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Meredith Kopit Levien, President and CEO, The New York Times Company Sonal Shah, Chief Executive Officer, The Texas Tribune Moderator: Ruth Umoh, FORTUNE

MPW Summit 2023: The News Leaders

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According to an Oxford University study this year, just 22% of the top editors at global news outlets were women. That's despite the fact that 40% of the journalists in the top 12 major news markets, I'd say including all the journalists in this room are women. These are definitely statistics that we need to move the needle on. But fortunately, there are bright spots uh especially in this country. The study shows that in the United States, 44% of the top editors are women, including the editor in chief of fortune. Our next guests are some of the women forging the way in media and journalism breaking barriers as they helm news organizations where they have power, influence and reach and they are in the top jobs at a pretty challenging time in the media landscape. The industry is transforming as it works to harness new technologies. Keep up with shifting consumer habits and hold up high standards of journalism in a rather politically divided society. MEREDITH Kopit Levine is president and CEO of the New York Times Company and we're also pleased to add that she is on this year's list of the most powerful women in business. And Sanel Shaw is CEO of the Texas Tribune. They join us for a conversation with my colleague, Ruth Uo. Please join me in welcoming them to the stage. Delighted to have you my fellow newswoman. This is the panel I've been looking forward to all week. Um So thank you so much for joining us and welcome to NPW. So happy to be here. I just want to say if I always felt the way I felt when I was in a room full of women leaders, life would be perfect. I know it's so much more comfortable, isn't it? Yeah, let's jump right in until about a month ago. All of the major U STV news organizations were led or co led by women. Two of those women, Kim Godwin of ABC News and Rashida Jones of MS NBC were supposed to be here. Unfortunately, they couldn't because of the break in situation in Israel, which is completely understandable in the corner office. We obviously have the two of you women at time, Inc, we have Jeff Ss here at Fortune. We have Chantel. I'm curious, does having a woman at the top of a news organization change its output, change its coverage area. What are your thoughts? I'm so glad you're, you're starting there. And I want to say Kim Godwin and Rashida are extraordinary and every, I'm the CEO of the Times, I'm not the editor. I can tell you everyone in journalism is working around the clock right now to cover the, um, the situation in Israel. So, um, they're here spirit and we'll try and hold it up for them too. Um, I don't, I'll, I'll give you my perspective at the times and I suspect. So now you'll share this, I don't think you can be, um, a news organization endeavoring to serve, you know, we, we serve 10 to 15 million people every day. You come directly to the New York Times 50 to 100 million every week. I don't think we can be that at our best if we are not as diverse as the population to whom we are trying to give understanding hard stuff. So I think um it is incumbent on every leader of every organization and maybe especially news organizations to see that the whole team top to bottom reflects the diversity of lived experience, race, gender, ideology of the world around them. I I can only add to uh everything MEREDITH saying I live in Texas, right? So uh 40% Hispanic, 15% black, 7% Asian. Just to re remind everybody here, 15% black means we are the largest black population of any state in the United States. And so when you in in sheer numbers and size, remembering that when we cover the state, we think about our newsroom reflecting what the state looks like. We think about that every single day. How are we getting the stories. Where are we getting from? Who are we sourcing from, who are we connecting to and remembering that? And so when leading, you're always thinking about who's going out there, how are they thinking about it again? I'm not the editor in chief, but we're always asking these questions. So the newsroom from everything from technology side to the, you know, the audience development needs to be reflective of the audiences. We, we're trying to serve. Can, can I add one more beat? Um when I got to the New York Times, um shortly after I was there, not right at the beginning, but I'm there 10 years. Shortly after I got there, there was a period of time, maybe a year and a half where I was the only woman on the executive team, pretty big, executive team of the New York Times and all the religion I have about why no one should ever be the only um sort of comes from that period. And I want to tell you today, half the executive team of the New York Times, which is, is business and news um are women and more than half of the newsroom, mast head and desk heads are running the journalism, running the coverage, running the report are women. I wanna talk business. Uh Both of you have led the charge and are leading the charge in transforming your respective companies into more than just print news operations and into modern digital news operations, uh videos, podcasts, social channels, et cetera. One of the biggest challenges of running a multi platform news organization. Um I mean, you can see the biggest challenge, I think unfolding in real time right now. And the the there are two things. The first one I'll describe is just the enormity of the change, not the process of reporting and editing so much. Although that, that changes too, but the pursuit of truth is basically the immutable thing, wherever it may lead, the thing that is changing dramatically and probably presents the biggest challenge to every news organization is the scale at which we expect people to find an experience that the multiplicity of format in which we expect them to find an experience of the fact that, you know, so much of what we used to do was the once a day kind of polished record of history that a couple of million people read. And now you've got tens of millions on some days or, or weeks, hundreds of millions of people expecting you to be able to give them understanding um in, in, you know, the most fair way possible in the palm of their hand in near