Ben Cotton on lessons at the New York Times on growing digital subscriptions

In the second episode of the State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with Ben Cotton, General Manager for News at The New York Times.

They discuss how the Times has grown its digital audience through a subscription-first strategy, the rise of product bundles like games, cooking, and sports; and how video, creators, and shifting audience habits are shaping the future of journalism. They also explore what local news organizations can learn from the Times’ growth playbook—and why building direct relationships with readers matters more than ever.

This Q&A transcript captures their conversation on growth, product strategy and the evolving future of news.

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  Hello everyone, and welcome to the second episode of the Medill State of Local News podcast. I'm your host, Tim Franklin, and I'm the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the home of the Medill Local News Initiative. I'm joining you from the broadcast studio on our beautiful Evanston campus on the shores of Lake Michigan and I'm truly thrilled to be joined virtually today for this episode by Ben Cotton, the General Manager for News at the New York Times. Ben, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.

  Tim Franklin

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  Thanks, Tim. It's great to be here. I'm excited to be here with you.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. Well, I'm excited to have you. So I recognize that some people listening or watching may be asking themselves right now, Franklin, this is the State of Local News podcast. Why do you have an executive from a national and international news juggernaut on this show? Okay, I get the question and here at least are a couple of reasons why I think this discussion is hugely relevant to anyone interested in local media. First, the Times has always been viewed as a trendsetter and as a place where innovation in the news industry takes root and second, I think there are important lessons for the entire media industry, including those in local news from the growth of the times in recent years. So stick with us and at the end of the next 25 or 30 minutes, I hope you'll agree with that assessment. So we're talking today with Ben, who's been at the center of the Times Robust transformation over the past decade or so.

  We're going to talk about the ingredients of that growth and how some of the time strategies could translate at news organizations of all sizes. Before we do that, Ben though, I want to take just a couple of minutes to familiarize the audience with your background. You grew up in the Boston area.

  Tim Franklin

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  I did, yeah.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. And during your college years at Columbia, you served as the editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Spectator.

  Tim Franklin

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  That's right.

  Ben Cotton

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  And you also interned in the Red Sox organization.

  Tim Franklin

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  I did.

  Ben Cotton

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  While you were in school. So one of our crack researchers here found a quote from you, I think it was while you were still in college, where you said, "that you dream of running a baseball team."

  Tim Franklin

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  I did. That sounds like me. Yeah.

  Ben Cotton

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  So I have two questions for you. Do you still dream of running a baseball team even though you're at the upper echelons of the nation's premier news organization? And second, are you still a Red Sox fan even though you live in New York and work at the Times?

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, the second question, that's the most important one to get out of the way. Definitely still a Red Sox fan and that's something that will never change. I mean, my interest in journalism started from being a Red Sox fan. That's where the paper that I grew up reading was, the Boston Globe in the suburbs of Boston and sort of reading everything that they produced about the Red Sox and frankly, most of the other sports too, every single morning. Running a baseball team one day would be fun, but I feel pretty good about where I am now. I think what I'm doing feels incredibly important and like I'm contributing something meaningful to a very important organization. So I'll stick with the Times for the time being.

  Ben Cotton

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  I think you're in a good spot, Ben. I think you're in a really good spot. So let's talk about that. You've had a really impressive kind of astronomical ascendance up the Times org chart after working at McKinsey as a media industry consultant for about three years. At a school, you've now been at the Times for about 11 and a half years. On LinkedIn, it shows you've worked in 10 different roles in that time in strategy and product and subscription. You've been a senior vice president, a vice president at the Times for growth. And basically you've been at the epicenter of the Times working in these different roles and through the growth of the Times. Talk about the general manager role that you're filling now and what are your responsibilities? What's your average day like?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. So this role as general manager for news, I lead the team responsible for product development work on our news app and website. So that includes product managers, engineers, designers, data analysts, and more. And I'm doing that in very close partnership with colleagues in the newsroom who work on sort of different parts of our product experience and whom I am partnering with every day to think about how we can give our audience the best possible experience with our journalism, as well as with others here on the business side to ensure we're delivering on our business goals and subscriptions and advertising on our news product, subscriptions in particular that I have experience with in my prior roles here. So, on a given day, I'm doing a little bit of all of those things. I'm spending time with colleagues in the newsroom or elsewhere in the company thinking about our strategy and priorities.

