Before Meredith Kopit Levien became President and CEO of The New York Times Company, she did not follow the traditional path of a newsroom veteran. She began in sales. But as she explained at a conversation hosted by Columbia Business School’s Distinguished Speaker Series, that commercial grounding — combined with an enduring commitment to independent journalism — proved critical in leading one of the world’s most influential media organizations through sweeping digital transformation.
Levien’s early career was rooted in commercial roles, including advertising sales at The Atlantic and later at The New York Times. While she initially aspired to go into journalism, she ultimately found her impact in building sustainable business models to support it. She advised early-career leaders to use their strengths to enter the field they care about, to stay long enough to solve progressively bigger problems, and to align commercial strategy tightly with their company’s mission.
In a conversation with Jonathan Knee, Michael T. Fries Professor of Professional Practice of Media and Technology at CBS, Levien shared her insight into strategy, leadership under pressure, trust in media, and the existential questions raised by AI in media. Across topics, Levien returned to a consistent theme: protect what is immutable, and innovate everywhere else.
The ‘Essential Subscription’ Strategy
A defining strategic shift came with The Times’s articulation of a clear ambition: to become the essential subscription for every curious person seeking to understand and engage with the world.
Levien emphasized that the slogan was only the first part of a much deeper transformation. The company committed to a subscription-first, digital-first model even when advertising remained highly profitable. It continued investing heavily in journalism regardless of market cycles. And it deliberately chose to compete not for “drive-by” traffic but for sustained loyalty.
She described what she calls the “four Ds” that underpin the strategy: The Times must be a destination that readers actively seek out; it must build direct relationships with its audience; it must become a daily habit; and it must avoid becoming merely drive-by content dependent on platform algorithms.
This strategic clarity required significant operational change. The company invested deeply in technology and product capabilities, recognizing that competing in a digital subscription economy meant building software as well as journalism. Today, roughly 1,000 employees at The Times work in technology roles, reflecting a structural transformation from print-era operations to product-driven digital engagement.
Growth Beyond News — But Powered by News
While The Times has expanded its sports coverage through The Athletic, as well as its games, recipes, shopping advice, and audio products, Levien made clear that news remains the economic and brand foundation.
“[The] vast majority of economic value at The New York Times today — and tomorrow and always — comes from news,” she said.
The company’s growth engine rests on several structural advantages. It already operates in large, enduring content categories where hundreds of millions of people spend time. It has built a scaled content-production engine capable of reporting from around the world across beats. It continues to innovate across formats, including video and audio. And it benefits from multiple growing revenue streams, including subscriptions, advertising, distribution, and affiliate commerce.
In addition, the company’s bundle strategy — offering subscribers access across news, games, cooking, sports, and more — has helped drive sustainable growth across all parts of its business.
Trust in a Polarized Era
Levien attributed today’s challenges with media distrust to algorithmic feeds reinforcing prior beliefs rather than challenging them, leaders publicly attacking journalism, and the collapse of local journalism ecosystems.
Today, the organization increasingly puts reporters on video to explain their reporting process and reinforces the professional standards behind its work. Levien also underscored the company’s governance structure, a design intended specifically to protect the mission of The Times.
When faced with high-stakes decisions, she said, the leadership team returns to its principles and values and works to stay focused on the journalism.
AI, Copyright, and the Future of Truth
Levien noted that The Times is currently suing generative AI companies, including OpenAI and Microsoft, over copyright use, framing the lawsuits as a defense of intellectual property and a broader defense of sustainable creative industries.
She argued that while tech companies pay large sums to make their LLMs work, namely in talent and compute, the content that make LLMs possible is often gleaned from “copyright-protected journalism and other content from The New York Times.”
“They should be paying fair value for that too,” Levien added.
At the same time, The Times is using AI in pragmatic ways. It offers automated audio narration for articles, enables dynamic scaling of recipes, and uses AI tools to analyze large troves of data to accelerate investigative reporting.
However, Levien was unequivocal that AI cannot replace the human work of reporting. Professional journalists bear witness, apply judgment, and convey facts with sensitivity, eloquence, and nuance. In her view, AI can augment that work if used lawfully and responsibly, but it should not substitute for it.
In the same vein, Levien highlighted the importance of human-powered journalism in a democracy. Editors still convene daily to determine the most important stories in the world, a ritual that reflects the institution’s civic duty. In a fragmented digital environment, making judgments about relative importance has become more complex, but it remains essential.
For Levien, leadership in the digital age is not about chasing every technological shift. It is about safeguarding the core mission, building sustainable economics around it, and deploying innovation in service of public understanding.
In an era defined by polarization, platform disruption, and synthetic media, she argues that independent journalism — human, principled, and professionally executed — remains indispensable.