New York Times runs in-house ad asking listeners to 'support any news organization dedicated to original reporting'

The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger has voiced a new ad encouraging listeners to support any news organization dedicated to original reporting — even if it’s not the Times.

It’s Sulzberger’s first-ever advertisement, the Times confirmed, and it ran for the first time on Monday. A New York Times spokesperson said the publisher wanted to “call attention” to the shrinking of the news industry.

The ad:

This is A.G. Sulzberger. I’m the publisher of The New York Times. I oversee our news operations and our business. But I’m also a former reporter who has watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk and shrunk in recent years. Normally, in these ads, we talk about the importance of subscribing to the Times. I’m here today with a different message. I’m encouraging you to support any news organization that’s dedicated to original reporting. If that’s your local newspaper, terrific — local newspapers in particular need your support. If that’s another national newspaper, that’s great too.

And if it’s the New York Times, we’ll use that money to send reporters out to find the facts and context that you’ll never get from AI. That’s it, not asking you to click on any link, just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you.

My colleague Sophie Culpepper first heard it on The Daily but the spot “will eventually run across most Times podcasts,” according to the spokesperson. Sulzberger has spoken out about press freedom, generative AI, and the shrinking of the news industry in the past.

You don’t hear publishers using ad time to encourage their audience to subscribe to other news outlets very often. But the Times can afford to be generous. As Nieman Lab readers well know, the Times has emerged as one of the clearest winners of the digital era. Few other news publishers have been able to replicate their enviable subscription model, however, and the vast majority of Americans do not pay for or support any news sources. As Sulzberger notes, local newspapers have suffered some of the deepest cuts in coverage.

Another Nieman Lab colleague, Joshua Benton, has argued that “if the Times is going to be truly mission-driven … it should be using its position of relative financial security to work harder on the biggest and most intractable part of the problem … local news.”

The appeal from the Times publisher is a small — but welcome — step in that direction.