Welcome to The New York Times Company's 2026 annual meeting of stockholders. I would now like to introduce A. G. Sulzberger, Chairman of The New York Times Company.
Good morning. I'm A. G. Sulzberger, Chairman of The New York Times Company. Welcome, and thank you for joining us for our 130th annual meeting of stockholders. Before I go any further, let me note that we will conclude today's meeting by noon Eastern Time, and that our discussion may include forward-looking statements. Various risks and uncertainties could cause our actual results to differ materially from those predicted. These are detailed in our SEC filings, including our 2025 annual report. I want to thank the members of our board of directors who are joining us virtually today. They include Rachel Glaser, our presiding director, Aman Bhutani, Manuel Bronstein, Beth Brooke, Arthur Golden, Margot Golden, Brian McAndrews, David Perpich, John Rogers Jr., Anu Subramanian, and Rebecca Van Dyck. Our board also includes our President and CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, who you'll hear from in a few minutes.
I'd like to thank all of our directors for their service. Other members of our executive team are also attending today and will be available during the question and answer portion of the meeting. In addition to myself and Meredith, we have Will Bardeen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Diane Brayton, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Mike Brown, Vice President, Assistant General Counsel, and Assistant Secretary, and Jacqueline Welch, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer. I'll also note that representatives of Ernst & Young, our independent auditor, are also attending today and will be available to respond to appropriate questions during the question and answer portion of our meeting. Now let me kick off with a few words about our journalistic mission and its importance in this moment. This year brings the confluence of two milestones.
The United States is marking its 250th year as a nation, and its paper of record, The New York Times, is celebrating 175 years. These two histories are deeply intertwined. The Times would not have succeeded without our nation's founding commitments to free inquiry and free expression that enable a free press. America, in turn, has been strengthened in countless ways by the work of the Times. In seeking the truth, we ensure the reliable flow of facts and context that inform our politics, economy, and national security. In helping people understand the world and each other, we bring a diverse country closer together. In asking hard questions without fear or favor, we make it possible for the public to hold its leaders accountable. Truth, understanding, and accountability. A strong democracy depends on these things. So does a secure and prosperous nation. So too, does a free people.
Over the last year, our journalists chronicled a world facing a moment of pressure and transformation. We covered a world both deeply interconnected and increasingly divided as it grapples with social, economic, and political shifts, regional conflicts, and powerful new technologies. Our beat reporters brought deep expertise to the most complex stories to help the public understand issues as diverse as presidential power, immigration, and global trade, as well as the impact of the first American pope, declining crime rates, and the rise of GLP-1s. Our correspondents were on the ground in 155 countries, from bearing witness to conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Myanmar, and Sudan, to chronicling the expanding centers of innovation and growth in China, to exploring how leaders across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and India are navigating a more aggressive America First posture.
Our team of investigative journalists, the largest at any news organization, produced an unmatched bounty of hard-hitting reporting that led to important reforms, making fighting wildfires safer and organ donations fairer, while prompting bad actors in car battery recycling and private education to stop practices that were hurting people. Our opinion pages helped readers develop and challenge their own views by offering a wide range of perspectives from our diverse roster of columnists, contributors, and outside newsmakers. Across all these efforts, our relentless reporting added to the public record in important ways. Here are a few things that you learned first, thanks to The New York Times. We broke news on covert action in Venezuela, military plans to blow up alleged cartel boats, DOJ's inflated claims of savings, and the president's demand that the Justice Department pay him $230 million.
We exposed misconduct by the internationally acclaimed chef of Noma and the labor rights icon, Cesar Chavez. Our original reporting led to reforms from New York's prisons to Texas's lottery, from the safety of Uber rides in the U.S. to the rights of African workers in Saudi Arabia. This kind of independent, first-hand, fact-based reporting is the central act of journalism and the essential value we provide to society. It requires going out into the world to follow the facts with an open yet skeptical mind and sharing what we learn with the public fully and fairly, regardless of whom it might upset. This reporting is even more notable for the scale at which it's occurring. Last year, The Times published 53,000 articles, 7,000 videos, and 1,100 podcast episodes. Our other products added to this bounty. The Athletic published 49,000 articles. Games, 6,000 puzzles. Wirecutter, 1,000 reviews and recommendations.
