Can the New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Overlords?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Uncanny Valley | WIRED
Episode: Can the New York Times Save Journalism From Our AI Overlords?
Date: July 28, 2026
Host: Katie Drummond, WIRED Global Editorial Director
Guest: A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of The New York Times

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Episode Overview

This episode of Uncanny Valley features a deep and candid interview between Katie Drummond and A.G. Sulzberger centered around the existential threats AI poses to journalism. They discuss the recent governmental overreach targeting Times reporters, the industry’s collective response to political and tech power, the ongoing legal battles over AI’s use of journalistic content, and how news organizations must both compete and collaborate to survive in the age of AI.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Press Freedom Under Attack (04:35–12:39)

• Escalation Against Journalists: Sulzberger addresses recent DOJ subpoenas, calling it “another disturbing escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to punish and undermine the free press in this country.” (04:35)
• Personal Impact and Historical Parallels: He notes the unprecedented nature since “probably since Woodrow Wilson, so in more than a century.” (04:35)
• Comparison to International Media Crackdowns: Sulzberger discusses studying foreign “playbooks” on press suppression as members of the Trump team voiced intentions to replicate them in the U.S. (07:31)
• Chilling Effect in Newsrooms: Sulzberger highlights that some reporters at other outlets are “no longer pursuing certain stories because they’re too worried that their editors will kill them because of fear of retaliation...That is the definition of chilling.” (10:50)

“Your rights only hold if you seek to enforce them...The surest way to lose your rights is to avert your eyes, drop your head, and try to avoid notice.”
—A.G. Sulzberger (10:50)

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2. Communicating Journalism’s Value in the AI Age (13:27–15:32)

• Visibility of Journalistic Labor: Sulzberger details the immense, often invisible, investments: sending reporters to over 150 countries and pursuing long, costly investigations.
• Journalism’s Civic Role: He cites the Founders’ belief in the free press, referencing Jefferson’s adage about preferring “a press without the government.” (14:21)
• Journalism Feeds AI: “Journalism is quite simply, very often how you know what you know. And, shifting over to AI, it’s how AI knows what it knows.” (15:25)

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3. Navigating AI’s Impact on Journalism (16:25–19:39)

• Cautious Adoption: Sulzberger advocates for slow, responsible experimentation with AI in the newsroom: “There is risk to moving, jumping too quickly into an emerging technology.” (16:35)
• AI as a Tool, Not Replacement:
  • AI is used mainly for pattern detection/reporting, not full article generation.
  • Real-life example: AI filtered millions of bomb crater images from the Gaza conflict to a manageable set, but “it was his job as a journalist to look at every one...to make sure he felt confident in the findings.” (18:28)

“Humans are responsible for everything we produce, period. And there’s something about AI that’s tricked people into forgetting that it is a tool.”
—A.G. Sulzberger (17:08)

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4. AI’s ‘Original Sin’ and the Fight Over Data (20:37–29:07)

• AI’s Four Pillars: Sulzberger describes AI’s reliance on coders, compute, electricity, and “data”—which, he argues, is largely appropriated creative content like journalism, books, and media. (20:37)
• Uncompensated Use of Content: He claims, “They have taken it all without permission and without any compensation because they think they could, they think they can get away with it.” (21:24)
• Collapse of Web Traffic: Katie notes, “It’s hard to overstate the degree to which publishers relied on traffic from Google referral links...as Google has introduced AI...that traffic has disappeared...” (23:53)
• Legal Battles: The Times has spent over $20 million on ongoing lawsuits against AI companies for copyright infringement—still early in the process (discovery phase). Sulzberger highlights the unfeasibility for smaller publishers to wage such battles (25:28, 27:10).

“This is not about money. This is about the ability to sustain essential work.”
—A.G. Sulzberger (28:42)

Memorable Analogy:
“Anytime you hear the anti-tech line, I just want you to picture Jensen Huang coming down onto the factory floor of his Nvidia factory, discovering that Sam Altman has arms full of chips…If you tell me that I can’t take this, you’re anti-tech Jensen, and you’re going to make China win. Right?”
—A.G. Sulzberger (28:16)

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5. Competition and Collective Defense in Journalism (29:47–36:43)

