[upbeat music] Have a seat. Which side? Uh, you're on the left, I'm on the right? You go for it. I'm on the left. You're on the left. Unless you wanna be on the left, I don't have a preference.
Both of you- I'm just kidding. [laughs] Both of you- Because, like, they only notice you if you screw up. Oh. Yeah. Well, now I'm like one of those people with a severely out of date headshot.
Just, it's circumstance, I'm not trying to pretend I have an age. Joining him today is Jessica Sibley. Please join me in welcoming Brian and Jessica. [audience applauding] Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.
Excellent. [upbeat music] Welcome to the Rebooting Show.
I'm Brian Morrissey. This is a special midweek bonus podcast from our usual Tuesday schedule. It features a conversation I had with Time's CEO, Jessica Sibley, at last week's Omida OX6 conference in Chicago.
Jess and I discuss her vision for Time, why she doesn't think a paywall is right for the brand, as well as her experience as a first-time CEO, and being a female CEO as well.
Thanks to Jess for doing this with me, and to Omida for being a great partner and putting on a terrific event. Now here's my conversation with Jess. [upbeat music] So happy to be here.
I really wanna thank Omida for their partnership and for their support, you know, in getting the Rebooting off the ground. Been doing it since October twenty-twenty, back in the height of, uh, really the pandemic.
And I left and wanted to start something new around how we build sustainable media businesses.
I think it's one of the great challenges, and I felt like the media business needed to reboot itself, that's why I called it that.
And every company in it, I think one of the big challenges is always, like, how do you change your business? So it's a newsletter and a podcast. If you want, please do check it out.
And this is actually part of the podcast that's gonna run later. So I wanna thank you for doing this, Jess. Really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here and to see you all here in the audience.
Yeah.
So, like, I think one of the great things is, like, you know, a lot of what I've heard and people I've talked to, it's like, it's very positive, and I think there's a lot of, like, negativity ar- around the media industry of late.
Always a difficult business.
But I think if we were having this discussion, say, ten years ago, I would've been asking you how you're gonna, like, catch up with these new digital media upstarts, the Buzzfeeds, the Voxes, and the Vices.
And those businesses do not look as good. And, and what we used to call legacy businesses look quite a bit better. And you've spent your whole career with these legacy businesses. Thank you for that, Brian. I, I have.
[audience laughing] Legacy to relevancy, I think that's what's really meaningful and what matters.
And I joined Time just about six months ago as the newly appointed CEO, and I have done this my whole career, and it's hard, but it's also really exciting and rewarding.
And to take a brand that is so storied, that is so iconic, and to be on a journey of transformation and innovation, and to keep a business growing and vibrant and relevant is really important, and it's really important more so I think now today than ever before in my career, having done this at other storied, iconic brands.
Yeah. So one of which is Forbes. Like, explain what the, the Forbes playbook was, because, you know, a lot of what was f- the artists formerly known as magazines struggled to...
Well, 'cause they, they ran away from the term magazines for a while, and, and like, but because, you know, the reality is the businesses are not magazines anymore, they're, they're multifaceted brands.
But a lot struggled on that transition, and I think Forbes did a, a really good job of, of changing the business. Give me the contours of what that playbook is like. Yeah.
So in my role at Forbes as chief operating officer, it... I, I'm so proud of the work that the team has done. I oversaw product, technology, revenue, marketing, subscriptions, many different businesses.
And what I learned and was a part of there was diversification in terms of building a business, driving value, and making sure that all of those components work together, and I think that's relevant to really any and every business today.
And the ability to understand your audiences, understand new formats, take risks, and be able to be a modern-day media company that's also based on something that was so meaningful and relevant, which you might call legacy, but it's the, the history and the past of what the brand has meant and what it stood for.
At Forbes, we always talked about success, and success has no age, you know, limit or- Mm. -requirement. It's global.
It can be anywhere all the time, and we really focused on that and, and grew the business, and it was a really exciting time to, to be there over the last ten years. Yeah.
And, and the thing with legacy, I should say, I mean, the roots of it is a gift, it's a bequest.
So I think a lot of times, like with- in media, legacy went through a period where it was viewed as a pejorative almost, and that being backwards or being, like, lumbering.
