Leaked NYT innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
The New York Times remains a newspaper with a website attached. It is optimized for:
- one distribution channel (newsstands / deliveries)
- one format (big sheets of paper)
- one consumption pattern (peruse the current edition, then throw it away)
- one production pattern (professional journalists)
- one means of attracting eyeballs (the front page / home page)
The digital folk are enormously frustrated. They know they could do so much better, if the organisation would get behind them. Time after time, they miss opportunities to:
- repackage old content that remains relevant, or becomes relevant again
- promote curated collections of material
- monitor the "online impact" of stories
- take advantage of user-generated content
- and so on...
So they get their lunch stolen by the likes of the Huffington Post.
The infrastructure and processes are also lacking. There are too many one-offs and "just make it work now" hacks, and material is not tagged properly.
that being people are no longer stuck with a news and opinion source which does not appeal to them, either intellectually or politically.
It doesn't matter how well you package it, if the customer doesn't like the message putting flowers on it won't make it more appealing to them
Think there will be and need to be a place for traditional type of journalism with more materials based on critical thinking. It just may not need to be on print media anymore.
The aggregation of other people's content and shameless attention grab can only last so long and it doesn't build toward any credible production of original content. Its primary purpose is to kill boredom and create marketing buzz. Shitty content may appeal to more people these days, just like Bieber might sell more records but there will always be room for quality content and engaging dialogues in this world. The challenge is all about finding a new medium and tending the old flames in a new form.
But the point the report was making was that HP et al repackaged NYT content and did better with it than the NYT did themselves.
In this case it is explicitly the packaging that matters.
I think it's more accurate to say that the internal culture at the NYT is fragmented - there's a portion that either is or wants to be digital-first, and a portion that still doesn't understand that.
Furthermore, they are dealing with existing infrastructure and organizational structures that were originally optimized for a print-first business model, so the inertial "default" ends up being biased slightly towards print-first.
That said, this is the same shift that all of the traditional "old media" establishments have to make. Most (if not all) of the companies that the Times is being compared to in that document were created in the digital era (Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Gawker, etc.)[0].
I'd still say that the NYTimes has made the "new media shift far better than any of the other traditional, "old media" establishments. Perhaps all of those publications will end up failing - it's certainly possible. But if any succeed, my money would be on the Times.
[0] Also, as pointed out elsewhere, they all are primarily resellers of content, as opposed to companies that primarily generate their own content. They are also certainly not known for the quality of their own original journalism the way to the extent the Times is.
Reasoning - Businessinsider.com, buzzfeed.com & huffingtonpost.com are loaded with aggregated content. Not all of it is great, often it is old news or a meme from 3 months ago.
But, every piece of content is carefully designed and crafted to produce as many clicks as possible. It's laughable at times how headlines are rewritten and sexed up to get you to click.
As soon as you realized that it's the same article you read 2 weeks ago on nytimes.com but with better images, a nice interactive chart and a youtube video you might feel bad for a second or two but the damage is done - product sold.
=== 7 NYTIMES Homepage Ideas ===
1) DESIGN:
Simpler - less noise - scannable (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/)
Too much noise on the homepage - yes we know you produce 25,000 articles everyday but we can't read all of it in 2 minutes - Make it easier to scan - my eyes should not be going left - right and up - down constantly.
2) HEADLINES -
Please make them more interesting - more to the point - shorter - Tell us what the article is really about - A/B test them live.
3) VIDEOS
More videos - not one-offs but branded segments with style and character and good production value - with an actual point of view or focus not some bland summary like "Ok this is what happened today in Washington ..." - we can get that anywhere.
The folks at theverge.com do a good job of that - please copy, adapt & iterate.
4) SECTIONS: Books,Music,TV,Restaurants
You can read a great book review on nytimes.com but you can't download a sample or add it to "Book to read later" list, or take any meaningful action on that book - fix it.
Same deal for movies, restaurants or TV shows. I'd suggest some integration with Netflix/Amazon/iTunes/Google/Spotify.
5) TRAVEL -
Again, great read but all you can do is save a link to that article for your next vacation -- not good enough.
Suggestion - mobile service/app/map integration that keeps track of those favorite reviews and notifies you, the next time you walk into that restaurant so you'll know what not order.
6) What do I want to read next ?
Articles read + (Netflix info + Amazon info + Spotify info + Other services/purchases) = ???
If you can data-mined at least some of that you could have a good enough answer most of the time.
7) KILL THE PAYWALL
For the overwhelming majority of users this is a big NO. As an added bonus to a Netflix or Amazon Prime subscription ... maybe.
BONUS: Better search & filtering -
The Times is still a great news site because of it's great reporting. And valuing great reporting is inherited from the paper newspaper days. But it would be amazing to see a company value great reporting while simultaneously seizing the ways the internet has improved our ability to communicate.
[1] http://www.buzzfeed.com/joelanderson/the-woman-who-kod-manny...
It was a shock to me when I heard this as well. But I've seen some of the work at Buzzfeed lately and they're even publishing strong cultural essays like this one: http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-...
Buzzfeed appears to be making a real go at the investigative journalism thing and it'll be interesting to see what they do.
They've mastered the art of selling a product (Journalism, faux or otherwise), now they're attempting to produce as much of it as they can.
They've also realized that there's a market for all sorts of it, from the low-brow click-bait up to the hard hitting investigative stuff and are attempting to fill all the slots.
The next decade (or just 2-4 years) is really going to be interesting.
Their only innovation, and the core of their value, is realizing that most publishers will not bother to sue them for republishing articles. As such they are able to "publish" (i.e. copy/paste) tremendous amounts of interesting content for almost no cost.
