On the morning of Sept. 8, 2020, Meredith Kopit Levien’s first day as CEO of the New York Times, she opened her laptop in the living room of her pandemic rental in Calabasas, Calif., as her 9-year-old son remotely attended fourth grade nearby. She stared into a world on fire.
Much of the publication’s 4,700-person staff was working from cramped apartments, taking meetings on Zoom, or reporting from the streets—some in harm’s way. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a few months earlier had ignited a summer of rallies and a national reckoning on race and power. Inside the newsroom, an incendiary op-ed calling for military force to subdue Black Lives Matter protests had led to the abrupt ouster of the opinion editor.
Meanwhile, Levien’s longtime mentor, Mark Thompson—the British chief executive credited with transforming the Times into a digital subscription powerhouse—was gone. For years, the two were in constant contact as COO and CEO; Now, she was alone in the chair.
At age 49, Levien (pronounced Lev-EE-yen) was the youngest person and second woman to lead the institution in its 173-year history. “I didn’t really understand, as COO, how profoundly different the CEO role would be,” she tells Fortune now. “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.”
The demands were immediate and unrelentingly high-stakes: Make the big strategic calls. Choose who stays and who goes. Defend every decision to the newsroom, to shareholders, to the unions, to the public. And at the Times—a public company where editorial integrity and business imperatives often collide—those decisions rippled far beyond the building walls.
“You’re on the hook for everything,” Levien says. “I spent a lot of my first year sort of holding my breath and just not wanting to get it wrong… not wanting to let the board down, not wanting to let the publisher down, not wanting to let my own team down.”
Part of that pressure was to keep up the publication’s remarkable momentum. The Times had crossed several milestones with initiatives Levien helped set in motion as chief revenue officer and later COO. By mid-2020, digital subscription revenue had surged 24% year-over-year to $276 million, surpassing print for the first time. The company ended the quarter with 5.7 million digital-only subscriptions—6.5 million total—making steady progress toward its goal of 10 million by 2025. Wirecutter, the Times’ product recommendation site, had a growing affiliate revenue stream. And the Cooking app saw a spike as people hunkered down at home, hungry for guidance in the kitchen.
But that early success soon gave rise to a more existential question: What’s next? Levien’s answer, in a word: the bundle. By doubling down on the all-access subscription—offering not just news, but also Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, the Athletic, and more—she reenergized the Times. No longer just the storied “Gray Lady,” it has morphed into a lifestyle subscription platform, a daily companion that moves with readers through their routines: morning headlines over coffee, the Spelling Bee on a commute, product reviews at lunch, and analysis of the Lakers game by night. As one marketing campaign put it, the Times wants readers to go “all in.”
The New York Times Cooking app on a smartphone arranged in Germantown, New York, US, on Tuesday, March 11, 2025. The New York Times has pushed ahead with a digital-first strategy, NYT Cooking, which encompasses an app, website, YouTube channel and newsletter, has helped it stand out from, and even vanquish, the competition. Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesSo far, the bundle strategy has borne fruit. In fact, of the Times’ 11 million-plus digital subscribers, only 1.9 million pay for news alone. Levien calls it “the essential subscription for every curious person.” The Times doesn’t want drive-by traffic, she says. It wants daily, habitual engagement.
But critics worry that the Times risks straying from its core: rigorous, high-brow journalism. Levien insists the inverse is true, arguing that the bundle is designed to sustain the newsroom, not distract from it. “The first dollar always goes to journalism,” she often says.
The stakes for journalism
That commitment to the work of journalism is particularly necessary at a time when the profession is under siege: Political hostility toward the press is intensifying under a resurgent MAGA movement, and the ad-supported, platform-reliant business model that once propped up the media industry continues its free fall. At the same time, the rise of generative AI threatens to unravel the very concept of authorship, burying real journalism beneath a flood of synthetic content and algorithmic noise.
Against that backdrop, trust in the media has become both more fragile and more consequential. Public confidence in traditional news organizations has eroded sharply in recent years; just 31% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the press, according to Gallup. The result is a precarious information ecosystem where falsehoods sometimes outpace truths, and the very institutions designed to hold power to account are increasingly dismissed, doubted, or directly attacked. It’s amid this disruption and distrust that Levien is staking her strategy.
Unlike peers, such as the Washington Post and the LA Times, the New York Times doesn’t have a billionaire owner with unlimited wealth as a backstop. (Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim provided a $250 million loan at a steep 14% interest rate during the company’s financial crisis in 2009, but that loan was repaid in 2011.) Levien holds the CEO title, but ultimate control still rests with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who hold most of the company’s voting shares and are known among industry insiders for their cautious approach to risk, measured pace of growth, and complex family dynamics that require company leaders to navigate with finesse and a keen sensitivity to legacy and bloodlines.