But in fact, you know, these brands are incredibly strong. And it like, you know, with Forbes, you know, the, it's in rap songs for a reason, right? Because it stands for success. So what did you see in Time?
'Cause Time is a classic brand. It's a classic American brand. I can remember reading it a- as a child. It's how I... It was a, a key part of how I discovered the world really, because it was, you know, a newsweekly.
It, it was... I don't mean to date myself, but this was before the internet. [laughs]I, I lived through that as well. [laughing] Okay, we're gonna admit that we both grew up without the internet, right?
I-- Well, look, I, I lived at the Wall Street Journal, worked there for many years when it was just a black and white newspaper, and it was in the trash by eight thirty.
Or so some of the photographs that our competitors would take would show. And all of a sudden there was Google and Yahoo Finance, and we always thought we were the only game in town and, and no one else mattered.
And that, that was a real transition and change.
And so when I look back at my career, whether it was at Forbes or the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, now Bloomberg Business Week, The New Yorker, as you said, I've sort of stayed in my, in my zone in taking, I think, what is really important in terms of a brand that stands for something.
And there are very few brands that if they went away, would it matter and would anyone notice? And with Time, what I learned, especially over the one hundred first days at Time, I traveled the world.
I literally went to DC, Davos, Dallas, Dubai, and many other cities, and everyone had a Time story, and everyone wanted to share their Time story with me. And that was a surprise.
You even shared your Time story with me and, and some of the stories were we were at our Impact Awards, an event gala like this, and Jeffrey Katzenberg was winning an award, and he's just such a legend himself.
And he had to come over and find me to tell me that he had been reading Time since he was fifteen in nineteen seventy-two.
He had not missed a week, and if there was anything ever that I needed from him, to, to reach out at any time. Farwiza Farhan was also on our stage getting an Impact Award. She is a young woman from Indonesia.
She's a climate activist that has literally launched a movement to save the rainforest. And she came over to me to say she never would have imagined being on the cover of Time and being in, in our pages and on time.com.
I've heard people say they learned how to read in Time or learn English in Time. Everywhere I go, people tell me these stories, and so that's really important.
And what I'm here to do at Time is what I've done my whole career- Mm-hmm...which is be on this path of innovation and transformation and build this business.
What's really important is reaching new audiences that are meaningful, that are relevant, that are young, and that are diverse on a global basis. And Time has that incredible permission and that incredible opportunity.
What, what is the mission? I mean, you talked about like, you know, Forbes stood for success, right? What does Time stand for?
Well, the red border is, uh, globally recognized around the world, and the red border, we're a hundred year old, so we just celebrated our centennial.
Time 100 is one of our biggest, most iconic platforms, and it really means something, and that's trust. So at the core, our mission is all about trusted journalism, and we are in a crisis of trust right now.
And we stand for something that is really important and that's really meaningful, and everything that we do as launch- as launching new businesses, as curating content in whatever format anyone wants to engage in Time's content, that is really at the mission and at the core.
Okay. So how you execute on that, like, I think, like, I can see, like what, what you're doing there, obviously, to diversify the business. There are echoes of, of Forbes.
But explain how you see this becoming a sustainable business. You, you are owned by billionaires, but I'm told that they, that billionaires like to stay billionaires and, and so they don't like to lose money [laughing].
This is, this is the rumor. You are, you are correct. [laughs] So we are-- Time is owned pr- a private company. We are owned by co-owners and co-chairs Mark and Lynn Benioff.
Mark is most known as the CEO of Salesforce, and they share in supporting our mission and our goal in terms of leading with our trusted journalism.
What our business is today is very different than it was a hundred years ago. And yes, we started as a magazine.
We were actually founded in nineteen twenty-three by young entrepreneurs, and we were written for busy men, which I find exciting being a female CEO.
[laughs] Written for busy men by men, and boy, have we transformed our business, especially when we have a great readership of, of women, and we have young people coming to Time as well. The business is evolved.
I will say in the media business, change is the only constant. Our business is still magazine.
We have the largest, you know, subscription business in the news industry with over a million readers for our magazine, but we've expanded exponentially across digital, social, mobile.
We have the largest audience in our history at over a hundred million, so we're really proud of that.
