BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the groundbreaking case studies used in the classroom at Harvard Business School. In an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how information is created, distributed and consumed, few industries feel the tension more acutely than journalism.
In today’s case, we explore a landmark partnership between a storied media organization and one of the world’s leading AI companies. The deal promises new revenue, expanded reach, and a chance to help shape the future of AI. But it also raises difficult questions about intellectual property, newsroom independence, and the long-term value of human creativity. Inside the organization, leaders see a pragmatic response to industry-wide economic pressure. Many journalists, however, see an existential threat as AI systems trained on their work begin to compete for the same audiences.
Beyond this single partnership lies a broader debate about fair use, innovation, and whether the economic foundations of the internet are being fundamentally rewritten. This is not just a story about one company. It’s a window into the future of knowledge, creativity, and trust in the digital age.
Today, we’re joined by Professor Caroline Elkins to discuss her case, “The Atlantic and OpenAI.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. That was a one-take right there. Carrie Elkins’ research focuses on empire, violence, liberalism, and insecurity with a particular focus on Africa and various regions of the former British Empire. And you are a repeat guest on Cold Call. Welcome back, Carrie.
CAROLINE ELKINS: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. What a thrill.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you here. Now, this case has nothing to do with any of those things that I just read.
CAROLINE ELKINS: Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing.
BRIAN KENNY: You’ve moved into some new areas.
CAROLINE ELKINS: I have. And in some ways, Brian, it was a little bit of a journey of self-understanding. In other words, I write a lot in trade presses and try to connect with audiences, and my world was changing. And this is what I call the business of ideas and was changing. And what do I mean by this business of ideas because it situates our case today? It’s the business of creating ways of thinking, right? Spreading them and capturing value from them, and capturing the value and the intention and the influence from them.
And so how do we start thinking about that? And once I started getting into it, I was hooked. I mean, it is a massive business. I mean, we think about the relationship between idea and meaning and scale and value. And if you think of the ideas as the raw material, right? And then the business is everything that’s built around them. And the one person, as I started really getting into this, who gets it, who really gets it, is Laurene Powell Jobs, the owner of The Atlantic.
BRIAN KENNY: How did you hear about this? What made you want to write a case about it?
CAROLINE ELKINS: I began sort of thinking about some of this about three or four years ago. And as we know, and if you wait a nanosecond, the AI field is changing. And so at that time, and certainly this has snowballed, many of the major legacy media organizations are suing AI. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest, and New York Times is a famous case. The Authors Guild, John Grisham, and the rest, and they’re suing them for IP violation.
Basically, they’re saying, “This is not fair use. You need to pay us. We need to talk about some of that.” But Laurene Powell Jobs says she comes at this from both somebody who has a deep appreciation for literature. She formed something called the Emerson Collective named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. And it’s an LLC, it’s not a nonprofit, and she’s buying up various aspects, including The Atlantic, one of the most storied magazines, literary magazines in the history of the United States. But she’s also somebody who clearly embraces technology.
And when she buys this from Bradley, she says to him, “This is both a literary magazine, but it’s going to be a technology company.” And she looks at this and says, “If we think about those classics from the strategy playbook, S-curves,” right? We think about things like Kodak and Blackberry and all of those who failed to get on the next S-curve. Laurene Powell Jobs looks at legacy media and says, “I’m going to look to the next S-curve.” And that’s precisely what she does with this magazine.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. So, that’s the motivation, that’s sort of driving her to make this decision. How should we think about the tension between the short-term revenue opportunities that come along with this and the longer term existential threats that I sort of teed up in the introduction?
CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. I mean, look, short term is obviously the revenue she partners with OpenAI. It’s an undisclosed deal, but she’s obviously getting money, obviously funds from this, and capacity to build potentially some of their own internal language models, and then OpenAI is obviously getting the material.
Now, let’s step back for a minute in terms of the short-termism and what’s in it for her. She’s looking at this, and I say she and I’m sort of ventriloquizing and sort of imputing some of her motivation, but she looks at this and says, “Look, technology is racing ahead, and OpenAI needs me as much as I need them.” And she’s thinking that if you think about these large language models, there’s a certain degree to which if you keep feeding it the same stuff, the model’s going to collapse. They need new, really good material. And the case talks about this. Altman talks about this.
