New York Times Study Calls for Rapid Change in Newsroom
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
However I think there's a gap here to do something radically different, global and paid for with subscriptions (from those who broadcast and companies who want aggregate data about fashion trends for example, or weather reports based on individuals reporting it).
If you want 10 shallow disconnected sources of information from the fringes then that works.
If you want someone who knows where to go, who to talk to, and how to actually build out a story then you still need journalists.
Context and commitment and a large amount of original data is important in understanding information and people on the ground provide that (even if sometimes their view is limited, sometimes amongst them you'd find the best person to write the story of x). There are of course big problems with this flood of information, but it is now there (instantly, from anywhere on the globe), and it wasn't before. That changes everything.
I do think there is value in having all that information, of course you still require a separate level of aggregation, analysis and perhaps narrative (Who will provide that? I think there is the opportunity), but the OP was talking about getting the data, that's now easy, the hard part is making sense of the firehose of data, which traditional journalism is ill-equipped to do given its emphasis on owning the story and speed to press.
There is value in constructing a narrative based on the facts but the old business models of a news factory which 'makes news' and gets it to the public first in order to sell advertising are irrevocably gone now, they just haven't realised they are obsolete yet, and are scrabbling around for ways to adapt their old news-gathering infrastructure to this new world.
Is that why I see numerous people live blogging every city council meeting or random discussion forum on a possible new law?
Yeah, 20k people will post that they're at the inauguration and thought that X had an ugly dress or Y looked unhappy... but that's hardly useful.
And facts are tricky things. They can be easily manipulated, either by the people in the 'photo' or by the person who took it.
Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content.
[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
The Brave browser is trying to integrate micropayments into the browser. It blocks ads by default and pays websites directly out of a monthly amount that the user configures.
https://brave.com/publishers.html
Flattr tries to do a very similar thing even earlier, except you have to click the "Flattr" button on websites that you visit that you want to fund. But still works with the same model where you set yourself a monthly budget and the system pays content producers directly for you.
I realize not everybody would take advantage, but I certainly think it's worthwhile to integrate to supplement revenue.
You can theorize it might work, but has an enormous activation energy, but it's hard to move past that theorizing without a few dozen million dollars for marketing. Most things easier than that have been tried.
The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. But then again, if you've already consumed it, then you're too late to decide if it's worth reading or not.
This is why reputation is important in journalism. If you step back and think about it, your sense of "quality" depends 99% on what other people think. I'm not insulting you, this is how it works. People have better things to do than sitting around reading every single article to figure out if it's high quality or not, and that's why most people regardless of intelligence rely on reputation to judge quality.
That's why the successful model will be building a news organization with high reputation. That's what people actually want (so they don't have to waste time trying to decide what to trust or not) and that's what makes sense for the organizations financially. That's why the micropayment model will never replace the subscription model and increasingly so.
If you read my comment above, that's basically what I'm saying. You are delegating your quality judgment to Blendle, so you are not paying for quality articles "regardless of where they come from". You are paying for quality articles that Blendle sent you. You know it's worth your time to go through the list because you trust Blendle's reputation.
Like say, being awkward to set up with normal payment processors. Things like taxes and fees mean that genuinely 'cheap' articles (read, a couple of dollars or less) are prohibitively awkward or expensive to set up.
They also don't have popular appeal as a concept, since free competition is just too high. Yeah, some people will pay for 'quality'. But a lot of people will just find free alternatives regardless of how accurate or well written the content is. Or if they're like a lot of people now, they'll write off the sources charging for content as 'fake news' and 'propaganda'.
And it also doesn't really fix the clickbait issue. It makes it slightly less convenient for some people (since you can't trick the 1% of people that see through your shoddy reporting any more), but most people just want content based on their own biases. Even when the content is something they're paying for.
I mean, look at a print newspaper if you need proof of that. Over here in the UK, questionable quality tabloids and gossip rags like the Sun and the Daily Mail sell a whole lot better than the likes of the Telegraph or Guardian. If micro payments caught on as a concept, I suspect the same thing would happen there. People would buy poor quality articles that support their own views and don't challenge any of their beliefs.
In general, I don't think people like being nickel & dimed, and that's basically what micro payments are. Subscriptions allow one to rationalize the price upfront, then consume without concern. This appeals to heavy consumers, consumers who overestimate their usage, as well as consumers who don't want to think about each purchase.
There would need to be a large enough category of people who would be willing to buy a few articles per month, but not want a subscription. And that would need to generate a large enough profit beyond paying for the micro payments implementation, support, etc.
By and large, it seems that once you get to $1+ per unit cost, people are willing to put at least a modicum of thought into whether they want to buy/rent something. For a long period, people had no problem renting a film (or going to a theater) for $5 or so. There wasn't a lot of demand for unlimited passes. (Of course, now we have Netflix as well.)
I suspect it's the literal nickel and dime-ing that's the problem. It's too small a transaction to want to fuss with. Think if you had to go through some sort of transaction process every time you flipped on a light switch (which is pay-as-you-go but the financial transaction is largely opaque). And I strongly suspect that, at the end of the day, the dollar amounts involved just wouldn't be large enough to be interesting.
