THE Journalism
That Stands Apart
REPORT OF THE 2020 GROUP JANUARY 2017
This is a vital moment in the life of
The New York Times. Journalists across
the organization are hungry to make change a reality, and we have new leaders
ready to push us forward. Most important, The Times is uniquely well positioned
to take advantage of today’s changing media landscape — but also vulnerable to
decline if we do not transform ourselves quickly.
While the past two years have been a time of
significant innovation, the pace must accelerate. Too often, digital progress has been accomplished through
workarounds; now we must tear apart the barriers. We must differentiate between
mission and tradition: what we do because it’s essential to our values and what
we do because we’ve always done it.
The New York Times has staked its future on being a
destination for readers — an authoritative, clarifying and vital destination.
These qualities have long prompted people to subscribe to our expertly curated
print newspaper. Today,
they also lead people to devote valuable space on their smartphone’s homescreen
to our app, to seek us out on social media amid the cacophony and to subscribe to
our newsletters and briefings.
We are, in
the simplest terms, a subscription-first business.
Our focus on subscribers sets us apart in crucial ways from many other media
organizations. We are not
trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them. We are
not trying to win a pageviews arms race. We believe that the more sound
business strategy for The Times is to provide journalism so strong that several
million people around the world are willing to pay for it. Of course, this
strategy is also deeply in tune with our longtime values. Our incentives point
us toward journalistic excellence.
And our strategy is working. The Times is unrivaled
in its investment in original, quality journalism. In 2016, our
journalists filed from more than 150 countries —
nearly 80 percent of all countries on the planet. No newsroom in the world
has more journalists who can code. We remain the employer of choice for top
journalists, receiving job queries from our peers at other leading publications
every week and hiring many of the field’s most creative, distinguished people.
Most
important, our readers pay us the highest compliments: They are willing to give
us both their time and their money.
The Times is by far the most cited news publisher by other media organizations,
the most discussed on Twitter and the most searched on Google. Thanks to our journalism, our
digital revenue towers above that of any news competitor. Recent media accounts
have made clear the gap: Last year, The Times brought in almost $500 million in
purely digital revenue, which is far more than the digital revenues reported by
many other leading publications (including BuzzFeed, The Guardian and The
Washington Post) — combined.
Our
digital-subscription revenue also continues to grow at a strong pace, while
revenue from digital advertising is growing in spite of the long-term shift of
ad dollars to platforms like Google and Facebook. In the third quarter of 2016,
our digital subscriptions grew at the fastest pace since the launch of the pay
model in 2011 — and growth then exceeded that pace during the fourth quarter,
in a postelection surge. We now have more than 1.5 million digital-only
subscriptions, up from one million a year ago and from zero only six years ago.
We also have more than one million print subscriptions, and our readers are
receiving a product better than it has ever been, with rich new standalone
sections.
Yet to continue succeeding — to continue providing
journalism that stands apart and to create an ever-more-appealing destination —
we need to change. Indeed, we need to change even more rapidly than we have
been changing.
Why must we change? Because our ambitions are grand: to prove
that there is a digital model for original, time-consuming, boots-on-the-ground,
expert reporting that the world needs.
For all the progress we
have made, we still have not built a digital business large enough on its own
to support a newsroom that can fulfill our ambitions. To secure our future, we
need to expand substantially our number of subscribers by 2020.
As Dean wrote to the newsroom, when explaining
Project 2020, “Make no mistake, this is the only way to protect our
journalistic ambitions. To do nothing, or to be timid in imagining the future,
would mean being left behind.” There are many once-mighty companies
that believed their history of success would inevitably protect them from
technological change, only to be done in by their complacency.
Our focus on
subscribers stems from a challenge confronting us: the weakness in the markets
for print advertising and traditional forms of digital-display advertising. But
by focusing on subscribers, The Times will also maintain a stronger advertising
business than many other publications. Advertisers crave engagement: readers
who linger on content and who return repeatedly. Thanks to the strength and
innovation of our journalism — not just major investigative work and dispatches
from around the world but also interactive graphics, virtual reality and
Emmy-winning videos that redefine storytelling — The Times attracts an audience
that advertisers want to reach.
A year ago, in the “Our Path Forward” document, the company announced its intention
to double its digital revenue by 2020, to $800 million. The center of this strategy is increasing our
digital subscriptions. Doing so requires our news report and newsroom to
move past many habits that are holding us back.
These
realities led to the creation of the 2020 group. Our seven members have spent
the past year working closely with newsroom leaders; conducting hundreds of
conversations with Times journalists and with outsiders; studying reader
behavior and focus groups; and conducting a written survey of the newsroom. (An
appendix contains excerpts from the survey responses.)
Our group is the heir to the Innovation
Committee, whose 2014 report and
related work changed the culture of the newsroom. But 2020 has been different
from the Innovation Committee in two important respects.
