Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO, The New York Times Company Sonal Shah, Chief Executive Officer, The Texas Tribune Moderator: Ruth Umoh, FORTUNE
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00:00 According to an Oxford University study this year, just 22% of the top editors at global
00:06 news outlets were women.
00:09 That's despite the fact that 40% of the journalists in the top 12 major news markets, I'd say
00:15 including all the journalists in this room, are women.
00:19 These are definitely statistics that we need to move the needle on, but fortunately there
00:23 are bright spots, especially in this country.
00:27 The study shows that in the United States, 44% of the top editors are women, including
00:33 the editor-in-chief of Fortune.
00:36 Our next guests are some of the women forging the way in media and journalism, breaking
00:41 barriers as they helm news organizations where they have power, influence, and reach.
00:48 And they are in the top jobs at a pretty challenging time in the media landscape.
00:53 The industry is transforming as it works to harness new technologies, keep up with shifting
00:58 consumer habits, and hold up high standards of journalism in a rather politically divided
01:05 society.
01:07 Meredith Kopit Levine is president and CEO of the New York Times Company.
01:13 And we're also pleased to add that she is on this year's list of the most powerful women
01:17 in business.
01:19 And Sonal Shah is CEO of the Texas Tribune.
01:23 They join us for a conversation with my colleague Ruth Umo.
01:27 Please join me in welcoming them to the stage.
01:43 Delighted to have you, my fellow newswomen.
01:45 This is a panel I've been looking forward to all week.
01:48 So thank you so much for joining us and welcome to NPW.
01:51 So happy to be here.
01:52 I just want to say if I always felt the way I felt when I was in a room full of women
01:56 leaders, life would be perfect.
01:58 I know.
01:59 It's so much more comfortable.
02:01 Yeah.
02:02 Let's jump right in.
02:03 Until about a month ago, all of the major US TV news organizations were led or co-led
02:09 by women.
02:10 Two of those women, Kim Godwin of ABC News and Rashida Jones of MSNBC, were supposed
02:15 to be here.
02:16 Unfortunately, they couldn't because of the break-in situation in Israel, which is completely
02:22 understandable.
02:23 In the corner office, we obviously have the two of you women.
02:26 At Time Inc., we have Jess Sibley.
02:28 Here at Fortune, we have Alison Chantel.
02:30 I'm curious, does having a woman at the top of a news organization change its output,
02:35 change its coverage area?
02:36 What are your thoughts?
02:37 I'm so glad you're starting there.
02:39 And I want to say Kim Godwin and Rashida are extraordinary.
02:44 And I'm the CEO of the Times.
02:46 I'm not the editor.
02:47 I can tell you everyone in journalism is working around the clock right now to cover the situation
02:54 in Israel.
02:55 So they're here in spirit.
02:56 Very much so.
02:57 And we'll try and hold it up for them, too.
02:59 I'll give you my perspective at the Times, and I suspect, Sonal, you'll share this.
03:05 I don't think you can be a news organization endeavoring to serve...
03:13 We serve 10 to 15 million people every day who come directly to the New York Times, 50
03:17 to 100 million every week.
03:19 I don't think we can be that at our best if we are not as diverse as the population to
03:26 whom we are trying to give understanding, hard stop.
03:30 So I think it is incumbent on every leader of every organization, and maybe especially
03:36 news organizations, to see that the whole team, top to bottom, reflects the diversity
03:43 of lived experience, race, gender, ideology of the world around them.
03:53 I can only add to everything Meredith is saying.
03:56 I live in Texas, right?
03:57 So 40% Hispanic, 15% black, 7% Asian.
04:02 Just to remind everybody here, 15% black means we are the largest black population of any
04:08 state in the United States.
04:11 And so in sheer numbers and size, remembering that when we cover the state and when we think
04:17 about our newsroom reflecting what the state looks like, we think about that every single
04:21 day.
04:22 How are we getting the stories?
04:23 Where are we getting from?
04:24 Who are we sourcing from?
04:26 Who are we connecting to?
04:28 And remembering that, and so when leading, you are always thinking about who is going
04:33 out there, how are they thinking about it.
04:35 Again, I'm not the editor in chief, but we are always asking these questions.
04:39 So the newsroom, everything from the technology side to the audience development, needs to
04:45 be reflective of the audiences we are trying to serve.
04:48 >> Can I add one more beat?
