News Business In "Bloody Revolution" -New York Times CEO

Post date: Nov 29, 2013 3:31:45 PM

It's been a year since you've been CEO, so why don't you talk a little bit about the challenges that you faced since coming on board and then some of the surprising things that you found about working at the Times.

MARK THOMPSON, CEO, NEW YORK TIMES

So the whole news business is going for a kind of bloody revolution and we are right in the middle of it. But the great thing about the New York Times is it's a group of people who have an incredibly clear, absolutely kind of laser-like view about what great journalism is, about how you make it, how you report it, how you edit it, and how you bring it to the public, and how you kind of bring it together into this offering. And the reason I'm really confident about the future of the New York Timescompany is because of that certainty of kind of values and of the kind of commitment to quality because actually, those things, even in a world which is full of media with new entrants arriving every day, those things are still at a real premium. They're very hard to find and many of the things that the Times does, like great international reporting, like some of its analysis and some of its comment, in some ways there's less of the really good stuff now than was 10 or 20 years ago so I think we've got a lot to work with and we have a very loyal audience to serve. The challenges, if you are trying to think about strategy, is what are the steps to turn that into a business model which can grow its revenues and grow its profitability.