We've launched several new businesses over the last several years, a global events business, again, leading with our platforms and our biggest tentpoles, like Person of the Year, which I'm sure everyone talks about all year long, about who it's gonna be.
Time 100, which we've expanded globally. We also have Time 100 Next, so looking at next generation. We've launched climate action platform, Time CO2, so we're really leaning in on sustainability.
We launched Time Studios, which again, when you think about content, we're creating documentaries, docuseries, scripted and unscripted shows that we're producing and that we're packaging and actually selling to MSNBC, CNN, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon.
They're all really, really interested in everything that we're doing there. We have a Web3 and NFT business. We bought a company called Brandcast, so we're in the-SaaS space as well.
We've got Red Border Studios, which is a branded content business, and we're just gonna keep going, taking risks and finding new opportunities to reach audiences on a global basis.
[instrumental music] Okay.
So it's not an advertising business.
I mean, it's partially an advertising business, but, uh, we don't need to go back a hundred years ago, but I would go back, like, even ten years ago, Time was mostly an advertising business. That's correct.
Advertising comes in different formats. Yeah. And we look at ourselves as a content business. And what a content business is, is it's a brand that generates content. So we have the brand Time. We generate content.
Content, leadership, climate, sustainability, healthcare. We have Time for Kids, so news literacy is super important. We do a lot in, obviously, politics and so many other subject matters, culture, entertainment.
That generates audiences, right? So who's engaging in our content? It could be on TikTok, it could be in our magazine, it could be on time.com, it could be on LinkedIn, which is really, really important to marketers.
Marketers really wanna align with the audiences that we reach and that we are engaged with.
And we're really proud that we're reaching younger audiences, more diverse audiences, and that's really where marketers come in and where advertising comes in in different formats.
And so why is Netflix and Amazon interested in the work that we're doing with Studios? Because we have an incredible business that's telling incredible stories that their audiences wanna- Mm-hmm...
subscribe to or not watch an ad on Hulu and engage in our content. Yeah. It's gotta be very complicated to run. Like, these are...
I mean, they're, they're not totally different businesses, but these are, the- these are almost like different businesses, right?
Like, running a production studio, you're running an agency, you're running a classic publisher magazine business too. You're running a digital publishing business. You're now doing a commerce business.
Y- you're doing an events business. You know what I mean? I mean, this is, like, the story of, like, modern digital media in that you have to keep a lot of plates in the air at once.
[laughs] So how do you maintain the cohesiveness? Because the brand has to spread, and because that's the main value proposition is the brand, right?
But, like, how do you link together all of, all of these businesses to make sure that they're not almost competing against each other? Yeah, and they don't really compete against each other.
I think diversification in media is critical. I think taking risks and doing a lot of testing and learning is really important.
That's what makes it so exciting because, you know, the, the, the journey and being able to go from, you know, meeting with the Time Studios team to the Time Tech team, to the editorial in our newsroom, it...
The cohesiveness is the content, which is really our product. How you deliver that product is multifaceted, and there's an incredible ecosystem.
It starts with our brand, it leads with our content, and it's what makes everything really exciting.
And there are some businesses that, you know, we ha- in, in my role, we, we really wanna grow, and then there are some that there's less opportunity. Mm. So Timepieces, we launched, you know, an NFT Web3 product.
Really proud of that. We have sixty thousand digital artists that are in our community that are super active. They're really interested in engaging with Time. They love the red border.
And the NFT business, maybe that isn't where we're gonna see growth, but it just shows our ability with our brand, with our content, to engage a whole new community and build a business really quickly and to be able to pivot and then maybe have to
pull back if there's not as much demand. So it's gonna continue, the NFT Web3 business? Web3, uh...
I saw a terrifying slide which was Web1, Web2, and then Web3, and you see who was in Web1, who didn't make it to Web2, who started in Web2, and then we're looking at Web3, and we wanna make it into Web3.
So yes, that is gonna be something that we will continue to focus on. Okay. I mean, everyone's talking AI now. Everyone who was doing Web3, now they're talking about AI.
I do wanna talk about, like, one decision 'cause I think there's a lot of... There's always a decision to do more, but some- sometimes you make decision to, to stop doing things.
And that can be particularly hard when l- when it seems like the tide is all going in one direction, and that's around, like, digital subscriptions.
