Leaked NYT innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age

The digital folk are enormously frustrated. They know they could do so much better, if the organisation would get behind them. Time after time, they miss opportunities to:

- repackage old content that remains relevant, or becomes relevant again

- promote curated collections of material

- monitor the "online impact" of stories

- take advantage of user-generated content

- and so on...

So they get their lunch stolen by the likes of the Huffington Post.

The infrastructure and processes are also lacking. There are too many one-offs and "just make it work now" hacks, and material is not tagged properly.

cpeterso• 12 years ago

The saddest part was The Huffington Post would repackage syndicated New York Times content and get way more traffic.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

nah, the saddest part is that old media doesn't realize why Huffington Post, Drudge, and others, are in and they are not.

that being people are no longer stuck with a news and opinion source which does not appeal to them, either intellectually or politically.

It doesn't matter how well you package it, if the customer doesn't like the message putting flowers on it won't make it more appealing to them

xtx236• 12 years ago

Times seems to have more mobile content already though...not entirely in one format.

lugg• 12 years ago

Thanks I was really interested in reading their insights but its quite a long read.

louhike3• 12 years ago

Yes but it is really interesting though. If you have the time to read it later, I recommend you to do so.

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

Don't read TL;DR, the report is actually interesting and applicable on a lot of projects / startups

zwieback2• 12 years ago

I second that - worthwhile read.

tomek_zemla2• 12 years ago

Absolutely. The common theme I found here (after many years of consulting) is disconnect between different divisions, namely journalism, technology and business. I have seen it in many other companies small and large. It seems like such an obvious solution to get people to work together and make sure that they will make an effort to understand other domains not only their own. I would certainly expect the leadership of such prominent institution as NYT to grasp that and make it part of the culture. Certainly if they hope to extend their existence into 21st century! The mention of an engineer quitting because the person was not allowed to attend editors meetings just broke my heart. This kind of attitude in the digital age is like sabotaging NYT by setting its building on fire...

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

The New York Times remains a newspaper with a website attached.

I think it's more accurate to say that the internal culture at the NYT is fragmented - there's a portion that either is or wants to be digital-first, and a portion that still doesn't understand that.

Furthermore, they are dealing with existing infrastructure and organizational structures that were originally optimized for a print-first business model, so the inertial "default" ends up being biased slightly towards print-first.

That said, this is the same shift that all of the traditional "old media" establishments have to make. Most (if not all) of the companies that the Times is being compared to in that document were created in the digital era (Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Gawker, etc.)[0].

I'd still say that the NYTimes has made the "new media shift far better than any of the other traditional, "old media" establishments. Perhaps all of those publications will end up failing - it's certainly possible. But if any succeed, my money would be on the Times.

[0] Also, as pointed out elsewhere, they all are primarily resellers of content, as opposed to companies that primarily generate their own content. They are also certainly not known for the quality of their own original journalism the way to the extent the Times is.

k-mcgrady• 12 years ago

Does Huffington Post have any quality content? Any time I go to them they seem like the Yahoo Answers of news.

samyxp17• 12 years ago

How to increase traffic on nytimes.com:

Reasoning - Businessinsider.com, buzzfeed.com & huffingtonpost.com are loaded with aggregated content. Not all of it is great, often it is old news or a meme from 3 months ago.

But, every piece of content is carefully designed and crafted to produce as many clicks as possible. It's laughable at times how headlines are rewritten and sexed up to get you to click.

As soon as you realized that it's the same article you read 2 weeks ago on nytimes.com but with better images, a nice interactive chart and a youtube video you might feel bad for a second or two but the damage is done - product sold.

=== 7 NYTIMES Homepage Ideas ===

1) DESIGN:

Simpler - less noise - scannable (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/)

Too much noise on the homepage - yes we know you produce 25,000 articles everyday but we can't read all of it in 2 minutes - Make it easier to scan - my eyes should not be going left - right and up - down constantly.