So, she is attracting, right? She’s looking at this and she’s trying to attract the top long-form journalists and paying big money. We’re going to come back to that. She’s paying big money for them. And in return for giving them big salaries, 200, they’re way above industry standards, two to 300,000, along with all the other platforms that she’s got, but she pays them this kind of money. And in return for that, she feeds the machine, right? In return, the machine is giving her all kinds of different ways behind the scenes that they might be able to use their archives and materials, that they might be able to use all of this.
But look, that’s short-termism. Long term, what she’s doing is she is looking at this, and I would tend to, and again, imputing some of this, but look, we have a creativity crisis in the United States and we know this. There’s been a wonderful series of studies done by a fabulously smart professor at William & Mary, looked at 300,000 Torrance tests. Now, the Torrance test tests creativity, and we were doing well with this from the ’50s up until the 1990s. And since the 1990s, we’ve been declining.
Laurene Powell Jobs looks at this and says, “Look, at the end of the day, the question becomes, is AI going to make us more creative? Am I going to lose out? Eventually, are my long-form journalists going to be replaced by AI?” And basically you look at this and she’s saying, “No.” What she’s looking at this and saying, and if you look at some of the literature and some of the ways in which we can analyze this and say, “Sure, chances are, I don’t know what the percentage is, Brian, a healthy percentage of people doing short form journalism, news copy, this kind of stuff, chances are AI is going to replace that.”
But the question becomes, is AI creative, right? Is it creative in the same way that a human is creative? Well, right now the answer to that, and we can talk about it some more, is no. And so she’s looking at this and saying, “There’s going to be a market for these long-form, very exceptional journalists for two reasons. One, your language machines or large language models are going to need this material to keep going, right? So, I’m going to keep producing this.” But two, she’s also saying that if you think about sort of the world of getting back to this business of ideas, so often we think we can just take an idea, let’s say you’re a super smart writer, let’s say you’re Jill Lepore, and you have all these great ideas. Jill just won the, colleague of mine, so smart, she just won the Pulitzer Prize for her new book on the Constitution.
Let’s imagine you take her ideas and you say, “I’m just going to scale them right away. I’m going to throw them out. I’m going to be like the Buzzfeed of Jill Lepore,” and you click all over the place. Well, what we know by this is that in the short term you can have some pretty ramped up monetization of this, but at the end of the day, what happens to Buzzfeed? It fails. So, the question, you need to have something in between the idea and the scale, and that’s meaning and what she is doing with The Atlantic and what all these platforms that are going to succeed and that is they are incubating meaning to this.
When we think about sort of the supply chain of ideas, it goes from idea to meaning to scale to value, and so you can’t take out, what she’s recognizing, is you can’t take out that meaning stage. You can take it out of the commodified daily news, but you can’t take it out of the interpretation, and that’s what she’s banking on. We’ll see where it goes. I have no crystal ball, but it’s a new disruptive model, and I think it’s quite clever.
BRIAN KENNY: And as you describe it, it makes a lot of sense. It sounds very logical, but then we have to throw culture into that, and we know from the case that this was not well-received within the organization. There was some cultural backlash to this, and it’s understandable. People are, frankly, concerned about their livelihoods and if you’re a journalist, this is what you’ve staked your life on. How do you deal with something like that?
CAROLINE ELKINS: 100%. Okay. Let me back up for a second. I have multiple lives here at Harvard University, right? I’m now full time at the business school, but I also have appointments, as we like to say, on the other side of the river. And then I’m on the faculty of arts and sciences and the history department in the African and African American studies department. Now, I’m telling you this story for a reason, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: Okay.
CAROLINE ELKINS: The reason I’m telling this story is I’m actually writing a book right now called, “Crossing the River: Creativity in the Age of AI,” because I literally, physically, crossed the river back and forth, and it’s like I live in two universes. On the other side of the river, the faculty of arts and the departments that I sit in, I sit in on conversations about how we’re going to forbid students from ever using AI. I’m not kidding you.
And then I come to this side of the river and I hear about how AI is going to solve world peace. Now, chances aren’t somewhere down there, but these are cultural issues, right? And I think one of the things where she has, I hope, the kind of gravitas given her… Look, she wrote her graduate school application for Stanford on how does one have a lasting impact or popularize literary fiction? So, this is a woman who, and she names her LLC, the Emerson Collective, so she clearly… At the same time, she understands technology.
And the thing is that as all of these things happen, these disruptive technologies, it’s going to be somewhere down the middle. And the question becomes, I think there’s a lot of anxiety and fear, right? There’s a lot of anxiety and fear around creatives. Is AI going to take my job? Is it going to dumb down our readers, right? Is it going to homogenize thoughts?