  I'm working with our team members to give them whatever they need to deliver on the things that we've agreed to go and build. And then as we ship new features and new elements of our product, I'm looking at how they're doing. And then sort of going back to the beginning and thinking about what does that tell us about how we should evolve our strategy for the rest of the year and beyond.

  Ben Cotton

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  That sounds like a lot of responsibility. Also sounds like a lot of fun.

  Tim Franklin

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  It is. I would say it's both of those things and it's part of what keeps it interesting.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. No, absolutely. So I wanted to talk for a second about, you arrived at the Times around 2014, somewhere thereabout, which was about the very same time that the Times Innovation Report was leaked and became public. And for those who don't know, the innovation report was this internal document at the Times that talked about the transformation that needed to occur at the Times. And it landed like an earthquake. It was an earthquake that shook the entire industry, I think. And it was a real wake-up call for the need for digital transformation, not only at the Times, but I think by extension at news organizations all over the country. So given your kind of unique perspective, having just started there, just as this thing was being released and there was this urgency to kind of transform the Times, how have you seen the culture of the Times change during your time there?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, I think the cultural change that started then and has continued to the year since is part of why it's been such an exciting place to work over the past 11, 12 years. There have always been sort of new challenges or new things coming at us and we have had to move quickly and ambitiously and be willing to sort of take risks to kind of stay ahead of the trends in the broader industry. I started a little bit after that innovation report was released, as you said, and so got to see some of the initial work to start to transition from being a more print centric organization to being a more digital centric organization. That was one shift, but I would say that there have been a few others happening a little bit in succession, but also sort of at the same time over the last decade that have sort of added on top of that.

  One is transitioning from being an advertising business first to a subscription business first. That's something that happened on the business side in the couple of years after I got here. And while advertising is an enormous part still of our sort of success and growth, and advertising has been growing meaningfully over the last couple of years, putting the subscription business at the center of the company has really helped drive our growth. It succeeded on its own terms, but it's also helped us build out other parts of our business by developing relationships with so many people who are not just subscribers, but they're also people who are interested in buying products that are recommended on WireCutter. There are also people who are interested in reading our other products who become more valuable to us over time as a result. And then the last thing I would cite is how we have grown as a product development organization.

  That's obviously something that I've been a part of over the last several years in the roles that I've held, but we have so much traffic that comes to us organically every day, people who are seeking out the news, people who are seeking out not just the news, but also our games or our sports coverage with the athletic or the rest of our products. And we have invested much more in what happens when they arrive on our site or in our apps and how to bring them from their initial experience down the funnel to engage with us more and ultimately subscribe. And we might talk a little bit more about this, but those products have come together into a bundle more over time that has allowed us to continue. That has really helped to power our growth.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah, for sure. So I would like to dive into that. Before we get there though, I think it's important to talk about some of the stats of that growth over the last 10 or 11 years. So for the audience, just bear with me while I throw a bunch of numbers at you. In 2020, there were 6.69 million digital subscribers. That's now doubled or nearly doubled to almost 13 million today. In 2025, revenue grew 9.2% year over year to 2.83 billion. Subscriptions now constitute nearly 70% of all Time's revenue. So it's almost completely flipped from advertising being at 70% or so just a few years ago to now being digital subscriptions. And then one other note that I think is really interesting, at the end of last year, the Times had 4.27 million single product subscriptions to something other than news. So cooking, games, WireCutter, The Athletic.

  In 2022, the Times had 4.2 million news only subs and 2.2 million single product subscribers. So you can see the growth that's occurred in subscriptions in these other areas. So if you could, and I know the audience would be really interested in hearing you talk about this, tell us how you nearly doubled digital subscriptions in five years, because everybody's trying to figure this out right now.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think a big part of it is leaning into our strengths. I mean, you mentioned the other products are single product subscriptions, games, and cooking, and so on. But the core of our strategy always is to be the best news destination in the world. And we think that most people are going to come to us first for news. And to the extent we're able to get people to subscribe to other products beyond news, it's often because they've had an experience with us there and think of the New York Times brand as something that they really value and believe in. And if we're putting out other products under the New York Times brand, because of the credibility we've built up in news, audiences are likely to think other products are valuable and worth their time and worth subscribing to as well.

  Ben Cotton

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  Sure.

