In print, the production is handled by people considered to be proletarian subhumans who are paid almost nothing and disposed of at a whim. This was not always

In print, the production is handled by people considered to be proletarian subhumans who are paid almost nothing and disposed of at a whim. This was not always so: when printing was closer to high tech, it was also higher prestige. Manufacturing in general also used to be higher status than it has been since the 1970s. 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.