• Rivals and Allies: NYT’s fierce rivalry with the Washington Post, but also frequent alliance under duress, such as during the Pentagon Papers case (31:06) and in recent press freedom battles.
• Industry Solidarity: Sulzberger urges that news organizations must “tell the story of these abuses and help the public understand them...We can enforce our rights...We can push Congress and legislators.” (33:00)
• Survival Over Dominance: “Our industry is not going to win compared to the tech giants. We are a tiny little minnow. What we want...is for an essential profession, an essential service...to survive.” (34:01)

“Is AI going to go to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict and show what’s happening? AI can’t do any of those things. So we need journalists for it. And AI needs journalists for it.”
—A.G. Sulzberger (34:36)

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6. The Need for a Robust News Ecosystem (35:09–38:54)

• Why NYT’s Scale Isn’t Enough: With 13 million subscribers (vs. Netflix’s 300 million), Sulzberger argues, “We are simultaneously the largest player in our beleaguered industry. But what we need is the entire industry to be much bigger.” (35:54)
• Crisis in Local Journalism: 80% loss of local journalists in the past two decades, with two local news organizations closing every week or two (37:00).
• Civic Value: Strong local coverage leads to better civic outcomes: “When you lose local journalism in your community, basically every unhealthy civic metric goes up. Loneliness goes up, distrust goes up, voting goes down, corruption goes up.” (37:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Press Retaliation:
  “This is objectively very rare...This is building naturally off...a broader effort...to target news organizations that are willing to publish [what] the president doesn’t want the public to know.”
  —A.G. Sulzberger (07:31)

• On the Ethics of AI:
  “If the casualty is that [AI] completely guts what remains of our already financially beleaguered industry of journalism, so be it...And that is objectively the wrong thing to do.”
  —A.G. Sulzberger (21:24)

• On Industry Collaboration:
  “Let’s compete on the stories all day long...But when our rights are attacked, the same rights that protect me are the rights that protect you and vice versa. We all come together.”
  —A.G. Sulzberger (33:09)

• On Optimism and Purpose:
  “At the end of the hardest days, what makes me feel it’s all worth it…is reading the paper...to remind myself, oh, this is what I’m fighting for...No matter the battles we have ahead, they are battles that we must win because the country needs that type of reporting.”
  —A.G. Sulzberger (41:23)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• DOJ Subpoenas and Press Freedom: 04:35–12:39
• Journalism’s Value in the AI Age: 13:27–15:32
• How NYT Uses AI: 16:25–19:39
• AI’s ‘Original Sin’ & Lawsuits: 20:37–29:07
• Competition vs. Collaboration: 29:47–36:43
• Journalism and Democracy’s Survival: 35:09–38:54
• Sulzberger’s Optimism: 38:54–41:23

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Conclusion

This episode is a sweeping and personal exploration of journalism’s perilous new terrain, with A.G. Sulzberger making a forceful case for holding tech—and government—accountable. He emphasizes the human and civic value of journalism, the critical need for cooperation among industry rivals, and the necessity of dogged defense both in courts and public opinion. Drummond and Sulzberger’s tone is frank, urgent, and filled with a mixture of grievance, indignation, hope, and commitment to the public good.

Transcript

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[Katie Drummond]

From Wired, this is the big interview where we get to know the people beyond the headlines, conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. My guest today has issued a stark warning on AI.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

We must do more Our profession has been too quiet, too passive, and too fragmented in the face of abuses by the companies leading the AI revolution. We cannot allow AI cheerleaders to dominate the public conversation without interjecting to argue for the importance of ensuring a sustainable future for rich, original journalism. We cannot watch as AI companies attempt to permanently dismantle the rights that give us control over the work we create.

[Katie Drummond]

A.G. sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, recently had this to say at a conference of our peers in journalism from around the world. When I heard his remarks, a lot of it resonated with me, both as a journalist and as someone trying to get my hands around what is to come in the age of AI. For you, the listener. Think about it this way. You expect to be able to access accurate information from a plurality of sources with relative ease as long as you have the Internet. AI's effects on digital ecosystems and on the news media's business models make that less of a given every single day. There's a lot to get into about AI and everything else. And AG is here in our studio with me. Welcome. Thanks for being here.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

[Katie Drummond]