04:50 When I got to the New York Times, shortly after I was there, not right at the beginning,
04:54 but I'm there 10 years, shortly after I got there, there was a period of time, maybe a
04:58 year and a half, where I was the only woman on the executive team, pretty big executive
05:03 team of the New York Times.
05:04 All the religion I have about why no one should ever be the only sort of comes from that period.
05:11 And I want to tell you today, half the executive team of the New York Times, which is business
05:16 and news, are women.
05:18 And more than half of the newsroom masthead and desk head, so running the journalism,
05:24 running the coverage, running the report, are women.
05:27 >> Fantastic.
05:28 I want to talk business.
05:30 Both of you have led the charge and are leading the charge in transforming your respective
05:34 companies into more than just print news operations and into modern digital news operations, videos,
05:41 podcasts, social channels, et cetera.
05:44 What are the biggest challenges of running a multi-platform news organization?
05:51 >> You can see the biggest challenge, I think, unfolding in real time right now.
05:56 And there are two things.
05:58 The first one I'll describe is just the enormity of the change, not the process of reporting
06:05 and editing so much, although that changes, too.
06:08 But the pursuit of truth is basically the immutable thing, wherever it may lead.
06:13 The thing that is changing dramatically and probably presents the biggest challenge to
06:19 every news organization is the scale at which we expect people to find and experience that,
06:27 the multiplicity of formats in which we expect them to find and experience it, the fact that
06:34 so much of what we used to do was this once a day kind of polished record of history that
06:39 a couple million people read, and now you've got tens of millions on Sundays or weeks,
06:45 hundreds of millions of people expecting you to be able to give them understanding in the
06:54 most fair way possible, in the palm of their hand, in near real time, in every conceivable
07:00 format.
07:01 And that just means enormous change to the people doing the work of bearing witness and
07:08 translating that to understanding it all.
07:10 The freshest example is sometime between Saturday night when Hamas attacked Israel until yesterday,
07:19 we had produced more than 50 videos, visual investigations, visual graphics to give people
07:28 an understanding of what happened and where.
07:32 There are dozens of people on the ground for The New York Times from all of our, you know,
07:36 all the major national and global news organizations there now, but, you know, they're not just
07:41 writing 900-word text articles.
07:44 They are, you know, showing you, they are getting you to understanding by in some cases
07:50 shooting themselves at a scene and describing what's happening.
07:55 There's a long-time New York Times columnist who's an expert in all things Europe and Middle
08:02 East named Roger Cohn.
08:04 Roger Cohn is probably in his 60s.
08:07 He landed in Tel Aviv, I think, yesterday, and the first thing he did was make a TikTok
08:14 that he is in, you know, describing what it was like to be walking on the streets of Tel
08:19 Aviv.
08:20 And I would say, just I could give you hundreds of examples like that.
08:24 The enormity of change that has already happened to the report is there, and I think even more
08:31 change is yet to come.
08:33 We'll soon look to the future, but same question for you.
08:35 >>Yeah.
08:36 So I run, just a background, Texas Tribune is a nonprofit newsroom.
08:39 It is the largest nonprofit newsroom in the country.
08:43 We're the largest nonprofit newsroom running a statewide newsroom.
08:47 So our challenges are twofold.
08:49 So one part is everything that Meredith just said, right?
08:51 A journalist can no longer, is no longer just writing an 800-word story.
08:55 They're thinking about TikTok.
08:56 They're thinking about going on TV.
08:58 They're thinking about radio.
09:00 So what we had trained for and what the world is asking for are two different things.
09:05 So how do we train journalists differently to think about their job differently?
09:09 And from a nonprofit space, do we partner with places like NPR and PBS and other places?
09:15 Like where does that look like?
09:16 Because you don't, you can't do it all yourself, but how do you think about that?
09:19 So that's changing.
09:21 And technology is just changing.
09:23 Every day audiences are finding us in different places and we segmented by age, right?
09:28 Some people, we're digital only.
09:30 Some people read it on their laptop and on a screen.
09:33 Others just get it through Google news and others get it through TikTok.
09:37 And that, those preferences are constantly changing.
09:40 So understanding where people are finding you, but more importantly, building trust
09:43 with them so they keep coming back to you is actually the bigger challenge that we all
09:48 have to work with.
09:50 And understanding that is not a one-time thing.
09:52 It's changing daily.
09:53 You look at it monthly, then you look at it, you know, annually and you're like, what did
09:57 we learn in this that we have to be prepared for?
10:00 We have to be way more agile today than we've ever been before.
