Leaked. And it was never written to be leaked. And at first we thought, thats just awful. It was only a few days later that we suddenly realized the power of what had just happened. Because people around the world embraced the fact that the times had the courage to do a deep z dive on itself, which we have done and to say heres what we have done right, heres what we must improve on and within a month i cant tell you how many calls i received from other Newspaper Publishers around the world asking for to come and meet with the people who had done the innovation report because it was a wonderful wakeup call. When dean became executive editor at the same time, one of his first steps was to reach to our business side and take alex and make her an executive in charge of Audience Development. As you noted, one of the great findings was that the journalists must take greater responsibility for building their audience. Welcome to the world of social media. As fewer people come to a home page and more people want to engage with our journalism on facebook and other platforms, how do we get people to engage in that way with us. And i dare you to name the last business side person to become an executive on the news side because there isnt any. So it was a bold move. We have done subsequent work to say heres what weaver doing right, heres what we need to push harder. Theres a lot of work ahead because as soon as you catch up what has been going on, the digital universe shifts. And you have to start saying, okay, its not as much about search as it used to be. Its now more about social. How do we adapt. The audience of the New York Times has risen by 25 and growing. But from where i sit, and im an editor who wants a journalism of the New York Times to have impact, i dont want to be big stories and have them go into a vacuum where nobody reads them. I think we have tools to make sure people read the stuff we have and thats terrific. When you look at the times reach globally, youre talking about 75 million users. Let me get back to the relationship between business and news side. Traditionally the times has tried to maintain that trust by scrupulously maintaining a chinese ball between news side and business side. But now they are not just two sides. There are three. News, business and technology. A recent example is the wonderful series on nail salon workers. In my day when the the times would launch a big investigative series, it would be with a splash on page one on sunday. Yet this one was launched online and on thursday, which led some sprint readers to complain why are you giving us the stale stuff on sunday. Very few print readers complained. And were in a a mode now of testing learn iing and adapting. If you dont have the courage to try new things and grow, youre going to fail. And thats just the reality of the world were in. So i applaud what dean and his colleagues did, which is to increasingly say lets put the story out when the story is ready. And theres some people who are going to read it then and other people who are going to read it later on a different in print but its not about the device. I mean print as well as you so eloquently stated some decades ago, we must platform agnostic. Go to where the people are. And increasingly that means mobile. And were doing a fun test right now at the New York Times. You want to talk about that . I will. Just to say one thing, i think theres a myth about whats remarkable to me as much as people look at journalism and newspapers so closely how ignorant we are of the history. When i ran the louisiana a. Tooims, if i had a big project thats going to run about Orange County government, they were the giant place next to l. A. That we were in the middle of a life and death competition with the Orange County register. If i had a big story that was going to run about Orange County, i would go to circulation director and i would say, please tell me which day youre going to have the most papers distributed in Orange County. And if they said to me monday, i would run it on monday. Because to me the question that i ask myself is i want a story to be read. You want it to have impact. Im still fundamentally an idealist about journalism. And the idealist says i want as many people to read it, i want investigative stories to have impa impact, you want things to change as a result of hard hitting stuff and the only way to do that is to be widely read. To make sure that everybody in the building knows just how many of our readers are on the phone. E we made it so if you type on to your laptop, it automatically takes you to the phone app. Just so you can think about it. Which side of the chinese wall does Audience Development lie on . It lies part of it lies on my side and probably a little bit lies in advertising. Can i back up one thing . The chinese wall has never been in newspapers between newsrooms and the entire business side. It was never the case. Theres always been promotion. But also the wall is existed between newsrooms and advertising. Not newsrooms and technology, not newsrooms and circulation. Thats always been the case. Talking about Audience Development, what new forms lie ahead . I would be especially interested to know if your experiments with instant articles on facebook and apples new news app. You mean what kinds of stories . I can make it a complicated question. Youre risking a lot when you give these articles away f for free. Theres a risk, but here to me is the biggest risk. I know i keep coming back to wanting to be read because thats what all journalists want. The biggest risk is to not go where your readers are. The biggest risk is to not go to places where there are millions and millions of people who want to read you. The biggest risk is to sort soft stay out of that world. Thats why we felt we had to experiment with