So I want to get into AI and I will, but ag I would be a terrible journalist if I didn't start with some news that has recently affected your paper. So specifically, I'm talking about the subpoenas that the Justice Department issued to several times journalists about their reporting on the Air Force One jet that was gifted to the Trump administration by Qatar. The Justice Department also issued subpoenas to third party phone service providers to obtain text messages and phone calls between some of those journalists and their family members. Your lawyers filed a motion to quash those subpoenas and in fact, the DOJ did drop their request on Thursday after some hard questioning from a federal judge. Though the administration maintained this was all about national security, your lawyers characterized the filings as a bad faith effort to punish the paper. Is that how you see this?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Thanks for starting there because it's obviously a, you know, yet another disturbing escalation in the Trump administration's efforts to punish and undermine the free press in this country. First, I should say I have so much admiration for the reporters who have done this work and who are doing it under a different kind of pressure than we have seen in generations. I think that by any objective metric, this is the biggest effort to go after the press that we've seen from a White House probably since Woodrow Wilson, so in more than a century. And these reporters just continued day after day to put their heads down, not to get baited by the folks booing them or the folks cheering them on, and just to do their work. And that work includes reporting things that the President of the United States doesn't want the public to know because it may be unflattering or embarrassing. In this case, they reported a story, as you said, the Qatari donated jet, and it's a little unclear. Was it donated to the Trump administration or to Trump himself?

[Katie Drummond]

Well, fair.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

A donation worth hundreds of millions of dollars. When that occurred, a lot of people had questions about whether it could ever be secure enough to hold the President of the United States and ferry him around the world. And sure enough, our reporters found out that on one of its inaugural trips, its first trip overseas to Turkey, there were sufficient concerns that it was insufficiently equipped to respond to a threat that the President had to fly back on the original Air Force One. He denied this initially. Right. But we. We expose the truth, which has subsequently been confirmed. And then it gets even stranger. That's a standard thing every administration. We will publish something that the President of the United States doesn't want the American people to know. Upsetting a president of either party is nothing new to us. What is new is that the administration defied many of its own standards and practices and explicit guidelines to. To very rapidly, in the course of a day or two, serve subpoenas on these reporters. They went straight to the homes, to the reporters in an obvious attempt to intimidate them. As you said, we are now learning that they sought to get records not just from the reporters themselves, but from members of their families. And it's a gross overreach.

[Katie Drummond]

Just to contextualize for listeners a little bit, maybe, how unusual is all of that to have law enforcement at your home as a journalist, to be subpoenaed right out of the gate, to have those phone records called up by the Justice Department. Like, how weird is that?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

I mean, it's extremely unusual. It's very rare. The closest comparison that I have had at the times in my tenure, I've been in this job roughly a decade, happened at the first Trump administration, when some of our reporter records were secretly seized by the Justice Department. And in fact, that led to some reforms in the Justice Department aimed at curtailing that type of abuse. So, on one side, this is objectively very rare. There was similar overreach, you may remember, in a. In a Washington Post case some months ago, where they actually raided the reporter's home and seized her devices. On the other case, this is building naturally off of what I think is a broader effort. And here it may be worth stepping back. Prior to the 2024 election, when it became clear that President Trump may win back the office, I spent a ton of time with some colleagues trying to actually understand how the press was attacked and undermined in countries that were experiencing some level of democratic erosion. So Hungary or Turkey or India or Brazil or Pol. I wanted to study the sort of emerging playbook there because members of the Trump team were very overtly saying that they were studying that playbook and had some eagerness to put it into effect in the United States. I published our findings in the Washington Post and did that so that the rest of our industry could see what was happening and see what might happen and begin the work of preparing what we've seen since then is basically a version of that playbook put into effect in this country. So that's the use of many different levers of power to target news organizations that are willing to publish ask questions that the president doesn't want or to publish things that the president doesn't want the public to know.

[Katie Drummond]

So you issued that warning. You have also personally criticized other media outlets for, quote, capitulating to the administration, particularly around settling what you've called winnable cases to appease Trump. Do you still see your peers as largely capitulating? Do you still feel like that's where we are?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

I don't think I ever said largely capitulating. Right. I actually think that the industry has largely held its ground. Right. And to be very clear, holding your ground does not mean an adversarial posture. Right. It means being willing to publish the truth, even when powerful people get angry at you for publishing it. It means being willing to ask any, no matter who it might upset. And I actually think that the industry, by and large, has done very good work. Right. Wired's done good work. The Journal has done terrific work. I look at the Associated Press, and when the White House ordered them effectively or conditioned their continued access to the White House on them, switching from calling a big body of water the Gulf of Mexico, remember the Gulf of America,

[Katie Drummond]

sometimes really hard to believe this is

[A.G. Sulzberger]

actually happening, they didn't take that sitting down. They sued. And I think rightly, and by the way, I think rightly, they sued regardless of whether they win the case. Right?