I work at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is doing a lot of work in this area; the Digital News Project reports are interesting: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/page/digital-news-...
I've recently authored one of these reports looking specifically at digital-born news media in Europe, which is particularly focused on the diversity of non-advertising focused news business models.
EDIT: What about micropayments?
(See this comment for more on the subject
The first is traditional public service broadcasting (such as the BBC, or the German ARD). As these are funded by a compulsory public levy, they don't need either advertising or subscriptions, and have no need to exclude using a paywall. This model adapts from television to Internet news very well.
The second is something donation-based. Some organisations are trying to fund reporting using either public donations (e.g. Krautreporter), foundation support (e.g. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), or a mixture (e.g. Correctiv). It's difficult to scale, though.
Blendle [1]? I guess it depends on how you define 'work'.
In Italy, the leftist newspaper il manifesto basically rebooted around this concept, although they still have a printed edition. They dramatically lowered costs (also shedding quite a bit of personnel) and now survive relatively well, but the numbers are far from replacement - they still sell 7 physical copies for each digital one, digital subscriptions are pretty stable, and their paper numbers are crashing in the same way as all other newspapers.
Digital models have higher margins but clearly they cannot reach the same amount of people as traditional models yet, and don't fully compensate the inevitable death of paper.
e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/why-i-will-not-ca...
exposed here http://www.redstate.com/mickeywhite2/2016/12/16/new-york-tim...
e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-i...
exposed here http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/220635/why-did-the-new-york-...
I won't make a big list, and it seems are subjects are somewhat partisan, my comment here is not. What I mean to say is that rumor is equally at home on the NYT website as anywhere else.
I'd like to see your defense of the claim you're implying, which is that the New York Times publishes mere "rumor and falsehoods" with anything approaching the frequency of Breitbart, Fox News, or even CNN.
And while a news outlet surely should have some standards regarding the factual assertions made in the editorials they publish, a few highly debatable distortions is not the same thing as running an entire news outlet largely on misinformation masquerading as news.
I made a fantastic return betting against The Upshot.
No, you'd walk away much more angry about all kinds of things, including Hillary's satanic rituals and pizza parlour pedophile ring, but still be very confused.
Baring one thing. Who your next president is. And who says that's not due to a lot of very confused people?
I read the Times every day but I have no illusion about its editorial slant; however it is starting to seem to me that many Fox News viewers know more about the Times than the Times readers know about Fox News because Times readers believe everything negative they have heard about Fox News without actually watching it.
Fox News viewers are consistently the least-well-informed of Americans in surveys. It would be difficult to dismiss that fact as simple coincidence.
Except he's not. Krugman is no longer an economist, he's a commentator. And with that comes his slant. From the "Mises Wiki" [1]
The Economist cites critics of Krugman stating that "his relentless partisanship is getting in the way of his argument". In addition, a website (titled "Lying in Ponds") that tracks partisanship among public intellectuals rated Krugman second in the overall partisan slant of his columns, behind only Ann Coulter ... The Economist magazine supported the finding, noting the vast majority of Krugman's columns feature attacks on Republicans and almost none criticize Democrats, making him "a sort of ivory-tower folk-hero of the American left
As he moved from Nobel-winning economist to the political realm, he also left behind many of his economically sound ideas. For example [2]
Would cutting the minimum wage raise employment? - New York Times, Dec 16, 2009
...the belief that lower wages would raise overall employment rests on a
fallacy of composition. In reality, reducing wages would at best do nothing
for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.
Stanford University economist Paul Krugman, however, said raising the
minimum wage and lowering barriers to union organization would carry a
trade-off --- increased unemployment.
It turns out that there's a strong correlation between budget deficits
and interest rates - namely, when deficits are high, interest rates are
low ... On reflection, it's obvious why...
But we're looking at a fiscal crisis that will drive interest rates
sky-high. A leading economist recently summed up one reason why:
"When the government reduces saving by running a budget deficit,
the interest rate rises."[1] The site isn't working for me, so I can't get a link
[2] http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/06/paul_krugman...
Consider the recent misleading article about economists' feelings about market-based education. Scott Alexander points out what it seems to me can only be a deliberately-engineered effort to mislead:
By leaving it at “only a third of economists support vouchers”, the article implies that there is an economic consensus against the policy. Heck, it more than implies it – its title is “Free Market For Education: Economists Generally Don’t Buy It”. But its own source suggests that, of economists who have an opinion, a large majority are pro-voucher.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/30/contra-nyt-on-economist...
I might be with you if your claim was just that the New York Times sometimes exhibits a liberal slant. And your citation would provide a perfectly defensible case in point. But to defend the claim that the New York Times is in the same league as Breitbart? Absurd.
