Trusted Lifestyle
There’s an absolutely lovely podcast with Alex Hardiman, The Chief Product Officer of The New York Times, on how the organization is evolving to become an essential lifestyle brand and subscription service, with truth-telling as the core of the product and platform.
I put together a few notes from the conversation, but I highly recommend a listen, as the interview lays out a grand vision and meticulously sweeping strategy, something just robust and bold enough to work. I have every confidence they will succeed.
A few facts:
There are currently 9m subscribers with plans to increase to 15m by 2027.
The projected audience size is 135m people willing to pay for high quality journalism.
Newsroom = 2,000 people.
The ambition is to create a lifestyle of learning:
To become the best news destination in the world, where the news is the sun, a large audience that has trust in the high quality journalistic coverage.
Build beyond news, engage with passions.
Bundle - connect the entire family of products.
Make best possible versions of these products:
News
Games (Woordle)
Cooking and recipes (Cooking App)
Sports (Athletic)
Shopping
Audio
NYTimes Kids (Beta)
There are three types of organizational missions:
Consumer mission (with editors embedded on teams):
Understand a consumer problem and find the best solution for it;
Monetization mission:
Subscriber growth; account management; etc
Digital advertising; first party data program that is privacy safe
Platforms mission:
Experimentation tooling
ML platform
Database
The idea is to marry journalism and design and have embedded teams spin up individual use cases to scale.
The New York Times is a brand capable of becoming an essential subscription service. The product ambitions are getting bigger, utilizing software to help people get access to information, to head to the ballot box or figure out what they would like to could for dinner.
An eventual user journey through a connected family of products:
breaking news story
turn to latest coverage in China
take a small break and enjoy a spelling bee challenge
plan a korean dinner party
replies you need a new rice cooker to order
watch Brittany Spears documentary to wine down
Anchored in news; stretched to other parts of lives.