First, we
have had the benefit of working closely with Times leadership over the past
year to begin implementing changes. As a result, this report is not intended to
be the detailed guide for change that the Innovation Report was. Many of the
changes we advocate are
already well underway. The details will continue to
come from Dean, Joe and the rest of the leadership. This report is instead a
statement of principles, priorities and goals — a guide to help members of the
newsroom understand more fully the direction that The Times is moving and to
play an even bigger role in making that change happen.
Second, the 2020 group was charged with questioning
the assumption behind the very first sentence of the Innovation Report: “The
New York Times is winning at journalism” We are indeed winning, but not at a
scale sufficient to achieve the company’s goals or sustain our cherished
newsroom operations.
We have not yet created a news report that takes
full advantage of all the storytelling tools at our disposal and, in the
process, does the best possible job of speaking to our potential audience. More of our journalism needs to
match what a large and growing number of curious and sophisticated readers have
told us they value most — distinctive journalism, in a comfortable form, that
expands their understanding of the world and helps them navigate it. Our
work too often instead reflects conventions built up over many decades, when we
spoke to our readers once a day, when we cultivated an aura of detachment from
them and when by far our most powerful tool was the written word. To keep our current readers and
attract new ones we must more often apply Times values to the new forms of
journalism now available to us.
For The
Times to become an even more attractive destination to readers — and to
maintain and strengthen its position in the years ahead — three broad areas of
change are necessary. Our report must change. Our staff must change. And the
way we work must change.
Our report
The Times publishes about 200 pieces of journalism
every day. This number typically includes some of the best work published
anywhere. It also includes too many stories that lack significant impact or
audience — that do not help make The Times a valuable destination.
What kinds of stories? Incremental news stories
that are little different from what can be found in the freely available
competition. Features and columns with little urgency. Stories written in a
dense, institutional language that fails to clarify important subjects and
feels alien to younger readers. A long string of text, when a photograph, video
or chart would be more eloquent.
We devote a
large amount of resources to stories that relatively few people read. Except in
some mission-driven areas or in areas where evidence suggests that the articles
have disproportionate value to subscribers, there is little justification for
this. It wastes time — of reporters, backfielders, copy editors, photo editors
and others — and dilutes our report.
The most poorly read stories, it turns out, are
often the most “dutiful” — incremental pieces, typically with minimal added
context, without visuals and largely undifferentiated from the competition.
They frequently do not clear the bar of journalism worth paying for, because
similar versions are available free elsewhere.
Our
journalism must change to match, and anticipate, the habits, needs and desires
of our readers, present and future. We need a report that even more people
consider an indispensable destination, worthy of their time every day and of
their subscription dollars. Specifically:
1. The report needs to become more visual.
The Times has an unparalleled reputation for
excellence in visual journalism. We have defined multimedia storytelling for
the news industry and established ourselves as the clear leader. Yet despite
our excellence, not enough of our report uses digital storytelling tools that
allow for richer and more engaging journalism. Too much of our daily report
remains dominated by long strings of text.
An example of the problem: When we ran a story in
2016 about the roiling debate over subway routes in New York, a reader mocked
us in the comments for not including a simple map of the train line at the
heart of the debate. Similarly, when we write about dance or art, our reporters
and critics are able to include video or photography but only in a limited way;
they lack the proper training to embed visuals contextually, and our content
management system, Scoop, makes the placement of visuals an afterthought. (The
advent of Oak, our new story creation tool in Scoop, is encouraging because it
is designed to address these problems.) The same issues apply to our critics
writing reviews on other topics, our sports reporters writing about
well-executed plays and our foreign correspondents trying to convey a sense of
place.
Reporters,
editors and critics are eager to make progress here, and we need to train and
empower them. “It’s sort of demoralizing to know that your story could be
stronger with the help of a graphic” one reporter told the 2020 group, “but to
also know that you will probably receive no help with it” To solve the problem,
we need to expand the number of visual experts who work at The Times and also
expand the number who are in leadership roles.
We also need to become more comfortable with our
photographers, videographers and graphics editors playing the primary role
covering some stories, rather than a secondary role. The excellent journalism
already being produced by these desks serves as a model.
Given our established excellence in this area,
creating a more visual daily report is an enormous opportunity.
2. Our written work should also use a more digitynative mix of journalistic forms.
We should embrace and expand new
storytelling forms, like the morning, evening and live briefings.
The daily
briefings are among the most successful products that The Times has launched in
recent years. They have a big, loyal audience, among both Times subscribers and
nonsubscribers. They also largely build on journalistic investments The Times
has already made. The briefings are in many ways a digital manifestation of a
daily newspaper: They take advantage of the available technology and our
curatorial judgment to explain the world to readers on a frequent, predictable
rhythm that matches the patterns of readers’ lives.
We need more innovations like the briefings.
We have
dozens of regularly appearing features built for the print edition but not
enough for a digital ecosystem. We need more journalistic forms that make The
Times a habit by frequently enlightening readers on major running stories,
through email newsletters, alerts, FAQs, scoreboards, audio, video and forms
yet to be invented.
