Since Donal Trump took office, the New York Times has broken one readership record after the other. Does that make you grateful to the president?
I wouldn’t put it that way. But we have seen a remarkable thing happen in the last couple of years. In the week after the election Dean, our editor said in a company wide ‘all-hands’ meeting that our mandate and our mission has never been more clear. For journalists like us this is the news story of a lifetime. We have met the moment we have been waiting for all our lives. We doubled our Washington staff, we increased our investigative reporting all over the world, we’ve covered the Trump administration in ways that nobody else really can. And there is something else that has happened. Partly because of Donald Trump and the polarization around his political rise, partly because of the way Facebook has changed and developed and partly because of Russia’s intervention in our elections there is a new concern about where the news comes from. Who controls the news? What kind of news are they? At the same time that we’ve had this story of a lifetime, with which we could really show the value of what we do there has been an outpouring of need for the kind of journalism we do: independent journalism, without fear or favor, on the ground in more than 150 countries last year, investigative in nature but also powerfully narrative, digitally innovative and engaging. So there is an outpouring of need for an authoritative, independent source that people can trust and believe in. And there is an increased value on the commodity of truth.
You have immediately included this aspect into the presentation of your brand.
It is no accident that we started a brand campaign around that. Two weeks ago I went to a dinner party for the 50th birthday of a friend in Manhattan, and he made a toast to everyone in the room, introducing all guests. He mentioned that I work at the New York Times and how grateful he is for the role we are playing and the work we are doing, and the room burst out in applause. That has happened to me a number of times in the last year, whereas it did not happen one single time in the preceding 19 years that I worked here. There is a renewed sense in the public for what we always knew we are doing, which is safeguarding the democracy, holding people and power to account, bearing witness, explaining complicated things. I believed in that all my life.
At the same time Donald Trump, the president, calls the New York Times fake news. How do you perceive the current polarization in America? It is a fact, after all, that America is breaking into two camps, each of which holding up its own version of the truth.
I think that Donald Trump’s invoking of this idea that mainstream journalistic organizations are fake news has zero impact on the average consumer. His hardcore followers may buy that. What we’re seeing, though, is something different. There is a real frustration with the system of politics, playing out alongside a decline of traditional media and the rise of social media.
And the media landscape is much more fractured today.
And it is smaller.
Our media reality is quite different today than it was during the Nixon era.
The problem is: we had a democratization of publishing. But the majority of the new sources are not based on reporting. In large parts we are talking about advocacy journalism, opinion journalism, blogs and the like, which is essentially people riffing off of reporting to make their case. At the same time there has been a reduction of the money being spent on reporting. In other words, there are actually fewer sources for independent journalism. I think that is the real change in the media landscape. We saw a decline of information and an increase in shouting. I was bureau chief in Jerusalem for a period, where the polarization over the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is obviously deep and passionate. It is very similar to what we see in America under Trump, in the sense that people read different versions of the news. There is a relatively large and very loud, engaged community on both sides, of which I had maybe a thousand people shouting at me about our coverage, from both sides, all day long. So, to you, in that situation, that can sound like half the population.
President Trump calls every news story he does not like fake news. Do you see the danger that one day truth is no longer reported at all, or stops being recognized as such?
I think it’s the opposite. People have been worried for a long time about politicians lying. Trump is distorting the truth in ways we have never seen. The response I see is that people care more about the truth than before. There is a difference between hardcore Trump supporters and the people who voted for him. He has something between 30 to 35 percent of supporters really on his side. But there is another 15 or 20 percent that brought him over the finishing line. I think those people are responding to various issues like Trump’s lying, his treatment of women, etc., in much more differentiated ways.
From your perspective, is it conceivable that one day there will be no printed edition of The New York Times anymore?
We made the decision a couple of years ago to be a digital-first news organization and also to be a subscriber-first news organization. Do I think that someday there won’t be a print New York Times? Yes. Do I think that is going to be soon? No.
With Jeff Bezos and his Washington Post you have a very strong competitor.
The resurgence of The Washington Post is great for the world, for truth and for democracy, even if it’s not necessarily great for our Business.
The New York Times is available in Spanish and even Mandarin editions. How important is the international business for your newspaper?
We see it as one of the biggest areas for growth. A little more than a quarter of our overall audience and about 15% of our subscribers are outside of the United States. We are also experimenting with live events to raise our brand awareness.
More than half of all Americans are getting their news from Facebook.
We have worked closely with Facebook to make sure that users see actual New York Times content in their Facebook feeds. That is still an important part of our strategy.