[Katie Drummond]

Right.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

And one of the things that I'm saying to peers in the industry regularly is that your rights only hold if you seek to enforce them. And you may not win every battle, but the surest way to lose your rights is to avert your eyes, drop your head, and try to avoid notice and just take what comes. But, yes, I do think that some news organizations have clearly felt the pressure from the administration and I think allowed that pressure to affect anything from coverage. And here, my colleagues in Washington tell me that they're regularly talking to reporters at other news organizations who are saying that they will no longer pursue certain stories because they're too worried that their editors will kill them because of fear of retaliation, and that their model is actually to wait for an institution like the Times to report the story, and then they'll follow it. And they think that that's a fight they can win. But breaking the story, being the one to first upset the White House, seems like a road too far. That is the definition of chilling. Right. That's when the sort of. The message that retaliation and punishment be avoided gets down to the lowest levels of the newsroom. Now, my job as publisher of the Times is to make sure the opposite message is getting through. Right. It is to. After these great reporters were served these subpoenas, I called each of them and I said, we have your back, and we will do whatever we need to support you. And one of the things that I was most encouraged to hear in those conversations, although not surprised. These are tough guys, was that they said, oh, we're not gonna let. Let go of this story. Yeah, we're gonna keep at it.

[Katie Drummond]

Good. You know, as a journalist myself, and I run a publication that. That takes heat here and there. I worry sometimes, like, we're sitting here having this conversation, we're talking about how important the work that the Times does, that other news organizations do, that Wired does, and obviously, we both really believe that. I worry sometimes about how we better translate that to the audience. Right. So making sure the public understands how essential this. This work is, exposing them to the work itself, especially in the context of AI, which I want to sort of start to. To dig into. How do you think about that? I mean, what else can news organizations be doing to make sure that audiences are exposed to the work and see and understand the value of the work and what it means when that work stops happening?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah, yeah, Look, I fully agree with you that, and I agree that we haven't done good enough of a job as an industry on that We've sort of taken it for granted, you know, at the Times, you know, I think about just the outsize investment we are making on behalf of the public's right to know. So we put reporters on the ground in 150 countries last year. Every year, over 150 countries. Last year, we had reporters on the ground in Myanmar, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Venezuela, in Gaza, in Israel, in Russia, on Ukraine alone, we had more than 70 journalists on the ground. And I'm sure, although we've never done it, that if we dug in, it's really hard to find the financial case for those expenditures.

[Katie Drummond]

Yes, I would agree with you there.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

I am sure, though I've never done it, that when I look at all the investigative reporting we've done, and this is reporting that takes months, sometimes years of work to produce a single story, that it would be very hard to justify all those expenditures. Right. But I think the public sometimes doesn't know how much institutions like ours think about the civic good. I really believe, as our founding fathers did, and across all their lines of division, the founding fathers agreed that a free people need a free press, and that a country that aimed to steer itself needed access to independent and reliable information. Jefferson famously said, given the choice between a government without a press or a press without the government, he wouldn't hesitate to choose the press. And that's because this work really does matter to society. Journalism is quite simply, very often how you know what you know. And sort of shifting over to AI, it's how AI knows what it knows.

[Katie Drummond]

Let's get into that. Let's get into how AI knows what it knows. So in the context of AI and journalism, I guess I break it into two buckets at Wired, at least. I mean, for us, there's reporting on this technological moment in time, which takes up a great deal of our time and our resources and our energy, and it's really important. And then there's actually the separate question, although we cover that as well, of how AI will affect the practice of journalism and the consumption of journalism. Internal conversations and deliberations you have had and had to have as this technology has evolved around how to introduce it to the newsroom. Given. I mean, this is at Wired, and I can't speak for our parent company, but certainly at Conde Nast. Always a difficult conversation. I mean, there are really difficult lines to walk here. And I'm curious about how you think about that at the Times.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah. So I think my philosophy is you very rarely in life need to be

[Katie Drummond]

first,

[A.G. Sulzberger]

and there is risk to moving, jumping too quickly into an emerging technology. And there's probably more risk in that than waiting, watching, learning, studying, experimenting quietly behind the scenes. And I think you saw some of those risks, Right? Like, think about the news Organizations that, in my mind, incredibly foolishly decided to just hand over full responsibility for writing and publishing articles to AI.