“[Levien] has an incredibly complicated job that involves a lot of diplomacy,” says Ben Smith, cofounder of Semafor and a former media columnist at the New York Times. “I do think she has been incredibly successful.”
Her mission, she says, is to build a durable business model that makes the hard work of independent journalism commercially viable. To date, the results are unmatched by peers. Still, sustainability is a moving target when trust is fragile, attention is fleeting, and political headwinds are growing stronger.
Hardwired to win
Shortly after then-CEO Thompson announced that he would depart in 2020, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher—who at the time was launching a Times podcast—invited Levien to her home in Washington, D.C. Sitting in the living room, Swisher recalls asking her directly: “Are you going to be the next CEO?”
Levien, Swisher recounts, responded modestly, saying she’d welcome the role but wasn’t the one making the decision.
“I said, ‘Excuse me? What did you just say to me? Don’t do that. That’s such a typical woman thing to say,’” Swisher recalls. “Then I told her, ‘I need you to yell at me right now: I am going to be the CEO of the New York Times. I am the CEO.’”
Levien obliged. “We laughed and laughed,” Swisher says. “Because she knew she was going to be CEO—she was just being polite.”
Levien has spent her career on the business side of journalism, working behind the curtain to build institutions that she never expected to lead. “I never wanted the top job,” she says. “I just wanted to do the biggest version of the work I loved.”
She grew up in Richmond, Va., with a mother who worked in sales and a teacher father, and she spent her early years feeling like a jack-of-all-trades: competent, but never the standout. She wasn’t the star athlete, the gifted artist, or the straight-A student, by her own account. “There was no one thing that people said, ‘Oh, she is awesome at that,’” recalls Levien. “I think that served me because it made me work harder at everything.” Her edge, Levien says, isn’t necessarily innate talent. It’s sheer willpower and a relentless, almost obsessive, hunger to win.
She’s not a journalist, but she has had an acute curiosity about the world from an early age. The Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, which began when Levien was 8, ignited in her a fascination with current events, magazines, and “serious topics,” she says. She attended the University of Virginia—drawn in part by its affordable in-state tuition—where she wrote for one of the campus newspapers.
After college, Levien hoped to find a foothold in the profession doing fact-checking in New York, but her parents, wary of the city’s cost of living and the industry’s meager starting salaries, talked her out of it. Instead, she took a job at the D.C.-based consulting firm Advisory Board, rising to director of member services and forging a close bond with its founder, David Bradley.
When Bradley bought the Atlantic in 1999, Levien saw a path to journalism and asked him for a reporting job. He offered her a role on the business side, with a deal: If she didn’t love it, she could switch to editorial in a year. She never made the switch.
Levien went on to hold senior roles at the Atlantic, rising from advertising director to publisher of its now-defunct magazine 02138, and later became chief revenue officer at Forbes. Then, in 2013, the New York Times came calling, offering her the chance to lead its advertising business. Friends warned her against it. The business side didn’t carry weight there, they said, and it wasn’t run like a company. The Times’ golden age had passed, she was told, and its future was murky at best.
But Levien saw untapped potential and a once-in-a-career opportunity to reinvent an institution. “The Times should win,” she recalls thinking then. “It makes a product that's unique at a different scale and level of quality. It should easily have a business model that works.”
The bundle is the business
Levien’s first 18 months in the Times’ iconic midtown Manhattan headquarters were focused on reviving its advertising strategy, but the writing was already on the wall: Big tech platforms were swallowing most digital ad dollars, leaving publishers with diminishing returns. The Times’ leadership had seen the shift coming earlier than most. Advertising alone wouldn’t sustain the institution. The only viable path forward was subscriptions, at scale.
In 2015, Levien was promoted to chief revenue officer, responsible for all business streams, including subscriptions, advertising, and live events. At the time, the Times had just under one million paid digital subscribers. That year, it set a goal to double its digital subscriber base and its nearly $400 million in digital revenue by 2020.
Today, the New York Times has more than 11.5 million subscribers across digital and print, and says it’s on track to reach 15 million by 2027. And Levien, who insists she never chased power, is now arguably the most successful media CEO in America.
If she played a supporting role in the Times’ initial shift to subscriptions, she now takes center stage in its next act: transforming a storied newsroom into a multi-platform bundle of brands that reach readers well beyond traditional news. Part of that strategy is continuously enriching the bundle. In 2022, the company acquired the sports media outlet the Athletic and snapped up the viral word game Wordle, made by a software engineer as a gift for his girlfriend, for a reported low seven figures—a move Smith calls “obviously brilliant.”
