Month: August 2020

Here’s what global publishers need to know about the latest regulatory twists and turns down under between Google and the news business.

What just happened in Australia?

Earlier this year the Australian Government asked the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to draft up a code of conduct to address what the watchdog has described as “bargaining power imbalances” between news publishers in the country and Google and Facebook. 

On July 31, the ACCC released its draft News Media Bargaining Code. The code would allow news publishers to negotiate either individually or collectively for compensation from Google or Facebook when they feature their news articles on their services.

Elsewhere, the code includes a set of “minimum standards” that would require the tech giants to give news publishers 28 days advance warning of any changes to their algorithms that might affect the placement of news. The code would also require the tech companies to provide the data they collect on users when those users interact with news content.

The ACCC proposes compulsory arbitration if the tech giants and news businesses can’t come to an agreement within three months of negotiation. The parties can appoint the arbitrator or they can be assigned arbitrators by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Failure to comply with the code could mean that tech companies are issued penalties of up to 10% of a digital platform’s annual revenue in Australia. 

How has Google responded?

Noisily. From Monday, Google users in Australia were presented with a pop-up message that stated, “The way Aussies use Google is at risk.” Clicking on the pop-up — which carried an image reminiscent of a warning sign — led to an open letter from Google Australia managing director Mel Silva.

In it, Google argues that the News Media Bargaining Code would “force” the company to give an unfair advantage to news media businesses in Google Search and YouTube search results because those publishers “would be given information that would help them artificially inflate their ranking over everyone else.” Google said it wouldn’t be able to guarantee that data could be kept safe. And Google argued that the law could “put our free services at risk” should bigger news companies start to make onerous demands.

What did the ACCC say about that?

The ACCC was swift to issue a response on Monday, saying Google’s open letter “contains misinformation.” In its statement, ACCC said it’s up to Google if it wants to charge for its services. Similarly, Google only needs to share additional user data if it wants to.

Your move, Google!

It didn’t take too long for Google to issue a rebuttal to the rebuttal. In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: “We strongly disagree and are concerned that our view of the Code has been represented this way during a consultation phase.” (Australian publication Mi3 covered the back and forth.)

How’s Facebook reacted?

Certainly less overtly noisily than Google — for now at least.

William Easton, managing director of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand said in a statement: “We are reviewing the Government’s proposal to understand the impact it will have on the industry, our services and our investment in the news ecosystem in Australia.”

Could the decision in Australia pave the way for something similar in the U.S.?

In the U.S., The News Media Alliance, which represents around 2,000 publishers, has been trying to promote a bill called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, legislation which would allow newspaper companies to collectively negotiate with online platforms for better terms — something that competition law currently doesn’t allow.

NMA CEO David Chavern said he expects the House of Representatives will be supportive of the proposals and that it is gathering more support from the Senate, including majority leader Mitch McConnell.

What about in Europe?

There’s already been a lot of movement. In April this year, French competition authority Autorité de la Concurrence ordered Google to enter “in good faith” negotiations with publishers there over fees to pay for their news content — including article extracts, photos and videos.

That announcement followed the EU passing a new copyright rule last year requiring tech companies to license content from rightsholders. 

Still, things haven’t been plain sailing in the past between European news publishers and Google. The search giant shut down Google News in Spain in 2014 when it was asked to pay publishers for the news snippets it displayed. That same year, German’s largest news publisher Axel Springer pulled a u-turn on a plan to prevent Google News running snippets of its articles after its referral traffic plunged.

Hold on, don’t Google and Facebook already pay publishers for news?

Some publishers. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Google had reached agreements to license news publishers including Spiegel Group in Germany, Diarios Associados in Brazil, and Australian local news publishers Solstice Media. However, the Financial Times reported on Monday that Google is “pausing” its Australian news licensing program. A Google spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about this reported development.

Google hasn’t announced any U.S. publishers joining this program yet. Last year, Facebook launched a news tab in which it is making “multi-year financial commitments” to some high-profile U.S. publishers. Participating publications reportedly include News Corp’s Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and New York Post, BuzzFeed News and Business Insider, according to The Wall Street journal.