These forms
are not only consistent with our readers’ habits, but they also naturally
encourage our journalists to use a less institutional and more conversational
writing style. Our journalists comfortably use this style on social media,
television and radio, and it is consistent with the lingua franca of the
Internet. One of its biggest advantages is that it can convey the
distinctiveness of The Times, making clear that we’re covering stories on the
ground and doing so with expert journalists. In our own report, however, we
still do not use this more approachable writing style often enough, and, when
we do, we too often equate it with the first-person voice. The Times has
rightly become more comfortable with the first person, but clear,
conversational writing does not depend on it.
One major problem is the bottlenecks that limit our
ability to launch new features, even when the tools already exist. A developer
in interactive news put it well: “We should be approaching the shape of our coverage with the same intent
that we bring to our formal newsgathering and reporting”
To be clear, The Times is making
progress in employing a richer, more digital mix of journalistic forms. The progress in audio, video and
virtual reality are obvious examples. But the overall pace should accelerate,
and more of our journalists should participate in the creative and production
process. The value of The New York Times does not depend on conveying
information in the forms that made the most sense for a print newspaper or for
desktop computers.
3. We
need a new approach to features and service journalism.
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. At the same time, we should make a small number of big
digital bets on areas where The Times has a competitive opportunity, the way we
did with Cooking and Watching.
The Times’s
current features strategy dates to the creation of new sections in the 1970s.
The driving force behind these sections, such as Living and Home, was a desire
to attract advertising. The main attractions for readers were our ability to
delight and to offer useful advice about what to cook, what to wear and what to
do. The strategy succeeded brilliantly.
Today, we
need a new strategy, both for traditional features (meant to delight and
inform) and for guidance (meant to be useful in tangible ways). Our approach
has kept us from building as large a digital presence as the Times brand and
journalistic quality make possible, and kept us from making our print sections
as imaginative, modern and relevant for readers as they could possibly be. To
be blunt, we have not yet been as ambitious or innovative as our predecessors
were in the 1970s.
Our readers are hungry for advice from The Times.
Too often, we don’t offer it, or offer it only in print-centric forms. Our
ability to collaborate with The Wirecutter,
the company’s newest acquisition,
and the advent of Smarter
Living are promising first steps in
rethinking The Times’s role as a guide, but we remain far from reaching our
potential here.
Well’s series
of guides expertly teach readers how to
do something new or improve their technique.
The audience and revenue goals laid out in “Our Path Forward” are highly ambitious. It is possible —
probable, in the view of 2020 — that The Times will not be able to meet them
simply by getting better at what we already do. In all likelihood, we will need
a modern version of the 1970s features expansion: devoting newsroom resources to new areas, primarily to
attract subscribers and engage new readers (which in turn will attract
advertisers). There would be nothing wrong or new about doing so. The success
of the 1970s features strategy helped The Times afford great investigative
journalism and foreign correspondents stationed around the world. The 1970s
features sections also produced troves of wonderful journalism on their own.
We expect that the bigger opportunities are in
providing guidance rather than traditional features. We can help people curate
the culture at a moment when the culture, from television and movies to fashion
and style, is changing.
As we expand service, however, we should not forget
traditional features. We
should continue producing trend pieces, profiles, essays and other journalism
that provides us a foundation of authority and are essential to our most loyal
readers.
4.
Our readers must become a bigger part
of our report.
The Times received nearly 6,000 responses from a call-out asking women from Saudi
Arabia about their lives, frustrations and ambitions.
Perhaps
nothing builds reader loyalty as much as engagement — the feeling of being part
of a community. And the readers of The New York Times are very much a
community. They want to talk with each other and learn from each other, not
only about food, books, travel, technology and crossword puzzles but about
politics and foreign affairs, too.
Our richest community engagement right now is
mainly in nooks and crannies of the site: the robust discussion of philosophers
on Opinion’s “The Stone” series;
the crossword fanatics on the Wordplay column; the stories of cancer survivors on
Well; or the helpful notes on Cooking’s best recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
We know from
research and anecdotes that readers value the limited opportunities we provide
to engage in discussion. “I have a friend who emails me every time The Times
approves one of her comments. It’s an accomplishment for her, akin to getting a
letter to the editor published,” wrote the author of a recent Columbia Journalism
Review story on commenting.
Asking
readers to invest their time on our platform creates a natural cycle of
loyalty. Network effects are the growth engine of every successful startup,
Facebook being the prime example. But the Times experience doesn’t get more
interesting or valuable as more of a reader’s friends, relatives and colleagues
use it. That must change.
Our staff
The Times
employs the
finest staff of journalists in the world and remains
the employer of choice for many top journalists. Much about our newsroom staff
must remain unchanged. We should continue to employ a healthy mix of
newshounds, wordsmiths and analysts. We should continue to place rigorous
editing at the heart of our journalism. We should continue to give journalists
the time and resources to pursue work that has real impact.