  Tim Franklin

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  So news is always sort of first and foremost. And so we have made huge investments in hiring hundreds and hundreds of more journalists than we used to have. Even talking about sort of the last decade plus of the Times, we have hundreds more colleagues in the newsroom than we had when I started here. And that I think is the core of the strategy.

  Ben Cotton

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  As I understand it, you have more journalists now than at any time in history, at the time's history, right?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah, that's correct.

  Ben Cotton

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  And what is that number? It's like almost 3,000 total, I think.

  Tim Franklin

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  2,300 in the newsroom, more if you think about The Athletic and Wirecutter and the other parts of the company too.

  Ben Cotton

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  Okay.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. But the second thing is we have invested in becoming more valuable to people by helping them make the most of their lives in other areas. So we've mentioned games and cooking and The Athletic with sports and Wirecutter now with product reviews. And of course we're investing in audio and video as new formats, both within news and in those other products as well. And I mentioned growing up on reading a local newspaper, The Boston Globe, and I loved sports and other members of my family liked reading the other sections. And I'm sure many people would say that if they grew up as New York Times print subscribers or print subscribers to another paper. And to some extent, we think about the bundle and our broader set of product experiences in a similar way, that there are going to be different ways that members of the family might want to engage with the Times.

  And we would like to have something for everybody and maybe you start on one product, but over time, that is sort of a springboard into engaging with more of our journalism and our whole bundle. And as you may have saw, we actually launched a family plan subscription just last year in part to sort of lean into that based on what we've heard from our audiences and our subscribers.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. I was already a subscriber, but I signed up for the family subscription bundle. It was a great deal.

  Tim Franklin

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  Excellent. I'm glad to hear it.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. So as you were saying, you've smartly developed these content verticals in sports, games, puzzles, cooking, and other areas. So should local news organizations, should other news organizations think about a similar strategy if they're not already? I mean, is this a strategy that's transferable, you think, in other markets?

  Tim Franklin

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  I think that the strategy, the specifics of what we've done won't be exactly transferable to every market, but I think there's some broad themes there that make a lot of sense that are something that a lot of different organizations could potentially learn from. I mean, the first one I would say is focusing on where you have differentiation in your product. So thinking about where you have particular strengths, which is probably going to be different for every market and every organization, but it's a lot easier to take something that you are strong at maybe in one format and transfer that to another format as we've done with some of the verticals you're describing and taking print experiences and making them interesting digital experiences rather than trying to do something brand new that you've never done before. It might take some creativity to figure out how to unlock that.

  It might take some trial and error, but I would say that versions of that are probably doable for anybody. And I think the second lesson there is about moving quickly and being willing to take some risks while being careful about what your brand stands for and making sure that you don't violate or undermine that, but recognizing that it's probably going to take some time to get one of these things right. You look at any of those products and it's not like we flipped a switch and then all of a sudden we had a huge digital growth story. They took a lot of development and years in most cases to figure out exactly the right formula.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. I think your point about differentiation is so important. And when I was editing newspapers, we talked a lot about having franchise topics. What are the unique franchises to our market that are topical areas that we can own, that are unique to this market that we have an expertise in. And that's really kind of what you're talking about, isn't it?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. Yeah I think there are some more tactical questions about when something should be a separate standalone subscription product on its own or when it should just be enhancing the existing subscription offering that you have, which again is going to be a little bit case by case. But even within our news product, there are areas like our culture and lifestyle coverage on sort of books and movies and TV shows, our travel coverage, our well section and coverage of health and wellness, those are all core parts of our existing news subscription and they're incredibly valuable. And they're areas where readers have relationships with the journalists in those areas or feel a deep connection to the journalists and the coverage in those areas. And those are helping make our core subscription even stronger while we pursue standalone subscriptions in areas that feel a little bit different.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. And I don't know if this analogy is a good one or not, but I'll go with it, but the audience has splintered across, as you well know, across all these different platforms. And there was a time where if you were interested in a couple of particular songs, you had to buy the whole album just to get those two songs. And I wonder if we're now in a news environment where consumers are saying, look, I just want these couple of coverage of these couple of topics, Red Sox Sports, for example, and maybe I don't need the whole package, but I love the sports coverage and I'm willing to pay for it, so bring it on. Do you think news organizations maybe need to think about that?

