A.G. Sulzberger on Why Journalism Matters Now

Full Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by an automated system and has been lightly edited for clarity. It may contain errors or omissions.

Amira Weeks: Welcome to View From The Top: The Podcast. I’m Amira Weeks, an MBA student from the Class of 2026.

Michael McDowell: And I’m Michael McDowell, a producer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Amira, could you set up today’s conversation for us?

Amira Weeks: Yes. So today I’m in conversation with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher and Chairman of The New York Times. He’s the fifth generation in his family to be at the helm of this iconic American institution.

Michael McDowell: That’s pretty incredible, and I know that’s something that you’re going to get into in the conversation, but why were you especially excited to sit down with A.G.?

Amira Weeks: Yeah, I mean, many different reasons, and I think two of the big ones we get into, one of them is about the AI challenge, first. The Times is suing Perplexity and OpenAI right now for copyright infringement. I think that’s a case that’s going to set precedent for a lot of companies going forward. And so, I think that’s a really big reason why it’s important to hear from The New York Times right now.

And then I think the other reason is on the political front, like The New York Times, along with many other journalism outlets, have been attacked in the past decade for not being credible institutions, and that really goes at the heart of what they believe in and what they’re trying to do. So, I also think it’s an interesting conversation of, how do you deal with when really powerful people are putting pressure on your organization and criticizing it for the very thing that it stands for?

Michael McDowell: Yeah. Amira, are you ready to press play?

Amira Weeks: Yes, let’s do it.

Welcome to Stanford, A.G.

A.G. Sulzberger: Thank you. It is nice to be back here. I was reflecting that the last time I was here it was 30 years ago when you guys rejected me, so I’m taking this as a measure of vindication.

Amira Weeks: Well, we’re so happy to have you here today. One of the things I learned about you when I was preparing for this interview is that you read the entire physical print New York Times, from cover to cover, every single day.

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah. So, that is mostly true. So, there’s this old saying that you can either work at The New York Times or you can read The New York Times, but no one has time to do both, and have been really determined to prove that wrong. And it’s because I believe really strongly that you’re only as good as your product, our product is journalism, and I really want to have my eyes on everything we produce. So why I said it’s directionally true, I’m in the app all day long, on our newsletters or podcasts, but I do use print as a sweep up mechanism to make sure that my eyes have touched every story in the evening.

Amira Weeks: Okay. Well, I took my preparation for this interview very seriously, so I did something I’ve never done before. I put down my phone, I went to the grocery store, and I got a print copy of The New York Times. And I’ve got to say, it’s pretty amazing. Fresh newspaper smell, you can actually open it up, read the stories while you drink your morning coffee.

A.G. Sulzberger: You’re making me feel so old.

Amira Weeks: I’m going to have to try it a bit more often. Thank you for the inspiration, A.G.

A.G. Sulzberger: Great, great. All right, well, I’m glad to have opened your horizons a bit.

Amira Weeks: In all seriousness —

A.G. Sulzberger: We also have an app.

Amira Weeks: I know, I know. I’m on the app, I have the app. In all seriousness, I commend your dedication, and I think that sense of commitment shows up not only in how you read The New York Times, but also in how your family has approached this business for generations, and I want to talk about that today. Your great-great-grandfather bought The New York Times in 1896, and it has been overseen by your family ever since. This year, The New York Times turns 175 years old, and you represent the fifth generation in your family to lead it. What does that mean to you, to have that family responsibility to uphold The New York Times’ mission for independent journalism?

A.G. Sulzberger: Well, thanks for the question, and I’m very happy to inspire you all with my from-the-bootstraps story of overcoming all the odds, to rise to the pinnacle of American journalism.

No, look, we believe really strongly in a model of leadership that we call stewardship, right? You use that word, and being a steward is recognizing that you are a part of something and that you’re a part in it is part of a longer journey. And that journey started as you said, 175 years ago. Our part of the journey starts in 1896 when my great-great-grandfather purchased the paper. He actually was a scrappy entrepreneur at the time, and he had a really different vision for what journalism could be in this country. It was a time when the press was overtly partisan, tied to parties and ideological causes, and he had this radical idea that the press should be independent and that it should serve the public alone, and that model was really successful. He took what was then actually the failing New York Times and turned it into this growing, not yet the number one paper in New York, but on the journey there as one of the most respected papers in the country. And when he died, he did an equally remarkable thing, which is, he left behind this will that called on his family to do a very specific thing, which is to protect the editorial independence and integrity of The New York Times and to ensure it remains a fearless newspaper and unselfishly devoted to the American public. And if it sounds like I’ve memorized that, it’s because I’ve memorized it, I have it taped above my computer.

A.G. Sulzberger: It’s a North Star for me and my work. And that starts in a will, it ends up in a trust, but that direction is such a gift because it has allowed the family to think about things like independence, integrity, devotion to the public, as we have each taken our turn, stewarding this enterprise. And it’s something we’re really proud of, but my great-grandmother had this line, “no big heads,” and it was repeated just constantly. And it was a way of saying we are here to serve this institution, the institution is in no way here to serve us. It will never reflect our personal politics, it will never advance our personal ambitions and goals, and we view that service as one of the great privileges of our lifetime.

Amira Weeks: Yeah, I can feel your dedication.

A.G. Sulzberger: Sorry if that all sounds corny, but it really is true.

Amira Weeks: I can feel your dedication to the service here. And I’m wondering, was it just always assumed that you would end up working for The New York Times?

A.G. Sulzberger: So, no one believes me when I say this. I mean, literally no one, and none of you will either. But look, the vast majority of people in my family, we have about 100 people in the family, will never work a day at The New York Times. And they feel like their contribution is giving the leadership at The Times, which very intimidatingly includes three of my board members in the front row, if I look nervously down there throughout this. They feel like their job is to give the leadership at The Times room to run and to make the right long-term decision.

