Meredith Kopit Levien will be the next chief executive of the New York Times

The company conducted “a deliberate succession planning process” to select Thompson’s replacement after he told the company’s board of directors in early 2019 that he planned to step down in the following year or two, Publisher A.G. Sulzberger said. Levien’s selection, he added, was unanimous.

Kopit Levien joined the Times as the company’s head of advertising in 2013 after five years with Forbes Media. A little less than two years later, she was elevated to serve as the company’s chief revenue officer and executive vice president, followed by a promotion to chief operating officer in June 2017.

Kopit Levien, who has been Thompson’s “closest partner over the past seven years,” according to Sulzberger, was long considered in line to replace him. They worked together on the company’s push to attract digital subscribers, a customer base that has grown from 500,000 subscriptions at the time of Thompson’s arrival in 2012 to 5 million today.

“In her seven years at The Times, Meredith has helped transform our company and our business strategy,” Sulzberger wrote in a memo to staff on Wednesday morning. “Many of our biggest successes — our subscriber growth, our product innovation, our more collaborative way of working — can be traced to her vision, tenacity, eye for talent and focus on results.”

In the announcement, Sulzberger credited Thompson, a former reporter, for joining and leading the business at a time when “the company’s path forward was uncertain.”

“Mark elevated our aspirations as a company and taught us to look at the ongoing change in our industry with excitement and a sense of opportunity rather than dread,” he wrote.

Thompson, who will “work closely” with Kopit Levien until his departure, said in the announcement that he decided to leave the Times because he has achieved all the goals he set out to achieve when he took on the top job. “There’s nothing that makes me more proud than the fact that our newsroom is substantially larger today than when I joined,” he said. The company’s stock price was below $10 when he got the top job but opened the day at $45 on Wednesday.

At the Times, Kopit Levien has also served as something of an evangelist for the company’s “branded content” arm, which creates editorial content sponsored by advertisers. Still, echoing media industry patterns more broadly amid the spread of the novel coronavirus, the Times suffered a 15.2 percent drop in advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2020, compared to 2019, with an even sharper drop expected for the second financial quarter of this year.

“It’s the honor of a lifetime to lead The New York Times,” said Kopit Levien, who promised in the announcement to spearhead the development of new technologies to expand the newspaper’s reach. “And at a time when the free press remains under pressure, the Times will continue to invest in and defend the high-quality, independent journalism on which our democracy depends.”