real time in every conceivable format. And that just means enormous change to the people doing the work of bearing witness and translating that to understanding and all like the freshest example is sometime between Saturday night when Hamas attacked Israel until yesterday, we had produced more than 50 um, videos, visual investigations, um, visual graphics to give people an understanding of what happened and where there are dozens of people on the ground for the New York Times from all of our, you know, all the major national and global news organizations there now. But, you know, they're not just writing 900 word text articles, they are, you know, showing you, they are getting you understanding by, in some cases, shooting themselves at a scene and describing what's, what's happening. There's a long time New York Times columnist who's an expert in all things. Um Europe and Middle East named Roger Cohen. Roger Cohen is probably in his sixties. He landed in Tel Aviv, I think yesterday. And the first thing he did was make a tiktok that he is in, you know, describing what it was like to be walking on the streets of Tel Aviv. And I would say just I could give you hundreds of examples like that. The, the enormity of change that has already happened to the report. Um is there and I think even more change is yet to come. We'll soon look to the future, but same question. Yeah. So I run just a background. Texas Tribune is a nonprofit newsroom. It is the largest nonprofit newsroom in the country. Uh We're the largest nonprofit newsroom running a statewide newsroom. So our challenges are twofold. So one part is everything that MEREDITH just said, right? A journalist can no longer is no longer just writing an 840 story. They're thinking about Tik Tok, they're thinking about going TV, they're thinking about radio. So what, what we had trained for and what the world is asking for are two different things. So how do we train journalists differently to think about their job differently and from a nonprofit space? Do we partner with places like N PR and PBS and other places? Like where does that look like? Because you don't, you can't do it all yourself? But how do you think about that? So that's changing and technology is just changing every day. Audiences are finding us in different places and we segment it by age, right? Some people, we're digital, only, some people read it on their laptop and on a screen, others just get it through Google News and others get it through Tik Tok and that those preferences are constantly changing. So understanding where people are finding you, but more importantly, building trust with them. So they keep coming back to you is actually the bigger challenge that we all have to work with and understanding that is not a one time thing, it's changing daily. You look at it monthly, then you look at it, you know, annually and like, what did we learn in this, that we have to be prepared for? So we have to be way more agile today than we've ever been before. And it's not as simple as you produced a great product. The product is great journalism. It's that where are people reading you, finding you and how are they staying engaged with you? Because in the absence of it, it's more polarization and more misinformation. So let's talk about polarization, misinformation. Uh trustworthy, rigorous journalism is obviously the bulwark of democracy uh especially as we approach, what I'm sure will be yet another contentious and fraught election cycle. MEREDITH. what were the key learnings from the 2020 elections? And how will that inform in your times approach to 2024? And then I have a related question for you. Um I would actually go back to, um well, let, let me say a headline thing first, which is the answer to almost every challenge at the New York Times um is more journalism, do more, more journalism. And I would go back to 2016. And I would say, um so much of what we learned um after the election of 2016 was, um we want more journalism, we want more reporters in more places getting to more voters from more angles. Um you know, looking at things like and this is something I would say we have substantially more of today post even 2020. Then we have then more people covering more religious communities in this country and how that intersects with politics from places that are not New York or Washington or California, but other, other parts of the country. So just more boots on the ground and more people out in the country talking to voters and trying to understand it. The second thing I'll say about covering the election, this is a moment where, you know, the two leading candidates are quite well known, like maybe obvious thing to say. But so, so much more can be done about how will they govern? What would a next Trump administration look like Jonathan Swan, one of our killer political reporters. He's amazing came from axios, did this piece over the summer and what does the next Trump administration look like in terms of what happens to all the agencies, what happens to these institutions of government that intersect with the presidency? But, you know, potentially in some profoundly different ways. So you should imagine that's an angle and then I'll just say 2020 election week, New York Times, I believe had the largest audience we've ever had for anything. And you know, COVID was giant, but in terms of um like a next level and we, we were able to bring that audience to the destination, to the app, to the home page, to the website and hold them there. And I think hold many people for a complete experience of an election unfolding in real time. So that maybe cable news is amazing, but maybe you didn't have to turn on cable news, you didn't have to go to twit or you could actually get that complete experience in real time at the New York Times. And you should imagine that is a huge part of what we're trying to do for an election or anything, even for the, the war between Israel and Hamas right now, anything that's happening in real time, we want to be able to hold you and give you perspective on the whole thing as a destination. So I'm curious to hear your experience because obviously you service all of Texas, but you're headquartered in Austin, which is this tiny blue dot in a sea of red. So going back to saying, you know, trust is so important and fundamental. How do you, how do you go about uh obtaining that? Yeah, I mean, that's something we