Still, NMA’s Chavern said Google and Facebook “have got to work faster.”

He added, “They wouldn’t have had the code of conduct [in Australia] if they hadn’t been dragging their feet.”

What arguments are there against the ACCC proposals that aren’t from Google and Facebook?

There’s the question of whether the horse already bolted and that publishers should have adapted their online business models far sooner rather than attempting to get Google and Facebook to retrospectively fix it for them.

“It’s so frustrating the sheer amount of energy and work put into discussions [among publishers] about entitlement and what has been and what should have happened,” said Markus Odevall, a digital and marketing consultant based in Sweden who works with news publishers. “Time to move on.”

Bloomberg Opinion’s editorial board made a similar argument in an op-ed published last week.

What happens next?

The consultation on the draft proposals is due to conclude on August 28 2020. Final legislation is expected to be introduced to the Australian Parliament shorty after.

Eric Johnson, Condé Nast svp of commercial marketing and events, said advertisers were “skittish” to buy into virtual events at first due to the uncertainty of what returns they might get from their already slashed marketing budgets.

But five months into the coronavirus crisis — with little promise of in-person events coming back this calendar year — brands are “looking for the emerging consumer that they weren’t able to reach at their beauty counter or other experiences that they had,” said Johnson. Some of the top advertisers that Condé Nast has had for its virtual events so far are Axe, Chipotle, Chloe, OGX, Ralph Lauren, Shutterfly and Ulta Beauty.

“Virtual events are still new as a complete substitute for in-person events,” said Samantha Stockman, group director at media buying agency The Media Kitchen., adding that for her clients looking to advertise against virtual events, having an upfront atmosphere where Condé Nast is able to differentiate itself from other publishers that have made the virtual pivot is helpful for making those buying decisions.

Johnson added that “there is a much higher aptitude for engaging in this virtual format,” from a consumers’ perspective, which his team found through a global survey they ran back in May focused on audience perceptions to and what they would likely tune into.

The survey found that over 70% of the Condé Nast audience had already attended one of the 150 virtual events that the company has held since March. Additionally, 90% of respondents said that even once live events are back, they would still be interested in the virtual offerings. 

“Regardless of what happens with the pandemic, we should be building a business around virtual events because they’re here to stay,” said Johnson, adding “I am bullish about the second half of 2021 … for hopefully what will be hybrid events.”

Last year, Condé Nast hosted upwards of 650 events globally with a turnout of more than 1 million attendees. A spokesperson for the company said that drawing year-over-year revenue comparisons between its in-person and virtual events is difficult since there are more media integrations that can be sold for virtual. However, some brands are seeing revenue lift in large part due to added virtual events, including Teen Vogue and its Teen Vogue Prom franchise that took place this spring.

Looking ahead, Johnson said, “we know that there is going to be an element of virtual” to all of the events in the first half of 2021. “So why not at least plan and build the virtual component.” 

Additionally, the global scale of virtual is too large to give up post-pandemic as well, Johnson said, and since 90% of its audience members are claiming now that they would tune into virtual events again even after they’re allowed to go to in-person events, it doesn’t make sense to give up reaching for as large of an audience as possible.

Part of the pitch is getting advertisers excited about the one-to-one connections, like conversations in breakout rooms and sending products to audiences’ homes ahead of the event, but Johnson said there is “no better way to show ROI” than through immediate transactions that can take place in some of these events.

For example, two of Vogue’s co-branded events with a clothing brand (which he declined to name) this summer drove over $25,000 in attendee sales in one hour, he said.

Johnson said there is also a goal to push advertisers beyond the one-off event partnerships and try to get them to buy across events and brands based on the event genre advertisers want to be a part of as well as the audience segment they want to reach. 

For example, advertisers that want to be seen as a thought-leader could easily sponsor the New Yorker Festival, the Glamour Women of the Year and Wired25, he said. 

“We’re really trying to set the stage so that there are a lot of different ways to connect,” said Johnson. 

While there are more advertisers looking at investing in election news this year, according to media agency sources, largely because of the absence of sports, the deals were executed later and more slowly thanks to persistent economic uncertainty, and some publishers have redistributed their reporting resources away from the conventions and onto suddenly important topics such as mail-in voting.

