
Leaked NYT innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age - cpeterso
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/
======
Pitarou
TL;DR

The New York Times remains a newspaper with a website attached. It is
optimized for:

\- one distribution channel (newsstands / deliveries)

\- one format (big sheets of paper)

\- one consumption pattern (peruse the current edition, then throw it away)

\- one production pattern (professional journalists)

\- one means of attracting eyeballs (the front page / home page)

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.

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

~~~
tomek_zemla
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...

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

~~~
knowtheory
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...](http://jimromenesko.com/2013/10/21/mark-schoofs-leaves-
propublica-to-head-buzzfeeds-investigative-unit/) ), and recently were joined
by 2014's Pulitzer winner for investigative reporting, Chris Hamby
([http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/04/8543804/...](http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/04/8543804/chris-
hamby-joins-buzzfeed-pulitzer-hand) ), 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/](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.

~~~
nathanstitt
It occurs to me that what BuzzFeed's doing is that following the mantra of
"Don't create something unless you're sure you can sell it"

They've mastered the art of selling a product (Journalism, faux or otherwise),
now they're attempting to produce as much of it as they can.

They've also realized that there's a market for all sorts of it, from the low-
brow click-bait up to the hard hitting investigative stuff and are attempting
to fill all the slots.

The next decade (or just 2-4 years) is really going to be interesting.

~~~
xtx23
When "Jennifer Lawrence Sports A Goatee On Jimmy Fallon" is top news on
Buzzfeed, you know it'll def be very interesting for a long day.

------
jey
The linked site seems to be down.

Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?authuser=0&outp...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?authuser=0&output=search&sclient=psy-
ab&q=cache:http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-
innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-
age/&=&=&oq=&gs_l=&pbx=1)

Scribd link to document: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-
Report-20...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-Report-2014)

------
danso
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](http://i.imgur.com/X5w61xm.png)

~~~
tomek_zemla
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...

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

------
tsunamifury
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
They do have tremendous talent in data, UX, and ML; see, for instance,
[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-
th...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-the-new-york-
times-wants-to-predict-that/) . 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.

~~~
tsunamifury
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.

------
allochthon
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.)

~~~
orbifold
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?

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

------
nmodu
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](http://www.charlierose.com/watch/60387818)

------
ryandrake
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.”

------
hagbardgroup
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.

------
dredmorbius
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](http://redd.it/1vknhc)

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

________________________________

Notes:

1\.
[http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-9133&y=-4660&z=6](http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-9133&y=-4660&z=6)

------
baldfat
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
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.

------
xtx23
It is kinda interesting that it mentioned Gawker repackaging and archive
without any mention of the new Timesmachine,
[http://timesmachine.nytimes.com](http://timesmachine.nytimes.com), which is
"a better job of resurfacing archival content."

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

~~~
xtx23
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
OCR isn't even necessary. There's also The Internet Archive's BookReader which
I noted recently:

[https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader](https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader)

GNU Affero Licence, on GitHub:

[http://github.com/openlibrary/bookreader](http://github.com/openlibrary/bookreader)

------
bsder
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.

~~~
louhike
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.

------
higherpurpose
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.

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

A worthwhile read!

------
davidy123
very interesting. but even in this introspection it's still a very consumer-
publish model. wikipedia is as great as the internet in impact.