Cooking, more than 900 new recipes. Our archives now contain upward of 20 million original works over our 64,000 days of publication. Perhaps most surprising, this 175-year-old newspaper with the nickname The Gray Lady has become synonymous with journalistic innovation and digital excellence. Last year, we began work to make it as compelling to watch The New York Times as it is to read or listen to us. Our journalists are putting AI to use in our reporting, including to assist with massive data sets that previously would have been nearly impossible to navigate. Even our more established desks are trying new things, like Standards, which has been helping readers understand how and why we make our journalistic decisions. The rest of our product portfolio continued to raise the bar as well.
The Athletic, now boasting the largest newsroom of sports journalists in the world, further expanded its multimedia bounty of coverage for sports fans. Wirecutter expanded its rigorous product reviews into new categories and delivered them in new formats. Cooking became a popular destination for video franchises and a growing home for recipe creators. Games launched several compelling new puzzles, including our first multiplayer game, Crossplay, which immediately hit No. 1 in the App Store. That we can do all of this at once while still setting the benchmark for excellence across all our offerings is only possible because we continue to invest deeply in our journalism. The newsroom is now 50% larger than a decade ago. Across all our products, the Times now employs more than 3,000 journalists.
In the last year alone, we've staffed up significantly to cover Washington, to launch an expanding array of video offerings, and to expand our geographic footprint in parts of the country like the South, where our readership is growing most rapidly. Our experience with this hiring shows that The Times remains the destination of choice for great journalists seeking to do their best and most impactful work of their careers. That's possible thanks to the unmatched support we offer, things like editing and legal and security, and because of our enormous and deeply engaged audience. We once again led news publishers by a wide margin in the amount of time people spend with our journalism and products. We continue to boast the most visited homepage, the most read newsletter, the most listened to news podcast.
Last year, we added 1.4 million net new digital subscribers, bringing our total subscribers to 12.8 million. That subscriber growth and engagement led to another year of significant revenue and profit growth, as Meredith will detail shortly. None of this is to say that the path ahead is straightforward. Original, independent, deeply reported journalism remains in retreat. The next big technological shift has already arrived, threatening to further upend and corrupt the information ecosystem. Platforms have stolen legally protected intellectual property at an unprecedented scale and sought to use that content, books, music, movies, research, and journalism to offer substitutive products impeding publishers' ability to form and strengthen direct relationships with their audiences. We are seeing mounting attacks on the rights, safety, and legitimacy of the free press. This anti-press playbook, deployed in eroding democracies for years, has been imported into the United States by the current administration.
This shift challenges not just our country's foundational commitment to a free and independent press, but the public's right to know about the actions of its government. We have not watched passively as these efforts have metastasized. Even as other news organizations averted their eyes, whether out of fear or opportunism, we've led the industry in speaking up about the risks, worked closely with others to try to address them, and when necessary, turned to the courts to defend our rights and the rights of all journalists. As a federal judge said in one of those cases last month, "Openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace, and more important, in times of war and upheaval." Americans need a free press. They need trustworthy sources of truth, understanding, accountability.
They need these things as much today as at any time in our nation's 250 years. If there's one lesson from our 175 years of history, it's that the best way to navigate moments like this is to hold fast to our journalistic mission and the values that animate it, independence, fairness, accuracy, integrity, excellence, and public service. The free press exists to empower our fellow citizens, arming them with the facts and the shared reality, and strengthening their ability to steer our nation through whatever opportunities and challenges lie ahead. That is a profoundly optimistic idea and one that drives us as a company. We are grateful to the readers, colleagues, and investors who make our work possible. That includes all of you, and you have my thanks. With that, I'll turn it over to Meredith, who will discuss the business strategy and performance.
I'll be back for questions after Meredith's presentation.
