
New York Times Study Calls for Rapid Change in Newsroom - anjalik
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/business/new-york-times-newsroom-report-2020.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
======
swampthinker
To be honest, I never appreciated the scale of the NYT until I read those
revenue numbers. $500 million in digital media revenue is nothing to sneeze
at.

I wonder if at some point in the future, there will be a reaction to this push
for a subscription-based news model. Perhaps a website who's value proposition
is that it only focuses on news, with no clickbait articles and titles.

~~~
rjtavares
I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I
want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.

~~~
lbotos
In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?

~~~
rjtavares
Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the
subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality
movies or books before I pay for them.

------
jdlyga
The most important area to focus on is accuracy. There's a huge prevailence of
rumors masquerading as news. Plus, there's an entire political party who's
base has lost faith in the mainstream media. If the NYT starts taking
shortcuts, they will fall into a dangerous trap and will lose a lot of
readers.

~~~
marze
What do you even mean? NYT has a price sheet for sponsered content/native ads.
If you have the funds, you can put any "fake news" you want in the NYT. Much
more up front about it than back in the day.

All "news" is fake to some degree or another, it is a fantasy to think
otherwise.

~~~
unethical_ban
What a load of garbage. If you're talking about what I think you are, you're
mentioning those half/full page ads that are marked "advertisement" and have
slightly different fonts than the normal news. It's hardly a conspiracy theory
to allow Trump to buy reporters.

------
pgrote
The internal report itself is interesting for a few reasons:

[https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/](https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/)

1) The graphic on top doesn't show a laptop or desktop.

2) " On a per-dollar basis, our freelance-written journalism attracts a larger
audience on average than our staff-written journalism."

Wow. Hopefully, they have automated internal metrics to track this.

3) " Today, department heads and other coverage leaders must organize much of
their day around print rhythms even as they find themselves gravitating toward
digital journalism. The current setup is holding back our ability to make
further digital changes, and it is also starting to rob the print newspaper of
the attention it needs to become even better."

Until the focus is changed to digital first, I am unsure how much more they
can grow.

I still marvel at how it is cheaper for me to get a NY Times Sunday paper
delivery with digital access halfway across the country than it is for me to
get just the digital access. lol

~~~
stuckagain
Re: 2, Does the freelance-written material attract more readers, cost less, or
both? The statements in the report are ambiguous.

~~~
pfranz
If you drop all staff writers, what's your differentiator (I guess, maybe in
editorial)? Assuming what they're saying is true, could staff writers be a
loss-leader to keep that brand and core audience used to reach the wider
readers?

------
erickhill
>The report coincides with a series of broader changes at The Times, including
a reimagining of the print newspaper; an aggressive international expansion; a
heightened emphasis on graphics, video, virtual reality and podcasts; the
$30-million purchase...

God, please no. Don't invest heavily in VR for news reporting. I agree with
reducing multiple layers of copy editing for a digitally focused company, but
VR is a misdirection of funds to get the facts straight. Or, maybe that was
just a buzzword that didn't get edited out of the final press release.

~~~
giggles_giggles
An investment in VR might be premature because of the immaturity of the
technology, but assuming that VR tech does grow to be commonplace, wouldn't
e.g. immersive VR video shot in a warzone be more affecting than still images
or 2D video when communicating the scale of atrocity/warfare/protests to the
viewers back home?

~~~
scott_s
That's actually one of their current VR stories. "The Fight for Falluja":
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/14/magazine/figh...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/14/magazine/fight-
for-falluja-vr.html)

Personally, I used the cardboard VR thing with my iPhone 6 to watch a short
during the election. I was underwhelmed by the experience.

------
jordanlev
This is anecdotal, but just today I cancelled my print subscription to the
NYTimes because they kept messing up the delivery (not showing up, going to
the wrong house)... and every time I contacted their customer service reps
(who were obviously outsourced) they had absolutely no power to do anything
about it.

I wonder how much the simple things like "taking care of your customers"
factors into their business struggles. (Probably "not much", but just seemed
strange to me that they'd drop the ball like that for honest-to-goodness
paying customers).