I thought I was going to be in that group, and that really didn’t change until college, not at Stanford, when my favorite professor was a journalism professor, a great investigative reporter who worked at the local paper. And she called me after I graduated and said, “I’ve set up an internship for you at the Journal and I want you to do it.” And I said, “Tracy, you know I have no interest in going to journalism.” And she said, “I know you say that, but I think you’d like it. I think you’d be good at it, and I think you should try it. And if you don’t like it, you’ll have the answer to a question, you’ll never wonder. But I really think you should give it a shot.”

I did, and she knew what I didn’t know, which is, being a reporter is the most fun an adult is allowed to have at work. It’s just this magical blend of spending half your day learning, being out in the world, talking to the most interesting people and going to the most interesting places and getting right all the way into the most interesting issues. No two days are the same. You’re just learning all the time. And then the other half of your day is teaching, right? Because you’re constantly thinking, okay, what did that all mean? How do I make it clear? How do I make it interesting? And it’s this very solitary creative pursuit, and that blend was just infectious.

And so, I spent the next few years as a local reporter, various spots around the country, Providence, or not Providence, actually, Narragansett, Rhode Island, tiny little town in the smallest state where I was a town reporter. And then went out to Oregon and then eventually to New York and then to Kansas City. And it was just such a valuable experience, and I think it shaped a lot of what I think about leadership, but also really widened my aperture for this country and the diversity of experience and views and hopes and fears in the country.

And if you don’t mind, I’ll tell one story, because I actually think it’s a useful example of just how those early jobs, how much they matter later, even if the scale is different. So when I was covering Narragansett, Rhode Island, I stumbled upon this big story, which is the Narragansett Lions Club. Right? So, stop the presses already. The Narragansett Lions Club, which actually was the power center in the community. It’s where all the business leaders were, it’s where the local elected officials were. They didn’t accept women, and they were one of the only Lions Club in America not to accept women. And so, I started working on the story and at some point the head of the Lions Club storms into my little office and in front of my colleagues starts sweet-talking me. “You’re a great reporter. I really want to help you out. The story’s going to make that all hard. Maybe you could pull back on the story. I’ve got a bunch of other great stories I can help you with.” And when that doesn’t work, starts threatening and eventually says, “I’m going to personally organize an ad boycott at the Providence Journal, and it’s going to cost you guys millions of dollars, your bosses are going to be furious, you’re going to lose your job.”

And of course, we publish, because sweet-talking and threats don’t work. And two months later, women are getting invited into the Lions Club. But why do I say that? Because what I’ve just described is exactly what happens when it’s a titan of Silicon Valley calling, or exactly what happens when it’s a foreign leader, or exactly what happens when it’s a President of the United States, it’s just a different scale.

Amira Weeks: Yeah. So, you built your foundation in local news and in 2009 you become a New York Times employee for the first time. You walk into the newsroom, it’s your first day as the publisher’s son. How did people treat you? How did you approach building credibility and earning respect?

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah. Yeah, I thought a lot about it. I mean, it was a pretty humbling thing to come into The Times. I mean, just the level of journalistic talent there is so extraordinary and I had no illusions that I was as strong as many of the people, most of the people I’d be working alongside. And so, I really thought a lot about how to come in. And I basically set a few rules for myself. The first was, accept any assignment, no matter how terrible. And there were so many terrible assignments because all the editors realized that when they had a terrible idea other people wouldn’t do, they could bring it to me then. I volunteered for the Sunday shift, volunteered for holidays, eventually volunteered for the Kansas City job that no one seemed to want. They were crazy not to want it. I made really clear that I would never go around hierarchy. Right? That it was my editor was my editor, and he could talk to his editor.

And then I really worked hard to make it clear that I valued candor and developmental feedback because I mean, you can just imagine at that point, I’m a little south of 30, I’m way too young in my career to now be on my own with everything I’ve learned. It’s like the great thing about being a young person entering a great newsroom is the ability to learn from people. So, I had to really hammer home to people and ask very intentionally, “What did I do wrong in the story? What could I have done better?” Any advice on, another voice I could have used. So, I was described in the press as having the temperament of an overeager intern, and I think that that was probably right.

Amira Weeks: So early days, it’s about putting in the hard work, getting feedback, respecting the hierarchy. I want to jump to 2013. And for everyone here in the audience today, in 2013, The New York Times’ print subscribers are still outnumbering their digital subscribers. You’re now leading the push that kickstarts The New York Times’ is digital transformation. Can you tell us about how you went about developing bold, innovative ideas for a more digital New York Times?

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah, so I was such terrible casting for this. I wasn’t on social media. As has been embarrassingly revealed, I read the print newspaper. I text like a grandpa with one finger, and I had been doing my reporting not on digital ideas, just heads down, not thinking about the broader business context. But I’m asked to lead this effort and I turn to basically the only tool in my toolbox. Right? It’s like the thing I’ve spent my entire career building, which is, I turn to reporting. And reporting is really well suited for something like this it turns out, because a big part of it is figuring out what your questions are and not being embarrassed if they’re dumb. Finding smarter people than you on a subject. Explicitly trying to find people who disagree. Being super skeptical of conventional wisdom. And then, trying to pull the patterns out of everything that you’ve accumulated. Right?

And when I did all that, it became abundantly clear to me that the assignment I had been given was all wrong. Right? Because the assignment was to build a… was to come up with an idea for a digital product that would enhance The New York Times portfolio in some way. But the pattern wasn’t that we lacked for ideas in the organization, it was that the ideas were systematically being suppressed inside The New York Times. That our most innovative, creative digital thinkers were actually being treated as second-class citizens. And when I say that, I’m not saying that in an abstract way. I found out, I was irate when I found it out.

