The thinking behind NYT's’ new digital strategy

It was a quiet manifesto — an 11-page document that unofficially serves as The New York Times’ follow-up to the much dissected Innovation Report of May 2014. (Nieman Lab’s story about the Innovation Report is the most popular story in its history.)
Look at the signatures at the bottom of this new Times document and you can see the impact of a year’s changes. CEO Mark Thompson, now moving into his fourth year at the company, has built his own team, and the 10 signatories inked their futures in what we’ll call the 2020 memo. Editor Dean Baquet, chief revenue officer Meredith Levien, and executive vice president for digital products Kinsey Wilson were among those laying out “Our Path Forward,” first in writing, and now in a series of sessions in the Times building with hundreds of staffers.
“We’ve talked to a dozen groups already,” Thompson told me Wednesday. “And we’ve got another dozen to go.”
The Times does show a confidence, though a budding one. After an often harrowing decade of challenge and change, the Times can move forward assertively, if perhaps not with a much business swagger — the future is still too uncertain a place for that.
As we get to the 2020 memo’s most important number, let’s recall a big one that has hung in media minds from midsummer on: 1 million. The Times officially hit the 1 million digital subscriber mark in August. On one hand, it’s a breathtaking number: What odds could you have gotten back in 2011, when the Times announced its new paywall to a skeptical world, that it would find a million people to pay only for digital access within four years? On the other, it’s just a start. But either way, it’s a number that demonstrates the Times’ new leadership in the news industry and gives it standing to figure out its next future.
The 2020 memo first generated one big headline: “Times sets goal of doubling digital revenue — to $800 million — by 2020.” Then one factoid circulated widely: 12 percent of Times readers deliver 90 percent of its digital revenue. Which led to Baquet’s point of clarity: “We need to focus on our loyal readers.”
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