So while early returns suggest that this week’s Democratic convention is not capturing the nation’s attention the way that it had in years past — television ratings for the first night of the convention were down 28% from their 2016 totals, according to Nielsen data — publishers are hoping to make up for any revenue they might lose from a smaller convention audience with a longer election season that could stretch well past November 3 if the outcome is immediately unclear or contested.

In a normal election year, the party conventions, particularly if they’re part of a large election package, can be one of the biggest buys an advertiser can make, provided they’re comfortable investing in news as a category, said Anne Elkins, svp of media investment at the media agency Assembly.

“If you’re a news advertiser, it’s the Super Bowl for news,” Elkins said.

Categories that tend to be comfortable with news range from pharmaceutical advertisers to automakers.

Advertisers that aren’t comfortable buying ads next to news normally keep away from the conventions too. But this year has bucked that trend. “There’s been an influx of new advertisers into the news genre because sports doesn’t exist, or hasn’t existed as it did,” Elkins added, saying that brands in the tech and telco categories have made their way into the category more this year; she declined to name specific advertisers. 

That money is gravitating toward the campaigns at a moment when many publications are being compelled to cover adjacent topics instead, with no campaign trail to report from. BuzzFeed News politics reporters who, under normal circumstances, might have been following candidates around on the country this spring and summer have instead focused more on covering the coronavirus.

“We’re certainly saving a lot of money on plane tickets,” Axios editor in chief Nicholas Johnson said. “But just because we’re not there, it doesn’t change the ambition of what we’d cover.”

In some cases, the topics publishers are focusing on were not on their radar at the start of the year. CBS News’s digital channel, CBSN, for example, launched a new editorial series Monday focused on voting rights, a topic that few expected to be as pressing a topic in the 2020 presidential race.  

The move to a virtual campaign season has upended some publishers’ events plans too. Axios, which will be covering the conventions for the first time — the site launched in 2017 — had planned to host nine in-person events in Milwaukee and Charlotte, five in Milwaukee and four in Charlotte, all at the same event spaces, which Kristin Burkhalter, Axios’s vp of events, hoped to turn into destinations that Axios reporters could use and possibly lure advertising partners in with snacks.

Those events will now be virtual, accessible on Axios’s website and app as well as platforms including YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Axios managed to preserve the sponsors it had secured for the events, which include Bank of America, Lyft and Microsoft. A company spokesperson declined to comment on whether those sponsors were paying Axios the same amount of money now that the events are virtual.

Whether some of the money that came in for the conventions continues to come in remains to be seen. But if television ratings continue to slide, either because sports like college football don’t come back or viewers remain distracted by any number of other big news events, some publishers may wind up benefitting.

And there’s a flurry of new platform and service features being touted as differentiators. For example, Amazon’s IMDb TV plans to introduce a more TV-like viewing experience and raise the streamer’s profile on its Fire TV connected TV platform. NBCUniversal distributes 24/7 streaming channels on its Peacock service, while its parent company owns Pluto TV’s original rival, Xumo. And Roku has increased the number of live channels on The Roku Channel and added a TV-style programming guide. 

Taken together, the companies appear to be making their services more familiar to traditional TV viewers, who are increasingly shifting their attention to streaming. By replicating the traditional TV experience, the streamers can flatten the adjustment curve for audiences and make it easier for people to find programs to watch and to keep watching.

Since March, streaming viewership has surged while cord cutting has accelerated, increasing the potential audience pool for these so-called FAST services. In April, the number of households in the U.S. that stream video increased by 5.2 million over the previous year to total 69.8 million households, according to Comscore. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ continue to dominate the streaming landscape, accounting for 77% of streaming viewership in the second quarter of 2020, according to Nielsen. Nonetheless, streamers outside of that group, such as the FAST services, saw their watch time increase by more than 57% in the second quarter to total more than 12 billion minutes, per the measurement firm. 