I was talking to one guy who was viewed as one of our essential digital leaders, and he told me he had been denied business cards because the newsroom at the time didn’t want people to think that he was a full member of The New York Times. Right? They thought it’d be bad for the brand, right? And so people like that were going to our competitors, places like BuzzFeed and Vox and Vice, and those competitors were completely ascendant. Many of them had already overtaken us in digital audience. We had a 170 year head start here and we were already losing ground.

And then there’s this business context in the background that again, I’d been blissfully unaware of as I’d just done my work as a journalist. We had gone from 12,000 to 3,500 employees in the course of a decade or less. We had built this brand new headquarters and within two years had to sell it and rent back the space. Our print business was accounting for something like 80% of our revenue still when I wrote the innovation report, maybe even more, and was hemorrhaging money. And the digital business was not growing anywhere near fast enough. And so, it was this, just so you had this context, and then us basically doing everything we could to hold the people and the ideas who could help us meet this moment at arm’s length, and they were leaving. They were voting with their feet.

And so, what I decided is that instead of building a digital product, we had to spark a meaningful cultural shift. And the way we did that, again, I don’t have that many skills. I’m a journalist, so I wrote, I wrote, and I wrote a 100-page memo. And I remember saying to the team that I was working with on that, our goal here is, with this memo, is to kill the status quo as a place of refuge. And to shift the conversation inside of The Times from, “Should we change, whether to change,” to “how to change?” Because whether a change is an incredibly unproductive conversation, how to change, you always win, right? Because it’s just like everything’s firing, everyone understands that you’re not going to be able to stand still.

Amira Weeks: Yeah. And I want to put this into perspective for the audience, because I know for some of you here it may seem obvious, of course they need to change because that’s The New York Times that we all experience today. But in the moment, this was really challenging for the organization.

A.G. Sulzberger: Classic innovators dilemma.

Amira Weeks: Classic.

A.G. Sulzberger: We were best in class, yeah, at the time.

Amira Weeks: So, what were some of the hardest sells and how did you persuade people?

A.G. Sulzberger: So I write this 100-page memo, the biggest thought in it was, I didn’t want anything that people could argue about. I didn’t want a ton of good ideas, I wanted a handful of completely ironclad ideas. And when I say a handful, I mean a handful. So, it was basically four or five, I can’t remember now, core arguments.

One, we need to introduce data into the newsroom so that our journalists are aware of how people are finding and engaging with their work. Two, we need the people who write the stories to talk to the people who designed the website. And if that sounds crazy, they weren’t talking, they weren’t allowed to talk in our enterprise. A third one was, we need to work as hard to get our work in front of an audience in the digital era as we did in the print era. And think about it, how insanely far we went in the print era, right? We had printing presses and we printed it out and we put it on trucks and we drove those trucks to your town, and then we handed to kids on bikes and they biked it to your house. But we were doing none of those things.

So, this is all very cloak and dagger, 100-page memo, I print out eight copies of it. I hand deliver eight copies to the eight people that the editor had told me she wanted to see it. And then a couple of weeks later, the whole thing is published in full on BuzzFeed. The very website we had warned was overtaking us, under a headline, “New York Times in Chaos.” And I thought I’d done immeasurable damage to the institution. I mean, truly immeasurable damage to the institution, right? All this dirty laundry out there, because to make a case like that you got to say the tough stuff, the lawyers were worried. And it ended up being the single best thing that happened to our transformation. And can I say a beat on why?

Amira Weeks: Yeah.

A.G. Sulzberger: Because I think it’s actually useful. So I run into later the day that it’s published on BuzzFeed, I run into one of our oldest investigative reporters and best investigative reporters, a guy named David Barstow, four-time Pulitzer winners, part of the team that got Trump’s taxes, I mean, a really incredible guy but exactly the type of guy who you would think would read a case for change and say, “Uh-uh.” And I run into him, he’s an intimidating, he’s an investigative reporter, so he’s an intimidating guy. And he looks at me and he says, “I read that report of yours.” And I said, “So, what do you think?” And he was like, “I was sure I was going to hate it.” And I was like, “And?” And he was like, “Well, if you were here at, a lot’s got to change, and I was like, I don’t think anything needs to change, I think we’re doing just fine. I think you got me 90% of the way there.

Amira Weeks: Wow.

A.G. Sulzberger: And I was like, “Wow.” And he said, “But that 10%, that 10% is full of my deepest fears and anxieties. Are you going to destroy the journalism? Are you going to ruin the mission, abandon the mission? Am I going to be rendered irrelevant? And the only thing that kept me going through those fears and anxieties was that I knew you and I knew other people on your team. And I kept thinking, I bet they have a good answer to this.

And so here’s my advice to you. Go and hear every fear and anxiety in the newsroom and give them their answers.” And so, I did that. I set up a 90-minute meeting with every person in the newsroom, groups of no more than 50. We had 1,300 people, so it gives you a sense of how long that took, and did a little bit of a spiel at the beginning, but mostly just hearing the questions, the concerns. And increasingly, you could feel the energy building, the ideas, the creativity, the positivity.

And to me, there’s a handful of lessons there that I think, that I hope will be useful for all of you. One, communication is item six on every leader’s list, and you never get to item six, right? Because one through five self-repopulates, right? And you need to push it all the way to the top, especially if you’re facing real challenge or going through a period of real transformation.

Two, most leaders have this inclination to hide the problem from their staffs. And they do that not because they’re bad people, they actually do it in this sort of misguided parental instinct, almost like hiding problems with family finances from the kids. They want to be able to say, “Don’t worry, don’t worry about that. We got this. Everything’s going to be good,” and most people are pretty smart, and certainly reporters are pretty damn skeptical. Everyone in the organization knew that we were facing real challenges, but we weren’t talking about those challenges directly. And we were still talking about the need to change, right? So, why do you need to change if everything’s going just great? And so, I have come to really believe that you have to share the problem. Find those really crushing statistics about your own company’s performance that you want to avert your own eyes from and now share that to say, “This is going to be really hard and we don’t have all the answers, but we’re going to need to try a bunch of things. Some of it’s not going to work, and I need your patience.”