But
we also must change our staff, and not primarily for budget reasons. We must
align the skills of our journalists with the demands of our journalistic
ambitions. We need a staff that makes The Times even more of a reader
destination than it is today, able to attract a larger paying audience and able
to become an even more influential source of news and information.
Specifically:
5. The Times needs a major expansion of its
training operation, starting as soon as feasible.
The 2020 group’s survey of the newsroom uncovered a
deep desire among many reporters and editors to acquire new skills. They
understand that Times journalism has already changed and will need to change
even more. They want to play a bigger role in making that change happen. To do
so, they need new kinds of knowledge, so that they are able to create digitally
native journalism that meets Times standards of excellence.
Our newsroom training efforts have improved
markedly over the past year, but they need to expand further. One recently
hired reporter told us, “The ability to maneuver and be trained on different
platforms would be ideal,” adding that, “training is always haphazard.”
Our staff is made up of the world’s
best journalists. Training will allow them to combine their expertise and
knowledge with the powerful new storytelling tools at our disposal.
6. We need to accelerate the pace of hiring top
outside journalists.
We do not now have the right mix of skills in the
newsroom to carry out the ambitious plan for change. A few areas are especially
important: visual journalists; reporters who have both unmatched beat authority
and strong writing skills; and backfield editors with expertise in sharpening
ideas and shaping more analytical, conversational stories.
Above all, this new batch of talent must help us
move away from traditional, print-focused roles and toward new,
multimedia-focused roles, like senior visual journalists shaping both the form
and content of coverage. The
most high-priority hires should be those of creators, such as reporters,
graphics editors, photographers and others who make journalism. The hiring of
star backfielders, well suited to the digital age, is also crucial.
Some of our
hiring needs have nothing to do with new journalistic tools. They instead revolve around traditional beat
authority. In the past, it was acceptable for Times coverage to be merely solid
in some areas, so long as the total package was better than any other
publication’s. It no longer is acceptable. The Internet is brutal to mediocrity. When
journalists make mistakes, miss nuances or lack sharpness, they’re called out
quickly on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Free alternatives abound, often
reporting the same commoditized information. As a result, the returns to
expertise have risen.
]This new reality forces The Times to take a
clear-eyed look at the coverage of every subject that is central to our report
and to evaluate whether it is good enough. Put simply, is it so much better
than the competition’s coverage — which is largely free — that we can plausibly
ask readers to pay for our own?
In many
areas, the answer is yes; we employ journalists who are recognized leaders in
their field. No other media organization has a report that is nearly as strong
as ours overall. Yet we are not seeking merely to be better. We are seeking to
be so much better than the competition that The Times is a destination that
attracts several million paying subscribers.
In recent
years, the newsroom has hired about 70 new people a year, as part of normal
turnover to keep the newsroom population flat. In very rough terms, about half
of these hires have fallen into the categories with the most direct impact on
journalism: coverage leaders, reporters, videographers, graphics editors and
others. This pace needs to accelerate, even though doing so will increase the
need for newsroom turnover given budget realities. The 2020 group does not make
this recommendation lightly; we also believe it is among the most important
recommendations we are making.
7.
Diversity needs to be a top priority for our newsroom.
Increasing
the diversity of our newsroom – more people of color, more women, more people
from outside major metropolitan areas, more younger journalists and more
non-Americans – is critical to our ability to produce a richer and more
engaging report. It is also vital to our strategic ambitions. Expanding our
international audience and attracting more young readers, which will go a long
way toward determining whether The Times meets its audience goals, depend on
having a more diversified report and a more diverse staff.
Every open position is an opportunity to improve
diversity. We should make an extra effort to broaden our lens. We should also
think beyond recruiting — to career development — to ensure that we create paths
for people in a variety of personal situations, including parents. When big
news breaks or investigations are launched, the people running toward the
action and the people sitting around the table plotting coverage should reflect
the audience we seek.
The recent hiring of an
executive vice president for talent and inclusion creates an important
opportunity to make progress, because it can create processes to ensure greater
diversity. In addition, the Design, Product and Technology groups
recently took concrete steps to
make diversity a priority and have seen results. These efforts provide a model
for other parts of the organization.
8. We should rethink our approach to freelance work,
expanding it in some áreas and shrinking it in others.
Inside the
newsroom, we sometimes conflate Times quality with Times staff, but our readers
have a different view. If something appears in The New York Times, they see it
as Times quality (either positively or negatively). The best of that work
elevates The Times, and it’s often the quickest and most economical way to
reach new audiences or improve an aspect of our report.
Indeed,
freelance work is often among our best-read journalism, in both the newsroom
and in Opinion. The successes are easy to name:
Op-Eds, Op-Docs, book reviews, photography, pieces for the Magazine, Science,
Styles, Travel, Upshot, Well and elsewhere, as well as news dispatches that
fill crucial coverage needs. These are not merely isolated cases, either. On a per-dollar basis, our
freelance-written journalism attracts a larger audience on average than our
staff-written journalism.