“We’re still in the wild west of [streaming] where things are developing slowly. On some platforms, there is going to be a convergence where parts of it mirror what traditional TV is or was like,” said Andrew Eisbrouch, COO of Law&Crime Network, which operates a 24/7 streaming channel across free and subscription-based streaming platforms.

Case in point: Amazon, this fall, will update the user interface for IMDb TV’s Fire TV app to automatically start playing videos when people open it, replicating the traditional TV experience, according to an Amazon spokesperson, who noted that an on-demand browsing option will remain within the app. The update will also add a programming guide featuring a combination of custom playlists and 24/7 channels. And later this year, Amazon will update its Fire TV’s TV-like live programming guide as well as its “Live” tab to include 24/7 streaming channels distributed on IMDb TV, the spokesperson said.

Other so-called FAST services have successfully co-opted the traditional TV experience. Both Pluto TV and Samsung TV Plus, for example, automatically stream programs upon launch, which industry executives say contributes to their platforms’ viewership. “It drives very high session times, way more than others with more of [an on-demand] interface,” said one streaming industry executive, referring to platforms that open up to a programming menu a la traditional TV’s on-demand section.

Pluto TV is not sitting on its hands, however. The streamer, which claims more than 33 million monthly active users, is updating its platform in ways that may make it more familiar to TV viewers. It is rearranging the channels it carries into 15 content categories with more intuitive category names, like “gaming and anime” replacing the previous “tech and geek” category and “home and DIY” becoming “life and style.” ( Pluto TV is also debuting more of its own channels that curate programming from other companies and adopting names for those channels like Classic TV Comedy and Pluto TV Love Stories. “This is all about the user and trying to get them into the content they’re trying to find as fast as possible,” said Scott Reich, svp of programming at Pluto TV.

Confessional

“IGTV is like YouTube videos, and Facebook is like my mom taping the dog.”

— Non-industry friend

Stay tuned: Pandemic clauses in upfront deals

Some advertisers and their agencies have added a new entry to the list of flexibility demands they are making in this year’s elongated TV upfront negotiations. After many advertisers asked to be let out of their quarterly upfront commitments immediately at the outset of the coronavirus crisis in March, ad buyers now are asking for that option to be put in writing.

“If there is another pandemic in place, then we’re allowed out [of upfront commitments] — that’s something that is going to be new to our deal points,” said one agency executive.

It’s not yet clear how common these pandemic clauses are becoming or whether TV networks are pushing back against their inclusion in this year’s upfront contracts. But advertisers and their agencies have already been asking TV networks to make all kinds of new allowances for advertisers to cancel their commitments, ranging from shrinking cancelation windows to increasing cancelation amounts. Asking for the option to cancel in case of another global health crisis, by comparison, seems like a straightforward request.

Numbers don’t lie

25%: Streaming’s share of total TV usage in the second quarter of 2020.

$1.5 billion: AT&T’s asking price for the sale of Crunchyroll.

WTF is Triller?

The threat of TikTok being banned from operating in the U.S. has turned attention to the cottage industry of TikTok competitors that have emerged. Among them is Triller. If you’re interested in learning more about the app that has been billed by one of its co-owners as the “adult version” of TikTok, here’s a primer.

What we’ve covered

Shopify breaks into TV:

• Shopify is far from the first brand to break into TV production, but it is providing a model for others to follow suit.
• Shopify has not pushed for its projects to be larded with branding, and co-producers have found Shopify Studios to operate like a normal production firm.

Read more about Shopify here.

TV networks, streamers seek out show formats that can adapt to another shooting shutdown:

• Wary of another production shutdown, show buyers are looking for projects that won’t need to go on hiatus.
• Unscripted projects have emerged as particularly adaptable as well as cost-effective.

Read more about covid-proof production here.

Publishers’ test kitchens return to studios with new safety measures:

• Tastemade, Trusted Media Brands’ Taste of Home, America’s Test Kitchen, BuzzFeed’s Tasty and Meredith’s EatingWell have started shooting in studios since June.
• The publishers are taking different steps to return to the studios without jeopardizing employees’ health and safety.

Read more about publishers’ test kitchens here.