You chose to go away from a paywall, and, like, that was unusual in that, like, most people have been going in the opposite direction. W- what did you see there?
I mean, there's a mission component, so let's talk about the mission component, but then I'm gonna push you on the business component.
So raise your hand if you try to read a piece of content and you can't 'cause you get something that blocks you. Does that... Raise your hand if that's happened to you. Raise your hand if you enjoy that experience. No.
No hands. How many en- people enjoy when consumers pay you though then for the content? [laughs] Yeah, there's some hands. [laughs] For, for us- Goes both ways... again, for us, our...
This was not a hard decision for Time, for our brand, for our mission. We fundamentally believe that our content should be available to everyone, everywhere, at all time for free. We want it to be accessible.
We believe that there has been a challenge with digital inclusivity. There's a digital divide which became exacerbated through COVID.
I mentioned we do have Time for Kids, so we feel that not only should ourJournalism and our content be accessible and available, we also feel the same way about our hundred years of archives.
And that if you wanna get access to information, we have, you know, President Carter, he's in hospice, he's the oldest living president.
And if you're at an age, at any age, and you wanna learn about him and the Carter administration, come to time.com and you'll learn a lot. And that's just one example.
So we felt like it was really important for what we do.
The business side of it is that it really wasn't a great experience for consumers to have to give their data, to have to remember every device, their, their sign-on, their passwords. So that wasn't pleasurable.
And the other part of it is, is the, is the tech aspect, but from a business perspective, we felt that there were other ways that we can market and get- Yeah... new, new, new readers and new audiences to Time.
So I, I'm really proud of that. We had our Time 100 gala just recently, and we honored Tracy D. Hall. She's the first African American woman to lead the American Library Association since 1876.
And you can actually watch this on Hulu or D-Disney Plus because it was on ABC.
We're the number one-rated show on Sunday night, and she gave the most moving speech that, you know, free people should be able to read freely, and we also believe that. Yeah.
So we feel like we're doing something right, but we're also doing something that does make sense for our business.
[gentle music] Okay, just to go on the business part, 'cause I get the mission part, and I don't think access to high-quality information should be a luxury good.
And I think y-we need to build sustainable media businesses, but at the same time, it doesn't make sense to only have, 'cause there will be a lot of garbage information out there. So I get that part.
At the same time, from a business perspective, you must have run the numbers and figured out that you can make more money other ways than only getting...
You know, there's only a small percentage of people who-whoever convert, you know, for subscriptions. Is that gonna be mostly made up for through advertising?
I would say the success that I personally have in my career is being able to see a little bit of the future- Yeah... and get some of that information and apply that and inform that in your business strategy.
And I felt that, again, I look at myself and my own behavior.
During COVID, I was reading this and reading that, and reading this and reading that, and I spent hours just reading and not committing or doing other things, and I kept subscribing and subscribing to all of...
And it's part of my job, but also my interest. I'm a voracious reader.
And then all of a sudden y-you start spending time doing other things, and you are now paying for a lot of things that maybe you're not actively engaging with and reading. I just looked at my own behavior.
I looked at that and applied that to our business. I feel like subscription businesses overall are starting to be tapped, and you can just read that information- Yeah...
and see that it's not just what you subscribe to to read. And also, the FTC is gonna play an important role, and I think that's important in advocating for consumers because this is now a recurring revenue.
You get auto bill, you get, you, you auto pay. You don't even really have transparency or the ability to easily opt out.
And that was also a part of the business strategy that we felt that there was a lot of tension there. You know, when you talk about growth or sustainable, it wasn't really that for us.
And then lastly, talking to the newsroom and talking to journalists and, and you're one of them- Mm... like, they want more people to read their stories. They wanna write for broader, bigger audiences.
This was like a, a win. You don't want, as a journalist, to have your, your stuff blocked. No. And, and that was one of- Yeah... one of the decisions. Well, you don't want it, but you also want to still get paid.
And a lot of times, most journalists have been laid off at some point of their career. It's sort of a rite of passage, unfortunately. So they come around to the, the subscriptions. But again, I don't think it...
It's like it's not a one-size-fits-all model for, for any one publication. Do you think too many publications went to subscriptions when really their brands a-and their models, it didn't make sense for?
I mean, 'cause like I think like a lot of people end up getting caught in between.