~~~
forgetsusername
> _but just seemed so strange to me that they 'd drop the ball so much on the
> kind of customer they should be very much desiring_

Don't get me wrong, I'd have done the same, but:

What makes you think you're such a desirable customer? What sort of effort did
_you_ put into solving the problem? I can easily imagine a scenario where the
delivery guy is so far removed form the news business (doesn't care a wink),
that it would be night impossible to ensure the paper "gets there" without
incurring costs beyond your subscription fee and satisfaction. This is
reality.

~~~
jordanlev
I was a desirable customer because I was paying for their most expensive
offering (delivery of the print paper, as opposed to just digital access).

And I'm baffled by the rest of your response... What sort of effort am _I_
supposed to put into solving _their_ logistics problem?? Other than repeatedly
telling their customer service people about the issue, how or why would I
investigate any further?

(Honestly I would have loved to get in touch with the actual delivery company
in my area to ask them if they have the wrong address or can't find the house
or something... but this is one of the many ways in which the customer service
reps could not help me because they either didn't know or wouldn't tell me who
the delivery company was!)

I think perhaps you misunderstood what I wrote or think I'm actually a
delivery person?

------
dinkumthinkum
This report started well before the real meat of the recent election and I
think it really shows some lack of appreciation of what's become pretty clear
in the last few months, is a rather spectacular failure of "the Web" and the
ridiculously over-hyped "digital journalism" as means of providing people
realistic information about people, events, policies and other things that
fall under the umbrella of "news."

As much as many of us have maligned newspapers as "legacy," "dead tree," or
"rags," or as people that just don't "get" technology, all we have built, from
news perspective, is a world wide network spreading silos of disinformation at
the rate of terabytes of nonsense per day.

I think if anything, for me, we have seen that the legacy dead tree rags are
far more valuable to an individual, a nation, and really the world, than blog
engines and social networks. Newspapers, as with anything, have their faults
but are much more preferable to "choose your own propaganda" aggregators or
Alex Jones meme factories.

So, please, don't give the "visual storytellers" a "primary role." Let's get
to real investigative journalism and journalism itself. It's not the medium;
it's the content.

------
cJ0th
My take away from this article is that they acknowledge that a lot of trouble
lies ahead. Ironically, they don't have the courage to state their current
state in a more factual manner. Instead they offer some vague statements and
occasionally some outdated PR-speak

> “The world is changing really rapidly,” David Leonhardt, a columnist who led
> the group’s work, said in an interview. “We have to keep up, and even get
> ahead of it.”

> In a note to the newsroom, Mr. Baquet and Joe Kahn, The Times’s managing
> editor, endorsed the group’s recommendations, saying they outlined an
> “opportunity we have to produce an even more vital, more authoritative, more
> indispensable[0]’’ news report.

Wouldn't it be a great ad for their product if they were demonstrating that it
is possible for the Times to even report about themselves in a blunt, factual
manner? While some admissions are there the overall article is quite humble-
bragish.

[0] more indispensable - what does that even mean?

~~~
emodendroket
The Times is one of the most successful papers at weathering the digital
transition. As more people get their news online it's the handful of mega-
papers that profit at the expense of local and regional ones.

If you want to read gloom-and-doom about the newspaper industry there is
plenty of that too.

------
kyleschiller
Yeah, this absolutely feels like a case where content is driven by business
model as much as the technology itself.

Going subscription-first and focusing on quality content makes sense if you're
trying to differentiate yourself. The concern, of course, is that subscription
baiting is just one step removed from click baiting. It certainly cuts out the
worst offenders, but there will always be pressure for media companies to
cater to their audience.

------
WhitneyLand
The NYT is just can't shake the negative influence of their printing legacy
with respect to their strategy.

The article quotes them as saying "Our future is much more digital than
print". Are you kidding me, they still have to say things like this?

Of course the $1B in non-digital revenue is important and needs a steady hand
to maximize it's contribution.

However their digital strategies have been so simplistic, so old fashioned,
they just can't seem to catch up to what they really need to do.

~~~
spyspy
And what do they really need to do?

~~~
WhitneyLand
For starters, the leadership has very little experience in innovating with
tech product or business models.
[http://nytco.com/executives](http://nytco.com/executives).