[Katie Drummond]

Mistakes were made. Mistakes were published.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yes, that is right. And indeed, not just mistakes were published, but fake journalists were invented. It was completely foreseeable and unnecessary set of mistakes. So, you know, the most important one is that we are. Humans are responsible for everything we produce, period. Yeah, right. And there's something about AI that has tricked people into forgetting that it is a tool.

[Katie Drummond]

Well, it's a very good conversation partner.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah, But. But I say to my colleagues all the time, you know, when they say, well, what if AI makes a mistake? You know? And I say. And I say, well, then it's your job to find that mistake and take it out of your work. And you would never ask that about a computer. What if a computer makes a mistake? Well, you got to find it. Right? Yeah. So I view this as a reporting tool. Right. So we're using it much more in reporting than in sort of writing, crafting, editing. Right. I think AI is very good at spotting patterns and anomalies in large data sets. And in many ways, that's a pretty good summation of a big part of reporting. Right. Campaign finance reporting is basically, what are the patterns? How is the mix of donors to the Republicans and Democrats changing big donors for small donors, and then anomalies. Right. One of the reporters who won our first Pulitzer that involved AI supported reporting, what he said to me is, you have to think of AI as a filter. It is not an output. And in his case, he was examining bomb craters in the Israel Gaza conflict, and he said that it regularly makes a certain kind of mistake. And so the way to think about AI is it took millions of images and it shrunk it down to thousands of images. But it was his job as a journalist to look at every one of those thousands of images to make sure he felt confident in the findings. So that's the type of experiment we're using. And I think between that sort of that natural posture of we want to take our time and move with curiosity and creativity, but also some degree of care and caution, and that we as journalists, as reporters, as editors are ultimately responsible for the work. I think that's how we've avoided most mistakes.

[Katie Drummond]

That makes sense. And I mean, I agree with you. I think it is a very valuable tool or can be used to create very valuable tools for reporting and for reporters and especially, you know, as newsrooms have gotten smaller. Right. And resources are much more strapped at some newsrooms, maybe not at The Times. I think there's competitive advantage there. I mean, I will say at Wired, we are building our own AI tools for reporting. And one of the goals is actually to beat the New York Times more often. So, like, we're trying to get clever in ways that maybe other news organizations aren't using AI.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

That said, well, good luck. Everyone needs competition, so we'll watch with interest.

[Katie Drummond]

We beat you guys all the time. I'm just saying. But in that speech that we excerpted, you also said there are early signs to be concerned about how AI will affect fact based reporting. I mean, some of those are obvious. You've alluded to them or mentioned them. But talk to me about what you see as those early signs. What worries you most here.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

It's really important just to go back to the foundational. What I referred to in that speech is the original sin here of AI, right? There are four ingredients in good AI products. There are the people who write the code. There is what we call compute, right? The chips and data centers, et cetera. There is electricity, and there is what Silicon Valley calls data, but which is content journalism, books, music, movies. And let's just go through those four right now. On the talent, on the coders. You literally have contracts that are sports

[Katie Drummond]

star like, oh, they're paid like NBA players. It's outrageous.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Hundreds of millions of dollars for a single individual coder at times. Now let's look at compute and electricity. Literally these companies are taking hundreds of billions of dollars of debt in order to pay for those things. That's how big the prize is if they win. These are companies that all now have trillion dollar valuations or near trillion dollar valuations. So the prize is big. So paying hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. And now you get to data and they've just taken it. They've just taken it all. They have taken it without permission and without any compensation because they think they could, they think they can get away with it. And if they can get away with that, then that boosts the profit margins of the richest and most valuable companies in the history of humanity. And if the casualty is that it completely guts what remains of our already financially beleaguered industry of journalism, so be it. And if it completely undermines the financial models for professions like book writing and music making and movies and TV and academic research, then so be it. And that is objectively the wrong thing to do. It is also not allowed under US Law, Right? Protections for what is called intellectual property date back all the way to the Constitution. So it is not legal to come in and take all this work. Why does this all matter? Why do I feel some degree of alarm about this? You know, it has already been challenging to compete with the giant platforms that basically exercise a monopoly over human attention. That's a little overstated. But if you added up all the minutes of a day, a handful of platforms and a handful of companies occupy the vast majority of those. But now you're not just competing with companies that are controlling the vast majority of human attention. Companies that are actually designed to be maximally intermediating. Companies that are feel that AI will work best if it sits in between the user and the content creator. Right? So that's AI is going to be maximally intermediate.

