 Thanks for being here. Well, thank you, Alberto, for that warm introduction. And for your leadership of an organization that has done so much to support informed and engaged communities across this country. In this time of sustained pressure on the news industry, we are lucky to have the Knight Foundation searching for solutions. So those pressures are familiar to everyone in this room. Collapsing business models, eroding trust, surging polarization, metastasizing disinformation, growing attacks on journalists and news organizations. Each represents an existential threat, not just to individual news organizations, but to the collective strength of the free press and to the health of our democracy. Like all of you, we at the New York Times have spent years trying to chart a path forward through this difficult, fast-changing terrain. And while the road ahead remains treacherous, our recent progress has provided some welcome optimism that there is indeed a future for the type of deeply reported mission-driven journalism that many of us feared might be lost. But even as the times and a growing number of national news organizations appear to have stabilized, thousands of local news organizations, the beating heart of our journalistic ecosystem, continue to struggle. Now you've all felt the impact of those struggles. You've felt it inside newsrooms, as friends and colleagues have lost jobs they loved. You've felt it in your hands, in ever-thinning local papers. And you've felt it in your communities, which are growing steadily more disconnected and divided. And because many of you are leading the response to this local news crisis, I'd like to use my time today to share some lessons drawn from helping lead our digital transformation at the New York Times. In particular, I want to focus on two words today, one that I think our industry, myself very much included, has at times focused on too much and a second that I believe holds the key door to journalism's future. As the times has grown over the last few years, I'm often asked by other media executives for the secret to a successful subscription strategy. And they usually expect me to respond with some sort of insight on metering models or e-commerce systems or optimal marketing spend. And those things matter. And we have worked really hard to get better at all of them. But the thing that really drives a healthy subscription business is deceptively simple. It is offering something worth paying for. At the times, our entire business strategy can be summed up by that phrase, journalism worth paying for. Original expert on the ground journalism. That's independent, fair, and accurate. And that strategy, I believe, can serve news organizations across the journalistic ecosystem. Whether your revenue comes from readers paying through subscriptions, listeners paying through donations, platforms paying through licensing, or foundations paying through charitable support. In every case, you need to produce journalism worth paying for. And I'm sure that sounds obvious, but I worry that some in our industry are losing sight of the essential role of original, deeply reported journalism, not just as the highest purpose of the Fourth Estate, but as the path to sustainability for our industry. I worry that too many news organizations, both legacy newsrooms trying to find their digital footing and digitally native outlets adapting to the platforms shifting sands, are chasing innovation as an end, not a means. The times has had times fallen into this trap ourselves, as became abundantly clear to me every time we raced to meet our monthly quota of Facebook Live videos. Innovation is the word, I believe, our industry is focusing on too much. The reason so many journalists shook their heads at all the pivots of the last decade, the pivot to newsletters, the pivot to video, the pivot to podcasts, is that these one word strategies so plainly put the tool before the use and the form before the substance. The world already has enough slideshows and podcasts and videos and articles to last us through the apocalypse. Meanwhile, emerging technologies like AR, VR, blockchain, virtual assistants are still more popular with advertisers and funders than with actual news consumers. The world doesn't need more content. We need more journalism. And that requires us to step back and ask a different set of questions. Why should readers, listeners, viewers, and users make room for us in their lives? In an ever-expanding sea of content, what is the thing news organizations can offer that earns trust, loyalty, and a spot in people's daily routines? Or even more broadly, why is journalism worth fighting for? Why did our nation's founders view it as so essential that they enshrined its protections in the First Amendment? Why are so many journalists a collection of people not otherwise prone to hyperbole, warning that the pressures on the news industry present a real and growing threat to a free and informed society? Those are the questions to ask. And I believe the answer to all of them come back to a word that the industry is not saying enough, reporting. And some of you may be thinking, why is a guy best known in journalism circles for writing 100-page digital manifesto called the Innovation Report, Warning About Innovation? And hear me out. Back in 2014, the future of the New York Times, as Alberta mentioned, was being openly questioned. The company was in debt. Advertising revenue had plummeted. Our audience was stagnating. Talented journalists were taking buyouts or fleeing for more nimble digital rivals. Against this depressing backdrop, I was asked to lead a team that studied how our 168-year-old institution, both justifiably proud of its traditions and undeniably burdened by them, should adapt to the digital future. I was extremely bad casting for this role. Despite my relative youth, I have the background of an old school journalist. I got my start at a local newspaper reporter at Metro Dailies, first the Providence Journal, then the Oregonian. I've all but refused to engage with social media. I never joined Facebook. And the last time I tweeted, which was under duress and only under direct orders from Jennifer Preston right there, was a decade ago. And there is very little in life that brings me more joy than unfolding a print newspaper. And having no particular digital expertise to offer, I tacked the problems the only way I knew how. I reported. My team and I spent time with readers. We interviewed fellow journalists inside and outside the building, including some of the folks in this room. We mined for fresh ideas from designers, technologists, and product managers. We dug deep into our operations, studied digital startups, devoured reports and presentations and articles. And perhaps most importantly, in my view, my team and I took advantage of an increasingly endangered journalistic privilege, which is time to step back and think. What emerged from our reporting was a memo to newsroom leadership sounding the alarm that the Times was being left behind by a changing world and laying out a vision for how to reinvent the company for the century ahead. Though we called the memo the innovation report, we didn't expect the name to matter much because it was only meant to be read by a dozen people all inside the building. But then it was leaked and published in full on Buzzfeed and the name stuck. And I'll confess that I was not thrilled to see 100 pages of our hopes and fears and dirty laundry being dissected by journalists around the globe. But in short order, something very good came from the leak. Dozens of other news organizations from dozens of other countries started creating their own teams to produce the innovation reports of their