How they reach those people, and how they make them pay, is now the work of hundreds of journalists, designers, engineers, data scientists, and product managers. At stake isn’t just the future of a very old newspaper that has seen its advertising revenue cut in half in less than a decade—it’s the still unresolved question of whether high-impact, high-cost journalism can thrive in a radically changing landscape. Newspaper companies today employ 271,000 fewer people than they did in 1990—around the population of Orlando—and with fewer journalists working with fewer resources, and more Americans getting their news on platforms where the news could very well be fake, the financial success of the Times isn’t an incidental concern for people who care about journalism. It’s existential, especially in the context of the new American president.

Just days after the election, Trump suggested that the Times—or, per his preferred Twitter epithet, “the failing @nytimes”—would be a frequent target of his administration, calling an article “dishonest” for citing something he had said on CNN (which was odd, since he did actually say it, in public, on video) and adding (also falsely) that the Times “is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage.” In fact, it’s been the exact opposite: Four weeks after the election, Times chief executive Mark Thompson told an industry conference that subscriptions had surged at 10 times their usual rate. To Thompson, the likeliest explanation wasn’t that the Times did a bang-up job covering the final days of the election—like everyone else, they failed to anticipate Trump’s victory—or that readers were looking to hedge against fake news. He suggests a simpler reason: “I think the public anxiety to actually have professional, consistent, properly funded newsrooms holding politicians to account is probably bigger than all of the other factors put together.” In other words, the president’s hostility to the press and the very notion of facts themselves seems to have reminded people that nothing about The New York Times—or the kind of journalism it publishes—is inevitable.

The Times is a big organization, with about 1,300 journalists, and management has created a number of task forces to workshop new approaches to reporting and story­telling. One committee, the 2020 Group, studied the newsroom for a year, and its report, published in January, detailed how Times journalism should evolve over the next three years. (Among the recommendations: Greater emphasis on visuals, greater variety of formats and voices. They also announced that the Times would be introducing an alternative metric to pageviews that would “measure an article’s value to attracting and retaining subscribers.”) Another division, Story[X], was created last spring to experiment with emerging technology like machine learning and translation. And then there is the Beta Group, which has become a hub for most of the Times’ digital initiatives. Beta was launched by Sulzberger’s 39-year-old cousin, Perpich, who, after working at two tech startups out of college, helped launch a DJ training school called Scratch Academy. He went on to Harvard Business School for an MBA and landed at Booz & Company as a management consultant. When he joined the family business in 2010 as an executive director for paid products, he and his team oversaw the rollout of the paywall that for the first time required people to shell out cash for full and regular access to NYTimes.com. The project has become the Times’ biggest business success of late. Five years on, more than 1.5 million people pay more than $200 million every year for a subscription.

Even with the success of the paywall, though, “it’s a very, very steep uphill battle to simply sell people on the idea of buying one more news story,” Kinsey Wilson, the Times’ executive vice president for product and technology, admitted at a conference last year. He later told me: “I believe that the only way you create value is if you’re able to bundle various services together.” Which is where the members of the Beta Group come in. They’re tasked with developing a new suite of editorial products (apps, blogs, verticals) that, in the way of expensive original programming on HBO and Netflix, keep existing subscribers coming back and new subscribers coming in. Central to Perpich’s original vision was having Beta’s product people work alongside designers, developers, and—most radically for the Times—editors. No one on Beta has an office; instead, each product is assigned its own conference room lined with whiteboards covered in colorful diagrams, design mock-ups, and Post-it notes where members of the team immerse themselves in what they are trying to build.

In addition to Cooking and Crosswords—two of the original Beta apps—the group is now working on Real Estate, an app for home listings; Well, a health and fitness blog the group wants to turn into a suite of personalized training and advice services; and Watching, a vertical dedicated to TV and movie recommendations. The newest addition to Beta was an acquisition: In October, The New York Times paid $30 million for the Wirecutter, a gadget review site. (In a show of confidence in the deal, Perpich stepped back from the Beta Group earlier this year to become general manager of the Wirecutter.)

“Working hour by hour, day by day, with software developers and designers and product managers—to me that was a real revolution, a kind of epiphany,” says Clifford Levy, who won two Pulitzers at the Times before being promoted to the assistant managing editor overseeing digital platforms. “This is standard operating procedure in Silicon Valley, but it was radical here.”

And the radical shift was felt, and heard, throughout the newsroom. “It is not incorrect for me to say that I had no idea what people were talking about in my first couple months,” says Sam Sifton, the Times’ food editor, who started working with the Beta Group to launch the Cooking app back in 2013. “‘We can iterate on that.’ What? We spoke different languages, different cultures.” Still, Sifton has embraced his new digital mission, agreeing this past November to host a text message experiment called “Turkey Talk” to help cooks with their Thanksgiving dinners.

This shift toward personality-driven personal service echoes an earlier chapter in Times history, when, in the 1970s, the paper rolled out an array of advertiser-friendly sections like Weekend, Home, and Living. The goal, according to then-executive-­editor Abe Rosenthal, was to figure out “ways that would get more revenue, more readers.” Just as those new sections were greeted with howls of derision both inside and outside the paper—James Reston, a Times elder statesman, said, “It goes against my original concept of what the Times ought to be”—today’s emphasis on news you can use (“What We Know and Don’t Know About the Trump-­Russia Dossier,” “15 Ways to Be a Better Person”) has provoked accusations of clickbait. To Jill Abramson, who ran the newsroom between 2011 and 2014 (and whose firing was, as firings go, public and acrimonious), the choice between publishing quality journalism and clickbait is a false one. “In my years, I used to laugh that everything you agreed to in terms of lighter or more advertising-­friendly content would be because we needed that advertising revenue to support the Baghdad Bureau,” she says. “So if a certain audience wants lighter content, they can click on it. If others don’t want it, there’s still plenty of great international or investigative reporting at the Times.”

In the 2020 Report, the authors announced that management would be dedicating an additional $5 million every year to its presidential coverage. They also wrote that service journalism like “15 Ways to Be a Better Person” is essential to attracting new online readers. For the Times to grow, they argued, there must be room for both.