Well, it does all of those things. So, it doesn’t mean that AI is going to replace everything, right? What it’s going to do is this is going to be, as we shake all this out, and this is now just me with a little crystal ball, as you shake all this out, people who are highly creative… And in her world, she’s betting on this. People who are highly creative are actually going to be in higher demand.
And she’s looking at this. And so what she says to her writers who are all concerned about this, she says, “Look, used to be in the world of writing, you were to protect your IP with your life.” Number one, you get an agent as a young academic, like you think you’re seeing the stars and your agent takes you out to lunch and says, “You protect your IP with all costs.” Now they’re telling you, “Don’t protect your IP, take all the money up front.”
The business model has changed, and that’s also where she’s incredibly clever, getting back to this cultural tension. The cultural tensions around can you connect, let’s say Brian’s ideas to the world that consumes them, so they don’t think it’s just some AI model that shot it out? And she’s protecting that with The Atlantic.
And at the same time, how do you as the producer, the creative, how do you make money? Well, it used to be we made a lot of money on the back end off of our IP. You always got your royalty checks, et cetera. Now you’re getting upfront. You want to have the biggest possible advance, or if you’re writing for The Atlantic, you want her to put a zero at the end of your salary. And so that’s how she’s thinking about sort of readjusting the business model.
But we’re in this odd stage of transition, and I think that, look, for many, many, many people out there, we’re still not entirely sure what AI can do and what it’s not going to do and what it’s going to… But some of the initial studies are telling us that, “Look, AI homogenizes. AI can take somebody who has a lower degree of creativity, let’s be clear about that, a lower degree of creativity, and elevate them, right?” There’s all kinds of… MIT has done a bunch, and there are other ones.
But what we don’t know and what Laurene Powell Jobs is banking on right now is what we know very little about is what does AI do for highly creative people? Right now, the highly creative people beat the machine, pretty consistently. And look, she knows a heck of a lot more than I do on some of this stuff. It seems to me that she’s not planning on folding The Atlantic in the next six to 12 months.
But what she is doing is she’s weeding folks out, right? She’s looking at this and she’s taking the best of the best writers, and she’s bringing them in-house, and she’s paying them a lot of money. She’s feeding the machine. She’s changing the business model. But at the same time, she’s got a whole new S-curve going. It’s why The Atlantic is… And so I always say to my students, “Do you partner with OpenAI or do you sue them? Which one is it?”
And by the way, I’ve got a lot of students who will tell me, both my MBAs and exec, “I would sue them to protect my IP.” And we can talk about why that is, but there are different schools of thought.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I mean, what you’re describing has huge ramifications across the whole creative industries, right? And we’re seeing this play out in Hollywood. We’re seeing it play out in the creation of video, using characters images without actually using the actual actors. So, I think it is just beginning to shake out. And the case talks a lot about the concept of fair use, which is one of the central themes of the case. I’m wondering, how should leaders be thinking about fair use, just beyond the sort of legal defamation piece of it?
CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. Fair use, of course, just so we’re clear with our listeners, fair use is the idea that you or I can create something, and that we don’t own the copyright or somebody else can use it without licensing it from us, right? And there are generally sort of in a legal universe four points or litmus tests around that. But I’ll give you an example. The last book that I wrote, this was a big book on colonial violence. I used a lot of George Orwell. I love Orwell. He’s great.
BRIAN KENNY: I do too, yeah.
CAROLINE ELKINS: He has smart things to say. His foundation protects IP with their life. So, if you even think about George Orwell on your way to work, you’ve got a phone call from his lawyers in the morning, right? So, they’re vigilant about that. And if I quote anything from it, you just know you’re going to go, you’re going to pay for the licensing fee, and off you go. And so typically what will happen with IP for all writers, and that is, as I said before, that’s your bread and butter, that’s what you own, that’s what you… And the AI machines, for lack of better terms, are saying, “Actually, all of this is fair use, everything.” Right? And I was telling a group of… I was teaching a group of execs, real estate execs the other day. I said to them, “Okay, how many of you own property?” Duh, right? The entire place raised their hand. And then I said to them, “Okay, so would you be okay if the government came in and took all your property, didn’t pay you for it, and said you got to move out? How would you do it?” And so they’re a little bit of this.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, of course.