And once you do that, it actually unlocks the third thing, which is, the best ideas flow upward in an organization. And that’s not to say no leader has ever had good ideas, but if you’re running an organization of any size, there are way more ideas down there that are bottled up than you could come up with yourself. And once you share the problem, it’s much easier for people to contribute.

And then I’ll just say one last thing, which is, people fetishize change. And if you want to get a proud culture, a legacy culture, a mission-driven culture to buy into change, you need to be really clear about what is not changing. Because if everything can change, you have no reason for being younger, hungrier, folks should come and displace you. But if you can articulate the thing that’s not going to change, for us it was original, independent reported journalism, without fear of favor. And if you can say that, say all of this change is in service of this enduring thing that we all signed up for, then all of the sudden people will give themselves a different level of emotional buy-in to sign up for the ride.

Amira Weeks: These are great learnings and lessons, and I know this period of time built enormous trust in your leadership, because in 2016, you’re announced as Deputy Publisher.

A.G. Sulzberger: Against all odds, yeah.

Amira Weeks: Putting you in the position to eventually succeed your father as publisher. And I want to talk about and acknowledge the timing of that because you become Deputy Publisher just two weeks before President Trump is elected. President Trump has repeatedly labeled The New York Times as fake news and the enemy of the people. How did you deal with that dynamic in real time as a new leader?

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah. Yeah, so I get named to this job, and literally this is literally true, the people who give me the news that I’m going to be stepping in as the next publisher tell me, “You only have one job for the rest of your career and it may be impossible, which is, to find a sustainable business model to support the expensive work of quality journalism in the digital era.” And Trump’s election basically announces the arrival of another suite of challenges. And I think they’re actually, they’re broader based than just Trump, but it announces the arrival of a moment that is marked with, well, probably the most significant anti press moment we’ve had in this country in the last century, right? Marked by growing distrust of the media, increasing attacks on the rights and legitimacy and safety of journalists, growing polarization and tribalism where people are getting stuck in their echo chambers and very intolerant of anything that challenges what they want to believe.

And Trump isn’t responsible for all of that, but he was a big force as he came in with this incendiary anti-press rhetoric, calling us the enemy of the people, not just fake news, not just the failing New York Times, but enemy the people, and eventually scaling that to accusing us publicly of treason, a crime that the federal government is charged with prosecuting, and that carries the death penalty. And so, a big part of my job has been positioning the company to be not just economically resilient and technologically resilient, but to be resilient in terms of our ability to do this important fearless journalism in this much more combustible environment. So, things like we immediately invested significantly in expanding our Washington operations, probably two to three times larger than it was at the beginning of the Trump era. We 5Xed our investment in investigative reporting, 5Xed. We 10Xed our spend on safety and security and press freedom work, which is a statistic I’m quite sobered by. Gives you a sense of how much the environment shifted.

And then for myself, it became clear that a big part of my job would be to talk about the media and its importance and the values that I think should be guiding it in these periods of pressure. And that ranges from writing a long essay in the Washington Post before this most recent election, saying the Trump Administration has been studying very overtly the anti-press playbook that has been put into place in eroding democracies like Hungary and India and Turkey. And that playbook is really clear, and here are the lessons we can learn from the experience of journalists in those countries about how the press has been systematically attacked and eventually, mostly dismantled or gutted. And here are what the effects on civil society that would have. And that work allowed us to prepare, but also allowed us to help the rest of the industry prepare for what would come. I’m sorry to say that a lot of the industry didn’t exactly use that time well.

But it also meant going to the White House and challenging the President directly on his anti-press rhetoric. And there my message is not, I want it to be very explicit. I want no favors. You are free to attack The New York Times by name, you are free to attack me by name. We’re the big boys, we can take it. But I want you to understand that this anti-press push that you’ve been making is being greedily embraced by aspiring strongmen all over the world who have just been looking for any excuse to crack down on free expression and the free press in their countries, the pesky questions of independent journalists. And saying to the president, “I believe this is really dangerous. I believe the people will die and be jailed.” And sure enough, I look back at when I said that to now, and the world has gotten more dangerous than ever for journalists. So, that is the posture that we’ve had to approach.

At the same time, I’m also needing to remind everyone that yes, we’re really proud that in a moment when a lot of the press has become nervous about reporting critically on this administration, that we’re an institution that has built the single biggest body of accountability reporting ever produced by a single news organization on a single subject, on Donald Trump. Right? And we’re proud of that, but we’re nobody’s opposition, right? Just like as we’re no one’s cheerleader, we’re not part of any, we are independent. And the same complaints that President Trump has had about the press, many of them we heard from Joe Biden every time we reported on questions about his age and fitness. He became the first president in a century not to sit down with The New York Times for a single interview because he was so upset about his coverage.

So, when you put all that together, a big part of my job is just to give the staff, again, the resources to do their work, but also the confidence that we have their back to do that hard work in such an incendiary environment and volatile environment.

Amira Weeks: Absolutely. I want to bring this to current events, because this dynamic is still ongoing. Just when you think about the last month or so, The Times is suing the Pentagon over restricting freedom of the press. And last week, your team sat down with President Trump for a rare, unprecedented two-hour long interview. So when you think about this dynamic over the past decade, what have you learned? Are there things that you understand now that you just couldn’t have in 2016?

A.G. Sulzberger: Boy, that’s a great one. And you didn’t even mention that he’s become the first sitting president to sue a U.S. news organization, he’s sued us for the third time. So yes, lots of fronts.

