The New York Times “really sees London as a home” in the long term, its Europe editor has said as she outlined the publisher’s UK growth strategy.
Adrienne Carter, a former business journalist and one-time licensed securities broker, took charge of the NYT’s London office in 2023 after four years as its Asia editor.
She told Press Gazette that in the UK the NYT is looking for readers “interested in the US and how the US interacts with the world”. And she also disclosed the best place in London to get a New York bagel.
The New York Times today employs around 100 journalists in London, up from around 70 two years ago and triple the number that worked there in 2016, when Carter was last posted in the city. These figures exclude commercial and administrative staff (of whom there were 67 on average in 2023, according to Companies House) and all 150 of The Athletic’s UK staff.
Part of the London office’s role is to help provide round-the-clock coverage for the Times in coordination with the New York headquarters and its other major international hub in Seoul, where Carter was last deployed. Each office takes responsibility for eight hours of the day, and around a dozen journalists in the London bureau are dedicated to breaking news.
Carter said when she first arrived in London in 2016, the NYT bureau “was basically the international desk. I came over as a business editor, and it was kind of the first time we had non-international editors overseas…
“Now we have almost all of the major coverage departments. Styles is here, Business is here, we’ll have Climate here soon.”
Today staff in the NYT’s London office have responsibility for everything from audio – The Headlines, one of its flagship podcasts, is produced from the UK – to audience and the nytimes.com home page itself.
“We are, I would say, like a mini New York newsroom – but it’s not that mini anymore.”
‘What’s going to both appeal to a UK audience and a global audience?’
The office also increasingly hosts journalists covering the UK itself. In 2023 The New York Times hired a dedicated UK editor, former FT Weekend deputy editor Esther Bintliff, and Carter said the publisher has three correspondents “specifically focused exclusively on the UK”, as well as a business reporter mostly focused on the country.
In December The New York Times ranked as the tenth most popular news website in the UK (in terms of total audience minutes). The amount of time Brits spent on the NYT was up 59% compared with a year earlier.
The “dual goal” of The New York Times in London is to attract both a UK and a global audience, Carter said.
“It’s a huge readership here, right? So it’s a huge opportunity. We’re never going to be the BBC — that’s not our goal, that’s not our mission. There’s certain things we’re going to compete on. We’ve got to lean into our strengths, and we can’t duplicate their work – they’re amazing.”
To that end, Carter said that The New York Times was not aiming to become Brits’ main news source about Britain.
“I think we’re looking at readers who are interested globally – interested in the world, interested in the US and how the US interacts with the world.”
An interview with Peter Mandelson as he took on the job of British ambassador to the UK was “really one of our sweet spots”, Carter said. But she also cited a multimedia article from October about the Steart Marshes in Somerset, a wetland that was purposefully allowed to flood as part of a rewilding and flood mitigation strategy.
Carter said that had been “both a UK story, but it’s a very global story – it’s an issue that resonated broadly. That’s how we try to play in these stories – what’s going to both appeal to a UK audience and a global audience?”
But the NYT does seem to sometimes attract UK readers intrigued to hear familiar stories told from another perspective. Some of its 2024 UK general election results stories, for example a collection of data visualisations about the 14 years of Conservative government, were “at the top of search in the UK”, Carter said.
Similarly, in January last year the NYT did a story about a pop-up, dine-in restaurant run by bakery chain Greggs inside a Fenwick department store.
“That story did really, really well for us – everywhere,” Carter said. “Just because it was interesting! And it told you a slice of life that people didn’t know, and introduced them to something that is very iconic here.”
Stories about the royals also do well – both at home in the US and abroad.
“Where we break through here [in the UK] in particular is when we can bring something different to it,” Carter said. “We did a story on how the Royals could be this soft power influence with Trump – that really broke through. When there was the whole controversy over the doctored photo by Princess Catherine, we did a visual look at where there had been some of the alterations – that did really well.”
The unusual proximity of different newspaper sections in the London office lends itself to “a lot more collaboration” between desks than is possible in New York, Carter said, which often resulted in more graphics or multimedia-heavy stories.
The Times will not disclose how many subscribers it has in the UK, but said in June that it “has over two million digital subscribers outside the United States, more than a third of which [i.e. more than 660,000] are in Europe”.
The New York Times Limited, the publisher’s UK incorporation, turned over £34.7m in 2023, all of which was categorised as service fee income. The Athletic Media Company UK Ltd turned over a further £19.2m.
‘Our role is to be independent… I think that frustrates people’
The New York Times has previously come in for criticism for its coverage of the UK, with notorious choices including the 2018 headline “Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton: A Taste of London” and a 2020 story reporting Londoners had “cavorted” in “swamps” (meaning the Hackney Downs).
Carter’s predecessor, Jim Yardley, told Press Gazette in 2023 that “I disagree strongly with the notion that we have any dislike of Britain”.
[Read more: ‘I love Britain’ – New York Times’ outgoing Europe editor on anti-UK bias claims, Ukraine and London newsroom growth]
Carter has now had Yardley’s job for two years. Asked how she had handled the same sensitivities, Carter stressed that the NYT’s London newsroom boasts “a large number of people from the UK and a large number of people who, even if they’re not from the UK, have lived here for a long period of time”.
“There’s always going to be criticism of – how do you cover any country? But I think the size of the operation in London, the diversity of the newsroom in London, the fact that we are a hub here, we’re not this transient player – we really see London as a home for The New York Times.”
There are, Carter said, “always cultural missteps that people will make, and we should own up to them and try not to make them. And I think we are very sensitive to that…
“And, you know, there’s a lot of people now in the US who come to us like: ‘Is this the right way to characterise this?’ So I think it’s something we are conscious of.”
Recently critics have accused The New York Times and the rest of the country’s established media of assisting Donald Trump’s re-election through coverage that they say was not adequately clear or urgent about the risks he posed to democratic institutions.
Carter said those criticisms were “100%” something the senior editors thought about, but she did not ultimately agree with them.
“I think in this era, in any number of issues where there is a very divisive partisan centering around those stories, people want us – and I mean the Times, I mean the media – to be advocates or ideologues.
“And so when you have a fraught issue and it doesn’t align with somebody’s worldview, necessarily, there is going to be criticism of bias, or not doing enough to portray one side or the other.
“That is not our job as journalists. Our job, and our role, is to be independent, is to be fact-based, is to be rooted in our reporting. And I think that frustrates people – that we do not necessarily align with one worldview or the other.”
Carter’s position is similar to that of NYT executive editor Joe Kahn, who said last year that “it is not the job of the news media” to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump.
She added: “There’s certainly criticism that is valid and we want to engage with that, we want to debate with that. But there are any number of bad faith actors, and that’s sort of where we have to listen, understand, take the criticism that’s important and valid, and put aside the noise that is based in ideology.”
How New York Times Europe editor Adrienne Carter is living London life
Asked how she likes living in the UK, Carter said: “I keep joking – and not so much joking – that I’m never leaving.”
Asked what home comforts she wished she could bring to the UK, Carter identified cracker brands Cheez-Its and Goldfish. (I suggest she might be able to get them in London’s numerous American candy stores, but Carter countered that “they’ll be like a bajillion dollars”.)
She added that “there are bagels here, obviously, it’s just a different type of bagel than a New York bagel”.
She recommended a Dalston bakery named Papo’s, however, who she said “are doing a pretty solid job”.
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