Our Strategy

Our mission is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. This is rooted in the belief that great journalism has the power to make each reader’s life richer and more fulfilling, and to make all of society stronger and more just.

This mission guided us through the existential challenges of recent years, helping us weather shifts from print to digital and upheaval in the advertising market. And it’s what propelled us in building a digital-first, subscription-first business, centered on journalism worth paying for.

After years of adversity, we’re proud of our hard-won success. Our journalism is flourishing, unmatched in depth and breadth, creativity and ambition. And we’ve reached a milestone that once seemed unimaginable: more than 10 million paid subscriptions.

But our transformation isn’t complete. We haven’t fully realized all that The Times can be and do in the digital age, and we still have more work to do to fully secure our future and realize our mission. More than 40 percent of our revenue still comes from print, a business that will continue to shrink, even as we expect to continue to produce a world-class newspaper for years to come. And advertising, which remains an important contributor to our success, will continue to be shaped by dynamics outside our control.

As we navigate a complex and fast-changing media landscape, other challenges remain, from the dominance of technology giants to historic shifts in how people find and engage with news. And the broader forces of surging polarization, declining trust and growing attacks on press freedom pose serious threats to independent journalism.

For the first time in more than a decade, we are facing a future defined less by economic threat and uncertainty than by opportunity and ambition. The lessons of the last few years and the larger opportunity we now see make this an important moment to align on a vision and strategy for the next chapter of our work together.

Our vision is to become the essential subscription for every curious, English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world. 

We see an opportunity for The Times to play an even bigger role in the lives of tens of millions of people around the world. When readers subscribe to The Times, they’ll have access to the best news coverage on the planet, as well as a broad range of other information and guidance that allows them to engage with their interests and passions, all made more compelling, useful and habituating through great technology and design.

This vision serves an enormous public need. Our latest audience research suggests there are at least 135 million adults worldwide who are paying, or are willing to pay, for one or more subscriptions to English-language news and opinion, sports journalism, puzzles, recipes, expert shopping advice or podcasting. That estimate is in line with our own experience. More than 100 million readers have registered accounts with The Times, a number that continues to grow. And tens of millions engage with our work each week, a number that becomes significantly larger in major news moments.

Of this 135 million, we’re focusing on a subset we call curious readers and lifelong learners. Their unifying characteristic isn’t politics, finances, geography or demographics. It’s independent thinking, civic engagement and interest in other cultures, perspectives and experiences.

Faced with an increasingly untrustworthy digital ecosystem and the ubiquity of low-quality news and guidance, these curious readers and lifelong learners need information they can rely on to help them understand and engage with the world. In this environment, a direct, paid relationship with an independent provider of quality journalism will prove its value again and again.

We are proud to have helped build the broader market for paid quality journalism, and continue to believe it should be significantly larger. Despite our success, we only have a relatively small share of this potential market. Our goal is to have at least 15 million subscribers to The Times by the end of 2027; roughly double the number of subscribers we had at the end of 2021.

We regard this number as a mile marker, not the finish line. Achieving — and ultimately surpassing — our goal of 15 million subscribers will allow us to continue to invest in hiring and supporting more journalists; offer more journalism that illuminates and interrogates the forces shaping the world; and help instill healthy news habits in future generations of news consumers.

There are three parts to our strategy:

1) First and foremost, we aim to be the best news destination in the world.

The foundation of both our mission and business is providing the most authoritative coverage of the most important and interesting stories. This coverage is general interest, meaning it’s crafted for a broad audience. It is also multimedia, thoughtfully employing every major storytelling format — articles, newsletters, photography, interactive graphics, data visualization, audio, video and events — to best serve our audience. Ours is a report of unmatched breadth, authority, creativity and excellence, produced with unwavering commitment to independence and integrity. In an increasingly untrustworthy information environment, we expect that all these qualities will become increasingly valuable to readers.

News isn’t monolithic for us. Rather, we cover the world in a variety of ways that help readers.