Yet the
landscape is bifurcated. We also use contributors to provide obligatory
coverage that doesn’t resonate with readers and help to make The Times a
destination. Much of this work exists because of
print legacies or an aversion to relying on wire reporting even for dutiful,
incremental stories. We rely on stringers in every state and around the world
for routine coverage of stories that too often does not surpass the quality or
speed of the wires and that requires considerable effort editing and
coordinating.
We need to
be more creative, and ambitious, with the money spent each year on outside
contributors. But we should not conflate changing our freelance spending with
cutting it. When a newsroom budget is under pressure, freelance is often the
most obvious candidate for cuts. Taking an across-the-board approach now would
be a mistake. It is likely, in fact, that overall freelance spending should
increase. But parts of it should be eliminated, as part of a rigorous review.
The way we work
We should reorganize the newsroom to reflect our
digital present and future rather than our print legacy. The Times needs a
newsroom more nimble and better at taking risks than in the past. It needs to
take the notion of management more seriously and run itself less by gut
instinct.
We
have spent the last 20 years tinkering with organizational structures and
processes born of print demands. Even today, our operation is still largely a
reflection of the physical newspaper. It is time to become more aggressive.
Specifically:
9. Every department should have a clear vision that
is
well understood by its staff.
Our most
successful forays into digital journalism, from both existing departments and
new ones, have depended on distinct visions established by their leaders —
visions supported and shaped by the masthead, and enthusiastically shared by
the members of the department. The list includes Graphics, the Briefings,
Cooking, Well and others.
This isn’t
an accident. The rise of digital journalism has given us many more ways to tell
stories and to reach readers. But we need to make choices about what we’re
going to do and not do. We need to be more proactive than we were during the
decades of a stable, thriving print business.
These
departments with clear, widely understood missions remain unusual. Most Times
journalists cannot describe the vision or mission of their desks, and the
identities of those desks remain closely tied to eponymous print sections. Most
departments have not made clear decisions about who their primary audience is
and and which journalistic forms are a priority (and which are not). Many
people in the newsroom are hungry for such clarity and believe it will make
them more effective journalists.
The 2020 group believes that an effective vision spans
three main areas:
·
Journalism What will the team cover (and not cover), and
in what forms? How will it distinguish its coverage from competitors’ coverage?
·
Audience Who is the target
audience for each aspect of the team’s report? How will these audiences find
and experience the coverage, and what role will it play in making The Times a
habit? What does success look like, and how will departments know when they
have achieved it?
·
Operations What skills does the group need? What, for
instance, is the appropriate balance between reporters/content creators and
managers/editors? How will the group interact with the print hub and other
cross-department teams?
10.
We should set goals and track our progress toward them.
In a print era, when the newspaper business was
stable, the newsroom could do without tracking the success of individual
elements of the report — or the report as a whole. The excellence of the
overall bundle overshadowed specific deficiencies. And it was cumbersome to
quantify success. The Times continued to make money and to have a strong
reputation. That was enough.
But today
our business is changing rapidly. We have much better data than we once did.
And as strong as our reputation remains, our position in the market is under
attack.
Our management
practices, however, remain mostly unchanged. Much of the newsroom does not set
tangible goals, much less feel accountable for reaching goals. Even those with
some access to data are exposed to just a narrow slice of it (like pageviews
about individual articles via Stela), and they don’t know what success looks
like.
Multiple
people told the 2020 group that they were frustrated by a lack of understanding
and transparency about newsroom goals. One said: “I think people would
appreciate our willingness to try different things if they were allowed a
better understanding of why we’re trying something an alternate way and what we
hope to achieve.”
As we saw with Cooking, the mere exercise of
setting targets, even rough ones, can be a powerful focusing mechanism. It
allows for clear-eyed assessment of what is and is not working.
Ultimately,
goals will work only if they are coupled with accountability. The Times should
be more willing to expand teams that are thriving, to change course for teams
that don’t appear to have the right approach, to shift resources away from
teams that appear to be failing and to change leadership when appropriate.
We’re no longer in a period when most coverage leaders have the luxury of
“figuring it out” over multiple years.
11. We need to redefine success.
The newsroom has embraced data and analytics over
the past year, with positive effects. We now have a better sense for which of
our work resonates with readers and which does not. We’re producing more
resonant work, and we have largely resisted the lures of clickbait.
Now we need
to take the next steps. The newsroom needs a clearer understanding that
pageviews, while a meaningful yardstick, do not equal success. To repeat, The
Times is a subscription-first business; it is not trying to maximize pageviews.
The most successful and valuable stories are often not those that receive the
largest number of pageviews, despite widespread newsroom assumptions. A story
that receives 100,000 or 200,000 pageviews and makes readers feel as if they’re
getting reporting and insight that they can’t find anywhere else is more
valuable to The Times than a fun piece that goes viral and yet woos few if any
new subscribers.
