11 ms·

New York Times Study Calls for Rapid Change in Newsroom

116 points by anjalik 10y ago

swampthinker 10y ago
To be honest, I never appreciated the scale of the NYT until I read those revenue numbers. $500 million in digital media revenue is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder if at some point in the future, there will be a reaction to this push for a subscription-based news model. Perhaps a website who's value proposition is that it only focuses on news, with no clickbait articles and titles.
- secabeen 10y ago
  The challenge there is to build up the infrastructure to do so. Real news gathering takes staff in offices around the world, relationships with residents and officials, etc. etc. Otherwise, all you end up being is an AP feed.
  - grey-area 10y ago
    Traditional news-gathering certainly did, but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. The current system is of course doomed... 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).
    - serge2k 10y ago
      > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket 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.
      - grey-area 10y ago
        Journalism, in spite of protestations to the contrary, has too often been a shallow gloss on half-understood ideas and a rushed frenzy to be first to print - to parachute in a correspondent to an unknown city/culture/subculture and expect them to understand it and not impose their prejudices on it while writing a story under time pressure is really expecting too much, and the results are often anything but insightful. The time pressure also regularly results in breathless stories without context and incomplete timelines with no closure and no revisiting the topic after the storm has passed. We can do better. 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.
    - MBCook 10y ago
      > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. 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.
    - jrockway 10y ago
      News and investigative journalism are two different things. If you want some barely-discernable pictures of what the cops are up to in some neighborhood, the citizens with cameraphone model works fine. But there is more than just reporting single facts, sometimes you have to chain a bunch of information together to build a worthwhile story. I think that's what professional journalists are focusing on. When the NYT figured out that Trump wasn't paying any taxes, they didn't go find someone on Twitter that took a picture of him not paying any taxes. They had to dig through thousands of pages of boring legal documents to figure it out. That's a full-time job, not really something a lot of hobbyists are going to get into.
      - hackuser 10y ago
        > But there is more than just reporting single facts ... And facts are tricky things. They can be easily manipulated, either by the people in the 'photo' or by the person who took it.
- rjtavares 10y ago
  I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.
  - lbotos 10y ago
    In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?
    - Eridrus 10y ago
      Iirc Blendle let's you ask for a refund after you finish reading.
    - rjtavares 10y ago
      Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality movies or books before I pay for them.
  - ttcbj 10y ago
    Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time. 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-million-1201397.php http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
    - noobermin 10y ago
      Are there any other stories about micropayments? I keep hearing how micropayments are going to change the internet, but here we are years later and no such service seems to be getting notability.
- pmyteh 10y ago
  There are a few subscription-based news models which run like this. Mediapart in France is one of the most prominent: hard news values, subscription-only, online. 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-project 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.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Has anyone found a way to finance serious news that is both sustainable and open. I fear the subscription model limits the best, 'real' news to the few who can and will pay for it, and keeps that news out of the online conversation. EDIT: What about micropayments? (See this comment for more on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 )
    - pmyteh 10y ago
      Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). For serious, sustainable and open [edit: and not ad-supported: some are trying to get that to work sustainably for serious news], there are two models out there: 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.
      - Fnoord 10y ago
        > Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). Blendle [1]? I guess it depends on how you define 'work'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- pm90 10y ago
  I'm a loyal NYT subscriber and I've suggested to them that I would be most willing to pay more for my subscription if they could please remove all ads. Did not get a response from them though.
kyleschiller 10y ago
Yeah, this absolutely feels like a case where content is driven by business model as much as the technology itself. Going subscription-first and focusing on quality content makes sense if you're trying to differentiate yourself. The concern, of course, is that subscription baiting is just one step removed from click baiting. It certainly cuts out the worst offenders, but there will always be pressure for media companies to cater to their audience.
slowm5 10y ago
sub based news model? pass. cant even read this article without paying.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
The NYT is just can't shake the negative influence of their printing legacy with respect to their strategy. The article quotes them as saying "Our future is much more digital than print". Are you kidding me, they still have to say things like this? Of course the $1B in non-digital revenue is important and needs a steady hand to maximize it's contribution. However their digital strategies have been so simplistic, so old fashioned, they just can't seem to catch up to what they really need to do.
- spyspy 10y ago
  And what do they really need to do?
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    For starters, the leadership has very little experience in innovating with tech product or business models. http://nytco.com/executives http://nytco.com/executives. Another example is they claim reader engagement is important yet have made almost no progress on this front. Most articles don't even allow community comments. Rather than complaining about the quality of internet comments, they could use their influence to embrace new techniques that raise the bar for discourse. Their selling of subscriptions is a mess. First the cheapest sub is $200/yr. They need to segment further and offer something at the psychologically important barrier of $9.95/month. This new tier could be made compelling with cannibalizing higher tiers. The sell screen is a mess: https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.html 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.
- mratzloff 10y ago
  Can you describe what you mean by simplistic and old fashioned in more detail?
jdlyga 10y ago
The most important area to focus on is accuracy. There's a huge prevailence of rumors masquerading as news. Plus, there's an entire political party who's base has lost faith in the mainstream media. If the NYT starts taking shortcuts, they will fall into a dangerous trap and will lose a lot of readers.
- jdlyga 10y ago
  *rumors masquerading as news on other sites, not NYT
  - SixSigma 10y ago