Wordle game website displayed on a phone screen is seen in this illustration photo taken in Poland on August 6, 2024. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Levien says her strategy rests on three pillars: lead in news, win in lifestyle, and make the bundle indispensable. The logic appears simple. The more often readers engage across the Times’ ecosystem, the more likely they are to subscribe, stay, and engage. Every product is built to reinforce that habit.
Her strategy is also powered by editorial curation and predictive tech, blending journalist-selected stories with a more dynamic, visual, and personalized feed across the Times’ website and apps. “We’re getting better at surfacing the next best thing for you,” Levien says. “And making it more engaging.”
Despite rising concerns about news fatigue and avoidance, the company says it is seeing direct traffic growth across all products, due in part to the post-2016 election “Trump bump” that sent readership soaring. In 2024, its websites and apps averaged about 137 million monthly unique visitors globally, according to internal estimates. Subscriptions, both print and digital, now account for the bulk of the company’s $2.59 billion in annual revenue, but advertising, affiliates, and licensing are inching up too. Advertising, while significantly down from its peak, generated about $506 million in 2024.
As editor-in-chief Joe Kahn tells Fortune, the editorial sensibility of the Times infuses all its products. “Cooking and games grew directly out of the newsroom, and actually, those are still within the purview of the newsroom,” Kahn explains. “So there's a cooking editor and a games editor who are journalists, and they came from the traditional New York Times newspaper.”
Lifestyle products like Cooking, which drew more than 456 million visits in 2024 across its site and app, and Wirecutter are produced by journalists. The sports writers, photographers, and editors of Athletic give the Times credibility in sports media.
The Games app was downloaded 10 million times in 2023, and its puzzles were played 11 billion times last year, led by Wordle’s 5.3 billion plays. “Three times as many people play our games every single day as watched the White Lotus season finale,” Levien told advertisers at a media showcase in May.
Smith scoffs at journalism purists who have side-eyed the rise of “softer” business verticals, pointing out that Levien’s bundling strategy has kept the Times on a steady growth track—and, more importantly, provided a financial bulwark against the political pressure that has challenged other outlets. “The only real defense against that kind of pressure, which is economic pressure that Trump is putting on news organizations, is having a strong business,” he tells Fortune.
Swisher agrees. It’s naive, she says, to think the Times can thrive on news alone, especially as overall news consumption plateaus. “If you’re just a pure news organization, well, that’s lovely—if you have a billionaire owner,” she tells Fortune. “Even then, you’re probably screwed because that billionaire has their own agenda. What you need is a 360-degree media offering.”
Public company, private guardrails
Levien remains convinced that the Times is far from hitting subscription saturation. The real challenge, she maintains, is breaking through an information ecosystem dominated by gatekeepers like Google and social media platforms. These companies not only control how people discover content but also prioritize their own, often competing, material. Levien’s offense is not to extract more from the existing Times audience, but to expand it. “We’re not pulling more and more from a fixed pie,” she says. “We’re building a bigger one.” In her view, anything that captures attention and focus—Netflix, TikTok, even a wellness app—is competition.
All told, the Times is thriving while much of the media world retrenches, a resilience that Levien attributes to two pivotal choices. First, a steadfast commitment to investing in journalism. Second, a deliberate focus on building direct relationships with readers. While many publishers chased scale through social platforms, the Times prioritized audience ownership, insulating itself from some of the volatility of tech giants.
Today, it has over 150 million registered users; a flagship newsletter, the Morning, delivered to 16 million people; and The Daily ranks among the most-listened-to news podcasts in the world, drawing some 4 million listeners weekly on average. And the vast majority of the Times’ users now come through owned channels—including newsletters and apps—a rarity in an industry still largely reliant on fickle third-party traffic.
Not having a wealthy benefactor to cushion the risks has its advantages, too, Levien points out. She says the Times’ distinctive governance structure—publicly traded yet family-controlled—offers a rare balance of market accountability and editorial commitment.
“The scrutiny of being a public company has made us sharper,” Levien says, noting her decade of experience on earnings calls. That pressure, she contends, enforces a discipline and day-to-day rigor that private ownership doesn’t always demand.
The Sulzberger family’s majority control and focus on protecting the editorial mission also buffers the Times from short-termism, she says. Whether that model is replicable—or even desirable—for other outlets remains an open question.
Calibrating power and principles
With President Donald Trump back in power, the Times is once more in his crosshairs. Elsewhere in the media, companies appear to have already softened their posture, retreating from confrontational coverage, shedding journalistic muscle, or making deals with the Trump administration. As others backpedal, Levien’s response is unequivocal: “We will not be cowed,” she says. “Not now. Not ever.”
If Levien’s mission is to lead in the business of news, her colleagues in editorial—Kahn, the editor-in-chief, and opinion editor Katie Kingsbury—are charged with upholding its substance. All three report to publisher A.G. Sulzberger. Running the Times, Levien says, is a constant calibration between business urgency and newsroom deliberation, and though she is responsible for the former, she takes the latter very seriously too. “If you break the newsroom,” she warns, “you can’t remake it.”