Thank you, A.G., and good morning, everyone. 2025 was a great year for The New York Times, thanks to strong execution against a clear long-term strategy.
We added 1.4 million net new digital subscribers, bringing total subscribers to 12.8 million. This puts us further down the path to our next milestone of 15 million subscribers and beyond. Engagement across the portfolio was strong, which contributed to significant growth in digital advertising. We generated more than $2 billion in total digital revenues for the first time. We also grew adjusted operating profit more than 20% and expanded margin to 19.5%. Let me spend a few minutes putting these results into a broader strategic context. The information ecosystem is changing rapidly, and the challenges media companies face remain steep. We're operating in a polarized, low-trust environment, shaped by a few powerful platforms whose actions create headwinds for publishers. We believe that the Times is well-positioned to navigate these trends, given the differentiated value we have developed through years of strategic investment.
There are even bigger opportunities ahead, and we're confident we can pursue them ambitiously and profitably, thanks to the durability of our essential subscription strategy and a handful of unique advantages. Let me name them. First, our world-class news coverage and each of our lifestyle products addresses a big global market. Hundreds of millions of people around the world engage with news, sports, games, recipes, and shopping recommendations in their daily lives. We already reach many tens of millions of them every week across our portfolio and see the opportunity to engage directly and deeply with many millions more than we do today. Second, we've built a unique engine for creating original, independent journalism and high-quality content at scale.
Our core New York Times newsroom is one of the few that can go wherever the story does, and we reported from on the ground in more than 150 countries and every U.S. state last year. The Athletic is the world's largest sports journalism operation. Our Games team has a track record of producing original puzzles that are cultural sensations and played by millions. Cooking has more than 25,000 vetted recipes and a growing video catalog that gets people excited for their next meal. Wirecutter's experts rigorously review thousands of consumer products every year. Providing independent, human-made journalism and lifestyle products that resonate with huge audiences around the world is not easy. While others have been doing less of it, we continue to thoughtfully invest, making what we do more rare and more valuable to more people.
Third, we're constantly innovating to express our journalism and our content in all the ways and formats that audiences want to consume it. We're using AI to make our reporting more accessible, and we're rapidly growing our offering in video, which represents a major new audience opportunity for us. As linear TV continues to decline and viewing habits shift even more to digital platforms, we see a long-term opportunity to establish The Times as a preferred brand for watching news, in addition to reading and listening. Finally, we've developed multiple digital revenue streams to monetize consistently high engagement. We're confident that our product portfolio will continue to fuel strong digital subscription revenue growth and that digital advertising and our other digital revenue streams are positioned for healthy growth as well. We plan to further capitalize on these advantages in 2026 in a few ways.
We'll keep covering the most important stories with independence and rigor. We'll do that in more formats and places, especially with video. We'll add even more value in every part of our portfolio through new shows, coverage areas, games, and product features. We'll thoughtfully navigate the changing technological landscape to make The Times even more valuable to more people. Executing well against these priorities is how we plan to get millions more people to have direct relationships and daily habits with The New York Times. As we do that, we expect 2026 to be another year of subscriber growth, revenue growth, AOP growth, margin expansion, and strong free cash flow. I'll close by reflecting briefly on history. As A.G. said, 2026 is a year of milestones. The 250th birthday of America and the 175th anniversary of the founding of The New York Times.
Trustworthy, independent journalism has been a crucial part of our country's success, and that is just as true today as it was in 1851. It requires continued vigilance to ensure journalism can play its essential role in society. It requires continued reinvention for a journalism business to succeed. Over the course of nearly two centuries, "The Times" has experienced the advent of radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, the internet, smartphones, social media, and now AI. Local markets turned into national and then international. Daily habits accelerated into a need for near-instantaneous information. Amid this relentless change, "The Times" has adapted, thrived, and played a crucial civic role. Today, we anchor the daily habits of millions who rely on our journalism and lifestyle products, making us more essential to more people than ever before.
This track record strengthens the conviction we have in our ability to continue to deliver on our mission and to build a larger and more valuable company as we do. With that, I'll hand it back to A.G.