10:05 And it's not as simple as you produced a great product.
10:07 The product is great journalism.
10:10 It's that where are people reading you, finding you, and how are they staying engaged with
10:14 you?
10:15 Because in the absence of it, it's more polarization and more misinformation.
10:19 So let's talk about polarization and misinformation.
10:22 Trustworthy, rigorous journalism is obviously the bulwark of democracy, especially as we
10:27 approach what I'm sure will be yet another contentious and fraught election cycle.
10:32 Meredith, what were the key learnings from the 2020 elections and how will that inform
10:36 the New York Times approach to 2024?
10:38 And then I have a related question for you.
10:40 Yeah.
10:41 I would actually go back to, well, let me say a headline thing first, which is the answer
10:47 to almost every challenge at the New York Times is more journalism.
10:52 Do more journalism.
10:54 And I would go back to 2016 and I would say so much of what we learned after the election
11:00 of 2016 was we want more journalism.
11:04 We want more reporters in more places, getting to more voters from more angles, looking at
11:11 things like, and this is something I would say we have substantially more of today, post
11:17 even 2020, than we had then, more people covering more religious communities in this country
11:23 and how that intersects with politics from places that are not New York or Washington
11:29 or California, but other parts of the country.
11:32 So just more boots on the ground and more people out in the country talking to voters
11:38 and trying to understand it.
11:39 Second thing I'll say about covering the election, this is a moment where the two leading candidates
11:45 are quite well known, like maybe obvious thing to say.
11:50 But so much more can be done about how will they govern?
11:54 What would a next Trump administration look like?
11:57 Jonathan Swan, one of our killer political reporters, he's amazing, came from Axios,
12:03 did this piece over the summer in what does the next Trump administration look like in
12:08 terms of what happens to all the agencies, what happens to these institutions of government
12:15 that intersect with the presidency, but potentially in some profoundly different ways.
12:21 So you should imagine that's an angle.
12:24 And then I'll just say 2020 election week, the New York Times, I believe, had the largest
12:30 audience we've ever had for anything.
12:32 And COVID was giant, but in terms of a next level, and we were able to bring that audience
12:39 to the destination, to the app, to the homepage, to the website, and hold them there.
12:45 And I think hold many people for a complete experience of an election unfolding in real
12:51 time so that maybe cable news is amazing, but maybe you didn't have to turn on cable
12:56 news, you didn't have to go to Twitter, you could actually get that complete experience
13:01 in real time at the New York Times.
13:03 And you should imagine that is a huge part of what we're trying to do for an election
13:09 or anything, even for the war between Israel and Hamas right now.
13:14 Anything that's happening in real time, we want to be able to hold you and give you perspective
13:18 on the whole thing as a destination.
13:21 So I'm curious to hear your experience, because obviously you service all of Texas, but you're
13:24 headquartered in Austin, which is this tiny blue dot in a sea of red.
13:28 So going back to saying trust is so important and fundamental, how do you go about obtaining
13:33 that?
13:34 I mean, that's something we think about a lot, which is 254 counties in Texas, they
13:39 are not the same.
13:41 It's not Houston, Dallas, Austin, right?
13:42 And you have to think about what does the rest of Texas look like.
13:45 So we have actually reporters across the state.
13:48 While Austin is our headquarters, we have people in Lubbock, we have people in the Permian
13:52 Basin, we're raising money to put someone in the Rio Grande Valley, which is in South
13:56 Texas.
13:57 We have people in East Texas, we have people in Dallas and Houston, San Antonio.
14:01 We think it's important to be where the communities are, because it's not just as simple as reporting
14:06 what's happening in Texas, it's reporting how do people perceive Texas from where they
14:11 are.
14:12 And what happens for us, for example, is we can talk about, for example, Roe v. Wade,
14:16 or we can give you a story of all of the maternal health clinics closing down in East Texas.
14:21 So where are people going to get their health care?
14:24 Today's story about a young woman who had to carry her babies to term, and that the
14:29 real impact on her life, because she was not allowed to get an abortion, a medical abortion,
14:35 to actually make it work, and what it meant to her and her family.
14:38 When you can tell the real-life story of real-life Texans and what they're going to, policy starts
14:43 to become a real thing.
14:44 It's not just something we write about in what the Statehouse is doing, we're starting
14:47 to write about what people are actually going through.
14:50 When farmers have no water, we can talk about climate in a whole different way.
14:53 So being in those communities really matters to us.