The data and audience insights group, under Laura
Evans, is in the latter stages of creating a more sophisticated metric than
pageviews, one that tries to measure an article’s value to attracting and
retaining subscribers. This metric seems a promising alternative to pageviews.
Yet
the newsroom should also understand that no metric is perfect. To a significant
extent, we will need to rely on a mix of quantitative measures and qualitative
judgments when deciding which stories to do and to promote. Achieving the right
balance is tricky. We neither want to equate audience size with journalistic
value nor do we want to return to the days when we persuaded ourselves that a
piece of journalism was valuable for the mere reason that it appeared in The
New York Times.
12. We need a greater focus on conceptual,
front-end editing.
The 2020 group’s survey of the newsroom found that
many reporters wished their editors had more time to help them sharpen stories
in the early stages of reporting and writing. At the same time, many reporters,
and editors, believe The Times wastes time and resources on repeated
line-editing of individual stories, making changes of limited value.
The 2020 group believes strongly in the value of
copy-editing. There is a high price for easily identifiable errors, such as
spelling and grammar mistakes. An increase in such errors would send the wrong
message to readers — that our product is sloppy and lacks high value. When we publish sloppy stories,
readers complain to us in significant numbers. At the same time, The Times
spends too much time on low-value line-editing, such as the moving, unmoving
and removing of paragraphs, and too little on conceptual editing and story
sharpening, including on questions like what form a story should take. A shift
toward front-end editing will need to involve changes in multiple parts of the newsroom,
including the copy desk, the backfield and the masthead.
The Times
currently devotes too many resources to low-value editing — and, by extension,
too many to editing overall. Our journalism and our readers would be better
served if we instead placed an even higher priority on newsgathering in all of
its forms.
13. The newsroom and our product
teams should
work together more closely.
New products, like Watching, benefit from close collaboration across teams and
lead to new ways of presenting Times journalism.
For The Times to remain a destination — a high bar
in an age of social-media platforms — the experience of reading, watching and
listening to our work needs to be as compelling as the journalism itself.
Achieving this goal will be far easier if our journalists and our product teams
(comprising product managers, designers and developers) work more closely
together. We need both journalists and product specialists to understand reader
behavior, to develop a sharp view of the competition and to understand how
different areas of coverage fit into the broader Times experience.
Each group
needs a better understanding of what the other does. Despite great strides over
the past two years, many product teams don’t have a deep understanding of the
newsroom, including how we think about our coverage and how we do our jobs.
Much of the newsroom, similarly, doesn’t understand what the product teams do.
The central
flaw in the current setup is that the newsroom ends up focusing on short-term
problem solving (How do we make today’s report excellent?), while the product
teams focus on longer-term questions (What’s the best future news experience?).
Our editors still aren’t involved closely enough in thinking about how the
Times experience across different platforms should evolve, and our product
managers often aren’t aware of coverage priorities. The results can be
problematic. For example, the design and functionality of our homepage have
remained effectively static for the past decade.
A closer
working relationship would cause both the newsroom and the product teams to
function more effectively.
14.
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.
The print
version of The New York Times remains a daily marvel, beloved by a large number
of loyal readers. It is a curated version of our best stories, photography,
graphics and art.
But the newsroom’s current organization creates
dangers for the print newspaper — and is also holding back our ability to
create the best digital report. 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.
The print
hub made impressive strides in 2016, beginning to take over some functions from
departments while also creating a series of successful new print-only sections
and features. Progress in these directions needs to accelerate in the early
months of 2017, to ensure that the print hub becomes more autonomous. A Times
working group is examining how to continue improving the print newspaper,
building off the recent progress.
A more
muscular print hub will also allow for the creation of more subject-focused
newsroom teams, which can make our coverage more authoritative and
sophisticated and allow it to rise above the competition more often. Our big
news desks were built to fill sections in the print edition. As a result,
high-priority coverage areas are spread across multiple desks, diluting them and
limiting collaboration among journalists covering the same subjects. There is
not enough coordination among some Times journalists who cover similar beats,
and there is even less consideration about which audiences we’re targeting and
how they’re expected to consume our journalism. The pending creation of climate and gender teams is a step in the
right direction.
The idea that The Times must change can
seem daunting and counterintuitive.
We continue
to be the most influential news organization in the country, with a large and
growing group of loyal readers. But the notion of a changing New York Times is
not new. The institution’s great success over the past century has depended on
its ability to change.
The Times was once filled with
short, dry articles documenting incremental news in business and public life. As recently as the early 1980s,
our front page included 10 stories a day and a smattering of small
black-and-white photos. There was even a time when Times editors considered a
crossword puzzle to be beneath the institution’s dignity.
