Meredith Kopit Levien

When Meredith Kopit Levien became CEO of the New York Times in 2020, prevailing wisdom was that legacy news organizations were in irreversible decline. Five years later, she has made a compelling counterargument. In 2025, the Times surpassed $2 billion in total digital revenue for the first time and added 1.4 million net new digital subscribers to reach 12.8 million in total. It grew digital advertising revenue 20%, and posted $550 million in adjusted operating profit, up more than 20% year over year. Much of that success is because of a bundle strategy that weaves together news, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and the Athletic into a subscription. Average monthly revenue per digital-only subscriber was $9.72 in 2025. At the same time, Kopit Levien has positioned the Times as an aggressive legal challenger to AI companies using its journalism without compensation, with an active intellectual property suit against Microsoft and OpenAI and another against Perplexity. The outcome of these cases could reshape how the entire media industry navigates the AI era.