What have we learned? I mean, I think the most important thing is, we have to tune out the cheers and the jeers. And cheers are just as dangerous as the jeers, right? You’ve got everyone baiting you to join a side, and we really believe that our model of journalism is independence. We believe that that is the single highest value to the American public. Right? Not every institution in American life needs to be independent, but America needs some independent institutions. And I’ve really come to believe that if you look at the core role of the press, seek the truth, help people understand the world, hold power to account.

Now, map that to some of the pathologies of this era. Misinformation. What’s the antidote to misinformation? It’s truth, it’s fact. Polarization and tribalism, what’s the antidote to that? Right? It’s understanding. Elite impunity, right? What’s the antidote to that? Accountability. And so I think our message is, we just need to keep our head down and just keep doing the work. Follow the facts where they lead, approach every story with an open mind, an empty notebook, but also, be completely unafraid to push through the pressure that we’re going to get from powerful forces to bring that to the public.

Amira Weeks: We’ll be back after this.

Amira Weeks: I want to touch on another challenge to your business, AI. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Perplexity for copyright infringement, essentially arguing that AI companies are free-riding on your journalism. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s at stake in those cases?

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah, yeah. As you may guess, I’m a little bit limited in how I can talk about an ongoing lawsuit. But let me say first and foremost, because we are in the center of Silicon Valley, this is not The New York Times being anti-innovation, and this is not The New York Times being anti-AI. Right? We don’t think that the future can be held at arm’s length. AI is here, it’s only become bigger, it’s obviously the next great wave of transformation that society is going to see. And every lesson of my tenure has been that you win by embracing technological shift and finding opportunity within them.

Now that said, it doesn’t mean that you get a license to steal our stuff. And there’s only really three ingredients to great AI, right? There’s the talent, the people who write the algorithms, right? And Silicon Valley is spending not just millions, not just hundreds of millions, but billions of dollars on that talent. There is the chips and data centers and electricity that makes it run. And Silicon Valley’s spending not just millions, not just billions, but hundreds of billions of dollars on that. And then there’s data, and there’s another word for data, it’s called copyrighted content. And the data powers the algorithms. And when we get to that third part of the equation, Silicon Valley says disproportionately, “We couldn’t possibly pay, we couldn’t afford it, and if you made us, China’s going to win.” And I just don’t think that’s true. We’re talking about the richest and most powerful companies in the history of humanity.

Amira Weeks: So, what do you think a fair relationship between AI companies and journalism looks like?

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah, look, I think the principle here, and it’s not just a principle that applies to journalism, right? It’s the same principle applies to the people making movies, to people making music, writing books, doing academic research, making video games. The principle is, if you are spending a lot of time and money to create intellectual property, you have the legal right to determine where and how that’s used and to set a market value on it, and that is just how the American system works. And that’s not like a novel principle, it’s in the Constitution, in fact, and that’s all we’re pushing for. We think that it’s really important to recognize that intellectual property has value, and that the laws protecting it need to be respected.

And let me just say one last thing. If that were not to happen, all of the industries have just listed would collapse, right? In the same way that if the companies making the AI algorithms were able to march into the NVIDIA factories and just take the chips and say, “I’m sorry, I got to take them. Otherwise, China…” It wouldn’t hold there either. So, and that would not just be bad for our industries, it’d be bad for our country, it’s a big source of American success and power. But it would also be bad for the AI, right? Among other things, AI needs accounts on journalists like the journalists at The New York Times out there finding the facts that have not yet been reported, and so can have not yet been input into these algorithms.

Amira Weeks: Thank you for your perspective on that. I know this is a space a lot of people in the audience are closely watching, and I want to focus on the audience for a bit.

A.G. Sulzberger: Oh, great.

Amira Weeks: There’s a lot of people in this audience who are going to go on to highly influential roles in business. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, roles that come with a lot more interaction with reporters and the press. Why do you think high quality journalism should matter to business leaders, and not just for its impact on preserving democracy, but also for its impact on business outcomes?

A.G. Sulzberger: Great. I love that, and I’m very happy to have the opportunity to talk to all of this hostage audience about this.

Look, I think there’s a few things. First and foremost, basically almost every successful business leader that I’ve encountered is a really avid reader of the news. Right? And many of them are among the most avid readers I’ve ever encountered, right? I cannot tell you how many of the top names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and elsewhere, names that you would all know, have told me the same story about needing to read between three to six papers before they show up at their office each day. Right? And that’s because I think less successful business leaders are often myopically focused on their own little challenge, right? And it’s really valuable to know about the rest of the world and to spot the opportunities and patterns there. Right? If you’re going to navigate the world right now, you really want to understand how Washington works and what’s going on with tariffs and so much more. So, that’s one.

Two, it has become increasingly fashionable for politicians and business leaders to publicly attack press coverage and the integrity of the people, the journalists who make it. I think you’d all be surprised by how many of those people at the same time recognize that journalists really are trying their… trustworthy journalists like you’d find at The Times, or the Journal or the Post or Bloomberg or the Wires, are really just trying to get the story as full and fair and accurate as possible. And so a lot of those business leaders, even the ones who are griping in public, are engaging sometimes publicly and sometimes in private, and have determined that that has real value in helping journalists produce the fullest and fairest version of a story that they or their companies are central figures in.

And the third thing I would say is, the part of journalism that drives business leaders the craziest is accountability journalism. It’s investigative journalism, right? It’s a journalism that looks at your mistakes and missteps and sometimes misconduct. And the thing that I’d urge people to remember there is, that as irritating as the role of journalists can be there, and as pesky as our questions can be, and as hard as it can make your lives in the moment, the integrity of the systems we all rely on, not just democracy but capitalism and markets, rely on the type of transparency and accountability that the press provides. Right? You look at the Enrons of the world or Elizabeth Holmes, right? And the work of the press helps save investors money and allows from throwing good money after bad. And helps create a culture of accountability where business leaders can make deals with confidence and work with each other with confidence. So, I think of this as a system and the role of journalists in that system isn’t always fun, but I do think it’s really important.