    The op-ed and opinion pages of the NYT have their fair share of rumor & falsehoods e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/why-i-will-not-cast-my-electoral-vote-for-donald-trump.html 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-times-publish-fake-news-faithless-elector/ http://www.redstate.com/mickeywhite2/2016/12/16/new-york-tim... e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-in-the-age-of-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-i... exposed here http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/220635/why-did-the-new-york-times-publish-fake-news-about-trump-zionism-and-alan-dershowitz 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.
    - spyspy 10y ago
      Those are both opinion pieces, not NYT journalism proper.
    - pdabbadabba 10y ago
      Really? Equally? 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.
gist 10y ago
> The report, Mr. Leonhardt said, was written for The Times newsroom, but it could end up providing guidance for other news organizations facing similar challenges. The company is also releasing the report publicly. This is so non business like (and the way things seem to be in today's day and age). You take your hard work and give it away for free to your competition. Now you could argue that if others do the same it's good for you in some way (more people who buy print papers means more business for all print papers) but for some reason I don't think that's the case. Remembering all of the free publicity that newspapers gave the Internet back in the mid 90's and further down. Not realizing exactly how that would impact their business model and not seeing it as a threat in any way.
- spyspy 10y ago
  The NYT website has been online since 1996. You can't say they didn't see the significance.
- camus2 10y ago
  This report is obviously PR for the NYT. It's not some trade secret they need to keep under wraps.
psadri 10y ago
Would poorer people have access to non-fake news? Or would they be force to read/consume fake-but-free news?
- jmcgough 10y ago
  The larger problem is that many people can't differentiate between the two, and will be drawn to fake news if the message appeals to them (confirmation bias).
  - psadri 10y ago
    Agree with you observation. I think this just makes things even worse. Real news cost $ to produce. If publishers charge for access to real news, then what we are left with by default is the fake "news" that is so cheap to produce that it can be ad supported (or serves some other end that makes it worthwhile).
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  This strikes me as a return to the world as it was. The world of "free content" is a relatively new one, 20 years or so? Before that, you paid for a paper if you wanted one. Of course, before that you didn't have "free fake" news available so readily. 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.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > 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.
cJ0th 10y ago
My take away from this article is that they acknowledge that a lot of trouble lies ahead. Ironically, they don't have the courage to state their current state in a more factual manner. Instead they offer some vague statements and occasionally some outdated PR-speak > “The world is changing really rapidly,” David Leonhardt, a columnist who led the group’s work, said in an interview. “We have to keep up, and even get ahead of it.” > In a note to the newsroom, Mr. Baquet and Joe Kahn, The Times’s managing editor, endorsed the group’s recommendations, saying they outlined an “opportunity we have to produce an even more vital, more authoritative, more indispensable[0]’’ news report. Wouldn't it be a great ad for their product if they were demonstrating that it is possible for the Times to even report about themselves in a blunt, factual manner? While some admissions are there the overall article is quite humble-bragish. [0] more indispensable - what does that even mean?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  The Times is one of the most successful papers at weathering the digital transition. As more people get their news online it's the handful of mega-papers that profit at the expense of local and regional ones. If you want to read gloom-and-doom about the newspaper industry there is plenty of that too.
pgrote 10y ago
The internal report itself is interesting for a few reasons: https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ 1) The graphic on top doesn't show a laptop or desktop. 2) " On a per-dollar basis, our freelance-written journalism attracts a larger audience on average than our staff-written journalism." Wow. Hopefully, they have automated internal metrics to track this. 3) " Today, department heads and other coverage leaders must organize much of their day around print rhythms even as they find themselves gravitating toward digital journalism. The current setup is holding back our ability to make further digital changes, and it is also starting to rob the print newspaper of the attention it needs to become even better." Until the focus is changed to digital first, I am unsure how much more they can grow. I still marvel at how it is cheaper for me to get a NY Times Sunday paper delivery with digital access halfway across the country than it is for me to get just the digital access. lol
- stuckagain 10y ago
  Re: 2, Does the freelance-written material attract more readers, cost less, or both? The statements in the report are ambiguous.
  - pfranz 10y ago
    If you drop all staff writers, what's your differentiator (I guess, maybe in editorial)? Assuming what they're saying is true, could staff writers be a loss-leader to keep that brand and core audience used to reach the wider readers?
- scott_s 10y ago
  On point 1, editors at the NYT have previously said publicly that mobile is how they envision readers will primarily consume stories. (I heard this from their Inside The Times podcasts.) It may have been been executive editor Dean Baquet who said this. I believe they said that their internal metrics show mobile already is how most people consume their stories. 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
jordanlev 10y ago
This is anecdotal, but just today I cancelled my print subscription to the NYTimes because they kept messing up the delivery (not showing up, going to the wrong house)... and every time I contacted their customer service reps (who were obviously outsourced) they had absolutely no power to do anything about it. I wonder how much the simple things like "taking care of your customers" factors into their business struggles. (Probably "not much", but just seemed strange to me that they'd drop the ball like that for honest-to-goodness paying customers).
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >but just seemed so strange to me that they'd drop the ball so much on the kind of customer they should be very much desiring Don't get me wrong, I'd have done the same, but: What makes you think you're such a desirable customer? What sort of effort did you put into solving the problem? I can easily imagine a scenario where the delivery guy is so far removed form the news business (doesn't care a wink), that it would be night impossible to ensure the paper "gets there" without incurring costs beyond your subscription fee and satisfaction. This is reality.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    RE: delivery: You get what the company pays for. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/01/09/delivering-paper-long-hours-low-pay-vacation/QrIavPpVa8QIi3B2Iz7B4N/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/01/09/delivering-pape... > “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.”
  - jordanlev 10y ago