think about a lot which is 254 counties in Texas. Uh They are not the same, it's not Houston, Dallas Austin, right? And you have to think about what does the rest of Texas look like. So we have actually uh reporters across the state. Uh while Austin is our headquarters, we have people in Lubbock, we have people in the Permian Basin. We have, we're raising money to put someone in the Rio Grande Valley, which is in, in South Texas. We have people in East Texas, we have people in Dallas and Houston, San Antonio. We think it's important to be where the communities are because it's not just as simple as reporting what's happening in Texas. It's reporting, you know, how do people perceive Texas from where they are? And what happens for us, for example, is we can talk about, for example, Roe V Wade or we can give you a story of all of the maternal health clinics closing down in East Texas. So where are people going to get their health care? Today's story about a young woman who had to carry her babies to term and that the real impact on her life because she was not allowed to get an abortion, a medical abortion to actually make it work and what it meant to her and her family. When you can tell the real life story of real life Texans and what they're going to policy starts to become a real thing. It's not just something we write about and what the statehouse is doing. We're starting to write about what people are actually going through and farmers have no water, we can talk about climate in a whole different way. So being in those communities really matters to us, we also do not do editorials and we don't do opinions and we don't do endorsements because we know to build trust in Texas, we have to give people the facts of where they are and let them make those interpretations because that trust is really important for us and local news. I just want to bring it down to local aspect of news, which is what we think about local news is where trust is built at a day to day. So we have to make sure we're there locally. I, I just wanna add a beat to that. Um Something like a third of all the working journalists in the United States have lost their job in the last decade. Most of that is at the more of that is at the local level than anywhere else. You can draw a direct line from that to the increasing sort of fracturing and polarization of the country. Uh social media is in some ways, a competitor to traditional news. Uh It can certainly be an inhibitor as we've seen on X, formally known as Twitter. How do you grapple with that and compete for eyeballs on the internet on mobile? I'll say just a couple of things first, you know, social media in the last 10, 15, 20 years, even as long as it's been here has played an important role in helping get our journalism to more people. Um At the same time, I would say we feel very strongly at the New York Times. It is not a substitute for the idea that news is best experienced, we believe by consumer in one or a handful of relationships with news organizations and that relationship I think is best sort of manifest by going to the destination of a news organization and seeing the fullness of an unfolding event in context. And I would point you to what's going on right now between Israel and Hamas or the war in Ukraine or, you know, the unfolding of the, um, the taking down the, the speaker a couple of weeks ago, you don't just come to the New York Times and see sort of one story or one perspective, an 800 word article or a video or an opinion piece, you see it all presented in a way that is meant to give you the fullness of as much as you can absorb, as efficiently as you can absorb it to, to understanding on that topic. And I think social media never did that, right. And um what it lacked, you know, when you, and again, there are some positive things about social media in terms of amplifying the content, but to have a complete experience of news and get to understanding, I think that's best done at a destination, I'll say one more thing, which is one of the things, you know, independent journalism, um I think is insufficiently understood and appreciated in the country and in the world. And the idea that you would get your news, um get your independent journalism from something that is inherently an echo chamber is not good for society if that's the only, only way to get it. And before long before Twitter, now X changed ownership, we actually asserted New York Times newsroom leadership asked our journalists to consider spending less time on Twitter because just like we think the reader shouldn't be in an echo chamber. The journalist shouldn't be in an echo chamber either. And I think that's had a positive, I want to end with this question if we may, because I definitely want to get this in the media industry over the last decade has seen tectonic shifts. It certainly beholden to platforms like Facebook, like Google, uh which, which, which are almost gatekeepers for who has access to information, how it's disseminated. Um We've seen kind of the defination of advertising. And so it's an industry that's really in flux at this point. How do you maintain agility and, and what are you bracing for as you look down the horizon? I just wanna, I think it's important to recognize what the media and stream and what the platforms do when they change their algorithm. It has a dramatic impact on journalists, right? Because, you know, meta changing their platform has dropped the readership of journalism by 50%. So just to keep that in mind, like we're constantly paying attention to when those things are happening. And I think what, what MEREDITH has done extraordinarily well, at the New York Times, what we think about all the time is like we're the multiple places. So we're not dependent on any one source. We, we do events, we do everything from tiktok to all of social media platforms, but also directly connecting to people through the places where they're getting connected. But I think that is that is probably the most critical thing is that we're not dependent on any one source. Our version of that have to be 10 seconds. We want to be in the direct relationship business. Come play wordle which tens of millions of people do. You're going to find that however, and then maybe you'll read a news story or do a crossword puzzle. Thank you so much, ladies. Such a pleasure chatting with you.

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