Amira Weeks: Great to hear from an expert in the field on that.

A.G. Sulzberger: And I say that as someone who’s been on both sides of it, yeah.

Amira Weeks: I want to turn it to our audience now, we have some student questions prepared.

A.G. Sulzberger: Great.

Student: Hi, I’m [inaudible], MBA One, Class of 2027. I had a question. The Times now makes more from subscription like games and cooking, versus some new categories. This hints that the future of journalism might be funded by things which are not journalism. So when you are pitching this strategy to Pulitzer-winning journalists who have dedicated their lives to investigative reporting, what do you actually say to them? As in, how do you actually solve the problem of getting people and supporting their mission and values, and balancing that with what the business model demands? Thank you.

A.G. Sulzberger: That’s a great question, thank you for that. So I mean, first what I should say is, back in our newspaper days, newspapers played many more roles than just giving the news. Right? So this is going to blow some of your minds, the younger people in the audience, but this is true, ask your teachers.

It used to be that the newspaper is the only way that you could find out who won yesterday’s game, how your stock was performing, is a weird one, what was on TV, you found out from the newspaper, and even what the weather is today, whether you should take an umbrella you would get from the front page of the newspaper. And so, that was all unbundled by the internet, and much of what we’re trying to do now is to… And what we were left with was just the news. Right? And I almost think of us as, we became a health food restaurant, right? And it’s like someone stole the cocktail menu and then the wine list, and now there’s no dessert because we’re sugar-free, right? And it’s really helpful to have all those other things to round the edges of the report.

So, what we’re trying to find is a modern bundle, and we’re really proud that we’ve got the category leading cooking app, the category leading product review site, Wirecutter. We now have the largest newsroom of sports journalists on earth with The Athletic, and then I’m guessing you’ve all heard of Wordle.

So, that has really rounded the edges. What it actually hasn’t done, is it hasn’t taken over. The news continues to be the main source of engagement and revenue, whether it’s ad revenue or subscription revenue. It is still the beating sun of our solar system. And so, we really value those other things, but they haven’t displaced the news.

And as far as, what do I say to that investigative reporter? He likes Wordle too. So, people at The Times have seen what’s happened elsewhere in the industry and are really grateful for how hard we’ve scrapped to find solutions, even if they’re just piecemeal and just part of the solution to make the place more sustainable.

Student: Hi, I’m Helen Cashman.

A.G. Sulzberger: Are you all sitting next to each other?

Amira Weeks: Yes.

A.G. Sulzberger: Okay, okay. All right.

Student: Makes it easy to find us. I’m Helen Cashman, I’m an MBA student in the Class of 2026. So, the median age of a New York Times subscriber is estimated to be about 43 years of age, which is younger than many peer publications. How did you go about diversifying your subscriber base to attract younger readers? And then, how are you further thinking about diversifying going forward, both across age but geography, to avoid any form of concentration risk? Thanks.

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah, oh, that’s great. So, on the young people thing, I’m struck again and again by how many people in my industry think the way to get young people is to repeat their rad memes and echo whatever their cool new terms are. And it’s almost like a theory that if you imitate and patronize, you’ll be able to win their hearts. And I just think that young people just see through that.

And so, our model has been really different, which is, we want to be authentic to who we are. Right? And among the factors of who we are is, we are the place that is willing to tell you the boring but important story that isn’t trending on any of your social media platforms. Right? The whole world’s talking about two celebrities, we’re going to be the one who’s like, “Have you guys heard about what’s happening in Sudan? It’s getting pretty bad out there, and we went to the front lines, we want to tell you why you should care.” So, being authentic to ourselves and never patronizing. But also, I think a big part of our success in the digital environment is being authentic to the mediums we’re on.

And so when we started The Daily, which is the leading news podcast in America, the tone, it feels quintessentially like The Times. It’s that boring but important story and made as interesting as humanly possible, that doesn’t condescend in any way, but it also feels so authentic to the medium, which is, it’s much more informal. Right? There’s a lot much more of expressing uncertainty and the limitations of what we know. And I actually think that getting good at that platform has made us better at writing too, as a result. So I think that that posture, right? Respect your audience’s intelligence, stay true to yourselves, but embrace the opportunity and the tonal opportunities that come with new, whether it’s video or audio or anything else. I think that’s been our key thing.

Looking forward, it’s really maybe the most remarkable story of The Times. We, you know, a generation ago, our audience base was basically limited to people in the New York City metropolitan area because it was a physical product. And today, we’ve got readers in every country on earth. We have more subscribers in California than we do in New York, and Texas and Florida are next on the list coming right on up. We’re growing fastest in the South and the Midwest. We’ve got millions of subscribers abroad. None of that would’ve been possible. And as that’s happened, we’ve diversified in every way, whether it’s racial and gender or socioeconomic and political. So, it’s part of the magic of the internet, is that you can really reach so many more people. And the more we go into more of these different channels, the more comfortable we are that we don’t need to reach them all with all of them. We’re happy with someone who has just a relationship with The Daily, or even just with the newspaper.

Student: Hi, I’m Nirali, an MBA Two. I’m an avid reader of The New York Times, and I’m also an avid scroller of Twitter. So I’m curious, we’re seeing now how top journalists can also monetize their journalism through platforms such as Substack and Twitter. What do you think is the enduring value prop of The New York Times, both for journalists and for readers themselves?

A.G. Sulzberger: That’s a great question and something we think a lot about. So, The Times has never been the place, never, where a star could get the most money or the biggest platform, the biggest spotlight. Right? Historically that was TV, now it’s either TV or being the biggest fish in a smaller pond, or maybe start a podcast or a Substack or something like that, if you just want to maximize spotlight.