But as
readers’ habits and needs changed, The Times changed with them. Our values did
not change; our expression of them did. Previous generations of editors introduced
a magazine, a book review, readers’ letters, daily features sections and color
photography. The most recent manifestation of these changes is the creation of
a digital report, first on desktop computers and then on phones, that is widely
regarded as the world’s finest.
The digital revolution, however, has not stopped.
If anything, the changes in our readers’ habits — the ways that they receive
news and information and engage with the world — have accelerated in the last
several years. We must keep up with these changes.
The members
of the 2020 group have emerged from this process both optimistic and anxious.
We are optimistic, deeply so, because The Times is better positioned than any
other media organization to deliver the coverage that millions of people are
seeking.
The institution’s values are exactly right for the
moment. The strongest daily journalism, the meatiest enterprise, the
hardest-hitting investigations and the most useful and delightful features will
continue to make us stand out from the crowd. Thanks to our values and our
great strengths, The Times has the potential in coming years to become an even
stronger, larger, more influential news source.
But we must
not fall prey to wishful thinking and believe that such an outcome is inevitable.
It is not. We also face real challenges — journalism challenges and business
challenges. If we do not address them, we will give our competitors an
opportunity to overtake us. We will leave ourselves vulnerable to the same kind
of technology-related decline that has afflicted other long-successful
businesses, both inside and outside media.
The task
facing the leadership of The Times is more daunting than what those earlier
generations faced, because of the scope of the digital revolution. Yet the essential
challenge remains the same. We must be steadfast with our values and creative
in realizing them. We must act with urgency.
By David Leonhardt, Jodi Rudoren, Jon
Galinsky, Karron Skog, Marc Lacey, Tom Giratikanon and Tyson Evans.
Research and analysis contributed by Samarth
Bhaskar and Dan Gendler.
Newsroom
survey responses
The
2020 group conducted a newsroom survey last summer asking what the newsroom of
the future should look like. Nearly 200 people responded in writing, while
others met with members of our group in person. The following is a compilation
of responses that represents some of the strongest themes.
Reporting and writing
There was a broad consensus throughout
the responses that we are doing too many dutiful 800-word stories and that we
should do less coverage of incremental news. Many people said we should do more
profiles, investigations and long-form narratives, as well as quick explainers,
lists and live blogs. Quite a few editors said they would like to write
occasionally, and several reporters said they would appreciate a player-coach
model.
“The
800-word news story is the bread and butter of the print product, but time and
again we have seen studies (and can see in our own traffic statistics) that
those stories struggle mightily to perform well online. Everyone in the room
seems to know this, but we continue to produce them out of some rote allegiance
to a product that fewer and fewer people read.”
“I would like the burden of managing a coverage
area to be more on creating original work, less on covering all the bases.”
“I would love us to be more agile in how we chose
to report stories. A reporter in the field with a good sense of all the tools
available should be able to make the call over how best to tell the story, not
be in the middle of a live protest and have to call 5 different people and be
on three different email threads just to launch a Facebook Live or Snapchat
takeover from their phone.”
“There needs to be more versatility and movement.
Becoming an editor shouldn't mean the end of writing for strong reporters and
writers; and strong reporters and writers, especially with subject expertise,
should be encouraged to think of stories for others to write that they could
possibly edit or advise. Our structure and our approach (and hiring) should
encourage shared responsibility, not rigid roles and hierarchies.”
Editing
Reporters
said they wanted more helpful interaction with their editors at the outset;
less editing in the middle; and more attention to presentation and promotion.
There was much frustration about stories being held because of print
considerations. And several editors and reporters said they would like to see a
copy editing process that was more responsive to the complexity of the story
and the urgency of the news.
“Every story feels like a fire hydrant — it gets
passed from dog to dog, and no one can let it go by without changing a few
words.”
“We spend too little time thinking about how
stories will be told, which means we get too many stories that are middling in
every way. I’d like to see more time spent brainstorming and workshopping ideas
at the front end, and being more willing to kill ideas that don't rise to the
level of memorable.”
“Hire editors and reporters who don’t need to have
their hands held. Honestly, how can we still afford to have five editors
arguing for hours over a routine day story? The print mentality still rules the
newsroom, from the top down. But it is important to maintain the commitment to
copy editing, as it is essential to the quality of the journalism and the
reputation of the news site.”
“There is too much editing on the copy desks, where
editors are adhering to a style that is increasingly becoming far too rigid for
the Times.”
“Too often, on breaking, competitive stories, the
time from the reporter filing, to the slot publishing, is far too long. I get
the impression that the backfield and copy desk are overloaded and have trouble
prioritizing.”
“Most of the time, you time and edit
stories to print requirements, no matter what the official doctrine says. I've
had things hold for weeks while waiting for a print slot”
Visual journalism
Many people
said they were enthusiastic about the mandate to think more visually. But many
also said the obstacles to getting there were far too high, citing little or no
access to graphics editors or the video unit. Several people said they wished
they had the tools and ability to make simple graphics themselves.