  Tim Franklin

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  I think it's definitely an option. Again, I think it will be a little bit case by case. We generally see the value of our subscription as being, yes, there's maybe a particular article where you ran into a paywall or something that you want so badly that you're willing to pay for it and that is enough to make you a subscriber in the first place.

  But you aren't remaining a subscriber because you liked that one article or that one recipe or that one crossword puzzle so much. It's because of the promise of everything that comes next and the promise of there being something that you get a lot of value from ideally every single day, or if not at least multiple times a week. So on the one hand, I think that's worth exploring. On the other hand, I think you have to be careful because if you can get somebody to subscribe to begin with, but then you don't have anything that they're going to want later, then they aren't going to stick around. And you might get a one month subscription from them, but then they'll be gone by the next month, and that isn't really a sustainable way to do it.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah, no, retention is such a huge issue.

  Tim Franklin

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  Exactly.

  Ben Cotton

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  So the Times has talked about going from 13 million to 15 million subscribers between now and the end of next year, I think it is. Not looking for you to divulge proprietary information, although if you'd like to, I'm sure our audience would be interested, but how do you get from 13 million to 15 million?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, I think one thing, I could speak a little bit about news, but one thing I would say that is true across all of our products is we are trying to develop relationships with more readers or home cooks or shoppers or sports fans or puzzle fans who are willing to have some kind of a relationship with us, but are not yet ready to subscribe. Internally, we call them registered users, people where we have their email address and we know who they are, even if they're not paying us yet. That's been a big part of our growth to date and the evolutions we've made to our access model over time to bring people in sort of one step at a time. And we are heavily focused on building out the next group of that audience across all of our products, in part because there are challenges from a lot of the major platforms where we have gotten a lot of traffic in the past.

  And if we get less traffic from outside platforms, then it's more critical, even more critical that we have developed relationships with more people upfront before that happens. Within news, a few of the things that we're working on in particular, we talked a little bit about video and audio and trying to invest more heavily in those and make those a bigger part of our news experience. We think that will really help us engage audiences. We are trying to sort of elevate our reporters, the human expertise behind our journalism and develop more direct connections with our audiences that way. And we are working on personalization and some other things to just make it a better overall product experience for all of our readers, but particularly people who are coming in and are getting exposed to us either for the first time or for the first time in a little while.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah. So I wanted to follow up on your point about video. Your CEO, Meredith Culpet Levine, spoke on Scott Galloway's podcast recently about the importance of video as a critical component of the Times' strategy. She said the Times must provide independent original journalism and tell stories in various formats, text, audio, and video, to appeal to a range of audiences and reflect how people consume news these days. And she's also talked about how video journalism can help build trust with the audience. Can you talk about how you view video and its central role in helping you get to 15 million or to grow in the future?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, we talked a little bit earlier about how there are things that you might have as an organization that are strengths or that differentiate you and that you don't ever want to lose sight of those things, but there might be new and different ways to deliver those things than there were in the past. So in some sense, our view is that independent journalism that people can trust and rely on is core to our strategy, but some people might prefer to engage with that in a video format now, certainly many more people than before. And so we want to make sure that we are meeting our audiences where they are in terms of the format and the way that they're most interested in consuming our journalism. And that obviously takes some creativity and some trial and error to figure out how to do correctly, but we've started to see audiences really respond to that way of doing things and engage a lot when we put more video on our website or in our app.

  It also, as you're getting at, helps us build connections between our journalists and our audience. And when there's so much information going out on other platforms that it's hard to trust, we do think that we can build more trust with our audience if they see the reporters who are out sort of in the field doing that reporting and those investigations. We think that it's going to be engaging work, but it's also going to build trust in ways that will benefit us over time.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah, 100%. So along the same lines, let's talk for a second about news creators, many of which are on TikTok or on Instagram and are doing video. So as you know, there's been this explosion of news creators. They're catching on with news consumers. We do an annual news consumer poll of news consumer behaviors. And in the poll we did last year, they ranked fourth highest among news sources ahead of more legacy sources like radio and newspapers even. So how is the Times thinking about the news creator economy and what can we all learn from it?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a lot to consider there. I would say first of all, that we are certainly leaning into doing what we can to take journalists, whether sort of in the newsroom or on the opinion side, who are really naturally strong in this area and experimenting with them and what kinds of formats or tools we can create to help them do that more easily. You look at the Cannonball Show with Wesley Morris or Ezra Klein's show, obviously those are examples I think where we have found success and we'll be able to sort of grow both on our own platform, but also in ways that really extend to some of those other platforms like you talked about. I also think we are interested always in experimenting on new platforms. It's not always completely clear at first what the right way to do to provide our journalism, whether it's on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or any other new platform, what it's going to be, but we tend to experiment and figure it out and see how we can grow on those platforms and then think about how can we take the relationships we are building between audiences and our journalists on those platforms and start to create more of a direct connection back to our own product.