Why publishers aren’t prioritizing Instagram Reels:

• The primary obstacle to publishers adopting Instagram Reels is the lack of immediate revenue.
• The shorter duration of Instagram Reels compared to TikTok videos has also been a drawback.

Read more about Instagram Reels here.

With A-list talent sitting at home, publishers eye video collaborations:

• Musicians’ and actors’ agents and managers are more receptive than ever to pitches from publishers.
• However, a surge of requests means the requests don’t elicit an immediate yes.

Read more about publishers’ video collaborations here.

What we’re reading

TV’s changing of the guard:
Hollywood’s executive ranks are in a state of upheaval as traditional TV and film companies shift their focus to streaming, according to The New York Times. The article suggests that the urgency of the streaming wars and the demise of the traditional entertainment business has accelerated the shift to the point that there is no time for patience with old dogs learning new tricks. That sounds about right. The idea that streaming technocrats are more cutthroat that Hollywood’s old guard, though? I’m not so sure.

The racial divide inside Hollywood unions:
It can already take a lot of time and effort to get a union card in the entertainment industry. But it is even harder to join a union if you are Black or a member of another underrepresented group, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Directors Guild of America, for example, has 18,000 members but only 5% are Black and only 4% are Latinx. Adding urgency to the issue, non-union crew members were left out in the cold when production shut down in March and face lower pay and less protection when returning to work.

Today, Levien is still on WiFi — but in one of the toughest and highest-profile roles in media: in September she will become the president and chief executive of the New York Times.

Talk to just about anyone in the media industry and you will hear a similar story about Levien’s work ethic. (“I don’t know when she sleeps. She must, but it’s a mystery to everyone,” said Mike Perlis, her former boss at Forbes). Her contemporaries gush about her personable nature and business savvy, but also note her ambition and ability to reinvent herself as the media business has changed. A traditional ad executive by background and pioneer of the sponsored content era, she pivoted to subscriptions and was the victor of a power shake-up that saw her emerge as the leader of the Times’ product and technology unit, too.

At 49, Levien is the youngest person to reach the paper’s CEO job, and her rise at the Times has been astonishingly swift. In 2013, she was hired away from Forbes to lead the Times’ ad business, where she oversaw a turnaround and managed to introduce a native advertising studio to an old-school news company. She was promoted in 2015 to chief revenue officer, which added the subscription business to her portfolio. Then, in an executive reshuffling in 2017, Levien was promoted to chief operating officer, consolidating power on the business side and establishing herself as the clear internal candidate to be named as the next CEO. In July, that’s exactly what happened. 

“She has successfully led much of our company’s most important work — from reimagining our advertising business to driving our historic subscription growth to fostering a culture of product innovation,” announced Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. The board of directors decided “there was really no one else,” outgoing CEO Mark Thompson told his own paper.

Levien declined to be interviewed for this story, but called the new job “the honor of a lifetime” in a statement. She takes over the position at an auspicious time for the newspaper. In the second quarter, the paper for the first time generated more revenue from digital than print, and the addition of 669,000 net new digital subscribers marked the biggest quarter ever for subscription growth. Advertising, on the other hand, fell off a cliff: down 43.9%, in large part thanks to coronavirus.

Thompson departs with a legacy of transforming a languid, print-focused newspaper into a healthy digital news operation, growing the company’s subscription base and championing important journalism in the face of President Trump’s regular taunting description of the company as failing. The Times passed $800 million in digital revenue last year, a goal Thompson had pledged to reach by this year. When he took over eight years ago, it was far from clear that the paper would emerge from his tenure as a modern digital operation that was still family-controlled. 

Levien, on the other hand, is inheriting a paper on a high note with plenty of cash on hand for new investments to further solidify its editorial dominance. But the challenges are there. The desolate advertising market has presented a catastrophe for publishers across the media landscape. The possible end of the Trump era could leave the Times and other publishers without the energizing sense of purpose they had for the past four years, an urgent news moment which lured in new subscribers. At some point, the skyrocketing subscriber business could hit a ceiling or investors could demand better margin growth. 

Being the chief executive of the New York Times will never be simple, but Levien’s many fans in media say that if there’s one person who can maintain the newspaper’s momentum, it’s her.

