Q&A with Stephanie Preiss, Executive Director of Audio & TV @ the New York Times
This week, The Idea caught up with Stephanie Preiss about the Times’s audio and TV strategy, and the ways in which they overlap or differ. Subscribe to our newsletter on the business of media for more interviews and weekly news and analysis.
What were you doing just before we met?
I was in a monthly-ish meeting that we have between the people who work on the business side of our audio department and the people who work on the editorial side. It’s a relatively new kind of meeting where we’re trying to think more in partnership about how we chart the future of audio at the Times.
Tell me about yourself and your role at The Times.
I oversee the business side of audio and TV at the Times, which are both areas of new journalistic and business ambition. On the television side, we have a new weekly show called The Weekly that’s made in partnership with a production company called Left/Right and distributed by FX and Hulu. It comes out once a week every Sunday at 10 p.m. In addition to that, we have a number of other television projects. Modern Love is a scripted anthology series based on a very popular column and a huge audience success. We just announced it was renewed on its fifth day. Then we have dozens of projects that are in earlier stages of production and development that are not yet out in the world. The other part of what I do is working with the audio editorial leadership to think about the future product and monetization of audio.
Both of those jobs are very close partnerships with journalists and editors. In both television and audio, it’s not really easy to separate out the business part of the job and the editorial part of the job. For The Weekly, for example, I worked really closely with a couple of editors who came up with the idea for The Weekly to figure out what a Times television show should be like. Should it be weekly, should it be newsy, should it be magazine-y, should it have a host? Then, what do we need in order to be able to make that? Once we knew what we needed to meet our journalistic ambitions, I was responsible for going and finding the right partner and revenue model to support that. After we chose FX and Hulu, I was responsible for helping to build up a big team of people to make the show every week.
My role is a new role in the company. That’s the part of what I get to do that is so lucky. Pretty much everything that I work on is something the company is trying to figure out for the first time.
What were you doing before this role?
I’ve worked on the business side of the Times the whole time I’ve been here, but I’ve worked with a lot of different journalistic partners on a lot of different journalistic projects. My experience at the company has been really at the intersection of what is commercial and what is editorially worth doing.
I joined the company on the video unit, which was a very large group of journalists who worked in the newsroom for a desk head, whose job was to make visual journalism for our website and apps. That team has really evolved. We have people who really focus on making news video for our website. We have people who really focus on doing more experimental things, like virtual reality and AR and things with Facebook. Then television, which is really quite separate because it’s just a different production cycle and timeline and different people who are experienced in the medium.
I spent some time working on helping to set up that strategy and separate out those teams into doing the things that they do today. I also spent some time working on the first wave of big partnership opportunities the company had with platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat and tried to evaluate those to understand what the benefits of participating in them might be, what the drawbacks were, how our competitors were thinking about it, what the business arrangement was going to be.
How different is your work in TV from your work in audio?
Audio and television have come about in really different ways. The company’s focus on audio is driven by the fact that The Daily is such a success from an audience, journalism, and business perspective. There have been many companies that have followed in the tradition of The Daily that have launched a daily podcast because now it’s a thing to have a daily podcast, but that’s not how we went about it.
I think the company has been stunned by the success of The Daily. It opened our eyes to thinking about the things we have the permission to do in audio that we might not have if we didn’t have The Daily.
Our interest in television came in the wake of the success The Daily. We thought, if The Daily has 25 minutes of your attention in your morning commute, when you’re getting ready, when you’re in the car, when you’re in the subway, is there an equivalent habit we can go after in the living room? Americans watch almost six hours of video a day on average, and although the distribution of that has really changed, the habit is very healthy. How, as a company that wants to be part of your daily life, can we compete for that?
How are the ways in which you evaluate commercial opportunities linked (or not) to the broader subscription strategy for the Times?
The company is really trying hard to focus on being a subscription-driven business, but there are lots of different ways in which something can feed into driving subscriptions. One of the things we think a lot about is habit. How do we cause people to have a daily habit, a weekly habit, a nightly habit, a morning habit? In both audio and in television, though, we are not charging people a subscription to access these things. We think that we’re building a habit with them that causes them to be more loyal to The Times, and ultimately, we hope, one day pay for what we offer.
They are also, you know, bets to a certain extent, with a little bit of a longer-term time horizon than some of the other work that we do. For example, there’s a huge team of people who are working on the subscription business we have today: how to improve it and optimize it and grow it and make it more valuable.
What metrics are you looking at to measure habit or impact more generally for audio or TV?
The metrics we have access to in audio and television are really different. When we launched The Weekly, I had to learn about television metrics and what is big in that world. There’s over a million people on average who watched the first run of episodes that we put out on FX and Hulu. That sounds like a big number. But when I learned that meant an average of a million people had watched all 30 minutes, which is how television metrics are counted, not a second, which is how page view metrics are counted, it made that number feel much bigger to me.
Whereas in audio, we look at reach, we look at unique listeners, we look at people who are listening multiple times within a month, which is a metric we care a lot about because it indicates to us loyalty and habit.
Looking to the future, what trends are you excited about that intersect with the work you’re doing in TV and audio?
In audio, there was another big piece of research that came out a couple weeks ago that showed that more people are listening to on-demand audio and that more people are listening more. That’s a really exciting habit because when we look at the stuff that does really well, it’s also the stuff that we think is journalistically really good. There are certainly lots of popular podcasts that we would not consider to be things that we would make, but it’s not, you know, there’s the popular and there’s the dutiful. There is high-quality narrative audio, and people really love that and are listening to more and more of it.
In television, I think it’s a little different. There’s so much television that’s made and there’s a lot of disruption going on in the television business. I think what’s interesting to see is just how a lot of these big companies are going to navigate the transitions that they’re experiencing from a very traditional business model to a new one.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen from a media organization that’s not the Times?
There’s a lot of noise around venture capital and M&A in the world of media, but when I read that Vox had acquired New York Media, I said to myself, “Huh, that’s interesting.” It certainly would never have occurred to me that those companies are a match. But they’re both very focused on consumer brands and the business you can build around consumer brands, in advertising, events, television, audio… I will be very excited to see how those companies merge and begin working to transfer their respective strengths to one another.
Rapid Fire
What is your first read in the morning?
It’s my push notifications, if I’m honest. Before I can face my e-mail, I’m generally looking for issues that surface to text, and I follow a lot of different news organizations.
What is the last book or podcast you consumed?
Against the Rules, which is a podcast about referees. The first episode is about an actual referee in the sports context, but then it goes on to explore different parts of the world where a necessary part of how that world functions is that there is a person or an entity who is understood to be an unbiased referee of things. There is an episode about spelling and grammar, there’s an episode on the economy, there’s an episode about judges. So I thought it was very entertaining and totally fascinating.
What job would you be doing if you weren’t in your current role?
I have no idea. I mean, I try not to think about it. Probably something completely different. I always joke I’d be manufacturing desk chairs or something. I definitely wouldn’t be working in media.
This Q&A was originally published in the November 4th edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
