73
the paper for the crossword”). After years of seeing digital in-
novators leave in frustration, the Times became a magnet for
web developers, multimedia producers, and product special-
ists who might do their work and move on. Most of the journal-
ists who worked on the Innovation Report are no longer there.
“People come through. You’re not going to spend your whole
life here,” says Dean Baquet, who succeeded Abramson, and
persuaded Sulzberger to leave reporting to become head of
newsroom strategy. “It’s constant experiment. Constantly try-
ing things. Print did not allow for experimentation. It could
not. It was like a manufacturing plant.”
The newcomers are shaping this newly flexible Times, some-
times into contortions that, once public, can resemble spectacles.
In August, after a black female opinion contributor called out a
white male editor for racial insensitivity on Twitter, the editor
was demoted. It was all written up in the Times, along with the
newsroom town hall where Baquet, who is African American,
fielded questions from employees alive to issues around gen-
der, race and patriarchy that are challenging workplaces every-
where. At the newspaper of record, the question was why it did
not label the President “racist.” “This is hard stuff,” Baquet said.
The Daily was created by an arrival from public radio and took
off like a shot with host Michael Barbaro, rising from 5.8 million
downloads in February 2017 to 48 million in June 2019. It was,
on one hand, an example of restlessness rewarded: the Times
was present with a new form when appetite for that form soared.
But it also revealed a unique resource the Times had not realized
it could exploit: its newsroom of 1,600 brimmed with experts.
And on The Daily, they sound careful, relatable, professional—a
lot like a news story written to go online. The Internet, which has
no time for throat clearing, required the
Times to find a voice. “We can be our best
version of ourselves, in a new medium,
in a new way,” says Sam Dolnick, a Sulz-
berger cousin who oversees the podcast.
In June, the Times unveiled The
Weekly, a half-hour documentary series
backed by FX and Hulu, that seeks to join
the ranks of Frontline and 60 Minutes. The
taxi story was the second episode. Experi-
ments with augmented and virtual real-
ity also continue, says Sulz berger, who as
an executive tends to hold to his conclu-
sions fiercely. (“He can sometimes be con-
vinced his point of view is not the right
point of view,” says CEO Mark Thomp-
son.) The long-term goal, Sulzberger says,
is to cultivate relationships and build
trust “with a whole different section of
readers, by meeting them where they are,
in the form that they want to be met at.”
To pay for all this, however, the com-
pany looked not to the future but to the
past: it asked people to subscribe. And
from that, more than money flowed.
thIs Is where the story of the Times
pierces the fog enveloping news and
information the world over.
“We have to produce journalism worth paying for,” Sulz-
berger says, a lot. It’s something the print Times actually never
stopped doing. To this day the largest share of the company’s
revenue flows from its print edition—a splendid platform, valu-
able for ease of navigation, serendipity, graphics that can spread
across two pages and the tactile pleasure of newsprint. A half-
million readers have remained loyal as the annual price of a
daily subscription can easily reach $1,000. At newsstands, the
Sunday paper now goes for $6.
But on the Internet, people were conditioned to expect infor-
mation to be free. When, in 2011, the Times began allowing only
the first 20 (now 10) stories to land on your screen at no charge,
then required payment, “it was a big bet,” says David Perpich,
a Sulzberger cousin with an M.B.A. from Harvard who joined
the Times as it instituted the paywall. “I don’t think we real-
ized how big the bet would be and how important it would be.”
But there was no choice. For a hundred years, newspapers
had relied chiefly on the sale of ads to cover most of the bills.
The Internet made that impossible, scattering eyeballs across
zillions of sites. You simply cannot support a newsroom on the
money brought in by digital ads attached to news stories—no
matter how viral your content.
BuzzFeed, founded on virality, laid off 200 journalists in
2019, and its leader is urging consolidation among other online
newsrooms, a trend that has accelerated across the industry in
recent weeks.
Still, among legacy outlets, only the Wall Street Journal and
Financial Times (whose readers might expense their subscrip-
tions) had dared erect a paywall by the time the Times did.
2010 2018
$200
$400
$600
$800M
$558M
print and digital
advertising
$642M
print
circulation
$401M
digital
subscriptions
SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES ANNUAL REPORTS. NOTE: PRINT CIRCULATION INCLUDES SUBSCRIPTIONS AND NEWSSTAND SALES
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