Of course it's not hard for HuffPo to compete against other publishers when HuffPo can use those publishers' content against them for free.
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?authuser=0&outp...
Scribd link to document: http://www.scribd.com/doc/224332847/NYT-Innovation-Report-20...
There is a real danger here that in the course of changing their looks they may lose their soul.
The report details specifically how the value of their content is being extracted by organizations with better products who beat them in all three areas.
This is a key point that needs to sink in at the nyt since they have avoided the iterative developement of new products due to an over reliance on inherit value of their content. I think if they simply hire the right talent in data, ux and machine learning they could begin to release a series of technologically exciting products which are powered by their exceptionally high quality content.
I have many friends in the NYT newsroom and am aware of how anti-innovative the legacy producers are -- I even sat with Bill Keller in 2010 trying pitch a multimedia production workflow.
The problem is the product people and the content people haven't really sat down and worked together to build a sustainably iterative production model.
Whether the choice to limit free access was a wise one is not for me to say and is something their business people will be more on top of.
(I realize that there are easy ways around the limit, but I haven't wanted to use them.)
David Leonhardt (of NYT's The Upshot) was on Charlie Rose the other night discussing the Times's approach to digital [1]. The leaked memo complements the interview nicely.
“When it takes 20 months to build one thing, your skill set becomes less about innovation and more about navigating bureaucracy. That means the longer you stay, the more you’re doubling down on staying even longer. But if there’s no leadership role to aspire to, staying too long becomes risky.”
There's been this change in US culture that provides a special aura to people who do nothing but write and speak. People who interact with physical things, and particularly machines, come to be seen as unclean.
With computers, you have to pay those people well and give them some authority so that they can do their jobs well. Socially, this does not play out well within traditional print organizations, in which the production side is invisible to the journalism side (the Times' manufacturing plant is not even close to its midtown office building), and the business side is ritualistically forbidden from contaminating the sacredness of the content side.
Stuff like labeling stories with appropriate metadata doesn't get done not because it's challenging (it's similar to slapping a Dewey Decimal code on a file folder and sticking it on there), but because writing an HTML element has the potential to make a religiously sacred 'writer' impure. A lot of print people see any sort of demand for learning technical skill as an insult, because technical knowledge is seen to be polluting.
Also you see a lot of knowledge silos in that report because it's clearly difficult for the organization to 'read' the skillsets of technical generalists.
We don't like to see it that way, but ordinary American business types see programmers as spiritually dirty people who do not deserve authority. At the Times in particular, business people are seen as particularly spiritually dirty, so much so that they must be literally segregated from the population of sacred scribes.
The change that the Times would need to make is less technological and more social: they would have to make coding not Haram anymore. That might be one reformation too many to ask for. This report is really good, but they would probably have to fire everyone over 40 to achieve its goals. Authority is zero sum, and asking the entire leadership to devolve authority is not likely to have a positive outcome.
There are a number of aspects of this:
• But the payor will determine the content: actually a problem of the present system.
As Jacob Nielsen noted in 1998:
"Ultimately, those who pay for something control it. Currently, most websites that don't sell things are funded by advertising. Thus, they will be controlled by advertisers and will become less and less useful to the users."
• The message is determined by the payment medium: a fundamental statement of the physics, if you will, of creative activities.
• Estimating the size of the syndicate
Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart[1] , the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways, but even with a few powers of two in either direction, it seems generally reasonable.
Phil Hunt's Broadband Tax / Content Compensation Fund proposal, and the Rent-Seeking Economy: http://redd.it/1vknhc
My own Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication: http://redd.it/1uotb3
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Notes:
I can't afford that. $35 a month for news is tooo much.
The format of the timesmachine might not be the best. It would be better to isolate articles and put them in a modern format.
Published articles at least through the early 20th century are indexed, typically with the lede paragraph or sentence. I'd love to have more, but that's a start.
https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
GNU Affero Licence, on GitHub:
Let's start with this: be hyper-local. I should be able to easily plan a trip and tour to New York without ever leaving the NYT website. I should be able to know every single Broadway and off-Broadway play that will be running when I get there and be able to get tickets NOW.
Reporting: How about being actively antagonistic toward government? How about real, hard-hitting government coverage? How about tracing every single dollar, favor, and deal until the politicians don't just hate you, but actively FEAR you.
Editorial: how about some informed opinion pieces? How about starting to peel apart complex topics in multiple parts and report TRUTH rather than both sides?
Gee, you know, that sounds like a ... newspaper. Shame this country doesn't actually have one anymore.
Sure, the NYT gets their lunch stolen, but mostly by one offs.
An aggregate of clever obits. A repackaging of Nelson Mandela's death. Could you predict those IN ADVANCE? Doubtful. Chasing them is like saying "We need to create Gangnam Style". Great. But it isn't going to happen.
I do not think it is relevant for them to cover everything in american towns even if most of their reader are in USA. Local newspapers are the ones who should do that. They cannot cover everything without expanding greatly their number of journalists. And I do not think they have the resources for that.
The times needs the government officials just as much as the officials need the times. Its a delicate dance and you can't just burn bridges.
Noble goals but come on.
> Editorial: how about some informed opinion pieces? How about starting to peel apart complex topics in multiple parts and report TRUTH?
Literally what Fox news believers say about the times.
So I won't cry for their decay and downfall. They've been shooting themselves in the foot for the past decade anyway, by relinquishing their integrity and becoming more and more like the other corporate media entities.
A worthwhile read!