2) HEADLINES -

Please make them more interesting - more to the point - shorter - Tell us what the article is really about - A/B test them live.

3) VIDEOS

More videos - not one-offs but branded segments with style and character and good production value - with an actual point of view or focus not some bland summary like "Ok this is what happened today in Washington ..." - we can get that anywhere.

The folks at theverge.com do a good job of that - please copy, adapt & iterate.

4) SECTIONS: Books,Music,TV,Restaurants

You can read a great book review on nytimes.com but you can't download a sample or add it to "Book to read later" list, or take any meaningful action on that book - fix it.

Same deal for movies, restaurants or TV shows. I'd suggest some integration with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes/Google/Spotify.

5) TRAVEL -

Again, great read but all you can do is save a link to that article for your next vacation -- not good enough.

Suggestion - mobile service/app/map integration that keeps track of those favorite reviews and notifies you, the next time you walk into that restaurant so you'll know what not order.

6) What do I want to read next ?

Articles read + (Netflix info + Amazon info + Spotify info + Other services/purchases) = ???

If you can data-mined at least some of that you could have a good enough answer most of the time.

7) KILL THE PAYWALL

For the overwhelming majority of users this is a big NO. As an added bonus to a Netflix or Amazon Prime subscription ... maybe.

BONUS: Better search & filtering -

bsder• 12 years ago

The problem isn't "NYT needs to engage more with social". The problem is that the Times needs to figure out how to be RELEVANT.

Let's start with this: be hyper-local. I should be able to easily plan a trip and tour to New York without ever leaving the NYT website. I should be able to know every single Broadway and off-Broadway play that will be running when I get there and be able to get tickets NOW.

Reporting: How about being actively antagonistic toward government? How about real, hard-hitting government coverage? How about tracing every single dollar, favor, and deal until the politicians don't just hate you, but actively FEAR you.

Editorial: how about some informed opinion pieces? How about starting to peel apart complex topics in multiple parts and report TRUTH rather than both sides?

Gee, you know, that sounds like a ... newspaper. Shame this country doesn't actually have one anymore.

Sure, the NYT gets their lunch stolen, but mostly by one offs.

An aggregate of clever obits. A repackaging of Nelson Mandela's death. Could you predict those IN ADVANCE? Doubtful. Chasing them is like saying "We need to create Gangnam Style". Great. But it isn't going to happen.

louhike3• 12 years ago

NYT is a newpaper read worldwide (as an example, I'm french and I read it). People read it to have deep insight on subjects at first, even if they may be interested secondary in topics like album reviews.

I do not think it is relevant for them to cover everything in american towns even if most of their reader are in USA. Local newspapers are the ones who should do that. They cannot cover everything without expanding greatly their number of journalists. And I do not think they have the resources for that.

poolpool• 12 years ago

Gee that sound a like a billion dollars a year and a fundamental misconception of how news reporting works when deadlines, personal biases, and large groups of people get involved.

The times needs the government officials just as much as the officials need the times. Its a delicate dance and you can't just burn bridges.

Noble goals but come on.

Editorial: how about some informed opinion pieces? How about starting to peel apart complex topics in multiple parts and report TRUTH?

Literally what Fox news believers say about the times.

danso• 12 years ago

Of special interest to HN readers, Jeremy Ashkenas and Mike Bostock get a shoutout on page 60 of the report as being "Digital Stars":

http://i.imgur.com/X5w61xm.png

tomek_zemla2• 12 years ago

This is interesting. I was looking for a mention of the data visualization department. Their work has been on the bleeding edge of data journalism in recent years and a proof that not all is rotten inside of NYT...

ritchiea2• 12 years ago

What's tough here, and I agree wholeheartedly that the Times isn't doing a great job digitally, is that the companies that seem to have a better grasp on digital (HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Vox, etc.) only have a grasp on strong digital business models and don't seem to have a grasp on delivering quality journalism/user experience.

