In the summer of 2020, shortly before Mark Thompson stepped down as chief executive of The New York Times Co., he gave an interview to CNN from a charmingly spartan kitchen in western Maine and was asked to reflect on the resoundingly successful tenure during which he’d helped the Sulzbergers transform their indebted, moribund print paper into a profitable, subscriber-supported digital news and lifestyle brand. Thompson, a veteran of British television who’d served as top executive at both Channel Four and the BBC, entered the job with no experience in American media and, indeed, no experience running a for-profit company. Yet in eight short years, the Times had amassed 6.5 million subscriptions. In the process, the company more than quadrupled both its digital-only sub revenue and the $NYT share price.

In the interview, Thompson was asked to explain what he’d noticed about the Times business in those early days. “I just felt—and I feel this about TV,” Thompson began, “just like TV, I felt that the newspaper industry was trapped in a psychology of the limits of the possible.”