    I was a desirable customer because I was paying for their most expensive offering (delivery of the print paper, as opposed to just digital access). And I'm baffled by the rest of your response... What sort of effort am I supposed to put into solving their logistics problem?? Other than repeatedly telling their customer service people about the issue, how or why would I investigate any further? (Honestly I would have loved to get in touch with the actual delivery company in my area to ask them if they have the wrong address or can't find the house or something... but this is one of the many ways in which the customer service reps could not help me because they either didn't know or wouldn't tell me who the delivery company was!) I think perhaps you misunderstood what I wrote or think I'm actually a delivery person?
erickhill 10y ago
>The report coincides with a series of broader changes at The Times, including a reimagining of the print newspaper; an aggressive international expansion; a heightened emphasis on graphics, video, virtual reality and podcasts; the $30-million purchase... God, please no. Don't invest heavily in VR for news reporting. I agree with reducing multiple layers of copy editing for a digitally focused company, but VR is a misdirection of funds to get the facts straight. Or, maybe that was just a buzzword that didn't get edited out of the final press release.
- giggles_giggles 10y ago
  An investment in VR might be premature because of the immaturity of the technology, but assuming that VR tech does grow to be commonplace, wouldn't e.g. immersive VR video shot in a warzone be more affecting than still images or 2D video when communicating the scale of atrocity/warfare/protests to the viewers back home?
  - scott_s 10y ago
    That's actually one of their current VR stories. "The Fight for Falluja": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/14/magazine/fight-for-falluja-vr.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/14/magazine/figh... Personally, I used the cardboard VR thing with my iPhone 6 to watch a short during the election. I was underwhelmed by the experience.
- scott_s 10y ago
  No, I believe that's a real thing. I've heard them talk about investing in VR on their Inside The Times podcast.
- tannerc 10y ago
  Why discount VR so readily? 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.
noobermin 10y ago
One possible outcome is more than one NYT, for the laid off workers to join some other organization and make it better, I suppose. I think it's very possible a few of those who just contribute "low-value line editing" would do much more if they were just given the chance.
dinkumthinkum 10y ago
This report started well before the real meat of the recent election and I think it really shows some lack of appreciation of what's become pretty clear in the last few months, is a rather spectacular failure of "the Web" and the ridiculously over-hyped "digital journalism" as means of providing people realistic information about people, events, policies and other things that fall under the umbrella of "news." As much as many of us have maligned newspapers as "legacy," "dead tree," or "rags," or as people that just don't "get" technology, all we have built, from news perspective, is a world wide network spreading silos of disinformation at the rate of terabytes of nonsense per day. I think if anything, for me, we have seen that the legacy dead tree rags are far more valuable to an individual, a nation, and really the world, than blog engines and social networks. Newspapers, as with anything, have their faults but are much more preferable to "choose your own propaganda" aggregators or Alex Jones meme factories. So, please, don't give the "visual storytellers" a "primary role." Let's get to real investigative journalism and journalism itself. It's not the medium; it's the content.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
An interesting contextual point from 2009 that highlights what an odd situation this is: Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-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.
subpixel 10y ago
I find it interesting that the report is full of renderings of NYTimes stories on phones. I wonder what the bounce rate is among mobile readers - that is, the percentage of readers who read less than 5% or so of a given news story. I suspect that it's very high. For me, it takes a significant chunk of radio-silence (that is, no calls, text, social media updates, app alerts, no need for map directions, etc.) combined with an equally significant amount of willpower (i.e. not proactively checking in on any of the above) to read an informative ~1000 word story on my phone. The NYTimes might be the highest quality content I skim online, but really, that's what I do 95% of the time at my desk and close to 100% on a mobile device: skim. I'm pretty sure devices that are concurrently in use for critical communication and/or work functions are awful places to try to engage readers and convey critical, often nuanced information. Print happens to be great for that. And while I'm not holding my breath, the fact that vinyl records are about to be a billion dollar industry does suggest that old good things can make a comeback.
- alfalfasprout 10y ago
  I subscribe to both the WSJ and NYT and find that my bounce rate is probably pretty high. But I tend to save articles that are interesting and I might want to read later on my device. I'll later read the article on my iPad or laptop. I can't stand reading a long piece on a small screen.
asimpletune 10y ago
The NYT have conducted internal investigations like this on a few occasions in my memory. I don't have specific examples right in front of me, but I vaguely recall reading of several other major internal reviews, all of them with the intention of being 100% honest, no matter what they uncover, to be sure, since 2007. Interestingly, I can't think of a single time where the conclusion was simply the quality of their editorial discretion, i.e. stories they cover, resisting telling a story according to an already familiar, established narrative, etc. Many people on HN are probably familiar with a similar design pattern: hiring consultants to either a.) tell you something you already know or b.) support a competing position with data points from an outside source. In fact, I vaguely recall the outcome of these internal investigations being something to the effect of needing to ramp up in the digital age with more multi-media, fancier toys, and things of that nature. I would argue that just as necessary as streamlining the editorial process to compete with online-only new sources, like Buzz Feed, would be to understand their major failings and differentiate themselves from their competitors by owning up to them with action. I'm in no way an expert on the subject, just a reader like anyone else, but off the top of my head I can remember the misreporting of the evidence behind the need to invade Iraq, and failing to report NSA mass-surveilinance before George Bush's reelection - the same revelations that came back years later from Snowden (along with more). Granted, they did own up to these failings, and others no doubt, but what editorial changes have been made? Why aren't the actual people who choose what news gets reported and how the facts are presented ever included as part of the outcomes of these reports? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's for the same reason as when a consultant is brought on to figure out how to tease out data points in support of justifying some new (and bold) initiative to, say, dockerize a division's infrastructure vs. actually getting to the bottom of why the reliable tooling of yesteryear are slowing development and deployment down. You get praise for doing things, and so you pay someone to give you a path towards justifying that. In many cases, I see a parallel between the reporters who lead this investigation and the ones from the NYT who are out there working in the field: to them the truth is all the news that's fit for their editors to print.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > Many people on HN are probably familiar with a similar design pattern: hiring consultants ... The two major reviews I'm aware of, including this one, were conducted internally.
