An investor’s reported plans for The New York Times would seek to make it the Netflix of news.
Fivespan Partners has taken a stake in the Times and is pushing the company to optimize its non-editorial operations with help from AI, Bloomberg reported last week, and to dramatically expand the Times’ total-addressable market through AI translations for articles and low-cost, high-quality video content.
Fivespan was launched last summer by Dylan Haggart and Sarah Coyne, alumni of a firm that led the last round of activist pressure on the Times. (They declined requests for comment.)
But conversations I’ve had over the last week suggest that the activist’s thesis for the Times would essentially apply a version of the Netflix model to the news business, localizing articles into French or Japanese and growing an international subscription base. That move would only marginally increase the Grey Lady’s subscriber base country-by-country, but taken across the whole world, it would dramatically increase the reach of its reporting — and high-margin revenue.
Haggart and Coyne would have entered the Times’ boardroom with considerable goodwill. In 2022, the two were at the firm ValueAct, which pushed the Times to make better use of its bundle and products, without much of the public rancor or knife-twisting that usually accompanies activist fights. The Times’ shares have risen nearly 90% since then, outpacing News Corp’s.