people like facebook and apple. I think the point is as the world is evolve lg, if you dont have the courage to risk knowing sometimes your going to fail, you will fail automatically. If you just say, you know what, i dont need to you know the famous case. Im blocking on the name. You know the titanic fallacy . Its a question that says, what was the fatal flaw of the titan titanic . Some people will say it was a captain trying to set a world speed record through ice fields. Some people note they didnt have enough lifeboats. Some note they didnt build the walls actually high enough to ensure it was unsinable. The answer is none of that. Even if the titanic had safely made it to new york harbor, it was still doomed. Because a few years earlier two brothers had invented the airplane. So were in a a world where we must shift. The mode is still there, its great, we have births for all of you. But we must become an Airplane Company too. That means trying things, testing, having the courage to invest in things. And not just financially and say that works, that didnt work, next. Thats a lot of what were trying to do. To the key point, youve got to increasingly go where the audience is and the way the audience wants you. That doesnt mean our journalism is going to change, but that means our presentation may change, the way we scroll on small devices is totally different than what you have on a laptop. We have to adapt increasingly to those issues. Let me go off your airplane metaphor. There are a lot of other airplanes in the air now and they are faster and more nimble. But they are not better. With all of the times tradition of careful editing going way until late night dead lines, there are a lot of nimble startup sites including what could be called parasites. I like that. Nicely done. How do you compete . First off, whenever theres a big news story, people come the New York Times by the millions. They dont go to the other sites. They come to us because we break the stories. Secondly because we dont make mistakes. We are a human enterprise. The question is do we own them. Keep going. The New York Times is as fully edited as it was in print, but people still come to uz for news. I dont if you ask me who my biggest competitors are, largely they are the same competitors we had in the predigital era. I would add in some of the european eras. But largely the guardian, the Washington Post and the wall street journal are the News Organizations that keep me up at night now and are the ones that kept e me up at night 20 years from now. I want to go back to the thought about the misu takes. What dean is saying is really important in this sense. We have all seen speed to market being such a critical element in a digital age. More so than in our earlier print era alone. Because Everyone Wants to be first. And so all of a sudden you have competitors throwing up the photos of the boston bombers. Oops, turned out they were not the boston bombers. They were innocent kids. Or people saying the Supreme Court just ruled on the Health Care Bill and then going out with the wrong ruling. And what dean is trying to say is that we pride accuracy so much that we are prepared to be were not prepared to be first and wrong. Were prepared to be fourth and fifth and right. Thats a core value. Let me inject a a little humility into my answer. I didnt mean it to be glib. Of course, we make mistakes. So the Supreme Court issues its ruling on the obama Administrations Health Care plan. E we knew it would be a huge complicated ruling. We knew if we tried to assess it quickly in realtime we would get it wrong. We wrote a memo and put it on the website and said that. We said please indulge us. Give us time to read it. What other News Organizations did is they read the first half and if you recall from the ruling it sort of flipped in the middle. And we waited until adam said now i understand it enough to write it. My main point is that we work really, really hard not to make mistakes. I understand that the greatest currency we have is that we work hard to be accurate, edited and truthful as possible. I understand that i cant squander that. Acknowledging that, i talked to some talented tech people who said they left the times because the News Department people patronized them as Service Assistants rather than recognizing them as innovative partners. Is that fair criticism . I bet you thats a fair criticism. I bet you that there was a period im going to hope that the assessments would be different now. But i bet you people would have said for a long time in the life of the New York Times that e we didnt quite understand how much the Technology People in the news and the New York Times had to offer and say that wouldnt surprise me. Dean has made another important hire in wilson. So dean hired a new head of digital. She used to be at npr and a variety of other places. She came to the the times it seems a nanosecond ago, but what happened is after he settles himself in the newsroom as head of digital, our new ceo, mark thompson, recognized, yes, thats who we need on the business side as well. So wilson now is a joint report to dean and to our Ceo Mark Thompson with Technology Reporting to him across those. Thats a critical because what we need to do is we need to be faster and we need to be more nimble. We need to make decisions less compl complex. I dont have to have seven bosses. So that speed to market issue is a critical one. And to your point of who you spoke with, it does empower our digital teams on news and business to feel eal. You mentioned two different people. Whats the relationship and do they have revenue obligations . Alex does not have direct revenue obligations. Hopefully if you increase the size of your audience, you increase the number of subscribers. If you increase your audience, you