They're not specialized enough and they're not The New York Times, and they're on this growth hamster wheel of we all get those dollar offers nonstop, and it's like, you know, I'll...
We'll, we'll make, we'll make the money in the future. And normally, the way you do that is people sign up because the, it's a dollar, and then all of a sudden it's fifty or ninety-nine dollars.
Look, I think we're seeing that in the business, and, and we'll continue to watch it and see.
There's, there's a reason why, you know, my, my daughter and her roommates are happy to pay a lower fee for Hulu and watch commercials. Yeah. You know, they're roommates and they're frugal.
They'd s-rather spend that money somewhere else. So I think time will tell. There are, there are winners in this space, yes, the Wall Street Journal. But remember, when the day- Other people's money...
the Wall Street Journal came out, you had to pay for your newspaper, and there were all those stories about how much it costs or where you would, you would buy it. So they've always been in that business.
That is not new for The New York Times. That is not new for The Wall Street Journal. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, a lot of the Journal is obviously its expense. I think B2B is a differentArea.
And you also do have to call to cancel, and that helps the retention. And that, and that's a good point. It's not like we're not gonna be in the subscription business.
So I talked about Time CO2, which just we launched in September. We're really proud of the work that we're doing in climate and sustainability. Justin Worland is the number one climate reporter in the country.
He works at Time in DC, and we think that there's a great business for us in subscription with that platform.
We have a newsletter that we've launched recently, and we're looking at, like, the success of Politico as one example, where, you know, they were able to reach the most important influential people in Washington with a product that they were willing to pay for.
We feel the same with what's happening with climate.
We feel the same in terms of reaching chief sustainability officers and how this is gonna be woven into the fabric of everything that we do personally and professionally and business-wise.
So to answer your question, it just is specific to where we're headed and where that content makes the most sense. Yeah. And that's more of, like, a B2B angle than, like, a mass Time audience, which is consumer, right?
That is exactly right.
Okay, let's talk about commerce a little bit because it seems to be an area that you're making a big bet in, which makes a lot of sense because I think one of the things that maybe didn't get enough attention w- with Forbes was the success of Forbes Advisor.
And one of the things I was always, like, very impressed in with, with Forbes Advisor, 'cause sometimes Forbes' user experience was a little aggressive for me. I've been open about it, like [chuckles] You have.
A little bit of autoplay video. But the Forbes Advisor site was super fast, super clean, and that's because the incentives are aligned that, because, you know, you won't get the traffic from Google, and you want to be...
And that's why I always think that business models really dictate so much, and you have to get the business model alignment correct.
But explain what you're doing, 'cause you're taking an interesting approach to commerce. We're really excited to launch a content-to-commerce business.
And again, it all is about that trusted journalism, so coming to time.com for the most important content, which is what you wanna purchase, what you're gonna buy, starting with, you know, financial services, whether it's credit cards, mortgages, loans, exploring how we can continue to grow that business into home and gadgets and technology products.
And it's a really good business for, for us. We decided to partner with Taboola. They, they have been around as a publicly traded company for many years.
I know the CEO very well, and they were really hungry, and they wanted to work with Time as a brand, and they saw incredible opportunities to partner with us and to build this business over the long term with us together.
And that's the journey that we're on, and it's around discovering content that you trust and then engaging with it, going through the journey of intent to conversion and getting paid for that.
And we do believe in getting paid- Yeah. -for bringing these incredible product reviews and content to an audience that converts for a company and a product.
And I see this as a great win for Time, and I'm really excited to be working with Adam at Taboola on it. Yeah.
So Taboola, like, I mean, historically, I would always think of Taboola as, you know, the things at the bottom of the webpage you might like. I think g- they're the You Might Like, right?
I get them in Outbrain sometimes, which they're... But, like, you know, they have the content recommendation network, and now they're moving into commerce.
And, you know, this is typical, like, affiliate business, very heavy with, uh, SEO, particularly if you have high SEO rankings. These businesses are really good.
But I think some publishers have struggled because, I mean, I can say this as a journalist, because of the newsroom in some ways because it's a different, it's a different skill set to be doing commerce content than to be doing, uh, investigative news content.
It's just different in the same way that sponsored content is different than, you know, the same, uh, investigative news content.