  So that's maybe the one other thing I would say that it's great and okay to have a period of experimentation, but you also have to keep in mind your strategy. Our strategy ultimately is to build direct relationships and to bring people to our destination. So we are always thinking about over time, how can we do that? If you're a news organization who is trying to do something like that, or that's sort of how you make money on your own platform and you are only ever going so far as getting your audiences to engage with your journalists on other platforms, there's going to be a disconnect there. And I think you look at the last 10 or 20 years, there have been news organizations that have gone in that direction and have struggled at the end of the day when something changes on those platforms. And so you do, of course, always have to be a little bit careful of that.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah, no, absolutely. So your publisher, AG Sulzberger, told an audience at the Stanford Business School that the New York Times has one of the lowest median readership ages across major news brands. So what do you attribute that? And maybe it gets back to the video question that we were just talking about in part. And what would your advice be to other publishers who are all desperate to attract younger consumers?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, video definitely might be a part of it, but I would never say that's an end all be all. I think it is important first to sort of get out into the community and find ways to talk to the younger readers who might be consumers or readers of your product. If that's a local news organization that's in one particular market, I would say get out and try to find the young people in that market who you think should be the current and future consumers of your product and try to understand not just what do they want from you, but first, what are they doing right now? How are they engaging with creators, as you said, or other news organizations? How do they like to receive information? How do they like to share information with their friends and family members? And then think about what role you could sort of be playing in that particular dynamic.

  It might be a different format. It might be a particular platform that you feel like you have to be on. It might be something more in person. It might be that you need to be having events out in the community to sort of engage people or give them a chance to connect in person. We obviously are doing a lot of experimenting on this front. We talked about video on news, but there are things like the pizza interview from our cooking team that I think is really fun. And so it requires some creativity, but also thinking kind of organically about what younger audiences are interested in and how therefore you can reach them.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah, that's great advice. Go talk to your customers, go talk to your consumers, which is really important. So in the remaining time we have, we only have a couple minutes left. Speaking of A. G. Sulzberger, he just began a new ad campaign imploring Times readers to support their local news organizations. And he encouraged listeners to support any news organization with original reporting, local or national. So it's not every day that you hear the leader of any business implore customers to spend their money elsewhere. It's a noble message, but can you talk about that a little bit?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing I would say is, in his own words, he is a former reporter, both at The Times and elsewhere at local news organizations. And so just very genuinely believes in the message that he's alarmed as the number of journalists has shrunk and some of the challenges that journalistic institutions are facing around the US and around the world and wanted to call attention to it. I would also say from a business standpoint that we here, really want to grow the market for paid journalism. If more people come around to the idea that journalism is worth paying for and is important to pay for, I think that will benefit everybody in the industry. And so we would hope that some people take that away from that message and go out and support other journalistic outlets wherever you may be in a local market or somewhere else, and that will benefit everybody in the industry over time.

  Ben Cotton

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  Yeah, absolutely. I would encourage that as well. So this time has flown by, Ben, but I could talk to you all day. But I want to thank you for taking the time to join us this afternoon and share your insights on what's happening at The Times and how it may be applicable in other places. I want to thank our listeners and viewers for sharing your valuable time with us. Look for this podcast every month on your favorite platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or the Medill Local News Initiative website. Many thanks to our partners at the MacArthur Foundation for supporting this podcast and the work of the local news initiative. For our next podcast, we'll be joined by Chuck Todd, the podcaster and former longtime anchor of NBC's Meet the Press. Chuck is now making local news one of his life's passions, and he's got a lot of ideas for how to help the industry.

  And he's also going to tell you why local news is a lot like the craft beer industry. So with that, we'll see you next time and have a cold one on me. Thanks a lot.

  Tim Franklin

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