Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hardiman: Facebook feed algorithms optimized for engagement, not content quality
“When I was at Facebook and we were focused on news ranking and feed, all we could do was train pieces of information based on an engagement outcome. We couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hardiman: NYT's global addressable market is roughly 135 million subscribers
“And what we found was that there are about a hundred and thirty-five million people around the world. We believe are willing to pay for the type of high quality journalism based products that the New York times produces. In the categories of news, gameplay, co…”
Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2027
Hardiman: NYT will reach 15 million subscribers by 2027
“We want to get to fifteen million subscribers by 20, 27, right? Just over nine million today. And I really think we can do it.”
Assertion Partly supported
Hardiman: Scheduled Wordle answer after Roe v. Wade leak was 'fetus'
“We had this pretty crazy moment a couple months ago right when the Supreme Court's draft ruling on Roe v Wade leaked. And an engineer on the games team happened to notice that the wordle solution the next day was fetus, which is just an extraordinarily bad coi…”
Disclosure
Hardiman: NYT trains algorithms on editorial importance scores from journalists
“We're training algorithms on specific data sets like editorial importance scores that actually come from our journalists. And what that allows us to do is actually scale editorial judgment to a large group of readers. And those algorithms, what I think is just…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hardiman: Consultants projected NYT would cap at 1M digital subscribers
“And we brought in consultants and they said, you know, maybe over the course of history, you'll get to one million subscribers if you're lucky.”
Assertion Supported
Hardiman: Facebook historically divided feeds into friends and public content
“And the approach to content on Facebook historically was very binary. You basically had content from friends and family, and then you had public content, and public content could come from anywhere.”
Insight
Hardiman: Thriving subscription businesses require direct customer relationships over platform distribution
“Because in order to build a really thriving subscription business, you really need a direct relationship with your customer, as opposed to just relying on platforms to really kind of distribute your coverage.”
Assertion Supported
Hardiman: NYT built a public COVID-19 database because nobody else was
“We're going to build a comprehensive public data set of COVID cases. Nobody else is doing it. So we really just started kind of scraping and pulling this together in what was a single spreadsheet at the time.”
Opinion
Hardiman: Wordle and Athletic transformed NYT into a multi-category subscription
“Up until I would say this year, we were more of a news brand with a collection of adjacent lifestyle products, but with the acquisition of Wordle and The Athletic, along with just the continued growth of Cooking and Wirecutter and some of our other offerings, …”
Insight
Hardiman: NYT PMs own content, distribution, and software unlike Big Tech
“A key difference of when you're a product manager working at the New York Times is that you work across the full stack of the product, meaning we own our journalism and our content, we own our distribution, and we own our products. And that's really different …”
Disclosure
Hardiman: NYT embeds newsroom editors into cross-functional product teams
“Cross-functional missions at the Times, again, include a lot of the same skill sets that you would find at a tech company. PMs, engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, product marketers. But the big difference is we also have editors if it's a prod…”
Assertion Supported
Hardiman: The New York Times newsroom exceeds 2,000 employees
“We have a newsroom of over 2000 people.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hardiman: Most interactive NYT stories use shared internal platforms
“The majority are on our platforms hands down.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hardiman: NYT product teams have no influence over editorial story selection
“Product teams don't have any influence over the selection of the stories. That is what the newsroom kind of retains as editorial.”
Insight
Hardiman: NYT views games as an essential counterpoint to news
“We really see games and demand for games is this basically like, it's like a counterpoint to the news. It gives people a chance to actually take a break. It's fun. It doesn't feel like empty calories. It's really time well spent.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hardiman: NYT acquired Wordle in a matter of weeks
“I mean, the whole thing took place in a matter of weeks, which is way faster than any other acquisition I've been a part of. It was a very amicable process, and we were just super delighted to bring Wordle on board, but it happened in like record speed.”
Disclosure
Hardiman: NYT has the product categories needed to reach 15M subscribers
“I think for now, we feel like we actually, we have all of the major categories to make the essential subscription work. For us to get to fifteen million subscribers, we really feel like news, sports, games, Cooking, audio, and shopping.”
Assertion Supported
Hardiman: Wordle had no backend and stored user stats locally
“So when we acquired Wordle, it was a simple web game with no backend. So that meant that people's stats and streaks, which was, you know, like that was the value in terms of like social currency that people were sharing after playing those stats and streaks we…”
Assertion Supported
Hardiman: The New York Times did not make Wordle harder
“And what I will say is a lot of people still think we try to make Wordle harder. We don't, I promise. It's not a thing.”
Assertion Supported
Hardiman: Half of the US visited NYT in March 2020
“At the height of the pandemic, when there's just so much confusion about literally what to do, like how to live each day in March, 2020, we saw that half of the country came to the New York times.”