The Times is still a great news site because of it's great reporting. And valuing great reporting is inherited from the paper newspaper days. But it would be amazing to see a company value great reporting while simultaneously seizing the ways the internet has improved our ability to communicate.

snicker• 12 years ago

I'm surprised that anyone even remotely considers Buzzfeed to be "journalism". Buzzfeed is like the zester to the lemon that is world events.

mrmaddog• 12 years ago

I've been pleasantly surprised by some of Buzzfeed's journalism. This article [1], a rich narrative following one of the few female boxing judges, has original reporting and is well written. Funnily enough, I discovered this article via a link from New York Times' wonderful new NYT Now app.

[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/the-woman-who-kod-manny...

bgarbiak• 12 years ago

Well, it is surprising, but between all these lists of funny gifs and celebrity photos lie a solid, proper journalism stuff. For example, they recently started a political ruckus with a single article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxseddon/bidens-son-polish-ex-presi...

ritchiea2• 12 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't seen any of the output yet, as it's rather new, but Buzzfeed started expanding their operations past lists of gifs sometime last year. Going as far as hiring an investigative team in late 2013 and getting some industry names (e.g. Pulitzer winner Mark Schoofs) to join by using the money from an enormous venture round offer higher salaries than many of their competitors.

It was a shock to me when I heard this as well. But I've seen some of the work at Buzzfeed lately and they're even publishing strong cultural essays like this one: http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-...

knowtheory• 12 years ago

Buzzfeed has spent the past 6 months standing up a really great investigative team. They hired Mark Schoofs (a Pulitzer winner) from ProPublica as the head of their investigative team (http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-propu... ), and recently were joined by 2014's Pulitzer winner for investigative reporting, Chris Hamby (http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/04/8543804/... ), and they've hired several really awesome people to fill out data/developer roles on the investigative team like Jeremy Singer-Vine (http://www.jsvine.com/ ).

Buzzfeed appears to be making a real go at the investigative journalism thing and it'll be interesting to see what they do.

zwieback2• 12 years ago

I don't get all the Buzzfeed hate. I've loved it from the first minute and it's constantly getting better. And I'm in my late forties having grown up on and still pay for quality journalism.

rdl• 12 years ago

Quartz? Verge? ArsTechnica?

dublinben• 12 years ago

All pretty forgettable. The Verge has really tanked in quality in the last few months. A good proportion of their content is now blogspam from other sources. Case in point, see anything 'written' by this staff member: http://www.theverge.com/users/casskhaw

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

I'm always surprised that people think Huffington Post has any sort of innovative or effective grasp of digital journalism.

Their only innovation, and the core of their value, is realizing that most publishers will not bother to sue them for republishing articles. As such they are able to "publish" (i.e. copy/paste) tremendous amounts of interesting content for almost no cost.

Of course it's not hard for HuffPo to compete against other publishers when HuffPo can use those publishers' content against them for free.

xtx236• 12 years ago

It is kinda interesting that it mentioned Gawker repackaging and archive without any mention of the new Timesmachine, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com, which is "a better job of resurfacing archival content."

louhike3• 12 years ago

Well, the goal is different. The TimesMachine is not specifically relevant to today's news. They would like now to easily provide insight on current subjects through old articles.

The format of the timesmachine might not be the best. It would be better to isolate articles and put them in a modern format.

xtx236• 12 years ago

yeah, makes sense. what you are saying sounds like this "http://nyti.ms/1i1l7f9" or retro reports "http://nyti.ms/1lwoYPh" that they have been trying, i think.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

One thing I do have to give The New York Times credit for is that it's got an exceptionally good digital archive. All Web content ever posted is available online in full form.