[Katie Drummond]

Google is one sort of really salient example here. I mean it stands out to me. It's hard to overstate the degree to which publishers relied on traffic from Google referral links and the degree to which that traffic has disappeared in the last year, year and a half as Google has introduced AI. So now when you search, you get an AI overview. It's reasonably helpful, usually helpful enough that you don't need to click through even just that change. I mean it's, Google is, is really sort of the backbone of, of the modern Internet has been crushing.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah, crushing. And we're at the various, earliest stages of this, right. We just had an article on it yet this yesterday and I think people are, are spending 10 times more time on Google and that's the time that they used to spend exploring the open web. So we're not just competing with that dynamic though, Right. Like what you just described is already so hard, but we are doing it after they've stolen all our stuff and used it to create explicitly substitutive products. Right. So we're asking people to come and visit Wired, to come and visit the New York Times, to come and visit ProPublica, the Associated Press, even though they can get our own stuff on those platforms, those AI platforms that they're already spending time on. And that is just, I mean in addition to being illegal and immoral, right. It is just under no circumstances a fair or winnable fight for the broader industry.

[Katie Drummond]

And you are suing, you are in a years long lawsuit. I think you said recently you've spent what, 20 million plus dollars on this legal battle against several big AI companies for copyright infringement. How is that suit going, if I may ask, and I'm curious, your ideal outcome from that lawsuit not just for the New York Times, but for the news industry more broadly. What do you hope to accomplish there?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah. Let me first just linger on the number you just said. So we are two and a half years into this lawsuit. Two and a half years. And we have spent well over $20 million on this lawsuit. And we are not yet through discovery. Oh, and I didn't realize that. Yeah. And so when you think about like this, you know, this original sin, this theft of every creative work ever created, which amounts to this immense wealth transfer from creators and researchers around the world to the biggest tech companies in the history of humanity, that is happening in part that sense of impunity that they can just take our stuff is happening in part because of how expensive it is to enforce your rights. Right. I mean, the times, thankfully, we've worked really hard to put ourself in a financial position where we can enforce our rights. Can you imagine being a small town newspaper and being able to take on Google or OpenAI or Microsoft or Perplexity or Anthropic?

[Katie Drummond]

Yeah, I mean, it's not going to happen.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

It's impossible. Or a smaller magazine, you know, it's just, it is completely unfeasible. And so these companies have been backed into this awful position, position where AI companies have already stolen your stuff. They say explicitly they're going to use it regardless. And then sometimes they'll throw a little bit of money your way. And what do you do? Do you try to spend what may end up being $40 million in a lawsuit, or do you accept the pennies on every dollar you spent to create your work and, you know, just to recoup something? So we think it's really important to enforce our rights and say, absolutely not. Right. Like you want to use our stuff. That requires permission and that requires fair compensation. We think the law is unambiguous, to be very clear. Right. And someone needs to fight that fight. Thankfully, we're not the only one filing a lawsuit like this. You know, a number of other publishers in the industry have filed similar lawsuits.

[Katie Drummond]

Our parent company has a few.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah. Silicon Valley has tried to portray our law is anti tech. It is not anti tech, it is anti theft. And anytime you hear the anti tech line, I just want you to picture Jensen Huang coming down onto the factory floor of his Nvidia factory, discovering that Sam Altman has arms full of chips, that he's snuck in his arm full of chips and he's running out of the building.

[Katie Drummond]

What a visual.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

And Jensen says, hey, you're not allowed to take that. And Sam Altman says, if you tell me that I can't Take this. You're anti tech Jensen, and you're going to make China win. Right. I mean, it's outrageous, right? We are not anti tech. We are anti theft. This is not about money. This is about the ability to sustain essential work. Right.

[Katie Drummond]

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. You've talked a few times about our profession, journalists, news executives, linking hands on this issue of AI Right. Really sort of teaming up to get ahead of it, to win. What does it look like to you? To compete? Because we do. We all compete fiercely. To compete and team up at the same time.

[Podcast Host (ProtonVPN Ad)]

Yeah.