The thing about The Times is we are the place to come to do the best and most impactful work of your career, and that is our differentiator. And we still pay very well and we pay our stars very well. But part of what not paying top of market for a handful of players allows us to do is to have the world, the country’s largest investigations operation, or to have a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, even after all these years of conflict and post-conflict. Right? We had 50 journalists on the ground last year in Ukraine. You can’t do that if you are just putting all that money behind a handful of big names.

But those big names tend to come to us and they tend to stay because they really, really value the things we can do. So we can lift up their work, so we just have the best editors and not just the best editors, but we have the best lawyers and the best security apparatus. And so, if you want to tell a story that’s going to involve risk going into Gaza, going into Sudan, going into Myanmar, if you want to tell a story that may involve risk of the President of the United States suing you by name, we can help. And we give you time, we give you the ability to tell that story not just one way, but to tell it in audio and video and multimedia. And then we give you the opportunity to put that in front of an audience that is completely unmatched in its combination of size, engagement, and influence.

And so, so many times those great reporters, they’re not just alerting the world to a problem, they’re letting the world solve that problem. And you compare that to if you are doing an email newsletter. At best, you’ve got tens of thousands of people reading you, almost all of them already agreed with you, that’s why they signed up. You have to give them three stories a week, otherwise your business model collapses. And if you ever tell them something they don’t want to hear, your viability is just completely gutted.

And so, just to use a metaphor that might resonate here, there have always been players and teams that care about the name on the front of the jersey that’s like, “It’s just the team approach,” right? And then there’s the places, it’s just the name on the back of the jersey, it’s like that’s the star approach. We want to be the place that’s the whole jersey, which is a way of saying, and I say this as a Knicks fan, and maybe we might have brighter days ahead of us, but we want to be the Golden State Warriors. Right? We want to be the place that has the perfect match between a great team with a great culture that lifts people up, and a place where a star wants to spend a whole career.

Amira Weeks: Thank you to my classmates for those really thoughtful questions.

A.G. Sulzberger: Those were great.

Amira Weeks: Okay, A.G., we’re going to wrap it up with a View From The Top tradition. Rapid fire questions.

A.G. Sulzberger: Oh, no.

Amira Weeks: Are you ready?

A.G. Sulzberger: Sure. You can tell I’m not good at rapid fire, but I will try.

Amira Weeks: Okay, hopefully not too hard. What is The New York Times game that you most enjoy playing?

A.G. Sulzberger: Oh, Connections.

Amira Weeks: Okay, I like that one too.

A.G. Sulzberger: Yeah, yeah.

Amira Weeks: What is the most overrated thing about New York?

A.G. Sulzberger: Um. Get me in trouble here. You know what? I think the notion that New Yorkers are mean. We’re not mean, we’re busy. We’re just really busy, and if you could just get us out of our busyness, I think you’ll find us to be a very nice, thoughtful, engaging group of people.

Amira Weeks: Okay. Do you have thoughts on the most underrated thing about New York?

A.G. Sulzberger: I should probably say Times Square because it’s named after us, but I cannot bring myself to do it, even as a loyalist. You know what? People love to hate on the subway, but I just think it’s a miracle. It’s like, everyone else in America spends all their life in cars. And in New York you get everywhere much faster, you get to see the full breadth of the city, and you get to multitask the whole time. So, subways.

Amira Weeks: Okay. Cheers for the subway. Outside of The New York Times, what is the journalism outlet that you most enjoy reading?

A.G. Sulzberger: I’m one of those annoying leaders who’s like, every day I must read all these publications. So, I subscribe to a dozen organizations. I probably spend the most time with the Journal. I think they’ve done a nice job under Almar and Emma, but it pales in comparison to the amount of time I spend with The Times. And I like to think we’re best in class on every front, so.

Amira Weeks: Will your kids work at The New York Times?

A.G. Sulzberger: Oh, you heard gasps in the audience? It’s a loaded question. What I would say, my kids are really young. They’re really young, they’re seven and three. And what I would say to them is, “The Times is a really special place, and as a family, we’re really lucky to get to be in service of it and its mission. But that doesn’t mean that you have to work there, and I’d much rather you find the thing that you love and are passionate about, just as long as it’s something that you work hard at and does some good in the world.”

Amira Weeks: I have one final question for you. It’s not exactly rapid fire.

A.G. Sulzberger: Okay.

Amira Weeks: What is the legacy that you hope to leave for the next New York Times publisher?

A.G. Sulzberger: Actually, that one, I’ve thought a lot about it. And so, when I got this job and I was trying to think about, what’s the marker that I’ve occupied it well, that I’ve proven worthy of it? Our tenures tend to be really long, they tend to be like 20 and 30 years. So it’s like, you couldn’t set some quantitative goal. And I realized it was just deceptively simple. It’s: Can you hand off the organization in a stronger position than it was handed to you? Right? Can you hand it off journalistically stronger? Stronger as a business with a stronger culture? And if you can do that, going back to that word, stewardship, that’s the definition of stewardship. That you’ve positioned it for the next leg of its journey and as its temporary sort of guardian, you occupied it well.;

Now I should say that it’s extremely early innings. It’s going well, but it’s early innings. But I always think about this conversation I had with this Japanese businessman. I was at this lunch and the host comes over and says, “I sat the two of you next to each other because you both run family businesses.” And I said, “Oh, I’m a publisher at The Times, fifth generation.” And I asked about him and he said he ran a company called Kikkoman and he started to explain, and I said, “I am well acquainted with your soy sauce. I have purchased many bottles of it over the years. God bless you. And what generation are you?” And he said, “18.”

Amira Weeks: Wow.

A.G. Sulzberger: And that’s what good looks like. And so, we are still very early in this journey.