gh1 10y ago
Only 37 % of NYT readers access the paper from the home page. The rest are coming from search, social media etc. [0] While I see a possibility of converting the first segment (37 %) into subscription paying users, I am curious about what they are doing to convert the rest? [0] (As of 2015) https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-Challenges/dp/1784534161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484688819&sr=8-1&keywords=innovators+in+digital+news https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-Challeng...
hackuser 10y ago
> The New York Times has deftly adapted to the demands of digital journalism EDIT: And from the report itself: [0] > The Times employs the finest staff of journalists in the world > [Elsewhere in the report, in case you forgot:] Our staff is made up of the world’s best journalists > We have defined multimedia storytelling for the news industry and established ourselves as the clear leader. Yet despite our excellence ... > The print version of The New York Times remains a daily marvel > We continue to be the most influential news organization in the country First, I'm not a hater: I think the NY Times is one of the more important institutions in the world and read it daily. IMHO they have been dragged into the digital age kicking and screaming, and their execution has been barely adequate to keep afloat. Financially, they've been cutting staff. Their digital products are clearly the product of old-school newspaper people trying to adapt their product to a web browser and to claim cred by doing some clever tech that has little impact or value (such as 'Snowcrash'). Look at their homepage: Does it look like, A) Any digital-native news site you've seen? B) Something optimized for the user and interface? Or C) Is it an old paper layout adapted to digital. (Answer: C). Look at their branding, the typeface: Overdone custom typefaces may have been a symbol of status and resources when printing presses were used, but now anyone can make a typeface on my laptop. The branding says loudly We have come to you from the world of paper. If someone used that typeface for anything else on the web, it would look bizarre; I can imagine the HN response. When the NY Times gets rid of that typeface, I'll believe they are all in for digital and aren't just trying to adapt. (EDIT: They even say it themselves in the report: Our largely print-centric strategy, while highly successful, has kept us from building a sufficiently successful digital presence and attracting new audiences for our features content; but then still can't let go: We need to reduce the dominant role that the print newspaper still plays in our organization and rhythms, while making the print paper even better.) Finally, I fear the NYT suffers from narcissism, similar to the U.S. President-elect. This report (see the quotes above) and prior internal reports I've read (very few, a small sample) repeated many times how the NYT is the greatest. These reports aren't for marketing purposes, but for internal consumption. I'd be worried if I saw that in my organization. Narcissists are fragile; they keep telling themselves how great they are because they can't handle reality. EDIT: A few edits after I read the report ---- [0] https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/
WalterBright 10y ago
It'd be nice to see more of a focus on news rather than advocacy. I'll decide my own opinion.
ozten 10y ago
News is now Global and readers are transient and not loyal. Brave should take it's micropayments wallet model, but dumb it down and sign a business deal with all major news papers. You pay $10 per month and get access to all of the news papers. Brave divides the royalties based on your reading habits. Benefits: * Easy for consumers to understand * Easy for news orgs to understand * Bitcoins and wallet hidden from mainstream * Proves Brave wallet technology for wider adoption
- ghaff 10y ago
  It's been tried with magazines, e.g. Texture. My library lets me read some magazines through Zinio. So forms of such services exist but they're pretty niche.
  - ozten 10y ago
    It's a good point. An all you can eat Comic reader is somewhat niche, but I wonder if news isn't a more mainstream market. Currently, Brave's wallet tries to "boil the ocean", but a more focused vertical seems more tractable.
    - BrendanEich 10y ago
      Hi Austin! We are in beta, and not ocean-boiling. Our plan does not require publishers to agree before they start getting revenue shares in escrow. That's part of the plan, because it turns out to be hard to get agreements inked and signed. Even at larger scale (we're growing), getting pubs to agree is not easy or quick. As always when bringing up a new protocol, Metcalfe's Law is a pain. So we decouple and start sending money first. Money always helps. We are talking to publishers from big to small, and we have verified ~120 publishers as domain owners, with 70 already having filed the W-9 or W-8BEN (if overseas) form.
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  Hi again Ozten! Another quick reply (but see my first reply nested below): 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!
mncharity 10y ago
The report aspires to the NYT becoming an "authoritative, clarifying and vital destination". I'd like that. But it's not clear to me that they realize how badly they are currently failing at it. Over the holidays, the PBS Newshour did a "free energy from water!" story. Really. And then apologized, saying they would review their news process. But even then, it wasn't clear to me they realized just how brainlessly they had f*ed up. The NYT usually manages to avoid such. And to spell names right. But on topics I know about, NYT coverage often/usually manages to miss the point. (And yet I keep going back, implicitly assuming their coverage of other topics, that I know less about, is somehow less bad. Somebody-or-other's fallacy.) There are more ways to "get it badly wrong", than to merely fail fact-checking. And then there's the old concept of news. Report the trivia of what happened yesterday, and if you're lucky, use it as a "hook" to squeeze in an inch or two aimed at providing context and understanding. From scratch each time, because you can't count on any one reader having previously encountered it. Authoritative? Clarifying? Well, they manage to be less bad at these than many other venues. But that's a very low bar. The report says "We have developed one of the most civil and successful comment sections in the news business". Talk about low bars. "but we still don’t do nearly enough to allow our readers to have these interactions." Interactions... not say, opportunity to lend us a clue. I was wondering over the holidays whether to get a NYT subscription. And then hit another article that was "well, sort of..., but no" getting it wrong, and gave up. News coverage, from every venue I know about, is just startlingly bad. Which makes "committed to holding powerful people and institutions accountable" a nice idea, but largely unimplemented. NYT search... "groupthink trump": 17 hits (hmm, I expected more). "groupthink tpp": 0. ""regulatory capture"": 2 hits in all of 2016. Sigh.