And I think, you know, organizationally, I think some publishers have, have struggled with that. How are you approaching that, and what is it like? 'Cause, like, Taboola has its own newsroom that you're tapping into.
Yeah. Our editorial team was very involved in the process- Yeah. -and identifying our best partner, Taboola, versus others.
And again, it's really important that we maintain that, that trust and that high level of quality control. We just announced that Julia Kagan is the editor. I'm really excited to partner with her directly.
She has an incredible background as a very well-respected journalist and editor. She comes from Consumer Reports, so she has a lot of experience in this, and it was really a collaborative effort. Mm-hmm.
But it's outside the newsroom, right? Correct. Well, there's oversight, I should say. Yeah. So nothing is ever outside the newsroom.
I named, in my last six months or my first six months, I named a new editor-in-chief, the youngest ever editor of Time, the first millennial, and Sam Jacobs and I are great partners, and we worked on this collaboration together.
Okay. One of the things with, with commerce is it's very tied to search, right? Like, it's just like when people would...
I compare it as like when sometimes, you know, back when people would talk about their, their, you know, distributed video strategy, and like s- that's just the Facebook strategy.
And a lot of, you know, to me, commerce is taking the search authority that brands, legacy brands too, you know, trusted brands have built upAnd being able to leverage that to some degree. I have to bring up AI.
Uh, Google had i-its AI demo yesterday. I don't know if you caught any of it. But it's not hard to see where these things are going with ChatGPT.
More answers are going to be done directly at the search level, and there's gonna be less traffic that is gonna be put around the internet. I don't know w-how much less, but I... It's hard to see otherwise.
When you see their examples, the kinds of questions that are being answered by Time Stamp or by Forbes Advisor or by a lot of other publishers, they're gonna be right on the page.
Is this something you're just, like, monitoring, or is there much to even be done about it? It is happening so fast. I don't think anyone can go slowly and figure it out. We don't have the answers.
No one ha- no one has them. This isn't just gonna disrupt Time's business or publishing business. This is gonna disrupt- Yeah... all businesses. The whole digital economy- And how-... will be... And it's gonna...
I'll, I'll use one example. My, my son graduated a week ago from the University of Michigan, and upon graduation, he was so proud to share his final exam, which he said he passed.
And his final exam was an eight-page paper that he told me that he completed using ChatGPT. First thing I wanna do was strangle him for doing that.
The second thing [laughs] I wanted to do was strangle him for telling me that he did that. Yeah. And- First rule of cheating is don't tell Mom you cheated. And then he said, "No, no, no, you don't understand.
The assignment and the exam was to use- [laughs]... ChatGPT."
And he explained for an hour how you have to understand how to use the prompts in order to get from a theme to an outline to a factually correct eight-page essay on the labor movement in the nineteen thirties.
So this is gonna disrupt everything, and he is twenty-two and learning in real time at school how to use this technology. We have to learn how to use it. We have to learn how to use it responsibly.
I think at Time, I've been looking at our, our data set, our file size.
I've been working with LLPs to understand, again, what you put in is also what you get out, and if we are the source of a hundred years of archives, which are now available on time.com for free wherever you are in the world- [laughs]...
that is something that's really valuable, and we are getting requests for that file set, and we are getting requests from some of the biggest names- Yeah... biggest companies to start to test next versions of AI.
And so I think it's really exciting. There's gonna be new models. There's gonna be disruption. There always has been. We're here.
Look at the journey that we've been on, and we went from, you said the World Wide Web, we went from one format to many formats, and new ones are coming along every day. This one is very significant, obviously.
[upbeat music] I know, and it's kinda scary. Maybe as [laughs] someone who types words because AI can replace...
You know, I think we're in this period of a lot of fear of AI because there's a lot of unknowns, and we've been reading a lot of science fiction for the last, like, thirty years, and it's told us where this goes.
And I wonder, how are you thinking about using AI internally, and do you expect that you'll be using AI to create content for Time? I don't know is the answer, yet.
I think that there are some applications that will make our business more efficient, stronger. Obviously, when you think about fact-checking and trusted journalism, I think that that is something...
Again, when we go back to our business and our mission, this is something that we are talking about and thinking about every day. Yeah. So final thing, I know I wanna encourage anyone to use Slido.