Amira Weeks: Well, I love that as a way to wrap it up. Thank you so much, A.G.

A.G. Sulzberger: Oh, thank you.

Amira Weeks: Truly, it’s been a pleasure.

Michael McDowell: I think we have a lot to talk about.

Amira Weeks: I think so too.

Michael McDowell: That was a fabulous interview. I want to start with whether to change versus how to change. What did you take away from A.G.’s really rather remarkable case study of The Times’ digital transformation?

Amira Weeks: I think the main thing I was left thinking afterwards was this idea of being so clear about what should not change. And I think that sounds like a simple thing, but there’s a lot of companies when revenue goes down or you face challenges, people think, let’s change everything. And so, I think it is really powerful to crystallize, what is the one thing that cannot change? And then feel free to change everything else in service of that.

Michael McDowell: Simple things somehow can be so complex to actually implement. Communication is always item six, needs to be number one.

Amira Weeks: When you think about the tangible outcomes like growing this 5X or convincing this customer. And I think something I really appreciate about the GSB curriculum is that we focus on those things, but we also focus on the soft skill aspects of it. So, when he made that point, communication is usually number six, it made me think back to all of the things I’ve been learning here over the past year or so, and how I really feel like there’s an emphasis here on making communication not number six. Communication is everything. So, I think that was just a really powerful reminder.

Michael McDowell: At roughly the halfway mark, you asked a very incisive question, it was super well-placed too. I’m paraphrasing but essentially it was, what have you learned from a decade of covering President Donald Trump? What did you learn about how A.G. thinks about covering President Donald Trump?

Amira Weeks: One of the stories he told in the interview was about the Narragansett Lions Club, and essentially how powerful people in that organization didn’t want him to say certain things in his reporting job. And I was just struck by how many similarities there were between that story and the challenges that he faced later in his life dealing with President Trump and pressure that may have also been applied in that situation. And it just made me think, these are values, elements of character, elements of leadership, that were present all throughout his journey, not only in the element of pressure or criticism he faced from the President of the United States.

And so, I think what I learned about how A.G. thinks about covering President Trump is that it’s not President Trump specific, it’s like how he thinks about being a reporter and being a journalist in general. His job is not to be liked or to be praised, it’s to be an independent journalist, to uphold that mission, and that’s how he sees it. So, I think just that thread throughout the interview is something that appeared to me and was a takeaway that I have.

Michael McDowell: Yeah, I think it’s like, there’s something else he said at maybe a little bit later on, “The integrity of the systems we all rely on democracy, capitalism, markets, depends on the accountability and transparency that the press provides.”

Amira Weeks: Absolutely. I think it’s a fundamental organization in our democracy. It helps uphold democracy, at least I believe that. So, it’s also great to hear that from the Chairman and Publisher of The New York Times.

Michael McDowell: Everyone’s on the same page, pun intended.

Amira Weeks: Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Michael McDowell: Let’s talk a little bit about AI. I’m going to quote him directly. “There’s another word for data, it’s called copyrighted content.” Any thoughts there?

Amira Weeks: I mean, so before GSB, I worked at Netflix in the entertainment industry. And so, I think that hits home as somebody who spent three years of their career in entertainment. People are putting their blood, sweat, and tears into producing information that AI can use into producing creative works. That’s the data that’s feeding the models in some of these cases. And so, I’m on the side that people deserve credit for that

Michael McDowell: I think on more personal note, you spoke to him about The Times being a family business, going from stewardship at the beginning to stewardship at the end. What did you learn from his answers about his relationship to the institution?

Amira Weeks: When I hear him talk about what stewardship means to him and what that mission passed down through generations mean to him, I could hear in his voice and I just see such a deep sense of duty to the organization. And I think someone can be an amazing leader, a principled leader, but it doesn’t negate the fact that it is a family business and that’s part of the reason that they’re in their position. And I was really impressed with his self-awareness about that piece of the conversation. His ability to poke fun at it, but also the hard work, the never saying no that he had to put in. So, it’s great to hear from somebody who, despite having those privileges, still puts in the work and still makes transformation and impact in his role.

Michael McDowell: Recognizing that leadership is something one learns, not something that one has necessarily been born with or inherited.

Amira Weeks: Yeah, those leadership capabilities and traits, you have to work on them. And you can inherit maybe some pieces of leadership, but in order to be a really transformational and respected leader, I think those are things that you have to work on.

Michael McDowell: Excellent. So, from the subscriber model to the modern bundle, A.G. had a lot to say about the business of the news. Was there anything that stuck out for you?

Amira Weeks: The news has changed a lot since I was a kid, we used to get the Oakland Press delivered to our house. Even while the business model has had to change to support the core of what they’re doing, the core of what they’re doing is the same. And so, I think that’s another piece on this point of transformation or what’s the one thing that doesn’t change, and how they’ve adapted the business model so much, but it’s in service of the mission. You know, if Connections in Wordle can finance independent journalism, so be it.

Michael McDowell: We’re all for it.

Amira Weeks: Yeah, we’re all for it

Michael McDowell: Amira, this was fantastic. Thank you so much.

Amira Weeks: No problem.

You’ve been listening to View From The Top: The Podcast, a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business. This interview was conducted by me, Amira Weeks, of the MBA Class of 2026. Michael McDowell is our managing producer, and Michael Riley edited and mixed this episode. Special thanks to Liz Walker.

View From The Top is the Dean’s Premiere Speaker series. It was started in 1978, and is supported in part by the F. Kirk Brennan Speaker Series Fund. During interviews led by students, leaders from around the world share insights on effective leadership, core values, and lessons learned along the way. You can find more episodes of View From The Top on our website, gsb.stanford.edu/business-podcasts. Don’t forget to rate and subscribe and follow us on social media at @stanfordgsb, and see you next time on View From the Top.