• Expert beat reporting that allows readers to stay abreast of important subjects and storylines: The Times offers reporters the time and space to go deep on a single topic, from public health to religion to architecture and from the Pentagon to Hollywood to Wall Street. Beat reporting also includes our dozens of national and international bureaus, where correspondents are steeped in the communities they cover. This is perhaps the most important thing we do. Grounded in the expertise and deep reporting of our journalists, our beat coverage provides authority that enriches the whole report.
• Breaking news that doesn’t sacrifice quality for speed: We provide fast, trustworthy and useful information and context as stories unfold. This has always been important, but we’ve been expanding and modernizing our breaking news operation with Live. That’s because we believe we can add real value as an alternative to cable news and social media, where speculation and punditry often overwhelm facts. Breaking news reporting is a vital service in moments when large numbers of people are searching for answers.
• Signature enterprise that reveals important truths: We produce resource- and time-intensive journalism. This journalism exposes problems, holds power to account and demands the public’s attention. We’ve significantly increased our investment in these types of projects, with signature journalism now produced in every major format and across a wide range of desks, including a record amount of investigative reporting. In addition to its important societal role, enterprise journalism adds distinctiveness to our report by offering readers journalism they can’t find anywhere else.
• Commentary and criticism that help readers interpret the world: We provide ideas-based commentary and criticism to help readers develop and challenge their own views on important subjects. This work of exploring and analyzing the ideas and forces shaping the world is anchored to Opinion, but it’s also central to the mission of our magazines, Book Review and cultural coverage. This type of interpretive journalism helps readers make sense of the moment by providing voices they trust and voices that challenge.

Our goal is for all this news journalism to cohere into an experience that is far more than the sum of its parts — more trusted, efficient and revealing for people trying to make sense of issues and events than that of any other publisher or platform.

2) We intend to become even more valuable to people by helping them make the most of their lives and engage with their passions.

We do much more than cover the news. We provide cultural and lifestyle coverage that helps readers explore the worlds of art, fashion, food and literature. We help them decide what to read or watch, what music to listen to, what restaurant to try. And we provide trusted guidance to help people make everyday decisions, whether it’s how to stay healthy, what to cook or how to be a better parent.

Long before the internet, The Times bundled news with a wide range of other valuable information. This included cultural criticism and lifestyle guidance as well as a stream of useful features such as weather forecasts, weekly recipes, daily TV listings, sports scores and stock tables. We are confident that The Times can continue to play a similarly broad and helpful role in readers’ lives in this era as well.

Our culture and lifestyle coverage is designed to serve our general interest audience and live within our core news experience. It helps people keep their finger on the pulse of society, from movie reviews, to profiles of tastemakers, to features like Modern Love and Diary of a Song, to explorations of the changing worlds of art, fashion, food, and literature.

We also provide trusted guidance to help people make everyday decisions, from longstanding service journalism efforts such as Well, to our Watching newsletter, to Opinion’s “Where Should You Live” project.

In recent years, we’ve expanded how we serve specific interests with dedicated passion products. Through Cooking, Games, Wirecutter and now The Athletic, we offer destinations designed to help people make dinner, exercise their brains, make the most of their shopping dollars and keep up with their favorite sports teams.

The key to our success in these passion products is that the editorial must be best in class — whether it’s a recipe, puzzle, product recommendation or N.F.L. draft analysis — and we must also provide the best experience for finding and using it. Readers of these products expect the same thing they expect of all Times journalism: it must be original, authoritative and trustworthy. But unlike general interest coverage, those who use our passion projects also expect more content with a higher level of detail and nuance.

3) We aim to create a more expansive and connected product experience that helps people engage with everything The New York Times offers.

We don’t want to just produce the best journalism — we want to offer such a useful and compelling experience that we become a daily destination for curious people seeking to understand and engage with the world.

We know that those who turn to us for more of their needs are more likely to subscribe, use our products regularly and develop lifelong relationships. So, even as we continue to invest in our journalism and content across our products, much of our growth will come from better guiding readers through all that we offer, showcasing our enormous value.

Accomplishing that will require us to unlock more of the value we already produce through better editorial programming, packaging, product navigation and more. Our core product, The New York Times app, will be the best place in the world to experience news, and it will also be the gateway to everything else we offer. But we’ll use all our products and entry points to introduce people to the whole of what we do. Some readers may come for news, but they’ll stay for The Athletic or Wordle. Others may come for Cooking, but stay for news. The strength of our offerings — and how they’re connected — means that we can be essential in a different way to each person.

