An organizational evolution at The New York Times

Posted

Today we are announcing a number of leadership and organizational shifts intended to put additional focus on key products and elements of our strategy, enhance collaboration between teams, and support our ambitious goals. Our essential subscription strategy is working, and we have significant runway ahead for growth. These changes are meant to accelerate that growth.

The Athletic

A year after acquiring The Athletic, we’re even more confident in the opportunity it presents to become a global leader in sports journalism. To get there will require time, resources and the focus of an executive leader dedicated to its success. Effective this week, David Perpich will shift to be fully focused on The Athletic as its Publisher.

David is a time-tested executive who has played a pivotal role in virtually every aspect of our strategy over the last dozen years, from leading the work to shape and execute our first digital paywall, to driving our standalone product strategy, to helping architect the essential subscription strategy, to leading our effort to acquire The Athletic. He has been deeply involved in The Athletic every day since, overseeing a smooth integration into The Times, getting the business off to a strong start economically under our ownership, moving swiftly to get it into our all access bundle, and putting it on a path to manifest our very big ambitions in sports. In this next chapter, he’ll work even more closely with The Athletic’s talented leadership team to unlock its very big opportunity with urgency and intent.

Wirecutter

When we acquired Wirecutter in 2016, it was known as a useful, trusted recommendations site, with a growing affiliate business — and it has become a more expansive, influential, successful product every year since. We see enormous opportunity to propel Wirecutter’s growth even further with a sharpened strategy and more executive-level support. To that end, David Rubin will take on executive oversight for Wirecutter while continuing to lead our communications and brand strategy, becoming Chief Brand and Communications Officer of The New York Times, and Publisher of Wirecutter.

With nearly 25 years of expertise in drawing connections between audiences and products that make people love them in new ways, David is known for his visionary thinking and for making great brands better. He’s had a lasting, consequential influence on our strategy and how we do marketing at The Times.

Marketing, Customer Care, and Growth

We see an enormous opportunity to continue to grow our subscriber base and subscriber revenue particularly by leaning into and leveraging our multi product bundle. We also believe we can improve coordination, while driving more impact between marketing, promotion, customer care, and growth.

To do so, we will consolidate leadership of our teams of marketers, growth experts, and customer care professionals under Hannah Yang’s executive oversight. With these additional responsibilities, Hannah will become Chief Growth and Customer Officer, while continuing to co-lead XFun. Hannah has been a key driver of our business and our success for nearly 15 years, having built and led numerous aspects of our subscription business. In that time she’s developed a strong and well deserved reputation as a general manager and people leader who can spot growth opportunities, move swiftly to execute on them, and enable and inspire ambitious performance. This shift strategically aligns an instrumental set of partner teams to work more closely on important shared goals. Jeff Shah will move to report to Hannah as VP of home delivery and customer care.

Amy Weisenbach will continue to lead marketing and brand communications as SVP, head of marketing, now reporting to Hannah. Since she joined six years ago, Amy has been integral to cultivating a world-class marketing team devoted to excellence and craft. Together with David Rubin, she’s been driving the evolution of The Times’s brand to mean more to more people, leading our marketing efforts across growth, product and brand, and the strategy, creative, media and operational teams who make it all happen.

Navigating generative AI (GenAI) and the changing information ecosystem

One of the most important elements of our success in the last half dozen years has been our ability to navigate through a rapidly changing information ecosystem with strategic clarity and unshakable principles. As GenAI becomes prevalent and demonstrates the potential to propel further, rapid ecosystem change, we’re thinking deeply about the ways it can impact our mission and business.

With that in mind, we’ve asked our Chief Product Officer Alex Hardiman to lead a cross-company effort to ensure that we think expansively and collectively about how we might put GenAI to use to support our journalists, grow audience and engagement with our products, and scale our business, while working to ensure we protect our intellectual property. Alex has already begun to lead a team of people from across a wide swath of the company including product development, the newsroom, legal, platform strategy, and information security to consider our opportunities and risks, and develop our plans.

Alex will do this work while continuing to serve as the ranking executive over our product and design functions and the executive sponsor of our efforts on news engagement, games, cooking, audio and ad products. She’ll draw on years of experience helping lead the company through rapid changes in the external environment and our own strategic evolution, including the shift to mobile that began over a decade ago, and, more recently, the development of our essential subscription strategy.

**

I’m confident these changes will put us in an even stronger position to pursue our strategy and ambitions as a company, and I look forward to seeing these shifts enable further growth. In the meantime, thanks, as always, for all you do to drive our mission and business forward.

 

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here