Another example is they claim reader engagement is important yet have made
almost no progress on this front. Most articles don't even allow community
comments. Rather than complaining about the quality of internet comments, they
could use their influence to embrace new techniques that raise the bar for
discourse.

Their selling of subscriptions is a mess. First the cheapest sub is $200/yr.
They need to segment further and offer something at the psychologically
important barrier of $9.95/month. This new tier could be made compelling with
cannibalizing higher tiers.

The sell screen is a mess:
[https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.html).
It's confusing, not clean, has unnecessary messaging, and looks like it's
never been through iterations of A/B testing to maximize conversions.

There are many more opportunities for improvement that are also not being
taken up on. I wish I could meet with them for a couple days of strategy
consulting.

------
michaelbuckbee
An interesting contextual point from 2009 that highlights what an odd
situation this is:

Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle

[http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-
costs...](http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-
as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle)

Also, their back of the envelope calculations were done presuming that a
Kindle cost $359.

------
subpixel
I find it interesting that the report is full of renderings of NYTimes stories
on phones.

I wonder what the bounce rate is among mobile readers - that is, the
percentage of readers who read less than 5% or so of a given news story.

I suspect that it's very high. For me, it takes a significant chunk of radio-
silence (that is, no calls, text, social media updates, app alerts, no need
for map directions, etc.) combined with an equally significant amount of
willpower (i.e. not proactively checking in on any of the above) to read an
informative ~1000 word story on my phone.

The NYTimes might be the highest quality content I skim online, but really,
that's what I do 95% of the time at my desk and close to 100% on a mobile
device: skim. I'm pretty sure devices that are concurrently in use for
critical communication and/or work functions are awful places to try to engage
readers and convey critical, often nuanced information.

Print happens to be great for that. And while I'm not holding my breath, the
fact that vinyl records are about to be a billion dollar industry does suggest
that old good things can make a comeback.

~~~
alfalfasprout
I subscribe to both the WSJ and NYT and find that my bounce rate is probably
pretty high. But I tend to save articles that are interesting and I might want
to read later on my device. I'll later read the article on my iPad or laptop.
I can't stand reading a long piece on a small screen.

------
WalterBright
It'd be nice to see more of a focus on news rather than advocacy. I'll decide
my own opinion.

------
psadri
Would poorer people have access to non-fake news? Or would they be force to
read/consume fake-but-free news?

~~~
jmcgough
The larger problem is that many people can't differentiate between the two,
and will be drawn to fake news if the message appeals to them (confirmation
bias).

~~~
psadri
Agree with you observation.

I think this just makes things even worse.

Real news cost $ to produce. If publishers charge for access to real news,
then what we are left with by default is the fake "news" that is so cheap to
produce that it can be ad supported (or serves some other end that makes it
worthwhile).

------
mncharity
The report aspires to the NYT becoming an "authoritative, clarifying and vital
destination".

I'd like that. But it's not clear to me that they realize how badly they are
currently failing at it.

Over the holidays, the PBS Newshour did a "free energy from water!" story.
Really. And then apologized, saying they would review their news process. But
even then, it wasn't clear to me they realized just how brainlessly they had
f*ed up. The NYT usually manages to avoid such. And to spell names right.

But on topics I know about, NYT coverage often/usually manages to miss the
point. (And yet I keep going back, implicitly assuming their coverage of other
topics, that I know less about, is somehow less bad. Somebody-or-other's
fallacy.) There are more ways to "get it badly wrong", than to merely fail
fact-checking.

And then there's the old concept of news. Report the trivia of what happened
yesterday, and if you're lucky, use it as a "hook" to squeeze in an inch or
two aimed at providing context and understanding. From scratch each time,
because you can't count on any one reader having previously encountered it.

Authoritative? Clarifying? Well, they manage to be less bad at these than many
other venues. But that's a very low bar.

The report says "We have developed one of the most civil and successful
comment sections in the news business". Talk about low bars. "but we still
don’t do nearly enough to allow our readers to have these interactions."
Interactions... not say, opportunity to lend us a clue.

I was wondering over the holidays whether to get a NYT subscription. And then
hit another article that was "well, sort of..., but no" getting it wrong, and
gave up. News coverage, from every venue I know about, is just startlingly
bad. Which makes "committed to holding powerful people and institutions
accountable" a nice idea, but largely unimplemented.

NYT search... "groupthink trump": 17 hits (hmm, I expected more). "groupthink
tpp": 0. ""regulatory capture"": 2 hits in all of 2016. Sigh.

------
gh1
Only 37 % of NYT readers access the paper from the home page. The rest are
coming from search, social media etc. [0] While I see a possibility of
converting the first segment (37 %) into subscription paying users, I am
curious about what they are doing to convert the rest?

[0] (As of 2015) [https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-
Challeng...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-
Challenges/dp/1784534161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484688819&sr=8-1&keywords=innovators+in+digital+news)

------
ozten
News is now Global and readers are transient and not loyal.

Brave should take it's micropayments wallet model, but dumb it down and sign a
business deal with all major news papers.

You pay $10 per month and get access to all of the news papers. Brave divides
the royalties based on your reading habits.

Benefits:

* Easy for consumers to understand

* Easy for news orgs to understand

* Bitcoins and wallet hidden from mainstream

* Proves Brave wallet technology for wider adoption