Published articles at least through the early 20th century are indexed, typically with the lede paragraph or sentence. I'd love to have more, but that's a start.

xtx236• 12 years ago

if they have Google's OCR tech, it would have been much better than it is. Wonder if Google ever thought about making a cloud OCR api product. it would align with their goals.

allochthon2• 12 years ago

With regard to decreasing traffic to the front page, I did not see the elephant in the room mentioned in the summary article -- the Times started limiting free access to 10 articles per month a year or so ago. I love the NYT. Since 1996 or so I would visit its front page way too much and then click through to the articles, and they no doubt got advertising money from my pageviews. Now I'm careful about which NYT links I click on so as not to waste an article. In this context the front page is less enticing. I now read a much larger variety of news sources, which has been a nice development.

Whether the choice to limit free access was a wise one is not for me to say and is something their business people will be more on top of.

(I realize that there are easy ways around the limit, but I haven't wanted to use them.)

leemcalilly• 12 years ago

Private browsing in Chrome and they still sell ads against your page views.

orbifold• 12 years ago

I'm not sure how they would enforce that, can't you just delete all cookies and reset your connection to get a new ip address?

allochthon2• 12 years ago

I doubt they can enforce it. I just feel bad circumventing the steps they've already taken.

suprgeek• 12 years ago

I hope they do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. In their rush to "repackage" and rebrand they need to be careful to not devolve into Upworthy-BuzzFeed-Mashable style popcorn BS. That stuff is worth about 15 seconds of glance thru, never remembered, never quoted, never relevant beyond ad-clicks.

There is a real danger here that in the course of changing their looks they may lose their soul.

processing• 12 years ago

They wanted to become a viral news agency, you won’t believe what happend next…

thrownaway24242• 12 years ago

The fact that they apparently tried to recruit an executive from Upworthy is very disturbing.

nmodu• 12 years ago

Very interesting article. Some of these statistics are surprising. Only 1% of Times readers comment and only 3% of Times readers read comments? Only a third of Times readers visit the homepage? Those numbers are far smaller than I would have expected (an expectation based solely on my own experience; I enjoy reading the comments on Times articles and I always access articles through the Times home page).

David Leonhardt (of NYT's The Upshot) was on Charlie Rose the other night discussing the Times's approach to digital [1]. The leaked memo complements the interview nicely.

[1] http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60387818

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

I've long thought that a syndication system in which content is compensated based on a schedule and a combination of both general tax funds and a portion of broadband access fees (the former for progressive costing, the latter as a bit of a user fee) might fit information markets better than other alternatives. Advertising in particular raises numerous problems.

There are a number of aspects of this:

• But the payor will determine the content: actually a problem of the present system.

As Jacob Nielsen noted in 1998:

"Ultimately, those who pay for something control it. Currently, most websites that don't sell things are funded by advertising. Thus, they will be controlled by advertisers and will become less and less useful to the users."

• The message is determined by the payment medium: a fundamental statement of the physics, if you will, of creative activities.

• Estimating the size of the syndicate

Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart[1] , the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways, but even with a few powers of two in either direction, it seems generally reasonable.

Phil Hunt's Broadband Tax / Content Compensation Fund proposal, and the Rent-Seeking Economy: http://redd.it/1vknhc

My own Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication: http://redd.it/1uotb3

________________________________

Notes:

1. http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-9133&y=-4660&z=6

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Times made a big screw-up by not writing about the Program in 2004, and because of them not doing that, Bush got a second term. They also barely touched the Snowden stories, and when they did, they made his image worse, somehow.

So I won't cry for their decay and downfall. They've been shooting themselves in the foot for the past decade anyway, by relinquishing their integrity and becoming more and more like the other corporate media entities.

baldfat• 12 years ago

NYTimes Cost - All Digital = 8.75 a week ($455 yearly) NYTimes.com + Tablet = 5.00 a week ($260 yearly) NYTimes.com + Smartphone = 3.75 a week ($195 yearly)

I can't afford that. $35 a month for news is tooo much.

marban• 12 years ago

I'm ok with paying for one or two news sites just to keep the ads out, but extra $ for the tablet version is a joke.

tsunamifury2• 12 years ago

I think, newsroom-culturally, the best thing this report illustrates is the complex relationships between the people working on journalism-as-content vs journalism-as-product. This has been a painful issue as print journalist refused to consider the legitimacy of re-examining their distribution product for years due to a belief that their work had inheret value regardless of its promotion, display, or distribution.