Rocket Ship

Levien first began reading the Times as a high schooler in Richmond, Virginia, thanks to her parents’ Sunday edition subscription, she told Digiday for a profile in 2015. A journalism lover in college, she joined the staff of the University of Virginia student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, first as a reporter and later as an ad seller (since it was a paid position). “I loved writing, I loved editing, I loved reporting,” Levien told the Cavalier Daily in an interview in July. 

After graduating from UVA, Levien moved to New York (she married Jason Levien, co-owner of Major League Soccer team D.C. United, and the couple have one son). Levien began her career at the Bradley-owned consulting firm the Advisory Board, traveling the country to bring in medical centers and health systems as members, Bradley said. “She was, as well, a rocket ship launched vertically up through the ranks of the company,” he said, adding that Levien was among the youngest elected to the company’s version of partnership. 

The Advisory Board eventually went public, and Bradley refashioned himself as a media executive when he purchased the storied, money-losing Atlantic magazine. He hired Levien as ad director and later encouraged her to move over to 02138, a short-lived title he purchased that was geared toward Harvard alumni. Asking Levien to rescue 02138 was the cruelest thing Bradley ever did to her, he said. “For almost all of us who touched that magazine, the experience was a disaster. It must have been my fault.” 

In 2008, Levien joined Forbes to run the luxury women’s magazine Forbes Life. As Digiday later reported, Levien proved herself by remaking the business, shuttering the print magazine to emphasize digital and launching an events series that would become Forbes’ Women’s Conference. She became chief revenue officer of the larger Forbes brand, where she helped put the business back in the black thanks to programmatic advertising and “Brandvoice,” Forbes’ controversial sponsored content unit.

Through Brandvoice, Levien helped to usher in a new era of “native advertising” into the media business, which was a novel concept at the time. The unit allowed advertisers to fashion their own content on Forbes’ property and faced vocal criticism from a journalism community that views the line between editorial and business as sacrosanct. For Forbes, the result was a rejuvenated business and ultimate sale. For Levien, Brandvoice won her plenty of fans in the ad world.

“She has been an unstoppable innovator who, while at Forbes, was at the forefront of using editorial content with audiences to warm them to brands, build trust and create long-term relationships,” said Meredith Verdone, the chief marketing officer at Bank of America. 

Perlis, the former Forbes CEO, credited Levien with setting clear goals for the revenue side and establishing loyalty on her team. “Forbes was generally a pretty platooned place, and there was a hierarchy and knowledge was exchanged very judiciously in the ranks. Meredith turned that upside down,” he said. 

When the Times came calling, Levien was at first unsure whether she wanted to join a publisher whose best years were seemingly behind it. Perlis, for his part, tried to convince Levien to stay at Forbes, but he could tell the process was far along. “Even though I was battling away, the little amber light was shining that this was going to be a manifest destiny for her,” he said. 

Right on time

When Levien joined the Times in 2013, its digital outlook was, by the paper’s own admission, a complete mess. An internal 96-page “Innovation Report” painted a dire picture, describing a news outlet that had failed to keep up with the competition. In the ad department, Levien engineered a more coherent combination of print and digital sales, orchestrated a major staff overhaul, and moved the company to DoubleClick for Publishers.

She also brought with her the native advertising playbook from Forbes. Initially, some at the paper were hostile to the idea, including then-executive editor Jill Abramson (who was replaced with Dean Baquet the day before the Innovation Report leaked to BuzzFeed). When Levien introduced a new “Paid Posts” program, then-publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wrote a note assuring staffers that, although native advertising is “relatively new and can be controversial,” it was key to helping “restore digital advertising revenue to growth.”

“She came in with the conviction and the proof from her experience at Forbes that digital sales was going in two different directions: one was branded content and the other was programmatic,” said Michael Zimbalist, formerly an ad executive at the Times and now the chief strategy and innovation officer at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Neither of those products or product strategies were particularly well embraced when she came to the Times, so it was not an easy task to get the full-throated support of the whole organization to go in those directions, but she did that.”