To do this, we need a connected family of products that seamlessly operate together. We will design our products to make it easier for readers and subscribers to move fluidly across them, and so that the more someone uses them, the better the experience becomes. To help us achieve that, we will continue to advance our underlying technology and capabilities, including platforms such as publishing, commerce and identity, which power all our products.

And we will more broadly promote a single, high-value New York Times digital bundle, one that includes full access to multiple products in one subscription. We’ll continue to offer stand-alone product subscriptions to attract the widest audience. But by focusing on the bundle, we believe we can provide the most value to our readers and, in turn, retain them and give people multiple reasons to engage with us every day. In short, we see the bundle as the best opportunity to develop lifelong relationships.

As we refine our product experience and increase the number of subscribers, we will focus on deepening our relationships with them. That means creating a superior experience for subscribers — especially in the app — and offering expanded benefits that only come with paying, such as subscriber-only newsletters. We want to make a subscription to The Times so engaging and useful that it’s too valuable to give up.

We also aim to continue to grow our nonpaying audience to extend the impact of our journalism and introduce new readers to our work. Today, we reach an overall audience that’s nearly as large as those of the biggest free news outlets. We’ll continue to invest in products such as “The Daily,” The Morning and our homepage, nytimes.com, which reach millions of people every day. These help new audiences begin to develop a relationship with The Times and learn how our journalism is different from what they’ll find elsewhere.

Even as we increase our nonpaying audience, we believe strongly that our journalism is something of value and worth paying for. The public would not have the information it needs without news organizations, including The Times, undertaking expensive, time-consuming, subscriber-funded work.

Achieving this vision

Achieving our vision requires the continued growth of our business downstream from subscriptions; a healthy Times culture; and the bedrock values and rights that make independent journalism possible.

The importance of our adjacent business.
Our primary focus will continue to be digital subscriptions, which in 2020 became not just our fast-growing revenue stream, but also our largest, eclipsing print subscriptions. But we have multiple other revenue streams that are important to our underlying economics, the largest of which is advertising. As with subscriptions, these revenue streams rely on our strong brand, unique content and large, highly engaged audience.

While we expect the advertising market to continue to evolve, our strategy has proven resilient. This strategy emphasizes direct relationships with highly engaged users; respects their experience on our platforms; and enables unique partnerships with brands. And while advertising will always be downstream of subscriptions, its growth and ability to continue to innovate is central to helping us achieve our goals.

We’ll continue to produce a best-in-class print newspaper, which also plays an important role in our economics and ability to continue to invest. However, we expect revenue from print to continue to shrink over time, making growth in digital subscriptions and these other areas that much more important.

And we’ll continue to take a long-term view and prioritize sustainable growth. Given the sustained pressures and continuing changes in the media environment, we’ve been steadfast in our focus on building a healthy amount of cash and assets. We plan to continue to operate with this strategy to ensure The Times can weather storms and seize opportunities.

Fostering an environment where world-class talent, unified by our mission, can do the most meaningful work of their careers. Working at The Times means working at one of the few places in the world where a great business challenge and an important mission intersect. At a moment when the need for journalism continues to grow, but the industry continues to hemorrhage jobs, the work to blaze a path for the industry is critically important.

Just as our business and mission are intertwined and inextricable to our success, so too is our culture. From College Point to Seoul, from our product teams to our investigations teams, every person at The New York Times helps power our work. As an institution, we’re able to harness the talents and efforts of many for a broader good.

In the last few years, we’ve devoted significant time and effort to improving our culture, with the goal of creating an environment where everyone who works here can do their best work. In that time, The Times has grown more collaborative, transparent, creative and experimental, even as our values and first-order commitment to journalistic independence and quality remain unchanged.

Last year, we articulated and began to make progress on a multiyear plan to make The Times more diverse, equitable and inclusive. We also codified in explicit terms what it means to not just have our company values — independence, integrity, curiosity, respect, collaboration and excellence — but to live them, in the way we work and interact with each other.

We’ve expanded our human resources, culture and communications teams and bolstered our managerial resources and training so that we can strengthen the foundational systems and capabilities that inform our staff’s experiences at The Times. As we’ve done so, we’ve made significant improvements in how we recruit, develop careers, ensure pay equity and communicate as a company.