The report details specifically how the value of their content is being extracted by organizations with better products who beat them in all three areas.

This is a key point that needs to sink in at the nyt since they have avoided the iterative developement of new products due to an over reliance on inherit value of their content. I think if they simply hire the right talent in data, ux and machine learning they could begin to release a series of technologically exciting products which are powered by their exceptionally high quality content.

btown• 12 years ago

They do have tremendous talent in data, UX, and ML; see, for instance, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-th... . The issue is the lack of "the newsroom's support." See, for instance, PDF page 34 about an experiment for Follow buttons that was never followed through, and PDF page 38 about how big projects don't incorporate marketing and rollout into their planning process. You can hire as many researchers as you want, but unless the institution is willing to support experimentation, in every possible sense of the word "support," your researchers will just be working with hypotheticals instead of actual data e.g. from your site's Follow buttons, and they'll end up being underutilized.

tsunamifury2• 12 years ago

The right talent advocates themselves and evangelizes their toolset around the organization -- even getting groups to do beta projects with tools in order to prove out the success. Then they expand and incentivize the journalists by showing them how using their tools makes the job easier, better and more successful.

I have many friends in the NYT newsroom and am aware of how anti-innovative the legacy producers are -- I even sat with Bill Keller in 2010 trying pitch a multimedia production workflow.

The problem is the product people and the content people haven't really sat down and worked together to build a sustainably iterative production model.

hagbardgroup• 12 years ago

In print, the production is handled by people considered to be proletarian subhumans who are paid almost nothing and disposed of at a whim. This was not always so: when printing was closer to high tech, it was also higher prestige. Manufacturing in general also used to be higher status than it has been since the 1970s.

There's been this change in US culture that provides a special aura to people who do nothing but write and speak. People who interact with physical things, and particularly machines, come to be seen as unclean.

With computers, you have to pay those people well and give them some authority so that they can do their jobs well. Socially, this does not play out well within traditional print organizations, in which the production side is invisible to the journalism side (the Times' manufacturing plant is not even close to its midtown office building), and the business side is ritualistically forbidden from contaminating the sacredness of the content side.

Stuff like labeling stories with appropriate metadata doesn't get done not because it's challenging (it's similar to slapping a Dewey Decimal code on a file folder and sticking it on there), but because writing an HTML element has the potential to make a religiously sacred 'writer' impure. A lot of print people see any sort of demand for learning technical skill as an insult, because technical knowledge is seen to be polluting.

Also you see a lot of knowledge silos in that report because it's clearly difficult for the organization to 'read' the skillsets of technical generalists.

We don't like to see it that way, but ordinary American business types see programmers as spiritually dirty people who do not deserve authority. At the Times in particular, business people are seen as particularly spiritually dirty, so much so that they must be literally segregated from the population of sacred scribes.

The change that the Times would need to make is less technological and more social: they would have to make coding not Haram anymore. That might be one reformation too many to ask for. This report is really good, but they would probably have to fire everyone over 40 to achieve its goals. Authority is zero sum, and asking the entire leadership to devolve authority is not likely to have a positive outcome.

ryandrake• 12 years ago

Good one from the report, relevant to any org that does big projects:

“When it takes 20 months to build one thing, your skill set becomes less about innovation and more about navigating bureaucracy. That means the longer you stay, the more you’re doubling down on staying even longer. But if there’s no leadership role to aspire to, staying too long becomes risky.”

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

I really hope NYT does something with this research. It contains a lot of valuable information.

A worthwhile read!

Leaked NYT innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age

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