own. But that word, innovation, continued to nag at me. And it's because innovation is necessary, but it is not sufficient. And at its worst, it can be a dangerous distraction. Innovation only works when it's in service of something more enduring. And to be clear, I maintain a convert zeal that journalism must continue to unshackle itself from the forms and traditions built for a different era. But I have another deeper conviction. And I believe that embracing change starts with knowing what will not change. And you can call that mission. You can call that value. You can call that purpose or anything else you'd like. And for us at the times, what wouldn't change was absolutely clear. For years, we had bet the farm on original reporting. We offloaded nearly every part of the company from our steak in the Red Sox, which was always weird for the New York Times, but it was probably the most profitable thing they had. Anyway, to about.com. And we offloaded these things to preserve the size and ambitions of our newsroom. We sold off our headquarters to pay off debt, even as we poured millions into bureaus in Iraq and Afghanistan at a time when other news organizations believed the cost wasn't worth it. Some people in the industry thought we were crazy, even financially reckless. But it eventually became clear that the investment in original on-the-ground reporting would save the times. But we also embraced innovation in service of that core mission. We changed how we work, becoming more collaborative and multidisciplinary. We changed how we communicate with our audience, becoming more transparent and responsive. We changed how we tell stories, creating a new form of multimedia investigations that, and I'm just going to use a recent example here, blend eyewitness video with plain spotter logs, radio recordings, and satellite maps to show how the Russian Air Force was secretly bombing hospitals in Syria. We even changed how we report stories. We now employ more journalists who can code than any other news organization. And that is not because coding is cool. It is because it allows us to do things like analyze massive troves of leaked location data to show how companies you've never heard of are following your every move. But all of these changes are in service of our enduring journalistic mission. And I believe the decision to align everything we do around original reporting and the imperative to make journalism worth paying for provides a near universal path forward for news in the 21st century. After a decade in which our own future looked perilous and the end times headline continues to haunt my dreams, I have been hardened to see not just the New York Times, but the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic all growing again. But these national news organizations will never be big enough to come close to filling the yawning void being left by the collapse of local news, which is the largest and most essential part of our journalistic ecosystem. Our country needs ambitious, creative, fearless, local journalists reporting in every small town, in every city agency, and in every state house. If we don't find a path forward for local news at something close to that historic scale, I believe that we'll continue to watch society grow more polarized, less empathetic, more easily manipulated by powerful interests, and more untethered from the truth. At the times, we are actively looking for ways to support original reporting at the local level. We've been partnering with local news organizations to tackle issues that matter to their communities, like our partnership with the Times-Picayune to explore the impact of rising sea levels, and our partnership with the El Paso Times investigating the detention of migrants. We're also trying to contribute in other ways from creating open source digital journalism tools to establishing early career training programs to help develop the next generation of reporters. We want to do more, and I'm very eager to hear your ideas. But our modest contributions pale in comparison to the daunting challenge facing local news, which is why I'm so encouraged when I see the examples of the model I've described today, journalism worth paying for built around original reporting, succeeding at the local level, often with the support of the Knight Foundation. The Texas Tribune built an entirely new nonprofit model to support accountability reporting. ProPublica has created an astoundingly impressive engine of investigative reporting. Report for America and the American Journalism Project are using ambitious new approaches to scale original reporting across the country. Established newsrooms like the Miami Herald are proving their mettle even in the face of financial pressure. As we reminded last year with the award winning reporting that led to Jeffrey Epstein finally being held accountable for his crimes. And I can't tell you how happy I was to hear today that that type of reporting is being supported by the Esserman family's new two and a half million fund for investigative journalism that was announced here on Monday. One bright spot that particularly warms my heart is the good work being done by my former colleague Les Zeitz. Les was the finest investigative reporter at the Oregonian, a two time Pulitzer finalist and a generous mentor to younger journalists myself very much included. As the Oregonian was decimated by cuts, Les retired and took up a seemingly quixotic cause, reviving the tiny weekly newspaper in Malier County in southeast corner of Oregon. Les was animated by the unshakable belief that people want high quality original reporting about their community. And in just a few years, he and his colleagues used that formula to transform a struggling paper into a profitable weekly that's winning awards and setting a high standard for deeply reported journalism. Circulation is way up, revenue has tripled, his formula is working. And to be very clear, I understand that success stories like this remain the exception at the local level, but it's a promising sign. Technologies come and go, but I believe that people will always want and democracies will always need great reporting. And I wanna end my comments today with a note of thanks and a personal request, especially to those of you with philanthropic budgets. First, I wanna thank all of you. Your presence in the room suggests a commitment to finding solutions to the big problems facing journalism. And that's true for those of you leading traditional news organizations searching for a sustainable path forward. For those of you leading digital newsrooms, filling the growing news and information voids in our communities. Those of you leading the efforts to support this journalistic ecosystem with money and tools and ideas. And those of you who simply subscribe to your local paper or speak up when you hear neighbor dismiss journalism as fake news or journalists as the enemy of the people. Thank you all. And, well, which brings me to my request. You thought you were getting off easy. The challenges we face are really significant. And even after the toughest two decades that our industry has ever had, the toughest two decades, I can imagine, I think it's pretty clear they're still mounting. And all of us need to keep pushing for solutions here. And as we do, here's my request, support original reporting. Innovate, but innovate in service of what matters. Help make the hard, expensive, essential work of gathering information and sharing it with the world possible. Because I truly believe in informed citizenry and a functioning democracy rely on it. Because the health of our news ecosystem depends on it. And because that's our mission, our core value and our highest purpose. Thanks.