CAROLINE ELKINS: Now with this IP stuff, it’s a little bit… This is a sticky wicket here because on the one hand, AI can get your ideas out, if I’m a creative person, but I want… There’s two things that creative people tend to want. They want to pay the rent. We don’t take the vow of poverty like we all… I like nice stuff. And you want attribution. Now, she has solved the first one, right? We haven’t gotten to the people who get left out, but the attribution part becomes a bit of an issue right now, right? Because right now we know even if they give the link, first of all, the link’s wrong 50% of the time and nobody clicks on it, and obviously some of that will get fixed in the future iterations, but it gets back to what she’s also betting on, which is this: that people who really want to understand meaning, interpretation, and that’s what people crave the most. We are swimming, I call it sort of collective exhaust, from the business of ideas world. There’s so much coming at you that you’re actually willing to be paying to somebody who is this intermediary like The Atlantic, who’s really good at producing stuff that produces deep, insightful meaning.
But what it does mean, Brian, is that the world, despite what we think, this democratization of getting ideas, anybody can have one of these microphones and send stuff out into the podcast universe or somebody can write a Substack, but the fact of the matters, as I pointed out before, they try to move from idea to scale, and they don’t have the meaning, right? And that’s also what she’s banking on here.
So, if we get back to the question about fair use, right? She’s looking at this and saying, on the fair use model, even if some of these AI folks pick this up, at the end of the day, people are still going to pay money for that full article. They’re still going to pay money for that book. And by the way, sales figures are showing that people will pay for this stuff. So, it’s interesting. It’s interesting.
But look, it’s a cultural shift insofar as, imagine you spend 10 years, right? You spend 10 years writing a book, and maybe you’re not Jill Lepore or you’re not Anne Applebaum or fill in the blank, Ezra Klein, and you spend these 10 years and your mom buys a copy, and the libraries buys some copy. Anyway, you haven’t made a lot of money off of this. And then AI scoops it up. I could submit my money to you on the Anthropic lawsuit, right? There’s been a settlement, and you can get a whole $3,000, Brian, from Anthropic that you have to share with your publisher if they took your book.
And so the question we have to ask ourselves, getting back to this dearth of creativity, what’s to prevent people from putting their tools down to say, “I’m not going to do this”? So, as we think about this and we spin this out, we need more Laurene Powell Jobs, more Atlantics of the world, more serious publishers, more podcasts like this, where we’re sitting and talking to each other, not for five hours, but 30 minutes of insightful, incisive commentary on a particular theme. And I think as we see right now, we’re sort of dealing with a whole lot of exhaust, and we’re going to come out the other end of this.
BRIAN KENNY: I want to go back to creativity for a minute because you talked about the importance of deep creative thinking and how that’s different than somebody who’s just writing copy or somebody who’s doing maybe a less strategic form of writing. Do you think that we’re sort of entering an age of meritocracy in the creative industries where the people who are truly creative are going to be able to continue to maintain what they’re doing, but a whole bunch of other people are going to fall by the wayside?
CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. I mean, that’s a great question, Brian. Look, I like to imagine, to a certain degree, it was a meritocratic world. Let’s sort of take aside biases, but that really good ideas and work rose to the top. And I think that one of the things that’s different about the world that we’re in now is that we have ideas out of the raw material, but the business is everything else that’s around it, all these complimentary assets.
I’ll take myself as an example just because I know this example, which is okay. So, if you write a big book about British colonial violence, it was true back in the day, when I first published back in the early 2000s that the New York Times would cover you as a book review and then other people would pick you up and you might be on morning edition, and it all took off. Not even close to enough anymore.
Now you need your own, you need to be on podcasts, you might need your own LinkedIn course that you do. You have all these different sort of systems around you, right? And so that’s different. Now, I want to be very clear, some people today confuse the systems for a great idea. They go, “Bam.” Right up to scale, and this stuff is junk, and it burns out, it flames out.
So, getting back to meritocracy, it’s going to become harder and harder, I think, to break in, right? But if you have a really good idea within all of this, that the essence of sort of creativity, the reward for people who have sort of pathbreaking or thought-changing ideas, I actually think it’s more valuable than ever, and that’s what Laurene Powell Jobs is telling us. She’s telling us in this world of all this noise, right, “I’m going to find the people who are really forcing us to think differently, to interpret differently.” But so therefore what ends up happening is gatekeepers like Laurene Powell Jobs begin to have even more power than they ever had before. And by the way, it’s not just her. She’s got a whole panel. She’s a firewall between herself, Nick Thompson and the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, and you have all this going on. But that funnel is getting, in some ways the top of the funnel, is getting more and more narrow.