get more advertisers. She doesnt have direct revenue obligations. Kinz si does because he oversees technology and product. Product is the part of the business side largely, though the newsroom has a window into it that tries to design stuff for the future. Product would have created the food section. But now were likely to try to create essentially products out of the journalism e we produce. He has revenue responsibilities. To the point of the creation of that section, lets not pretend when they started to rethink the paper in the 70s that there wasnt fundament need for revenue that they recognized they had to meet. They did. This is not unique. This is just transferring that to a digital era. What papers do you read in the morning . Me or him . Him, hes the editor. I read so i start out by looking at the New York Times on the phone to find out what i missed at night. Partly just to get a sense of experience. Then i read the New York Times pretty thoroughly in print. I read the journal, i read the post. Be more specific. The Washington Post. No, but then when im on the subway i read the new york post. I dont pretend i read every paper, but i spin through some other sites that have specific stuff. I look at courts for some business stuff and some media stuff. If theres a big a lot of it depends on the big story of the day is. But do you routinely look at buzzfeed or other sites . No, i look at facebook pretty regularly, which also gives me a glimpse of a whole other rem m. Do you tweet . I have tweeted once. So i dont tweet. But i post to facebook often. Do you tweet . No, i dont. I write too long to tweet 37. You remember the famous quote, i think it was from sally. You can work for the times or you can read it, but you cant do both. I sometimes feel during the course, because i go to it first on my phone. Thats how ill catch up on some of the morning reading stuff. What i have learned is i go to a lot of the pieces that are journalists suggest we go to. I want to ask another business question. Why is Digital Advertising so cheap when its produced so rel livety limit revenue compared with print, even though it reaches many more readers . Thats a great question to ask google. I u think its quite frankly for a variety of reasons. The first is the cost it much less. The cost of producing Digital Advertising is less and distributing it. Obviously, theres no paper, no trucks, no pressmen and mailers and drivers. So the cost of getting Digital Advertising is significantly less than print. So thats one reason. The second, obviously, is theres so many places to go. And what were e learning over time is how little effect some of those places really have on afelkting actual purchase iing. Its a constantly evolving process. Many advertisers recognize the value of both. That there are times you want to be in print because it does have a much greater sale possibility. People actually will focus on it and make a purchase decision. And other times if youre telling a story, digital is a remarkable tool. And one of the great creations of our head of revenue officer is the creation of it in house in a Story Telling Lab for advertisers to use. And that has been that branded content has really become a great tool for advertisers. And thats just not a little pop up ad. Were seeing people really do gravitate to that. So theres lots of new digital tool that were using and Getting Better at. That leads to the ultimate financial question. How is your pension doing . About the same as yours. Even assuming you succeed in developing a large and larger digital audience, given how cheaply people can buy Digital Advertising, can you generate the serious revenue thats necessary to pay for quality journalism . The answer is yes. The mission of the times has not changed since it was founded in 1851. And that mission has to be funded. And thats to produce the quality journalism that attracts a quality audience that we in turn sell to quality advertisers. But the value of our subscription plan, the digital subscription plan has made it such that its as much up to getting the readers to engage with us in such a way they say, yes, this subscription is worth it as it is to build that advertising base. Both are critical. But as we go back to the original numbers, the subscription value of a lifetime subscriber print or digital is one of the core thats going to give us the ability to support that journalism that dean and his colleagues are doing so e ext extraordinary well and, again, dean, congratulations on your three Pulitzer Prizes. The short answer is is paid digital subscribers. And advertising. Lets not pretend that advertising is not a critical part of the picture, it is. But its increasingly a combination of the two. And the final thought i have is as we continue to e grow and continue to grow our base of readers that advertising is going to play a deeper and deeper role. Its an evolving Digital Advertising is an evolving picture and its Getting Better. I want to ask dean a question as a some time victim. How is the public editors job working out . Its interesting. If you had i used to think when i was at the l. A. Times, we had a discussion about whether we should have a public editor. I think having a public editor is a great thing. Im surprised i feel that way. I think its a great thing for a bunch of reasons. First off, i do think it gives people even though in the digital era many people can criticize you, its not hard to get to us. It does give people a sense that the institution is listening. Even though i have no power over her, she can criticize me and often does, i think people feel theres some place to go in the institution. I think shes often right when she bets us up. I think even when shes wrong, shes reasonable and fair. Its probably not a bad idea for newspaper editors find out