Marty Baron

There was a difficult period after Trump lost the 2020 election, although he doesn't acknowledge that, but he lost the 2020 election.

And Joe Biden came in and I think a lot of the public who had supported the post and in its work and particularly in holding Trump accountable felt like, well, the threat's gone.

We don't need to do this anymore.

And how many subscriptions can I afford?

You know, what we hadn't done is we hadn't prepared adequately enough for a post-Trump era, although I had.

warned my publisher at the time that we needed to do so, particularly as we observed what the New York Times was doing, which was diversifying in a very determined way, away from news into other things.

So putting tens and tens of millions of dollars into developing a cooking app that is very popular, acquiring Wirecutter, a product recommendation service where they make money through transactions.

Starting their games initiative, which came later, but I was aware of and I alerted my boss to that as well.

That's been hugely successful.

And that's where a lot of their growth in terms of digital subscriptions is coming from.

And then more recently acquiring the Athletic, eliminating their own sports department and basically putting sports coverage in the hands of the Athletic.

We didn't do that at all.

We diversified a bit, but it wasn't at that scale.

And so we fell behind.

And that was a problem.

Clearly, it's true that the posts needed to adapt.

They needed to change.

These days, given the impact that AI is having on the business, which is dramatic, we've seen a decline in traffic from search engines, the primary one being Google, of course.

But also prior to that, there was a decline in traffic from social media, from Facebook in particular.

and so uh you have to adapt and they should adapt and i would encourage them to do that but i haven't seen a lot of innovation they talk about innovation the publisher there has talked about innovation and the need for it but i have yet to see an initiative that shows that he knows how to execute that so i agree with people who say it should be a sustainable business i agree with people who say they need to keep innovating and make some dramatic changes but i didn't hear yesterday