Thank you, Meredith. On to the business of the meeting. I will now ask Mike to address some of the formality of this morning's meeting and review the matters to be voted on.
Thank you, A.G. The agenda and the rules of conduct are available on the meeting website by clicking on Materials in the lower corner. We ask that all of you review those items, and we appreciate your cooperation with the rules of conduct. Polls are open, and they will remain open until I finish reviewing the proposals to be voted on in a few minutes. If you are a stockholder and have not yet voted your shares or wish to change your vote, you may do so by clicking the Vote Here button on your screen. Stockholders may submit questions electronically during the meeting by typing your question in the box in the lower left side of the webcast screen and clicking the Submit button. These questions will not be visible to other participants.
Questions received during the meeting that are pertinent to the company and in accordance with the rules of conduct will be considered during the question and answer portion of the meeting as time permits. To allow us to answer questions from as many stockholders as possible, we ask that stockholders limit themselves to two questions. Questions from multiple stockholders on the same topic or that are otherwise related may be grouped and answered together at once. The board has appointed representatives of Broadridge Financial Solutions to act as the inspectors of election for the meeting, and they are attending the meeting today. The inspectors have determined that the holders of the majority of Class A common stock entitled to vote at this meeting and the holders of a majority of the Class B common stock entitled to vote at this meeting are represented in person or by proxy.
We have a quorum, and our meeting is legally convened. I'll now review the matters to be voted on at the annual meeting. There are three proposals to be voted on by stockholders. The first proposal is the election of 13 director nominees, four to be elected by the Class A stockholders and nine to be elected by the Class B stockholders, each to serve for the coming year or until their successors are elected and shall qualify. The names and biographies of the Class A and Class B director nominees appear in the company's proxy statement provided in advance to all stockholders. The second proposal to be voted on by the Class A and Class B stockholders is to ratify the selection of Ernst & Young LLP as auditors for the 2026 fiscal year.
The third proposal to be voted on by the Class B stockholders is a non-binding advisory vote to approve the compensation of the company's named executive officers as described in the proxy statement. This concludes the review of the matters to be voted on, and we will now turn our attention to the voting of the shares. Now that everyone's had an opportunity to vote, the polls are officially closed. The inspectors of election will tabulate all of the votes received. Subject to the final tabulation, I can report the following preliminary vote results provided by the inspectors of election. First, each Class A and each Class B director nominee has been duly elected to the board and has received at least a majority of the votes cast. Second, stockholders have ratified the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as auditors for the 2026 fiscal year.
Third, stockholders have approved, on an advisory basis, the compensation of our named executive officers. Final vote results will be posted on the company's website and filed with the SEC on a Form 8-K. I will now turn it back over to A.G.
Thank you. The inspectors of election are directed to file their final report on the voting results with the Secretary of the company. This concludes the formal business portion of the meeting, and the formal meeting is now adjourned. With that, I'll turn it back over to Mike to see if there are any questions.
As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please enter the question in the box that appears in the lower left side of your screen and click Submit. We'll pause for a moment to gather questions. The first question we have coming in comes from Michael Petrelis, and this is addressed to you, A.G. I'll read the question out loud. "Dear Mr. A.G. Sulzberger, as a dedicated shareholder, I am writing to you for the fifth consecutive year with a singular urgent request, the reinstatement of the public editor of The New York Times. While I heartily applaud the recent milestone of reaching over 2,300 newsroom employees, such unprecedented scale requires equally robust accountability.
For the sake of the paper's integrity, the health of the American free press, and the stability of our democracy, a transparent ombudsperson should be in place before the upcoming fall elections. The question from Michael then includes quotes from Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor, arguing for the reinstatement of the role, including this quote, "But when it comes to really grappling with the tone of coverage or framing of issues, I'm not seeing a substitute for what the public editor used to do." Michael continues to say, "The fact that the other legacy media outlets lack a public editor is no reason for 'The Times' to follow suit." You possess the resources to immediately elevate the paper's integrity and reaffirm its commitment to ethical, fact-based journalism. Please, let this be the year you act on this request, one shared by myself, Margaret Sullivan, and a public that deserves transparency.
