Dean’s Speaker Series: CEO Elliott Hill’s vision for a reinvigorated Nike
After over two decades working across the media industry—and more than a dozen years at The New York Times Company—Meredith Kopit Levien has a specific way of describing what she does.
“Media is a big, wide word. It means a lot of things,” the CEO said at a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk, in conversation with Venkata Gadde, EMBA 26, and Ima Essien, MBA 26. “I have worked for more than 25 years supporting the business of something specific within media, which is high-quality, original, independent journalism, which is a professional practice for helping people seek the truth and understand the world.”
Watch the Dean’s Speaker Series talk.
For Kopit Levien, the distinction matters because it defines what the company is building. Journalism is not simply output, but a professional process grounded in independent reporting and judgment to ensure information is uncompromised—something that is becoming more valuable than ever in the current media landscape, she said.
“The most important value we have and hold on to is the independence of our journalism,” she said. “We pursue the truth wherever it may lead, even when that is to places people don’t like, and we do that in service to nobody’s interest but the public.”
That commitment to pursuing the truth without outside influence carries into how The Times approaches its business strategy. Rather than treat editorial quality and business growth as separate or competing goals, Kopit Levien says the two are tightly connected: The strength of the business depends on the strength of the journalism, and growth comes from expanding the engaged audience for that work.
But when Kopit Levien first joined the company as head of advertising in 2013, producing journalism and building an audience for it were largely separate functions. In a rapidly evolving digital environment, that division became harder—and less strategic—to sustain, she said.
Newspapers have long relied on building relationships with readers and becoming part of their daily habits. The difference, she said, is that The Times is now doing that at a digital scale.
During her time as COO, Kopit Levien said she noticed that The Times was competing for engagement with some of the most powerful technology companies in the world. Product-driven growth became a central part of her platform: not changing the content, but improving the way people find, experience, and return to it. The shift also meant investing more heavily in product and engineering.
She pointed to a set of principles the company has relied on for more than a decade that she describes as the “four Ds” of becoming a destination, building direct relationships with users, creating daily habits, and converting casual “drive-by” visitors into regular users.
For Kopit Levien, sustaining that commitment depends on the people doing the work and building the systems that support them.“Your first job as a leader is you’re there to serve other people, the people who work for you, the people who you’re making your products for. And it’s so easy to forget that,” she said.
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