14:58 We also do not do editorials, and we don't do opinions, and we don't do endorsements,
15:01 because we know to build trust in Texas, we have to give people the facts of where they
15:06 are and let them make those interpretations, because that trust is really important for
15:10 us.
15:11 And local news, I just want to bring it down to local aspect of news, which is what we
15:14 think about.
15:15 Local news is where trust is built at a day-to-day basis, and so we have to make sure we're there
15:21 locally.
15:22 I just want to add a beat to that.
15:24 I think like a third of all the working journalists in the United States have lost their job in
15:30 the last decade.
15:31 Most of that is at the, more of that is at the local level than anywhere else.
15:35 You can draw a direct line from that to the increasing sort of fracturing and polarization
15:41 of the country.
15:42 Yeah.
15:43 Yeah.
15:44 Social media is in some ways a competitor to traditional news.
15:47 It can certainly be an inhibitor, as we've seen on X, formerly known as Twitter.
15:51 How do you grapple with that and compete for eyeballs on the internet, on mobile?
15:56 I'll say just a couple of things.
15:59 First, social media in the last 10, 15, 20 years, even, as long as it's been here, has
16:04 played an important role in helping get our journalism to more people.
16:09 At the same time, I would say we feel very strongly at The New York Times, it is not
16:15 a substitute for the idea that news is best experienced.
16:21 We believe, by a consumer, in one or a handful of relationships with news organizations.
16:28 That relationship, I think, is best sort of manifest by going to the destination of a
16:33 news organization and seeing the fullness of an unfolding event in context.
16:39 I would point you to what's going on right now between Israel and Hamas, or the war in
16:44 Ukraine, or the unfolding of the taking down of the speaker a couple weeks ago.
16:54 You don't just come to The New York Times and see sort of one story or one perspective,
16:59 an 800-word article, or a video, or an opinion piece.
17:03 You see it all presented in a way that is meant to give you the fullness of as much
17:09 as you can absorb, as efficiently as you can absorb it, to get to understanding on that
17:14 topic.
17:15 I think social media never did that.
17:18 Again, there are some positive things about social media in terms of amplifying the content,
17:27 but to have a complete experience of news and get to understanding, I think that's best
17:32 done at a destination.
17:33 I'll say one more thing, which is one of the things, independent journalism, I think, is
17:40 insufficiently understood and appreciated in the country and in the world.
17:46 The idea that you would get your news, get your independent journalism from something
17:51 that is inherently an echo chamber is not good for society if that's the only way to
17:57 get it.
17:58 Before, long before Twitter, now X, changed ownership, we actually asserted, The New York
18:04 Times newsroom leadership asked our journalists to consider spending less time on Twitter
18:10 because just like we think the reader shouldn't be in an echo chamber, the journalist shouldn't
18:16 be in an echo chamber either.
18:18 I think that's had a positive.
18:19 - I want to end with this question, if we may, because I definitely want to get this
18:22 in.
18:23 The media industry over the last decade has seen tectonic shifts.
18:26 We've certainly beholden to platforms like Facebook, like Google, which are almost gatekeepers
18:32 for who has access to information, how it's disseminated.
18:36 We've seen the decimation of advertising.
18:40 It's an industry that's really in flux at this point.
18:42 How do you maintain agility and what are you bracing for as you look down the horizon?
18:48 - I think it's important to recognize with the media industry and what the platforms
18:51 do, when they change their algorithm, it has a dramatic impact on journalism.
18:56 Because meta changing their platform has dropped the readership of journalism by 50%.
19:03 Just to keep that in mind, we're constantly paying attention to when those things are
19:07 happening.
19:08 I think what Meredith has done extraordinarily well at The New York Times, what we think
19:11 about all the time is we're the multiple places, so we're not dependent on any one source.
19:17 We do events.
19:18 We do everything from TikTok to all of the social media platforms, but also directly
19:23 connecting to people through the places where they're getting connected.
19:26 I think that is probably the most critical thing, is that we're not dependent on any
19:30 one source.
19:31 - Our version of that is- - It's gonna have to be 10 seconds.
19:33 - We wanna be in the direct relationship business, come play Wordle, which tens of millions of
19:37 people do.
19:39 You're gonna find that however, and then maybe you'll read a news story.
19:42 - Yeah, or do a crossword puzzle.
19:44 Thank you so much, ladies.
19:45 Such a pleasure chatting with you.
19:46 - Thank you.
19:46 - Thank you.
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