And we have also prepared for the future of our workplace, one that will embrace a hybrid experience. We envision a balance of in-person togetherness, which is so valuable for collaboration, inspiration and community, with the flexibility that we have adopted and grown to appreciate over the past two years.

Our work on culture is never done; it’s a journey that we’re on together. Our overarching goal in this work is to be a company where world-class talent can hone their craft; have the time and space and resources to do the best, most meaningful work of their careers; and be surrounded by colleagues who inspire and support each other.

Defending independent journalism and the values and rights that make it possible. For The Times to succeed — and our journalism to have impact — we must ensure that our authority, integrity and independence are widely recognized. Our authority is rooted in the expertise and experience of our journalists. Our integrity comes from consistently holding our work to the highest standards. And our independence flows from our insistence on honoring our century-long commitment to cover the world without fear or favor.

This work is even more important in a moment when the very things that make journalism possible are under growing pressure: the trust of the public; the safety of journalists; and the freedoms that protect our work. We must be leaders in the fight for each of these areas, not just for The Times but for the broader news industry.

We’re living in an era of distrust. Confidence in the media, in particular, has declined and fractured. The corruption of the broader news and information ecosystem means that it’s with good reason that people no longer believe much of what they encounter. And a more polarized public has retreated to echo chambers that cater to their personal beliefs and politics. There, they are rarely presented with information and perspectives that challenge their worldview.

For us to build and maintain trust with readers, we must communicate more actively what quality journalism is, why it matters and how our work lives up to that label. That starts with ensuring our coverage meets the highest bar for independence, fairness and accuracy, but it also means helping readers better understand our journalistic process and decision-making. That’s why we’ve tripled the size of our standards department — now the largest in the industry — and have focused on finding new ways to show readers how and why we do our work.

At the same time, the safety of journalists is threatened like never before. Each year seems to set grim new records in the number of journalists harassed, prosecuted or killed for doing their jobs. The risks are particularly high for local journalists who continue their work in places where they face retaliation from repressive leaders. And our own journalists — and their sources — also face increasingly difficult and dangerous conditions. That includes a digital environment where harassment is being used as a tactic to intimidate and silence independent journalism. We have further expanded our investment in physical and digital security, as well as legal support, and are actively building new resources to support and guide our colleagues who face online threats and abuse.

Meanwhile, political leaders and activists are also attacking journalism to advance their agendas. These attacks range from years of anti-press rhetoric to politically motivated libel suits, to efforts abroad that criminalize routine reporting and publishing. Additionally, in the United States, judges and public officials are openly questioning whether longstanding First Amendment protections should be rethought and restricted.

We will vigorously fight any attacks on the core press freedoms that make our journalistic work possible. Our previous efforts have won key protections for generations of journalists and we believe we must be even more active in making the case for press freedoms in the current climate.

The journey ahead

The Times turned 170 last year. That is a proud moment for any company, and even more so for one that has endured the profound challenges that have confronted us — and the broader news industry — in recent years.

There are many reasons for why we’ve remained resilient. The clarity of our mission. The steadfast commitment to values like independence, integrity and excellence. The creativity, courage and talent of our colleagues. The insistence on always putting the best interest of our readers first.

But a big reason — perhaps a counterintuitive one — is our willingness to continuously change. This is not an institution that succeeds by standing still.

Five years ago, “The Daily” didn’t exist. The notion that a news podcast would reach more people every day than the front page would have felt impossible. Five years from now, we know The Times will look different, even if we don’t know exactly how.

We know that our journalism will change. Our business will change. Our culture will change. And all this will be guided by what won’t change — an enduring mission and values.

Looking ahead, we’ll confront many of the same challenges we’ve pushed through in recent years, as well as new and unexpected ones.

But here’s why the journey is worth it. A strong and growing New York Times will help millions of people engage with the most important and urgent issues of the day. We will provide a fact-based refuge in a broken information ecosystem. We will help a fractured, distrusting society better understand itself. We will hold power to account and expose efforts that undermine democratic rights and values. We will make a way for others doing the type of original journalism that a free and healthy society depends on.

And inside The Times, we will do this important work with a sense of common purpose, care for each other, and a culture that fuels our mission, business and people.

We look forward to working with you on this next leg of our journey.

Disclaimer This portion of our website contains archival information. Archived information contained or referenced herein should not be considered current and may no longer be accurate.

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