Mark Thompson has said news outlets will need to truly embrace the internet and invest in journalism if they want to survive, as he announced his departure from the role of New York Times chief executive after overseeing its transformation into a booming online publisher.
The former BBC director general helped turn the outlet into a digital success story thanks to a successful paywall strategy which has helped it attract more than 5 million paying subscribers and hire hundreds of journalists at a time when much of the rest of the industry has faced deep cuts.
In an exit interview, Thompson told the Guardian that news outlets need to change their internal cultures if they want to build a secure financial future: “The process of digital transformation can’t be done on a cost-cutting basis, it requires investment. It means being brave,” he said. “You can’t do it with the old tools and the old body of expertise. In terms of trying to find winners, it’s going to be around boldness, around younger audiences and truly embracing digital. The risk is if you think you can just eke it out. That’s not going to work. The economics slowly deteriorate.”
Thompson said he was warned against taking the job in 2012 because the Times was seen as a conservative institution that would resist change. He said his success there was built by fully embracing the internet, hiring younger employees and adopting the attitudes of Silicon Valley tech companies: “Letting very young, junior people play with big dangerous things. It’s a long way from the way things are done in many newsrooms.”
He compared the relationship between newspapers and their print editions to that between the Titanic and an iceberg. Thompson said that while he expected the New York Times would be one of the final outlets to go digital-only, “it’s going to happen”.
Now that the paper’s finances are more secure, he said his successor would face the challenge of working out how to deal with cultural issues such as increasing staff diversity and “how you report news, in particular political news, to a divided nation and divided world”. A staff rebellion recently forced out the editor of the paper’s opinion’s section.
Thompsonhas no immediate plans for a new job and said he would probably remain in the US rather than return to the UK. He will be replaced by the newspaper’s longtime chief operating officer, Meredith Kopit Levien, who has worked closely with Thompson over the last seven years. Levien has British links as her husband is a co-owner of Swansea City football club.
