and all that makes us optimistic. Ads should be a growth driver.
Can I, can I s-
Yeah.
It's an ad question, but I'm gonna shift-
Yeah
O ver to macro.
Yeah.
So a lot of investors that I speak with-
Yeah
T oday, and even over the last few weeks, are just a little bit skittish about macro.
Yeah.
The things that I think that are making them nervous is we've seen some travel companies-
Yeah
S ort of come out and say, "Oh, these, you know, we're gonna have softer numbers-
The consumer is maybe gonna spend less.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
We've seen some, like, low-end retail.
Yeah.
But to be candid with you, most of the sort of traditional media companies.
Yeah
A ren't sounding the alarm bells, you know?
Yeah.
And so I think it's a little bit of a confusing period that we're in right now.
Yeah.
I don't know if you have-
Yeah
A ny thoughts on your trends?
I would just say, I mean, we obviously have a guide out about Q3, which, you know, is that our digital ad business is gonna grow, and overall, 'cause we still have declining print business, we'll be somewhere between flat and up, and that, I would just say that guide has some natural optimism in it, meaning it reflects where we think the quarter will be.
Things are okay. Okay.
Things are okay. That said, I wanna say two things. Very, advertising visibility is very difficult for any number of reasons, one, and two, we don't always track with the rest of the market.
Okay.
We have a very wide product set in terms of the spaces we play in, and also the formats, and so we are not always... You know, like a bad market, not good for us.
Yeah. Yeah.
But beyond that, I would say we don't always track exactly like the rest of the market.
Okay, I wanna, I wanna go back to what you said about visibility. When you said low visibility, that's just endemic to that revenue stream, not a comment you're making about this particular moment in time.
Broad. I've-
Right
I' ve said that for 11 years.
Okay, understood.
You know, and some of that is even, like, the newspaper. Books really late, hard to see when it's gonna happen.
Understood. Shifting gears, uses of free cash flow.
Yeah.
You guys have no debt. It's amazing. You generate a lot of free cash flow. You return about, I think, half of it, either in the form of dividends or buybacks. You've also said you have a very high bar for M&A.
Yep.
Is there anything else you can add to that? I mean, it sort of-
Yeah.
What do you...
Let me say a few things about that. First, and, you know, most importantly, I'm gonna say we feel very excited about the product portfolio we have. I've just described to you many different ways, all the running room we see within it, and we've got some public targets out there, and we're very confident about the current portfolio and its ability to help us get there. When we think about uses of free cash flow and capital allocation, kind of more broadly, we think about three things in order. One, organic investment into everything I just described to you in the existing portfolio, starting with news, but kind of across the board in portfolio. We think there's real opportunity to continue to do that in the ways I've described.
Two, we do have a public target out there that we will return at least 50% of our free cash flow to investors in the form of dividends and buybacks, which we think are important and also show our confidence in both the opportunity and how the business is doing, and in my time at the Times, that's gotten, you know, better, and then three, I would say, yes, we are open. We, you know, we are open to things that, you know, come up over time from an M&A perspective. The bar, as you say, is really high-
Mm
F rom an ROI perspective. We've got a fair amount of experience now, too, with M&A. You know, we're two and a half years into owning The Athletic.
Mm.
We acquired Wirecutter, I think, six years ago. We have a sense of, you know, what works, how to do these things, but the bar is really high. We are very committed to the portfolio we already have, and I would say, most importantly, having that healthy balance sheet gives us a lot of strategic flexibility and optionality in a time of real change coming.
Okay. So I have two last questions.
Yeah.
And these might be a little bit far afield, but-
That's okay
T hey seem interesting to me, so I'm gonna ask them. The first is, it seems like a relatively recent phenomenon are some of the marquee writers that people know by name, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, are sort of unplugging from sort of traditional media and just going out and hanging out their shingle and doing their own thing. Is that Does that matter to you if that trend continues? Is it not meaningful? Is it existential? Like, where does it sit on your continuum of importance?
Those are interesting examples. I won't speak to those specific examples. I'm gonna say-
I just picked three at random-
Yeah
B ut they're,
Yes
They're household names.
Your point is made, and I could give you some others who-
I know some others.
But let me. I think we have learned, I think, two things that have to sort of travel together about The New York Times and our success formula. One is, we need the world's best journalistic talent, hard stop. Some of those people are people whose names are household names, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage. If you follow politics, they are household names. Andrew Ross Sorkin, I bet everybody, 100% recognition-
Yeah
I n this room, and they are people who either were or became stars at The New York Times, and we are very, very prepared. Ezra Klein, we are very, very prepared to support them, and they come and they stay for the second reason, which is, this is an institution that does two things that I have yet to see the other media company that can do. One is, it is an extraordinary-... three things: engine for audience, so we can bring audience to your work. I will not say who, but a very famous journalist who came to the Times and left the Times, one of the rare people who left, she will say, it's a woman, "I never saw an audience like I saw at The New York Times.
Mm.
And I came from, you know, other very big places. We bring audience, we bring the apparatus of support. So whether that's fact-checking, or you need to go to 25 countries to tell a story in a particular way, or you need to be legally defended or have people-
Mm
Y ou know, filing FOIA, briefs to
Yeah
U nlock information, we have an extraordinary apparatus of support to do that, and I would say the magical formula at The New York Times is the combination of those, those two things, and the-
Mm
What's the special sauce on that is the authority that the brand gives, and, you know, I wouldn't trade that for anything.
Okay. Here's my last question. You have a minute and a half to answer. In 2023, in your filings, you purchased or used, I don't know which one it is, 59,000 tons of newsprint. The interesting thing is that's half of what it was 10 years prior. And so my question is, if 10 years from now there isn't a print version of The New York Times, what does that mean? Is that an unalloyed good for shareholders? Does it not matter, and it'll just be this-
Yeah
S ort of gradual transition.
Yeah
A nd just disappears?
One of the things I have kinda religiously said since I got to the Times is, we're not in the newspaper business, we're in the understanding business. The understanding business should be, because there's such a gaping need for it, and we do it so well, a very successful business, and that is the journey we're on. That is what we are trying to do. I would just say, you know, it's no secret that print is in secular decline. We've been very descriptive about that. I do think in all my time at the Times, people have called for its end much sooner than we believe will be the case.
Right
Fo r any number of reasons, including the people who get the product still love it. The product is still awesome, and we have some control over it because we own a printing plant, and so forth. But all of that said, we've got public targets out there. The drag on profit growth-
Mm-hmm
I s accounted for in those public targets from a business that we view as in secular decline, and we've spent. Looking at our CFO, who's just new CFO, but been at the company 20 years. I've been here 11 years. We have spent all of our time building a business that is not wed to any format, and the growth strategy for which is not wed to any format, and believe we are well on the journey to building a larger, more profitable company in any format.
Fantastic. Meredith, thank you for your time.
Now it says zero.
Zero.
Perfect.
You did perfect! Great. Good job.
Thank you.
Thank you, Meredith.