The Times' news force in total - still twice the size of the rival Washington Post, which has increased its own staff at roughly the same rate as the Times in recent years - will grow even more this year, Thompson says. Long-ago Times competitor Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, thinks that investors still undervalue what the Times has become. The Times' success is a welcome tonic to anyone consumed with worry about the fate of the press into the 2020s, a fear neatly summarized recently by the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger: "We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how modern societies would exist without reliable news." Despite all the targeting and propensity modeling the Times has done - it counts about 300 in its Marketing, Product & Design and Data Insights groups - Thompson acknowledges that the Times still needs more "Rigor" in understanding all the complexity in the path from Times discovery to Times sampling to Times readership to Times subscribing. At the same time, the Times' resources allow it to test new products. That's in part about understanding the whole Times reader; it's also in part about believing that there may well be a Trump Slump at some point - an era in which Times readers no longer feel the need to compulsively check their iPhones in trepidation of what just happened. The Times says that over the past two years, "Our readers and subscribers have become generally more female, compared to before 2016 election." That could be an indication that the Times' efforts to broaden its content mix - as best showcased in its burgeoning Smarter Living story count - is working. Read more