116 points by anjalik 10y ago

To be honest, I never appreciated the scale of the NYT until I read those revenue numbers. $500 million in digital media revenue is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder if at some point in the future, there will be a reaction to this push for a subscription-based news model. Perhaps a website who's value proposition is that it only focuses on news, with no clickbait articles and titles.

secabeen 10y ago
The challenge there is to build up the infrastructure to do so. Real news gathering takes staff in offices around the world, relationships with residents and officials, etc. etc. Otherwise, all you end up being is an AP feed.
- grey-area 10y ago
  Traditional news-gathering certainly did, but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. The current system is of course doomed... 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).
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket 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.
    - grey-area 10y ago
      Journalism, in spite of protestations to the contrary, has too often been a shallow gloss on half-understood ideas and a rushed frenzy to be first to print - to parachute in a correspondent to an unknown city/culture/subculture and expect them to understand it and not impose their prejudices on it while writing a story under time pressure is really expecting too much, and the results are often anything but insightful. The time pressure also regularly results in breathless stories without context and incomplete timelines with no closure and no revisiting the topic after the storm has passed. We can do better. 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.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    > but that was in an age where every citizen didn't have an internet connected phone with a camera in their pocket. 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.
  - jrockway 10y ago
    News and investigative journalism are two different things. If you want some barely-discernable pictures of what the cops are up to in some neighborhood, the citizens with cameraphone model works fine. But there is more than just reporting single facts, sometimes you have to chain a bunch of information together to build a worthwhile story. I think that's what professional journalists are focusing on. When the NYT figured out that Trump wasn't paying any taxes, they didn't go find someone on Twitter that took a picture of him not paying any taxes. They had to dig through thousands of pages of boring legal documents to figure it out. That's a full-time job, not really something a lot of hobbyists are going to get into.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      > But there is more than just reporting single facts ... And facts are tricky things. They can be easily manipulated, either by the people in the 'photo' or by the person who took it.
rjtavares 10y ago
I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.
- lbotos 10y ago
  In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    Iirc Blendle let's you ask for a refund after you finish reading.
  - rjtavares 10y ago
    Quality of the publication/author, recomendations, and relevance of the subject matter. It's a proven model: it's the same way I determine quality movies or books before I pay for them.
- ttcbj 10y ago
  Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time. 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-million-1201397.php http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...
  - noobermin 10y ago
    Are there any other stories about micropayments? I keep hearing how micropayments are going to change the internet, but here we are years later and no such service seems to be getting notability.
pmyteh 10y ago
There are a few subscription-based news models which run like this. Mediapart in France is one of the most prominent: hard news values, subscription-only, online. 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-project 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.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Has anyone found a way to finance serious news that is both sustainable and open. I fear the subscription model limits the best, 'real' news to the few who can and will pay for it, and keeps that news out of the online conversation. EDIT: What about micropayments? (See this comment for more on the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13421905 )
  - pmyteh 10y ago
    Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). For serious, sustainable and open [edit: and not ad-supported: some are trying to get that to work sustainably for serious news], there are two models out there: 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.
    - Fnoord 10y ago
      > Nobody's made micropayments work (yet?). Blendle [1]? I guess it depends on how you define 'work'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
pm90 10y ago
I'm a loyal NYT subscriber and I've suggested to them that I would be most willing to pay more for my subscription if they could please remove all ads. Did not get a response from them though.

kyleschiller 10y ago

Yeah, this absolutely feels like a case where content is driven by business model as much as the technology itself. Going subscription-first and focusing on quality content makes sense if you're trying to differentiate yourself. The concern, of course, is that subscription baiting is just one step removed from click baiting. It certainly cuts out the worst offenders, but there will always be pressure for media companies to cater to their audience.

slowm5 10y ago

sub based news model? pass. cant even read this article without paying.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

The NYT is just can't shake the negative influence of their printing legacy with respect to their strategy. The article quotes them as saying "Our future is much more digital than print". Are you kidding me, they still have to say things like this? Of course the $1B in non-digital revenue is important and needs a steady hand to maximize it's contribution. However their digital strategies have been so simplistic, so old fashioned, they just can't seem to catch up to what they really need to do.

spyspy 10y ago
And what do they really need to do?
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  For starters, the leadership has very little experience in innovating with tech product or business models. http://nytco.com/executives http://nytco.com/executives. Another example is they claim reader engagement is important yet have made almost no progress on this front. Most articles don't even allow community comments. Rather than complaining about the quality of internet comments, they could use their influence to embrace new techniques that raise the bar for discourse. Their selling of subscriptions is a mess. First the cheapest sub is $200/yr. They need to segment further and offer something at the psychologically important barrier of $9.95/month. This new tier could be made compelling with cannibalizing higher tiers. The sell screen is a mess: https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8RX3Y.html 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.
mratzloff 10y ago
Can you describe what you mean by simplistic and old fashioned in more detail?

jdlyga 10y ago

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

jdlyga 10y ago
*rumors masquerading as news on other sites, not NYT
- SixSigma 10y ago
  The op-ed and opinion pages of the NYT have their fair share of rumor & falsehoods e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/why-i-will-not-cast-my-electoral-vote-for-donald-trump.html 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-times-publish-fake-news-faithless-elector/ http://www.redstate.com/mickeywhite2/2016/12/16/new-york-tim... e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-in-the-age-of-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-i... exposed here http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/220635/why-did-the-new-york-times-publish-fake-news-about-trump-zionism-and-alan-dershowitz 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.
  - spyspy 10y ago
    Those are both opinion pieces, not NYT journalism proper.
  - pdabbadabba 10y ago
    Really? Equally? 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.