BRIAN KENNY: Right, right. And would you say that these partnerships are going to be essential to the scale part of the equation? Are these partnerships with the AI engines going to be essential to success going forward? Or is there another path that you can choose?
CAROLINE ELKINS: I think they are. Look, I’m somewhere in between. When I say crossing the river, I’m like, “Am I going to raft somewhere in the middle of the Charles River, right?” But I think that if we eschew the idea that AI is the bane of all evil, which is what some writers or folks come out and the case talks about this, it’s problematic. We should be leaning to any new technology. I’m a firm believer in that with my own work.
At the same time, I think that if you embrace this technology without a hint of criticism around it, and also you need to understand what precisely it’s doing in the world of ideas and creativity. It is not unto itself creative. It’s pattern recognition. And so when you think about this and you think about the fact that if we even step back a little bit, and we think about sort of the… I tend to think about the new era that we’re moving into, I hope, is the age of creativity, and we’re coming out of and it’s overlapping with an age that’s called the age of efficiency. It’s all Taylor, right? Taylorisms, principles of scientific management.
You and I have a job because HBS was the first business school in the world built on the principles of Taylorism, scientific management efficiency. And if you think about this long march of efficiency, all the way through the 20th century, that in some ways AI is the last logical chapter in this march of efficiency. How do we make humans more and more efficient? Well, ultimately, you just get rid of them and replace them with a machine, right?
Now, if we think about that and we think about the idea that we’re becoming more and more efficiency and AI is about efficiency, well, there was a study by Microsoft about, I don’t know, two years or so ago, 30,000 companies, and they asked these top CEOs, super smart guys and gals, “What’s your biggest worry?”
Number one, more than two thirds of them, where the next big idea is going to come from. Second question, “What are you going to do with all of your efficiency gains from AI?” Hire KPIs. They’re going to plow the efficiency gains back in. Now, the reason I raise this, Brian, their connection with creativity is this, we know from our fabulous colleague, Teresa Amabile, who’s done lots of work on creativity, that the kryptonite to creativity is time pressure, efficiency.
So, you have two things in tension with one another. The question becomes whether it’s Laurene Powell Jobs and long form journalists. So, she’s patient capital, she’s patient, she’s letting these writers write. Time for insight. But for businesses, it’s the same thing, right? Are you going to take AI and plow all those things back in and create your little cushy ballrooms and think you’re going to come up with the next big idea? Not going to happen, right?
Time is a beautiful thing and it can’t be compressed. Now, in some ways, you can get divergent ideas that spit out of AI and the rest of it, but I would love to imagine that if we’re moving through this era of the age of efficiency, that the next big era is the age of creativity. And in the age of creativity, it’s going to reward highly creative people, and AI actually will take over in my view, a huge amount of stuff, including short form journalism and news copy and this kind of stuff. And we’ll get all the fact-checking figured out.
Anyway, in the big picture, I think we have to think about something like The Atlantic and OpenAI. I know we’re in big picture right now, but if you take it from the weeds and into the bigger picture of things, what this suggests to us is somebody like Laurene Powell Jobs, and she’s not the only one, she’s the protagonist of this case, they’re thinking really deeply and hard about the relationship between these things and how, in this instance, she can distill it down to a business plan and a strategy and a new S-curve in the context of the Atlantic.
BRIAN KENNY: So, do you think that something like this can completely redefine partnerships the way that the media industry works?
CAROLINE ELKINS: 100%.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.
CAROLINE ELKINS: 100%. And I think, look, the challenge too is we’re in a very anxiety-provoking time, right? We’re also in a time we just have to go to the supermarket and load up your grocery bag to know that it’s 2x of whatever it is of what you paid for. We have this moment going on where we have higher inflation and cost of goods and the rest of it, while we’re also telling people that, “AI might take your job.”
And so I think there’s a huge tension, not just in terms of business models, but just from a human standpoint, right? And how do we begin thinking about that? And I do think though that the notion that all of this is going to be replaced by AI and we’re going to, I don’t know, what some of these guys tell us when we have a two-day work week and blah, blah, blah.
Look, this is another podcast for us to be on, Brian, but the long history of technology tells us that’s not what happens. There’s all kinds of unforeseen contingencies that happen around this. But what we’re trying to do in this case is say, “Well, what can we say about creativity and efficiency? And how this plays out in a business model, in this case, from legacy journalism?” Which by the way, has been, I mean, it started with new media. I mean, it’s just got hammered, the whole advertisement business model, just not going to work.