We're gonna check for any questions shortly. But y-you're a first-time CEO, right? So you're a hundred days in.
You had told me before that Mark had always asked you, Mark, I'm acting as if we're on a first-name basis with the billionaire. He, he asked you, like, what surprise...
Like, that's his, like, go-to questions, like, what's surprising. What has surprised you about being CEO? It's a really big responsibility, and that doesn't...
You know, that, that weighs on me heavily, especially being the CEO of, of Time, an incredible storied brand that has so much meaning in people's lives.
It also is incredible to be a female CEO and a lot of outreach and rec-reception around that and how important that is for other diverse segments, people of color, women.
[audience clapping] The statistics are, are at an all-time high, and they're so disappointing, and only five percent of companies globally on the Fortune five hundred list are women-led and ten percent in the US, and that's an all-time high.
And when you think about the workforce, and you think about AI being scary or the importance of leadership, the importance of business being part of solving really hard societal challenges and issues,
women need to be a greater part of the C-suite. Yeah, to-- back to Mark, Mark Benioff, uh, and LynnThey are incredible owners. They are incredible bosses and s-super supportive of our mission and what we're doing.
And in me, he will arguably go down as the not just top ten, top five, one of the greatest CEOs of our generation.
And the opportunity that I have to learn from him, not really new at Time, 'cause I've been following, you know, his leadership and what he's done. It's pretty incredible.
The s-surprise, I guess, back to your initial question, has been how, again, that everyone has a Time story, and that they're sharing that with me, and I just didn't know how powerful that was because y-you keep mentioning Forbes, and I just love Forbes, and I thought Forbes was the coolest, and it's just different.
It's an incredible opportunity, and I couldn't be more excited about the last six months and the next six months ahead. Yeah. How difficult has it been coming out of the pandemic? I mean, I think we're, we're now...
It's funny 'cause, like,
I feel like the entire economy sort of follows the tech companies all of a sudden, and so they went so super far into work wherever you want, and now all of a sudden they're totally against it, and [laughs] now...
But, like, a lot of other companies moved in that direction. How hard is it to build cohesiveness around a culture with the weirdness of where modern work is now?
Because there's some in office, there's some not in office. Talk about that a little bit. It's still an ongoing project and experiment.
At Time, we've done a great job of bringing people back on a hybrid basis, bringing people back a couple days a week.
If anyone had said to me in my career that I would go to the office three days a week, I would've said, "That is science fiction. That'll never happen." Now, being in the office feels great. It feels right.
Think about all the President's Men. Think about Anna Delvey or Spotlight and the clickety-clack. Maureen Dowd wrote a great piece in The New York Times about this.
I just think newsrooms are a thing, and they're vibrant, and the collaboration, the communication. We're a media company.
That's communications company, and we need to communicate, and we need to collaborate and be together, and I think that's really important, and that's really important to me as, as CEO, and I do have an incredible opportunity to have, you know, state-of-the-art technology and office space in a great location in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
and London, and I've asked people to come back, and they have, and they're really happy about it. Yeah. Why not five times a week? Let's go all the way.
I'm there five days a week when I'm not here speaking in Chicago, but I understand that that doesn't work for everyone, and we have to be flexible, and I don't think zero days or five days.
I think it's great to have options. I have been a working mom my whole career as well.
I also have a dog, and I get the fact that people have things in their lives, and wow, the opportunity to work asynchronously and hybrid and use the technology that is in the infrastructure to run a newsroom, to run a marketing team globally, hybrid, using all of these tools is a great gift.
Okay. Great. We'll leave it there. Thank you so much, Jess. Really appreciate it. Thank you all. [applause] And thank you all for listening. Hope you enjoyed this podcast.
I wanna thank Jay Sparks from Podhelp Us, who produces this podcast. If you are interested in a podcast, you should get in touch with Jay. You can find out more at podhelp.us. And send me your feedback.
Would love to hear what you would like to hear from this podcast.
I did one the other week with Sarah Fisher and Peter Kafka that I got a lot of notes about, so I'm thinking about doing more of those, and hopefully, we can make that happen. So let me know what you think.
Looking to m-mix up different formats and try different things. My email is brian@therebooting.com. [outro music]