“It is too hard for a reporter or editor to get
help on a special project. Each pod should have a graphics and/or interactives
point person. They should be involved with reporting from the beginning,
identifying which stories are ripe for media and using their knowledge to make
the most of a story.”
“Some of our visual work is too polished. Intimacy
and serendipity is a huge part of the internet. We currently don’t have the
editorial courage to pull that lever.”
“I’m a reporter and I have almost never spoken to a
video person.”
“A friend at BuzzFeed has told me that he
effectively has to argue FOR a traditional story format, rather than for
non-traditional formats. In his context, all formats are effectively equal, and
all need to be justified as useful. I do not propose we emulate BuzzFeed (Times
readers come to us for specific reasons, obviously), but forcing us to justify
traditional stories could make us re-think how we use non-traditional formats.”
“If every desk had someone who could produce a
nimble graphic, and people didn’t need special ‘keys’ to make a simple chart or
a map, we could get a lot more done. It’s sort of demoralizing to know that
your story could be stronger with the help of a graphic, but to also know that
you will probably receive no help with it”
Conversational
tone
There
was quite a bit of ambivalence about changing the tone or sensibility of
writing. Some were eager to try new voice and forms but weren’t quite sure how.
Others said they were stymied by the backfield or copy desk when they tried.
Others still felt we should be very cautious about making any such changes.
“In simple terms, we need less head
and more heart in our storytelling. Emotion is not something we tend to embrace,
and we should. It’s a major driver of loyalty. Of connection.... We write too
often in a male executive voice, which tends to push away many readers we
should be bringing close.”
“We frequently hear from the top editors at the
paper that they want more voice and less institutional-ese in our stories. But
typically when you try to make the prose more playful or engaging in a news
story, or just generally inject a bit more personality, the copy desk is quick
to ferret it out, and it can be exhausting to push back on every single word or
phrase. If we’re going to loosen our style up a bit, the copy desk is going to
be the key swing demographic.”
“We really get nailed in a way that other
publications do not when we’re wrong or even just a little tonally false.
People hold us to higher expectations than other newspapers or Web sites, with
an almost visceral sense of betrayal when we’re wrong. I think we’ve chosen to
go the route of a high-quality publication and standards are a big part of
that. We need editors to keep that quality up”
Newsroom organization
There was
wide agreement that separating print production is crucial to fostering change
in the newsroom. There was little consensus, however, on structure. Lack of
collaboration among the desks was a top complaint. Several people advocated for
less rigid lines between being an editor and reporter.
“We should experiment with more hybrid jobs, in
which reporters edit and editors write, as is done at many other news
organizations — flatten the org chart, encourage collegiality, diversify skill
sets, vary how people spend their days.”
“The Times still suffers from a drastic lack of
teamwork, camaraderie and coordination between desks and reporters for
different desks.”
“How do we find a way for reporters to work with
more and different kinds of editors to learn more skills? Also, how do we make
it easier for reporters to write across the paper? We are encouraged to do
this, but in practice it’s really hard and weird.”
“I believe every editor must be directly ordered to
think beyond his or her desk, must be evaluated on how collaborative they are
(based on interviews or assessments by their peers on other desks) and must be
penalized when they play keep-away with stories.”
“I would like to report to an enterprise editor who
has the authority to offer my work to the department where the story best fits.
I can see this working for a variety of topics, such as immigration, drugs, etc
“
Hiring, training and development
Several respondents said they were
frustrated by a lack of transparency in the hiring process, as well as a lack
of diversity (in race, gender and experience) in top positions. Some said they
had received little or no training in their years at The Times and saw too few
opportunities for career development.
“The Times should invest more in
career planning, and should do more to not only hire people of color or people
who aren’t from the usual talent pipelines but also help them with mentorship
and career advancement”
“We need more diversity at the top, in the
traditional sense and in the sense of diversity of skills. There are too many
people at the top who are reporters or former reporters — and that’s just one
set of skills. Production and administration skills are essential, and should
be more fully represented at the top”
“I think it's really important to do a better job
of communicating general strategy with regards to our audience with the entire
newsroom (alerts, scheduling things for morning publication, homepage play,
liveblogging, Listys, mobile presentation, etc.). For the past year or two,
I’ve sensed a lot of frustration with our ever-changing direction — but, I
don’t think that’s purely a product of the experimentation, I think people
would appreciate our willingness to try different things if they were allowed a
better understanding of why we’re trying something an alternate way and what we
hope to achieve”
“The ability to maneuver and be trained on
different platforms would be ideal. The Times, unlike other places, does a
great job of mixing things up and changing the jobs/positions of people so they
do not get bored and always have a fresh take. But from what I can tell (I’m
still pretty new) the people don't get a huge say in where they may end up and
training is always haphazard”
“Leaders should be held accountable for stated priorities, whatever they
are. We focus on external metrics, but no one is saying ‘your desk needs to
have striking visuals in 40 percent of its stories next month’ and demanding accountability”