But I don't have the time to do that. And frankly, I don't have to in order to make a "meaningful comparison." I read the New York Times (and a few other outlets) every day, so I have a good sense of how much nonsense they publish. (I admit that I probably don't detect all of it, but I also don't read it completely uncritically.) And while I don't read/watch Fox News or Breitbart regularly, I look at them from time to time. One doesn't need to resort to quantification to see the difference.
If it were a close question it might be necessary to have a more robust methodology. But it isn't. Fox News, and especially Bretibart, are clearly much much worse.
Furthermore, what about Trumps oft repeated claims of "losing so many friends on 9/11" and after pressed, decided to not ever mention it again. Perhaps not stolen valor but stolen sympathy nonetheless.
I acknowledge they are op-ed and opinion pieces.
I don't have the wherewithall to do massive in-depth research on the subject.
They also printed this letter by Putin: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...
Doesn't mean they endorse the letter and it's content.
And it seems like it would be wrong for them to be editing the content.
By leaving it at “only a third of economists support vouchers”, the article implies that there is an economic consensus against the policy. Heck, it more than implies it – its title is “Free Market For Education: Economists Generally Don’t Buy It”. But its own source suggests that, of economists who have an opinion, a large majority are pro-voucher.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/30/contra-nyt-on-economist...
But I still do appreciate their journalism. Unlike some journalism outfits they do seem to try to get it right.
All "news" is fake to some degree or another, it is a fantasy to think otherwise.
You can allow for nuance and uncertainty without using faith-based logic for news, science does a pretty good job of it and gives a good framework for best-guess judgements.
Just because everything is "fake" to some extent doesn't excuse lazy, confirmation-biased opinions.
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
You can see this reflected in some new design decisions. On the front page, some stories have a bulleted list of points rather than multiple paragraphs for the teaser. And at the top of some stories, they have a bulleted list of main points
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.
Personally, I used the cardboard VR thing with my iPhone 6 to watch a short during the election. I was underwhelmed by the experience.
Seems that as VR becomes more accessible it would be a phenomenal way at delivering news and in-depth stories. VR can do a lot in the way of empathy and communicating things which the printed word—or even 2D video—never can. Similar to how the television influenced the standard news cycle and social media challenged it further.
Some of the best news stories from this year have been immersive 360 videos published by The Times, imo.
This kind of study is essentially a recommendation for layoffs in the newsroom and investments in other areas. Having worked at 3 magazines, I don't personally believe the current VR market is big enough to be a viable source of persistent and growing revenue for them to pay salaries. I do think there is an opportunity on long-term, expensive-to-produce feature stories where VR is offered more as a package deal to an advertiser rather than the sole output format of the report. That aligns an advertiser with innovation, even if those that actually experience it is statistically small. But those types of sales deals are expensive tactical one-offs, not strategic plans. Not yet, anyway.
Here's an example: http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-s...
You either start experimenting and learning and adapt to the new medium or you'll be replaced by someone else who will.
But all that aside, recreating print on the web isn't an answer, in my opinion. Leveraging what makes the platform unique[0] will be what ultimately separates some of the billions (trillions?) of written words on the web.
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
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).
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.
> “I have found myself so exhausted, literally sitting in someone’s driveway, door open, and I’ll wake up and say, ‘Where the hell am I?’” he said. “I fell asleep right in my car. It might be 30 seconds and it might be 10 minutes.”
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?
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.
> “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?
If you want to read gloom-and-doom about the newspaper industry there is plenty of that too.
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.
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.
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.... 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.
Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs...
Also, their back of the envelope calculations were done presuming that a Kindle cost $359.
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.
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).
Just a brainstorm, but perhaps this is a problem Facebook as the power to address? They want to get into providing content, and they have the resources.
And not to toot my own horn here, but I work for a mid-sized library (metro of about 200,000) and we subscribe to every regional newspaper. If someone wants to be better informed, the resources exist.
Since you decided to toot, you open yourself to questions: Can local citizens read those newspapers online? Traveling to a building and reading yesterday's news on paper is not realistic and at this point it's an anachronism.
But to answer your direct question, no, they cannot. Our local paper is fairly stubborn about its monitization (refusing to digitize back issues in major library databases such as Proquest), so I'm not optimistic.
A critical problem. The focus needs to be on providing 'real' news more than dealing with the fake stuff. Also consider:
1) Probably the vast majority of people online and who will be online, including in many poor countries, cannot afford a NY Times subscription. People who through the miracle of the Internet would now have access to objective, top-notch news coverage will now be shut out.
2) Parties who want to spread propaganda are the ones who would be willing to finance free publications.
3) Will the NY Times be part of the online conversation if only a small subset of the online population can read it?
I don't know a better way for them to fund themselves, but it's a serious blow to the public and their knowledge of the world.
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.
[0] (As of 2015) https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-Challeng...
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
Currently, Brave's wallet tries to "boil the ocean", but a more focused vertical seems more tractable.
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.
We are going to add "Patreon-style" pinned support options, also we'll make Patreon and YouTube account holder payable, not just domain owners. Still in beta, and your "dumb it down" advice is good. Onward!
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.