A.G., I'll turn it over to you.
Okay. Well, thank you for the question, Michael. We take the trust of our readers extremely seriously. As I think I've mentioned in the past, having a public editor is not the best way, in our view, to increase accountability to readers. Having a public editor essentially means that you're outsourcing accountability and responsibility for that type of oversight to a single person. What we want to do instead is to ensure trust is a core part of the expectations for all of our journalists, especially newsroom leaders, and to bake trust into everything we do.
That means things like holding the highest standards for reporting and editing, and enforcing rigorous rules to prevent potential conflicts of interest and obviously very high ethical guidelines, explaining to readers how and why we do our work. We're doing more of that than ever, and providing reliable channels for feedback from readers or from subjects of stories. We're doing all those things, and in fact, we've greatly increased our investment in each over the last few years, including significantly expanding what I suspect was already the largest Trust and Standards team in American journalism. All to say, this is and will continue to be an area of deep focus.
Thank you, A.G. We have another question here from Scott Kalben in Alberta. "How does participation in your virtual shareholder meetings compare to in-person meetings with respect to the number of shareholders attending and the number of questions asked?" Scott, I'll take this question. This is Michael Brown. We appreciate the question. As I've said for the past few years, we believe that hosting the meeting virtually allows stockholders who are interested, regardless of location, to join the meeting in an efficient and cost-effective manner. We value the opportunity for all stockholders to ask questions in this virtual meeting forum, and our practices are consistent with other public companies. Just as with an in-person setting, the virtual setting allows for all shareholders to ask questions. As I've said the past few years, we continue to evaluate the format each year to facilitate the best experience possible.
Scott has another question, which I'll read. "With respect to New York Times reader communications, I urge you to bring back printed letters to The New York Times Magazine." A.G., I'll hand that one to you.
Okay. Well, thanks for the suggestion, Scott. I'll make sure that it's shared with Jake Silverstein, who's the editor of the magazine.
We have a question from Brooke Williams, and the question reads, "The annual report says the Times news product is core to revenue growth, yet you've reported a loss of about 2 million news-only subscribers over the last few years. Part of that loss is directly attributable to The Times' reporting on transgender people, which has been cited by the Trump administration and others to justify discrimination and harm. This reporting is deeply concerning to me as the mom of a trans teen. What steps are you taking to be accountable to concerns of the trans community, readers, and shareholders?" A.G., I'll hand this question to you.
Great. Thank you, Brooke. First, I want to make a correction. We actually have more news subscribers than at any point in our history, and that number continued to grow robustly last year. That said, I really do appreciate hearing your perspective. Our editors and reporters covering these issues and overseeing coverage of these issues have actually spent a lot of time exploring concerns like this and meeting with those who have shared them. I believe and have concluded that our coverage has indeed been fair and comprehensive, and that's an opinion I share. It's been incredibly rigorously reported and edited, and I think really respectful of the people we're covering and sensitive to the moment. There are few issues in society that are evolving as quickly as questions around gender identity, and our role is to cover all aspects of that shift fully and fairly.
We have reported hundreds of stories totaling hundreds of thousands of words that look at prejudice and the attacks that this vulnerable community is facing. We've also covered groundbreakers in the community and the hopes and struggles for trans rights. I don't think you could read any of that and think that The New York Times is anti-trans. I should mention as well that our editorial page has explicitly championed trans rights for many years and continues to do so today. Again, I appreciate the question and can assure you that our reporters and editors are going to continue to work to make sure that this journalism meets the highest standards.
All right. Once again, if you have a question, please enter it in the box on the lower left side of your screen. Seeing as there are no further questions, this concludes the Q&A portion of the meeting, and I will now turn it back to A.G.
I'd like to thank each of you for your attendance today. We deeply appreciate your ongoing support and continued interest in The New York Times Company.
Thank you. The New York Times Company's 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders has now come to an end. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.