And so she has really figured that one out. And I think right now we all sit and wait and watch to see what happens with the New York Times. And let’s be very careful. Folks will say, in this case, Marc Andreessen comes in, it’ll be the end of the universe if we have to pay for fair use, blah, blah, blah, or they enforce fair use. They said that about standard oil, and the world kept spinning on its access.
My guess is that we’re going to see also different ways in which we’re going to have different kinds of IP issues coming into this, how do you think about IP going forward. If I were to advise any young person like, “Get a law degree in technology and IP today because it’s going to be a big one.” Anyway, so these are some of the things, but I think legacy media, I think she has shown the world and legacy media that there is a very different model to this, and a model that can withstand the anxiety of the writers, while also demonstrating to them that the universe isn’t over.
BRIAN KENNY: It also, it makes me wonder about the motivation. She has great motivation. We know that she appreciates the creative endeavor and she’s doing things to protect that and to sustain it, but there are other people who have bought large media organizations in the recent past who don’t seem to necessarily have that same bent. And I’m wondering your thoughts about how they might come at this model. I mean, would they take a different approach? Would they really try to rely on the AI for the creative endeavors and use that as an opportunity to downsize?
CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. Look, I think, Brian, in those cases, we’ve got obviously the famous case of Bezos buying the Washington Post and threats right now potentially he and his new wife buying Condé Nast, and we have these sorts of things out there. And look, we have two separate but related things intersecting, right?
So, if we look at the case of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs is reasonably known as being an owner who is not terribly interventionist. She’s not very present. She’s not on red carpet, she’s not on… She’s doing her thing behind the scene. And if you watch, it’s a very interesting interview with her with Kara Swisher and actually Kamala Harris a few years ago, and Laurene Powell Jobs was talking about what her interest was, and this is pre-buying The Atlantic and she’s very interested in sort of the, one, high quality journalism, and two, making them a business concern, but three, that you have to have all signs being able to write for these things that it’s a democratic process or a project.
I think Bezos and some of these other folks are up to something else, right? When we see things like, and I don’t care where you stand on the political spectrum, but he’s been pretty interventionist from Bezos one to… Basically Trump administration one to Trump administration two. Trump administration one, he was doing some really interesting things there in terms of bringing in some of his creativity around technology and bringing it… In Trump administration two, that’s changed.
Where I’m taking us is it’s not just the technology, but when you have people in the billionaire class coming in and buying these, the question becomes, “Why are they doing it?” In her case, it’s that she wants to facilitate augment the creative process and also the democratic, and what she sees as sort of the democratic process of free ideas.
Some might say something’s going on that’s different right now with the Washington Post, and there are a lot of folks who are feeling pretty negative about the fact that this storied newspaper has gone in a different direction, but that’s not to say it will always be that way. And there’s lots of potential there. There’s a massive brand. And then of course we have the New York Times, which is a very different kind of business model, and they’ve been very clever too in sort of thinking about their complimentary assets around… So, they certainly have, I have a separate, we can do a whole nother Cold Call of a case on the New York Times opinion and Paul Krugman. And Krugman ultimately decides to leave, and Katie Kingsbury needs to decide what to do about does she try to get him to stay or go or whatever the case may be.
But the New York Times is another model where it’s a little bit like Laurene Powell Jobs. They’re paying for some high profile people and the opinion and the rest of it. But they also have a series of complimentary assets around it. Wordle and cooking and all this kind of stuff. And also still, some long form journalism. And that’s different than your everyday news.
Anyway, it’s a very interesting time, but I think folks have a lot to learn from The Atlantic. And certainly our student, believe me, this case has great debate in terms of students on the side and participants on the side of partner or not partner with OpenAI. You just ask that one question, and it’s an hour and 20 minutes later. I’m done.
BRIAN KENNY: Well, this has been great, Carrie. I have just one last question for you. I always like to know if there’s one thing you want people to remember about this case, what would it be?
CAROLINE ELKINS: It’s how visionary Laurene Powell Jobs is, that she has really come in and looked at this with an equal love and embrace and clear eyedness around creativity in the literary form and technology. And she’s brought both of this together, and I think there’s a huge amount we can learn, not just from legacy media, but more broadly as we think about the impact, as I said, of the 21st century, as I see it as the age of creativity.
BRIAN KENNY: Carrie, thank you for joining me.
CAROLINE ELKINS: Thanks so much.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host BRIAN KENNY, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