[Katie Drummond]

How does that work?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Well, who would you say was the sort of closest fiercest competitor of the New York Times? If you look at the last half century, to the Washington Post?

[Katie Drummond]

I was thinking it in my head, trying to be emotionally generous, but that is the answer.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Yeah.

[Katie Drummond]

Yeah.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

So the Washington Post was our fiercest competitor.

[Katie Drummond]

Yeah.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

And boy, are they fierce. You know, like there are, you know,

[Katie Drummond]

and to their credit, they still are to this day.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

There are so many good journalists at the Washington Post, and there's, you know, not a week goes by without them publishing something that I'm just salivating with envy over them having gotten first. Right. And so they were our fiercest competitor. They were also our closest ally when our industry came under pressure. Right. So just think about the Pentagon Papers. So the New York Times starts publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon White House goes to war with the Times. It is so dark. Right. The threats are intensifying so much that my grandfather, who is publisher at the time, has his entire legal team quit over his decision to publish his stories. And they tell him he may spend the rest of his life in jail. And he starts carrying a toothbrush in his pocket in case he's hauled off at any moment.

[Katie Drummond]

The fresh breath was really important.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

The fresh breath was really important to him in prison. So we publish these stories, we defy the Nixon White House, and eventually we will win the legal case that establishes the right that the government cannot establish, what's called prior restraint, keep you from publishing something in advance. Right. And so we will end up winning that legal right. But there's a period in which we are locked down when now the court has ordered us to halt publication. And what happens the next day? The Washington Post picks up where we left off. Right. And I could give you a dozen of those stories. Right. So our journalists were all kicked out of China in retaliation for some of the actions of the first Trump administration. Who is my first call it was Fred Ryan at the Washington Post. Right. And my second call was Will Lewis at the Wall Street Journal. And we decided that we would raise concerns about these actions, collect collectively, right? When I told you earlier that at the end of the first Trump White House, we had some of our journalist records secretly seized, right? And when that became public, one of the first calls I got was from Fred Ryan at the Washington Post. And then soon after that, someone from CNN called and they invited me in to a meeting with the Attorney General, where we push the Attorney General for much needed reforms to prevent these kinds of abuses. So we have all these examples as an industry, when our rights are violated, let's compete on the stories all day long. Let's compete for the best journalists all day long. And then when our rights are attacked, the same rights that protect me are the rights that protect you and vice versa. We all come together. I think that's the posture we need in the face of these AI abuses. Now, there are things we can't do legally. We cannot forget that as Amazon took over the book sales in this country and gained this complete position over that, it was the book publishers that were found guilty of antitrust violations. So there are things you can't do mostly around commercial activities, but there are things we can do collectively, right? We can tell the story of these abuses and help the public understand them. We can tell the story of journalism, what journalism is and why it matters and the danger it faces if these abuses are allowed to continue. We can enforce our rights, right? So a lot of these lawsuits have been filed by multiple publishers working together, right? We can push our Congress and legislators, right? You know, use the word, how do you win? How does our industry win? Our industry is not going to win compared to the tech giants, Right? We are a tiny little minnow.

[Katie Drummond]

Well, let's say winning is synonymous for surviving.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

And that's it. What I am worried about and what you're worried about and all our peers across the industry is not about getting giant and bigger. That's what the folks in Silicon Valley are worried about. They want to take over the world. We want an essential profession, an essential service, right? The act of seeking the truth, helping people understand the world, holding power to account. We want that to survive. And I really believe that democracy needs it to survive. Right? Like who else does these things if journalists don't? Is AI going to go to the front lines of the Ukraine conflict and show what's happening? There is a high, going to spend years building the sources that we need to finally expose the get Trump's taxes and provide the fullest picture of Trump's wealth and the conflicts inherent in that. Right. Like AI can't do any of those things. And so we need journalists for it. And AI needs journalists for it. Right. And so we need to come up with a sustainable framework for all of this.

[Katie Drummond]

And I would argue one that ensures that the New York Times is not the only game in town. You guys need competitors, of course.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Look, we are the first to say that.

[Katie Drummond]

I mean, you know, I mean, you are a behemoth.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

I mean, it's interesting that you say that. We're a behemoth. And I really like. You cover behemoths here at Wired. Right.

