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I think, newsroom-culturally, the best thing this report illustrates is the complex relationships between the people working on journalism-as-content vs journal

I think, newsroom-culturally, the best thing this report illustrates is the complex relationships between the people working on journalism-as-content vs journalism-as-product. This has been a painful issue as print journalist refused to consider the legitimacy of re-examining their distribution product for years due to a belief that their work had inheret value regardless of its promotion, display, or distribution. 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.

btown 12y ago
They do have tremendous talent in data, UX, and ML; see, for instance, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-the-new-york-times-wants-to-predict-that/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-th... . The issue is the lack of "the newsroom's support." See, for instance, PDF page 34 about an experiment for Follow buttons that was never followed through, and PDF page 38 about how big projects don't incorporate marketing and rollout into their planning process. You can hire as many researchers as you want, but unless the institution is willing to support experimentation, in every possible sense of the word "support," your researchers will just be working with hypotheticals instead of actual data e.g. from your site's Follow buttons, and they'll end up being underutilized.
- tsunamifury 12y ago
  The right talent advocates themselves and evangelizes their toolset around the organization -- even getting groups to do beta projects with tools in order to prove out the success. Then they expand and incentivize the journalists by showing them how using their tools makes the job easier, better and more successful. 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.

btown 12y ago

They do have tremendous talent in data, UX, and ML; see, for instance, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-the-new-york-times-wants-to-predict-that/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/524716/unsubscribing-th... . The issue is the lack of "the newsroom's support." See, for instance, PDF page 34 about an experiment for Follow buttons that was never followed through, and PDF page 38 about how big projects don't incorporate marketing and rollout into their planning process. You can hire as many researchers as you want, but unless the institution is willing to support experimentation, in every possible sense of the word "support," your researchers will just be working with hypotheticals instead of actual data e.g. from your site's Follow buttons, and they'll end up being underutilized.

tsunamifury 12y ago
The right talent advocates themselves and evangelizes their toolset around the organization -- even getting groups to do beta projects with tools in order to prove out the success. Then they expand and incentivize the journalists by showing them how using their tools makes the job easier, better and more successful. 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.