~~~
ghaff
It's been tried with magazines, e.g. Texture. My library lets me read some
magazines through Zinio. So forms of such services exist but they're pretty
niche.

~~~
ozten
It's a good point. An all you can eat Comic reader is somewhat niche, but I
wonder if news isn't a more mainstream market.

Currently, Brave's wallet tries to "boil the ocean", but a more focused
vertical seems more tractable.

~~~
BrendanEich
Hi Austin! We are in beta, and not ocean-boiling. Our plan does not require
publishers to agree before they start getting revenue shares in escrow.

That's part of the plan, because it turns out to be hard to get agreements
inked and signed. Even at larger scale (we're growing), getting pubs to agree
is not easy or quick. As always when bringing up a new protocol, Metcalfe's
Law is a pain. So we decouple and start sending money first. Money always
helps.

We are talking to publishers from big to small, and we have verified ~120
publishers as domain owners, with 70 already having filed the W-9 or W-8BEN
(if overseas) form.

------
gist
> The report, Mr. Leonhardt said, was written for The Times newsroom, but it
> could end up providing guidance for other news organizations facing similar
> challenges. The company is also releasing the report publicly.

This is so non business like (and the way things seem to be in today's day and
age). You take your hard work and give it away for free to your competition.
Now you could argue that if others do the same it's good for you in some way
(more people who buy print papers means more business for all print papers)
but for some reason I don't think that's the case.

Remembering all of the free publicity that newspapers gave the Internet back
in the mid 90's and further down. Not realizing exactly how that would impact
their business model and not seeing it as a threat in any way.

~~~
spyspy
The NYT website has been online since 1996. You can't say they didn't see the
significance.

------
noobermin
One possible outcome is more than one NYT, for the laid off workers to join
some other organization and make it better, I suppose. I think it's very
possible a few of those who just contribute "low-value line editing" would do
much more if they were just given the chance.

------
asimpletune
The NYT have conducted internal investigations like this on a few occasions in
my memory. I don't have specific examples right in front of me, but I vaguely
recall reading of several other major internal reviews, all of them with the
intention of being 100% honest, no matter what they uncover, to be sure, since
2007. Interestingly, I can't think of a single time where the conclusion was
simply the quality of their editorial discretion, i.e. stories they cover,
resisting telling a story according to an already familiar, established
narrative, etc.

Many people on HN are probably familiar with a similar design pattern: hiring
consultants to either a.) tell you something you already know or b.) support a
competing position with data points from an outside source. In fact, I vaguely
recall the outcome of these internal investigations being something to the
effect of needing to ramp up in the digital age with more multi-media, fancier
toys, and things of that nature.

I would argue that just as necessary as streamlining the editorial process to
compete with online-only new sources, like Buzz Feed, would be to understand
their major failings and differentiate themselves from their competitors by
owning up to them with action. I'm in no way an expert on the subject, just a
reader like anyone else, but off the top of my head I can remember the
misreporting of the evidence behind the need to invade Iraq, and failing to
report NSA mass-surveilinance before George Bush's reelection - the same
revelations that came back years later from Snowden (along with more).

Granted, they did own up to these failings, and others no doubt, but what
editorial changes have been made? Why aren't the actual people who choose what
news gets reported and how the facts are presented ever included as part of
the outcomes of these reports? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's for
the same reason as when a consultant is brought on to figure out how to tease
out data points in support of justifying some new (and bold) initiative to,
say, dockerize a division's infrastructure vs. actually getting to the bottom
of why the reliable tooling of yesteryear are slowing development and
deployment down. You get praise for doing things, and so you pay someone to
give you a path towards justifying that. In many cases, I see a parallel
between the reporters who lead this investigation and the ones from the NYT
who are out there working in the field: to them the truth is all the news
that's fit for their editors to print.