[Katie Drummond]

You are a behemoth in the context of the news industry.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

But I really want just again, to slow it down. So we've got the newsroom the New York Times are really proud of. It has basically doubled the number of journalists that we have. Right. So to 2,400. Right. That is a drop in the bucket of the number of journalists that this country needs.

[Katie Drummond]

I could not agree more.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Could not agree more. We've reached this sort of amazing Milestone. We hit 13 million subscribers. We're aiming for 15. And that sounds like a big number until you remember that Netflix is over 300 million and you have another half dozen with 100, 200 million subscribers. And actually, it's almost all the way down the list to Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll has more subscribers than the New York Times. So we are simultaneously the largest player in our beleaguered industry. But what we need is the entire industry to be much bigger. If you're going to say that the New York Times is the country's leading news organization, do we really think that the country's leading news organization should have fewer subscribers than an anime streaming service?

[Katie Drummond]

Well, when you put it like that, Ag, it's. I agree. I just. What I want is for a 23 year old journalist to look at this industry and think, I could work there, I could work there, I could work there. Ooh, or maybe I could work there. And there are not enough places to point to right now.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

There are not. I mean, there are other success stories. I think the Journal has been doing extraordinarily well and doing great work. The Post had an amazing decade. And before a couple of really tough years. The Atlantic, the New Yorker. Right. Bloomberg still, I think, is, if not the largest, it may be still the largest newsroom in America. So there are a lot of. But there aren't enough. And particularly at the local level. We're seeing two news organizations close every week or two now, and we've seen an 80% loss in the number of working journalists at the local level in this country over the last two decades. And it's completely untenable, and it is not good for anyone. One of the things that makes me appreciate Meredith so much, she's our CEO, she's the top commercial leader of the organization. And anytime she is asked, she says, I would much rather build a market for journalism than to build a business for journalism, like a private business. So she wants to build up that market because the more we build up that market, the stronger we will all be. You'll have more talent in the market. You will have more competition for stories, which makes us all stronger. Right. Also just really important for America. There's all these statistics out there and studies that show when you lose local journalism in your community, basically every unhealthy civic metric goes up. Loneliness goes up, distrust goes up. Voting goes down, corruption goes up. And when you've got a strong local news organization, I think about Minneapolis at the Strip or the Seattle Times, the Baltimore Banner is doing amazing work. You see better civic outcomes. So I think it's important for the industry, it's important for the country.

[Katie Drummond]

Let me end on this because we've talked about a bunch of really tough stuff. Crunchyroll will stay with me. What makes you optimistic when you wake up in the morning or you're going to bed at night and you have a million things to worry about, you have a two and a half year, 20 million plus lawsuit among them. You have the Justice Department knocking down the door of your journalists. What gives you hope and optimism for this industry?

[A.G. Sulzberger]

It's a good question. This feels like a moment of great challenge, of existential challenge for our profession. And I try not to force myself to avert my eyes from that. Right, because you want to avert your eyes from that. But I think the AI challenge, I think the Press Freedom challenge, I think also the challenge of serving this incredibly polarized, tribalized public. I think of those as sort of the three great challenges of my tenure. And those are, first and foremost, that at the end of the hardest days, makes me feel like it's all worth it. And this isn't to sound corny, but it's true. And you can ask my kids, actually, because they're always complaining about it, is reading the paper just getting to remind myself, oh, this is what I'm fighting for. It's like we won a Pulitzer for the coverage of a few brave reporters who went, stayed in Afghanistan after the war ended. Right. And this is an incredibly risky story. This was a story. We had reporters kidnapped. We had folks who supported our reporters killed there. A photographer lost his legs stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan. And now the war is over. And not that America had been paying a ton of attention to it in that last decade, but the war's over and now no one's paying attention to it. And a handful of my colleagues decided to stay and to make sure that we understood what was gonna happen to the Afghan people who we were supposedly fighting on behalf of for all that time, and to make sure that America learned the lessons of its longest war. And. And when I read a story like that, right. It just. It makes everything worth it. And, you know, no matter the battles that we have ahead, they are battles that we must win because the country needs that type of reporting.

[Katie Drummond]

Ag, thank you for being here.

[A.G. Sulzberger]

Oh, it's a real pleasure. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

[Katie Drummond]

The Big Interview is produced by Kate Osbourne, music and mixing by Pran Bandy, fact checking by Matt Giles. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors visitors add you to their Slack channel. And if you like what you hear but want to also see us, check out video on Wired's YouTube. And as always, please rate and review.