In relatively short order, staffers at the Times got used to the work from T Brand Studio, the paper’s name for its sponsored content arm. A few projects, like a sponsored story for Netflix on “Orange is the New Black,” were even outright well-received within the newsroom. (Though Levien did have to apologize for once boasting at a 4As event that some of the Times’ native ads outperformed news stories).

Zimbalist said that Levien had a sense for what might anger the editorial side, and once pulled a published sponsored post for an alcohol brand because she felt it veered too closely to the framing of another series of stories done by the Opinion department. Levien communicated the mistake to the editorial side, and the post was quickly reworked. “The client was happy, but it just showed the lightning quick reaction,” Zimbalist said. 

Levien pushed her sales department to close big holistic deals across different parts of the paper. “She does her homework more than anyone I know, and is adept at making connections that enable marketers like me to see inside the paper and imagine what’s possible,” said Linda Boff, the CMO of GE. Boff said that GE did some of her “favorite campaigns ever” with the Times, including an audio-based project with NYT Magazine and a campaign that placed virtual reality goggles in the Sunday paper (which Digiday reported at the time was in the $1 million range).

The path forward

By 2015, executives at the Times understood that the advertising business was no longer the future of the paper. Google and Facebook were swallowing up the ad market. What the Times had to its advantage was a huge name brand and top-notch journalists. The strategy, made clear in a memorandum called Our Path Forward, was to lean into subscriber growth. Levien was promoted to chief revenue officer, making subscription revenue her responsibility as well, an area in which she was previously unfamiliar. When she managed to help grow that part of the business, too, insiders started believing she was the potential internal successor to Thompson. 

The only issue, sources said, was that she still didn’t have quite enough in her portfolio. The Times at that point had three major units: news, revenue, and product, the final of which was led by Kinsey Wilson. A key figure on the Times’ digital rejuvenation, Wilson had been the bridge between the business side and the news side. He helped fix clunky digital products and streamline the paper’s tech infrastructure from a half dozen tech stacks to a more uniform system.

What happened next depends on who you ask inside the Times, an organization perennially obsessed with palace intrigue. Descriptions range from “coup” to “organizational change.” Either way, in 2017, Levien was named chief operating officer. Wilson left the company. 

“I didn’t view it as a power struggle,” Wilson said. “In fact I’ve never worked with a senior team that was as talented, collegial and closely aligned as the one I was part of at The Times. Having spent a career driving digital transformation inside big, complex media organizations, I’m a realist about the need for constant organizational assessment and change. It comes with the territory.”

With Wilson’s exit, Levien added product, design, and technology to her portfolio, setting her up to be Thompson’s natural successor. In the years since, the Times’ digital products like NYT Cooking and its Crossword app have become increasingly important drivers for digital revenue. (Of the 669,000 total net subscriber additions last quarter, 176,000 came from Cooking, Crossword, or audio products). 

Indeed, audio is also a key area of focus for the Times (and also for Levien, who listens to podcasts at 1.5x speed or 2x if she is in a hurry). Last month, the company announced it had acquired the production company behind the hit podcast “Serial.” The Times’ “Daily” podcast, hosted by Michael Barbaro, has also become a huge hit in recent years, with about 3 million daily downloads.

In perhaps another example of Levien’s influence behind the scenes, the Times has its ad department to thank for the Daily. While the editorial side was still deciding on how to continue Barbaro’s campaign podcast after the 2016 election, Times salespeople went ahead and closed a multi-million dollar campaign with BMW — with a sponsorship of a daily news podcast as the lynchpin.

Thus far, Times newsroom staffers spread out across the world (and on Zoom) have received the news of Levien’s elevation well. The editorial staffers that have interacted with her tend to like her. She says the right things in staff meetings and legitimately cares about journalism. And they like that a young woman is now in charge.

Company insiders do not expect much to change. Levien told Axios that the company’s strategy is “broadly working” and “any change from here is a question of emphasis.” The goal, however, is to reach 10 million digital subscribers by 2025, up from around 6 million now. 

It’s an ambitious target, but David Bradley, at least, is confident. “As certain as the earth orbits the sun, Meredith will be a success as CEO.”