The syndication business was in decline and everyone left in the market was competing on price. The issue was not the decline. It was what the business was being understood to sell.
Category Design → Positioning → Content & UX
Syndication was the part of the business the digital turnaround had left behind. It licensed Times content to other publishers in a shrinking market, and buyers saw the offer as content. Content gets compared on price, replaced easily, and bought through procurement.
What the Times actually owned was verification. Sourcing standards. Editorial rigor. The systems and habits required to get things right, and correct them when they are wrong.
So we reframed the offer around that. The market analysis changed. The buyer changed. The category language changed. The licensing site and product catalog followed.
Same underlying asset. Different understanding of its value.
The New York Times had already made the hard transition from print to digital subscriptions. Syndication had not made the same move.
It was still licensing Times properties to other publishers in a shrinking market, against competitors selling similar content for less.
That put the business in a bad category. Useful content. Premium content. Trusted content. Still content. And content gets compared, commoditized and replaced.
The question was not how to market it better. It was whether the business was being understood correctly in the first place.
I came in as a brand and content strategist, working with T Brand Studio, as part of a team looking at what the business could become.
The useful question was simple. When people stop trusting what they read, what does The New York Times actually provide?
Not articles. The harder-to-replicate asset is verification. Sourcing standards, editorial rigor, fact checking, institutional process, and the ability to correct the record.
That moved the opportunity away from content syndication and toward something more useful to enterprise buyers.
The work included:
Once the positioning was clear, the licensing site had to reflect it.
The site was redesigned around a broader question: where could Times content create value beyond traditional publishing?
That meant helping new kinds of buyers understand how Times reporting, data and editorial standards could support their own products, communications and decision-making.
The strategy carried through the site copy, structure, verbal identity and user experience.
Visit nytlicensing.comThe same thinking then had to work at the product level.
I wrote headlines and product copy across the Times licensing catalog, including columns, podcasts, magazines and other properties.
The goal was consistency. Every product needed to explain its value to the buyer, not simply describe what it was.
We also developed case studies showing how non-traditional clients were already using Times content in ways that could be repeated.
BeforeA premium content supplier.
AfterA verification layer inside someone else’s decisions, products and workflows.
That changes the commercial conversation. Content is a procurement expense. Something tied to trust, risk and decision quality can sit somewhere else entirely.
Different buyer. Different budget. Different urgency. Same asset.
The Times did not need to become better at syndication. It did not need more titles, lower prices or faster delivery. And the journalism itself was never the problem.
The issue was that the business was selling the visible output rather than the value underneath it.
Once that changed, the category changed with it.
If buyers understand you only through features, price, speed or service, you are already inside somebody else’s comparison set.
Sometimes the better move is not to improve the offer. It is to change what the buyer understands the offer to be.
That is what category work is for. Not inventing terminology. Not dressing up the same thing with a new label. It is identifying the more valuable problem you solve, then building the business around that understanding.
The New York Times already had the asset.
The work was recognizing what that asset was worth.
With T Brand Studio.
That’s what the Outside Read is for: a senior outside diagnosis of why growth stalled. One focused week, a clear diagnosis, and the first move.
$1K · One focused week See If the Outside Read FitsIdeas, teardowns, and field notes. The stuff we use to help companies make sharper decisions.
Occasional offers. Mostly stuff worth stealing.
This is an Install. Not a project handed back at the end, but a capability the business owns and runs after we leave.
How the work takes shapeSame Product. Different Planet.
Category Design · Positioning · Go-to-MarketA Calendar Full of People Who Weren’t Ready.
Category Design → Brand → Content SystemYou Can’t Scale When Everybody Rewrites the Story.
Positioning · Brand · MessagingObservations and teardowns from the field.
Visit the case studies