New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien on Trump and an industry in crisis
Good morning! NBCU offers to buy MLB rights, Laurene Powell Jobs lays off Emerson Collective employees, and Fortune’s Ruth Umoh profiles the New York Times Company’s Meredith Kopit Levien.
– Fit to print. At 49, Meredith Kopit Levien became the youngest person and second woman to lead The New York Times Company when she was named CEO in September 2020. She did so during an historically tumultuous time: In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matters protests, which caused a reckoning on race and power not just in the nation’s public consciousness but within the journalism industry as well.
In the time since, Levien, No. 50 on Fortune’s 2025 Most Powerful Women list, has worked to transform the Times from the storied “Gray Lady” known for its rigorous journalism into a lifestyle subscription platform that has something for every kind of reader, Fortune’s Ruth Umoh writes in a profile of the media bigwig.
“I didn’t really understand, as COO, how profoundly different the CEO role would be,” Levien, who previously held roles as chief revenue officer and COO of the NYT Company, told Umoh. “It took me at least a year—maybe two—just to have any confidence that I could do the job. And that I could maybe even do it well.”
On the subscription side, Levien is certainly doing the job well. The New York Times has some 11 million paid digital subscribers, up from under one million in 2015, Umoh reports. But critics say some of that growth has come at the expense of the top-tier journalism the Times stakes its reputation on. And in a time of profound distrust of the media, it becomes trickier to balance traditional journalistic sentiment with the needs of the business that make producing the journalism possible.
Still, it’s hard to argue against her successful turnaround of a company that many people warned her to stay away from, Umoh writes.
“I never wanted the top job,” she says. “I just wanted to do the biggest version of the work I loved.”
You can read the rest of the feature here. MPW Daily will return Tuesday after the Memorial Day holiday.
Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com