Levien shrugs at criticism of coverage from both the left and the right. “We’re not going to tailor our journalism to please a party or win over a particular audience,” she says. “That’s not the job. It’s to pursue the truth.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 07: Meredith Kopit Levien speaks onstage during The New York Times Well Festival 2025 at Duggal Greenhouse on May 07, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images for The New York Times)Levien says she’s focused on making the Times’ journalistic process more transparent, showing not just what it reports, but how. The goal, she says, is to increase the public’s understanding of why independent journalism still matters.
That mission has never been more difficult. The press today faces both subtle obstructions and overt hostility, from exclusion at White House briefings to targeted harassment of reporters.
The Times has contingency plans across various functions—legal, operational, financial—to ensure it never has to choose between its values and its survival, Levien says. Her bet is that the Times’ long-game strategy focused on financial strength and original reporting will carry it through an era when facts are contested and journalism is under attack. “We have a very strong balance sheet, so I feel like we are as well prepared as we could be to weather whatever storms come and to do so in a way that does not compromise our principles.”
The AI conundrum
Meanwhile, a new existential challenge looms: artificial intelligence. What happens when machines provide the answer, but erase the source?
In 2023, the Times became the first major news organization to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they used its copyrighted journalism without permission to train large language models. “We are vigorously enforcing our intellectual property rights,” she explains. “Not just for ourselves, but for the principle that high-quality journalism deserves protection—and compensation.” (OpenAI argues that its use of publicly available internet data to train AI models constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law.)
Inside the Times, AI is viewed as both a threat and an opportunity. Teams are prototyping new features, from voice-rendered stories to intelligent cooking tools. In the newsroom, AI is already playing a role. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into bomb use in Gaza used AI to help verify visual evidence from the ground.
“We’re not replacing human journalism,” Levien says. “We’re using AI to make it stronger, more accessible, and more scalable.”
That dual-track approach—defending the journalism while reimagining how it’s delivered—is at the core of Levien’s tech-assisted strategy. And her conviction that the future belongs to publishers that cultivate direct, habitual relationships with their audiences has only deepened in the age of AI.
Even so, Levien is pragmatic about the scale of disruption AI could unleash. “We are in a moment of real transformation,” she says. As platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and large language models become dominant entry points for information, the threat to journalism isn’t just reduced visibility—it’s the erosion of value. When AI delivers answers without attribution, original reporting loses its power, and the public loses connection to the source.
That’s why the Times is trying to reimagine its products for an AI-native world. It’s also why Levien views financial independence as more essential than ever. “A strong business is what allows us to assert the value of the work and protect it,” she says.
We will not be cowed. Not now. Not ever.
Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO, the New York TimesBend the world
Not every bet Levien has made has been a slam dunk. Nearly four years after acquiring the Athletic, the jury is still out on the wisdom of that deal. The outlet was losing money at the time of the acquisition, and while the Times anticipated continued investment, it set a goal to reach profitability by 2025. In fiscal year 2024, the Athletic generated $172.1 million in revenue—a 31% increase from the year prior—but still posted a $5 million loss. Still, it cleared a critical hurdle by turning a profit in both the third and fourth quarters. Levien isn’t interested in meeting expectations for the Athletic, she says. She wants to far exceed them. “I’ll be bummed if it just becomes a niche part of the whole,” she says. “The ambition is bigger than that.”
So, where does future growth lie? The same place it always has, Levien says: high-quality journalism and a near-stubborn refusal to believe the ceiling has been reached. She has heard every reason that growth should have stalled—political polarization, news fatigue, shrinking attention spans, the dominance of video, a fractured nation allergic to nuance. And yet, the Times keeps adding subscribers. Earlier this month, the company announced that in the last quarter, it added 250,000 digital-only subscribers, and digital subscription revenue jumped more than 14% during that period.
“Persistence,” she says, “is believing the thing matters enough to see it through and then bringing others with you.” Those close to Levien say that that mindset defines her leadership style. She jokes that she was born trying to bend the world to her will.
That conviction runs deep, personally and professionally. Levien says she throws herself fully into both her job and parenthood, commuting weekly from Washington, D.C. to New York while raising her now-teenage son, whom she shares custody of with her former husband. “I have this belief that I can give 150% to both,” she says. “Even though anyone will tell you it’s not possible.”
Still, she knows that passion and stamina alone can’t shield an institution from economic headwinds, political backlash, or technological disruption. Whether the New York Times can continue to grow on its own terms and at its current scale remains to be seen.
For now, Levien is still pushing. And the world is still bending.
This article appears in the June/July 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline "Bend the world to your will."
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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