~~~
hackuser
> Many people on HN are probably familiar with a similar design pattern:
> hiring consultants ...

The two major reviews I'm aware of, including this one, were conducted
internally.

~~~
asimpletune
> The two major reviews I'm aware of, including this one, were conducted
> internally.

Good point, I wasn't very clear. For what it's worth, I know that they're
exactly the same, but I should have pointed that wasn't the main thrust of my
point. I was trying more to say "Hiring people to tell you what you want to
hear". Probably not the most helpful analogy in retrospect.

I should point out now that I don't disagree with their conclusions either,
but was arguing rather that they could have been made more comprehensive by
examining the editorial discretion.

------
hackuser
> The New York Times has deftly adapted to the demands of digital journalism

EDIT: And from the report itself: [0]

> The Times employs the finest staff of journalists in the world

> [Elsewhere in the report, in case you forgot:] Our staff is made up of the
> world’s best journalists

> We have defined multimedia storytelling for the news industry and
> established ourselves as the clear leader. Yet despite our excellence ...

> The print version of The New York Times remains a daily marvel

> We continue to be the most influential news organization in the country

First, I'm not a hater: I think the NY Times is one of the more important
institutions in the world and read it daily.

IMHO they have been dragged into the digital age kicking and screaming, and
their execution has been barely adequate to keep afloat. Financially, they've
been cutting staff. Their digital products are clearly the product of old-
school newspaper people trying to adapt their product to a web browser and to
claim cred by doing some clever tech that has little impact or value (such as
'Snowcrash').

Look at their homepage: Does it look like, A) Any digital-native news site
you've seen? B) Something optimized for the user and interface? Or C) Is it an
old paper layout adapted to digital. (Answer: C). Look at their branding, the
typeface: Overdone custom typefaces may have been a symbol of status and
resources when printing presses were used, but now anyone can make a typeface
on my laptop. The branding says loudly _We have come to you from the world of
paper_. If someone used that typeface for anything else on the web, it would
look bizarre; I can imagine the HN response. When the NY Times gets rid of
that typeface, I'll believe they are all in for digital and aren't just trying
to adapt. (EDIT: They even say it themselves in the report: _Our largely
print-centric strategy, while highly successful, has kept us from building a
sufficiently successful digital presence and attracting new audiences for our
features content_ ; but then still can't let go: _We need to reduce the
dominant role that the print newspaper still plays in our organization and
rhythms, while making the print paper even better._ )

Finally, I fear the NYT suffers from narcissism, similar to the U.S.
President-elect. This report (see the quotes above) and prior internal reports
I've read (very few, a small sample) repeated many times how the NYT is the
greatest. These reports aren't for marketing purposes, but for internal
consumption. I'd be worried if I saw that in my organization. Narcissists are
fragile; they keep telling themselves how great they are because they can't
handle reality.

EDIT: A few edits after I read the report

\----

[0]
[https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/](https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/)

~~~
_rpd
> Their digital products are clearly the product of old-school newspaper
> people trying to adapt their product to a web browser

I think by far their main concern is how to get people to pay for reading
their digital product in the same way that people pay to read their paper
product.

Given that every one else on the digital spectrum that extends down to 'random
blog page' gets paid zero or near zero for their writing (interesting
exceptions aside), making your web site look like something that people
currently pay for seems like a good idea to me.