gist 10y ago

> The report, Mr. Leonhardt said, was written for The Times newsroom, but it could end up providing guidance for other news organizations facing similar challenges. The company is also releasing the report publicly. This is so non business like (and the way things seem to be in today's day and age). You take your hard work and give it away for free to your competition. Now you could argue that if others do the same it's good for you in some way (more people who buy print papers means more business for all print papers) but for some reason I don't think that's the case. Remembering all of the free publicity that newspapers gave the Internet back in the mid 90's and further down. Not realizing exactly how that would impact their business model and not seeing it as a threat in any way.

spyspy 10y ago
The NYT website has been online since 1996. You can't say they didn't see the significance.
camus2 10y ago
This report is obviously PR for the NYT. It's not some trade secret they need to keep under wraps.

psadri 10y ago

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

jmcgough 10y ago
The larger problem is that many people can't differentiate between the two, and will be drawn to fake news if the message appeals to them (confirmation bias).
- psadri 10y ago
  Agree with you observation. I think this just makes things even worse. Real news cost $ to produce. If publishers charge for access to real news, then what we are left with by default is the fake "news" that is so cheap to produce that it can be ad supported (or serves some other end that makes it worthwhile).
stinkytaco 10y ago
This strikes me as a return to the world as it was. The world of "free content" is a relatively new one, 20 years or so? Before that, you paid for a paper if you wanted one. Of course, before that you didn't have "free fake" news available so readily. 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.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > 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.

cJ0th 10y ago

My take away from this article is that they acknowledge that a lot of trouble lies ahead. Ironically, they don't have the courage to state their current state in a more factual manner. Instead they offer some vague statements and occasionally some outdated PR-speak > “The world is changing really rapidly,” David Leonhardt, a columnist who led the group’s work, said in an interview. “We have to keep up, and even get ahead of it.” > In a note to the newsroom, Mr. Baquet and Joe Kahn, The Times’s managing editor, endorsed the group’s recommendations, saying they outlined an “opportunity we have to produce an even more vital, more authoritative, more indispensable[0]’’ news report. Wouldn't it be a great ad for their product if they were demonstrating that it is possible for the Times to even report about themselves in a blunt, factual manner? While some admissions are there the overall article is quite humble-bragish. [0] more indispensable - what does that even mean?

emodendroket 10y ago
The Times is one of the most successful papers at weathering the digital transition. As more people get their news online it's the handful of mega-papers that profit at the expense of local and regional ones. If you want to read gloom-and-doom about the newspaper industry there is plenty of that too.

pgrote 10y ago

The internal report itself is interesting for a few reasons: https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ 1) The graphic on top doesn't show a laptop or desktop. 2) " On a per-dollar basis, our freelance-written journalism attracts a larger audience on average than our staff-written journalism." Wow. Hopefully, they have automated internal metrics to track this. 3) " Today, department heads and other coverage leaders must organize much of their day around print rhythms even as they find themselves gravitating toward digital journalism. The current setup is holding back our ability to make further digital changes, and it is also starting to rob the print newspaper of the attention it needs to become even better." Until the focus is changed to digital first, I am unsure how much more they can grow. I still marvel at how it is cheaper for me to get a NY Times Sunday paper delivery with digital access halfway across the country than it is for me to get just the digital access. lol

stuckagain 10y ago
Re: 2, Does the freelance-written material attract more readers, cost less, or both? The statements in the report are ambiguous.
- pfranz 10y ago
  If you drop all staff writers, what's your differentiator (I guess, maybe in editorial)? Assuming what they're saying is true, could staff writers be a loss-leader to keep that brand and core audience used to reach the wider readers?
scott_s 10y ago
On point 1, editors at the NYT have previously said publicly that mobile is how they envision readers will primarily consume stories. (I heard this from their Inside The Times podcasts.) It may have been been executive editor Dean Baquet who said this. I believe they said that their internal metrics show mobile already is how most people consume their stories. 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

jordanlev 10y ago

This is anecdotal, but just today I cancelled my print subscription to the NYTimes because they kept messing up the delivery (not showing up, going to the wrong house)... and every time I contacted their customer service reps (who were obviously outsourced) they had absolutely no power to do anything about it. I wonder how much the simple things like "taking care of your customers" factors into their business struggles. (Probably "not much", but just seemed strange to me that they'd drop the ball like that for honest-to-goodness paying customers).

forgetsusername 10y ago
>but just seemed so strange to me that they'd drop the ball so much on the kind of customer they should be very much desiring Don't get me wrong, I'd have done the same, but: What makes you think you're such a desirable customer? What sort of effort did you put into solving the problem? I can easily imagine a scenario where the delivery guy is so far removed form the news business (doesn't care a wink), that it would be night impossible to ensure the paper "gets there" without incurring costs beyond your subscription fee and satisfaction. This is reality.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  RE: delivery: You get what the company pays for. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/01/09/delivering-paper-long-hours-low-pay-vacation/QrIavPpVa8QIi3B2Iz7B4N/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/01/09/delivering-pape... > “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.”
- jordanlev 10y ago
  I was a desirable customer because I was paying for their most expensive offering (delivery of the print paper, as opposed to just digital access). And I'm baffled by the rest of your response... What sort of effort am I supposed to put into solving their logistics problem?? Other than repeatedly telling their customer service people about the issue, how or why would I investigate any further? (Honestly I would have loved to get in touch with the actual delivery company in my area to ask them if they have the wrong address or can't find the house or something... but this is one of the many ways in which the customer service reps could not help me because they either didn't know or wouldn't tell me who the delivery company was!) I think perhaps you misunderstood what I wrote or think I'm actually a delivery person?

