I met the board, and I met key family members, and they said, “We’ve got to a point where we know we need fundamental change. Then I spent about a week thinking about it and remembered that I was a loyal subscriber, a digital subscriber, to the Times and that I thought it had the best newsroom in the world-which I thought was probably underleveraged. I got a phone call, asking whether I’d like to be considered to become chief executive.
A shared ambition for change Joining the New York Times Company In a wide-ranging conversation with McKinsey senior partner Yael Taqqu and McKinsey Publishing’s Raju Narisetti over three days in July, Thompson looked back at his tenure and the still unfolding transformation of the Times-and why some of the ambitious targets he set in 2019 seem modest compared with the opportunity “to become one of the tiny handful of trusted independent sources of news in the world.” Condensed and edited excerpts from their conversation follow. The world needs Times journalism now more than ever.” “There’s nothing that makes me more proud than the fact that our newsroom is substantially larger today than when I joined. “I’ve chosen this moment to step down because we have achieved everything I set out to do when I joined the Times Company eight years ago-and because I know that, in Meredith, I have an outstanding successor who is ready to lead the company on to its next chapter,” Thompson said, as part of the transition announcement. In late July, the Times Company announced that Thompson, age 62, will retire as CEO and be succeeded on September 8 by Meredith Kopit Levien, the Times Company’s executive vice president and COO, who was hired as head of advertising by Thompson in 2013.
The Times has said it now has 6.5 million paying readers, more than halfway toward Thompson’s target of ten million subscribers by 2025. Its annual revenue from digital-only subscriptions topped $450 million at the end of 2019. Under his watch, the Times’s digital readership has jumped to nearly 5.7 million subscribers, from half a million. Over an eight-year tenure that began in 2012, Mark Thompson, president and CEO of the New York Times Company, has overseen a dramatic transformation of the storied institution into a digital-centric news brand.
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