erickhill 10y ago

>The report coincides with a series of broader changes at The Times, including a reimagining of the print newspaper; an aggressive international expansion; a heightened emphasis on graphics, video, virtual reality and podcasts; the $30-million purchase... God, please no. Don't invest heavily in VR for news reporting. I agree with reducing multiple layers of copy editing for a digitally focused company, but VR is a misdirection of funds to get the facts straight. Or, maybe that was just a buzzword that didn't get edited out of the final press release.

giggles_giggles 10y ago
An investment in VR might be premature because of the immaturity of the technology, but assuming that VR tech does grow to be commonplace, wouldn't e.g. immersive VR video shot in a warzone be more affecting than still images or 2D video when communicating the scale of atrocity/warfare/protests to the viewers back home?
- scott_s 10y ago
  That's actually one of their current VR stories. "The Fight for Falluja": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/14/magazine/fight-for-falluja-vr.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/14/magazine/figh... Personally, I used the cardboard VR thing with my iPhone 6 to watch a short during the election. I was underwhelmed by the experience.
scott_s 10y ago
No, I believe that's a real thing. I've heard them talk about investing in VR on their Inside The Times podcast.
tannerc 10y ago
Why discount VR so readily? 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.

noobermin 10y ago

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

dinkumthinkum 10y ago

This report started well before the real meat of the recent election and I think it really shows some lack of appreciation of what's become pretty clear in the last few months, is a rather spectacular failure of "the Web" and the ridiculously over-hyped "digital journalism" as means of providing people realistic information about people, events, policies and other things that fall under the umbrella of "news." As much as many of us have maligned newspapers as "legacy," "dead tree," or "rags," or as people that just don't "get" technology, all we have built, from news perspective, is a world wide network spreading silos of disinformation at the rate of terabytes of nonsense per day. I think if anything, for me, we have seen that the legacy dead tree rags are far more valuable to an individual, a nation, and really the world, than blog engines and social networks. Newspapers, as with anything, have their faults but are much more preferable to "choose your own propaganda" aggregators or Alex Jones meme factories. So, please, don't give the "visual storytellers" a "primary role." Let's get to real investigative journalism and journalism itself. It's not the medium; it's the content.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago

An interesting contextual point from 2009 that highlights what an odd situation this is: Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-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.

subpixel 10y ago

I find it interesting that the report is full of renderings of NYTimes stories on phones. I wonder what the bounce rate is among mobile readers - that is, the percentage of readers who read less than 5% or so of a given news story. I suspect that it's very high. For me, it takes a significant chunk of radio-silence (that is, no calls, text, social media updates, app alerts, no need for map directions, etc.) combined with an equally significant amount of willpower (i.e. not proactively checking in on any of the above) to read an informative ~1000 word story on my phone. The NYTimes might be the highest quality content I skim online, but really, that's what I do 95% of the time at my desk and close to 100% on a mobile device: skim. I'm pretty sure devices that are concurrently in use for critical communication and/or work functions are awful places to try to engage readers and convey critical, often nuanced information. Print happens to be great for that. And while I'm not holding my breath, the fact that vinyl records are about to be a billion dollar industry does suggest that old good things can make a comeback.

alfalfasprout 10y ago
I subscribe to both the WSJ and NYT and find that my bounce rate is probably pretty high. But I tend to save articles that are interesting and I might want to read later on my device. I'll later read the article on my iPad or laptop. I can't stand reading a long piece on a small screen.

asimpletune 10y ago

The NYT have conducted internal investigations like this on a few occasions in my memory. I don't have specific examples right in front of me, but I vaguely recall reading of several other major internal reviews, all of them with the intention of being 100% honest, no matter what they uncover, to be sure, since 2007. Interestingly, I can't think of a single time where the conclusion was simply the quality of their editorial discretion, i.e. stories they cover, resisting telling a story according to an already familiar, established narrative, etc. Many people on HN are probably familiar with a similar design pattern: hiring consultants to either a.) tell you something you already know or b.) support a competing position with data points from an outside source. In fact, I vaguely recall the outcome of these internal investigations being something to the effect of needing to ramp up in the digital age with more multi-media, fancier toys, and things of that nature. I would argue that just as necessary as streamlining the editorial process to compete with online-only new sources, like Buzz Feed, would be to understand their major failings and differentiate themselves from their competitors by owning up to them with action. I'm in no way an expert on the subject, just a reader like anyone else, but off the top of my head I can remember the misreporting of the evidence behind the need to invade Iraq, and failing to report NSA mass-surveilinance before George Bush's reelection - the same revelations that came back years later from Snowden (along with more). Granted, they did own up to these failings, and others no doubt, but what editorial changes have been made? Why aren't the actual people who choose what news gets reported and how the facts are presented ever included as part of the outcomes of these reports? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's for the same reason as when a consultant is brought on to figure out how to tease out data points in support of justifying some new (and bold) initiative to, say, dockerize a division's infrastructure vs. actually getting to the bottom of why the reliable tooling of yesteryear are slowing development and deployment down. You get praise for doing things, and so you pay someone to give you a path towards justifying that. In many cases, I see a parallel between the reporters who lead this investigation and the ones from the NYT who are out there working in the field: to them the truth is all the news that's fit for their editors to print.

hackuser 10y ago
> Many people on HN are probably familiar with a similar design pattern: hiring consultants ... The two major reviews I'm aware of, including this one, were conducted internally.

gh1 10y ago

Only 37 % of NYT readers access the paper from the home page. The rest are coming from search, social media etc. [0] While I see a possibility of converting the first segment (37 %) into subscription paying users, I am curious about what they are doing to convert the rest? [0] (As of 2015) https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-Challenges/dp/1784534161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484688819&sr=8-1&keywords=innovators+in+digital+news https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Digital-News-RISJ-Challeng...

hackuser 10y ago

> The New York Times has deftly adapted to the demands of digital journalism EDIT: And from the report itself: [0] > The Times employs the finest staff of journalists in the world > [Elsewhere in the report, in case you forgot:] Our staff is made up of the world’s best journalists > We have defined multimedia storytelling for the news industry and established ourselves as the clear leader. Yet despite our excellence ... > The print version of The New York Times remains a daily marvel > We continue to be the most influential news organization in the country First, I'm not a hater: I think the NY Times is one of the more important institutions in the world and read it daily. IMHO they have been dragged into the digital age kicking and screaming, and their execution has been barely adequate to keep afloat. Financially, they've been cutting staff. Their digital products are clearly the product of old-school newspaper people trying to adapt their product to a web browser and to claim cred by doing some clever tech that has little impact or value (such as 'Snowcrash'). Look at their homepage: Does it look like, A) Any digital-native news site you've seen? B) Something optimized for the user and interface? Or C) Is it an old paper layout adapted to digital. (Answer: C). Look at their branding, the typeface: Overdone custom typefaces may have been a symbol of status and resources when printing presses were used, but now anyone can make a typeface on my laptop. The branding says loudly We have come to you from the world of paper. If someone used that typeface for anything else on the web, it would look bizarre; I can imagine the HN response. When the NY Times gets rid of that typeface, I'll believe they are all in for digital and aren't just trying to adapt. (EDIT: They even say it themselves in the report: Our largely print-centric strategy, while highly successful, has kept us from building a sufficiently successful digital presence and attracting new audiences for our features content; but then still can't let go: We need to reduce the dominant role that the print newspaper still plays in our organization and rhythms, while making the print paper even better.) Finally, I fear the NYT suffers from narcissism, similar to the U.S. President-elect. This report (see the quotes above) and prior internal reports I've read (very few, a small sample) repeated many times how the NYT is the greatest. These reports aren't for marketing purposes, but for internal consumption. I'd be worried if I saw that in my organization. Narcissists are fragile; they keep telling themselves how great they are because they can't handle reality. EDIT: A few edits after I read the report ---- [0] https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/ https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/

WalterBright 10y ago

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

ozten 10y ago

News is now Global and readers are transient and not loyal. Brave should take it's micropayments wallet model, but dumb it down and sign a business deal with all major news papers. You pay $10 per month and get access to all of the news papers. Brave divides the royalties based on your reading habits. Benefits: * Easy for consumers to understand * Easy for news orgs to understand * Bitcoins and wallet hidden from mainstream * Proves Brave wallet technology for wider adoption

ghaff 10y ago
It's been tried with magazines, e.g. Texture. My library lets me read some magazines through Zinio. So forms of such services exist but they're pretty niche.
- ozten 10y ago
  It's a good point. An all you can eat Comic reader is somewhat niche, but I wonder if news isn't a more mainstream market. Currently, Brave's wallet tries to "boil the ocean", but a more focused vertical seems more tractable.
  - BrendanEich 10y ago
    Hi Austin! We are in beta, and not ocean-boiling. Our plan does not require publishers to agree before they start getting revenue shares in escrow. That's part of the plan, because it turns out to be hard to get agreements inked and signed. Even at larger scale (we're growing), getting pubs to agree is not easy or quick. As always when bringing up a new protocol, Metcalfe's Law is a pain. So we decouple and start sending money first. Money always helps. We are talking to publishers from big to small, and we have verified ~120 publishers as domain owners, with 70 already having filed the W-9 or W-8BEN (if overseas) form.
BrendanEich 10y ago
Hi again Ozten! Another quick reply (but see my first reply nested below): 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!

mncharity 10y ago

The report aspires to the NYT becoming an "authoritative, clarifying and vital destination". I'd like that. But it's not clear to me that they realize how badly they are currently failing at it. Over the holidays, the PBS Newshour did a "free energy from water!" story. Really. And then apologized, saying they would review their news process. But even then, it wasn't clear to me they realized just how brainlessly they had f*ed up. The NYT usually manages to avoid such. And to spell names right. But on topics I know about, NYT coverage often/usually manages to miss the point. (And yet I keep going back, implicitly assuming their coverage of other topics, that I know less about, is somehow less bad. Somebody-or-other's fallacy.) There are more ways to "get it badly wrong", than to merely fail fact-checking. And then there's the old concept of news. Report the trivia of what happened yesterday, and if you're lucky, use it as a "hook" to squeeze in an inch or two aimed at providing context and understanding. From scratch each time, because you can't count on any one reader having previously encountered it. Authoritative? Clarifying? Well, they manage to be less bad at these than many other venues. But that's a very low bar. The report says "We have developed one of the most civil and successful comment sections in the news business". Talk about low bars. "but we still don’t do nearly enough to allow our readers to have these interactions." Interactions... not say, opportunity to lend us a clue. I was wondering over the holidays whether to get a NYT subscription. And then hit another article that was "well, sort of..., but no" getting it wrong, and gave up. News coverage, from every venue I know about, is just startlingly bad. Which makes "committed to holding powerful people and institutions accountable" a nice idea, but largely unimplemented. NYT search... "groupthink trump": 17 hits (hmm, I expected more). "groupthink tpp": 0. ""regulatory capture"": 2 hits in all of 2016. Sigh.