What Brands Can Learn from the NY Times Report

May 16, 2014

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This week, an internal report on the digital health of the New York Times was leaked. While many
may write this off as an analysis of modern journalism or media companies, there are themes that
may be more broadly applicable than scanning the headlines might make you believe.

Put another way, how much of the New York Times internal digital report could apply to
communications and marketing professionals within companies?

Joshua Benton, editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, called it "one of the most
remarkable documents Ive seen" in his years running the Lab.

The deep problems are cultural, according to a Buzzfeed exclusive, as the digital team is slowed by
"a cadre of editors who remain unfamiliar with the web." Indeed, according to some staffers
interviewed by Benton, the report "surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types
have been struggling to overcome for years."

It's not our intention to completely dissect the report; if you'd like to read it when you have time
(highly recommended for any digital professional), please do so. But we hope to pull out the salient
points that can apply more broadly to the companies you may be working for today.
Taken directly from the document, the company's goals are stated in such a way that they might
apply to a number of businesses or industries: Strategy for Growth, Speed and Agility, Unlocking
the Power of Data, and One NYT.

Clearly, these are four major challenges and opportunities that are common to most businesses today.
Let's take a closer look at some of the challenges as identified by the team in their document. For our
purposes, we'll be drawing parallels between the newsroom and communications staff, and the
business side and marketing staff.

The report is divided into two sections: Audience Development and Strengthening Our
Newsroom. The first is a core part of the newsroom team (journalists), while the other is a more
broad effort that includes imperatives for business units and the newsroom alike.


Audience Development
This section starts out with a recounting of the Times' original distribution process: from printers to
trucks to kids on bicycles and news racks, it's the story of "the most sophisticated consumer-outreach
operations in history." But it's not enough to rest on that history, as the Internet is getting more
crowded, content is difficult to find, and mobile is becoming increasingly important.

The report defines audience development as "the work of expanding our loyal and engaged
audience," and breaks it into discovery, promotion and connection. While this is a central role for
the newsroom, audience development is the responsibility of every individual.

In helping to define the changes afoot in the industry - particularly that there is no central, all-
encompassing destination any longer, the report includes a quote from Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief
of The Guardian's website:

The hardest part for me has been the realization that you don't automatically get an
audience...that you have to go find your audience - they're not going to just come
and read it - has been transformative."
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are becoming more of the norm for story discovery. Even
text, email and phone alerts have been worked into various news organizations. It's just as important
to pay attention to each of these as it is to focus on Page One or a homepage online.


Discovery
It is not enough to assume that people will find your content. Whether you're the New York Times,
Coca-Cola, an insurance company or a small business owner. If they do happen to make their way to
your page, it's equally as important to think of their ability to navigate and find what they need with
the least hassle. Design for the web, not for print.

With more then 300 URLs produced every single day and over 14 million articles that date back to
1851, the Times is a goldmine of content. But can you find what you're looking for? The Times
thinks it can help by surfacing evergreen content on a regular basis. As Henry Blodget, founder and
CEO of Business Insider said to the Times,

You have a huge advantage. You have a tremendous amount of high quality content
that you have a perpetual license to."
While the focus of the newsroom may be on current events and stories, sometimes it's important to
provide context to what's happening. And evergreen content can help do just that.

Flipboard and Pinterest have been helpful in the Times' assessment of another important concept of
discovery: packaging. By bundling stories together in magazines or boards, we're able to curate
content into collections for readers and consumers. If you package stories for readers or customers,
you provide value by making the process of discovery that much easier for them.

Personalization is an opportunity to put content out in new and smarter ways. Whether it's how the
stories are delivered to them, showing them a suggested article based on what they just read,
localized stories or offers based on their IP address, etc. And by giving consumers/readers a chance
to follow the stories, authors or feeds of the content they care about, you give them the chance to
personalize their experience themselves.

Finally, the staff realized that they need to invest more in some of the guts of the operations: the
tagging and structuring of data, so search results are more robust and that adhere not to the Times
Index, but to Google's and others'.

For anyone involved in content creation and management, these tenets should be universal. Whether
you're in the news business, the entertainment industry or selling shoes, the principles remain the
same.


Promotion
This should be a wake-up call for anyone managing content:

At the Times, we generally like to let our work speak for itself. We're not ones to
brag. Our competitors are doing a better job of getting their journalism in front of
new readers through aggressive story promotion. They regard this as a core
function of reporters and editors, and they react with amazement that the same is
not true here."
I've often heard the argument that the story should stand on its own or the brand should be the star,
but as you'll see in the next section ("Connection"), people want a two-way relationship, and there's
no way to do that without interacting with a human being.

The competition has teams dedicated to promotion inside their newsrooms, expect their teams to be
fluent in social media and expect them to promote their own work and mine traffic numbers to look
for best practices. And much of this happens in real-time: it's not about throwing out a link and
walking away. The best teams help "desks take steps to draw more traffic and to keep visitors on
the site longer."

The Times is taking a dual approach: institutional promotion, in which the official accounts on
Twitter and Facebook are responsible for promoting content, and front-line promotion, whereby
editors and reporters take initiative for advancing their work publicly.


Connection
The Times has identified its single most underutilized resource: its audience. This could likely be
said of many brands as well.

Nor is it an easy task:

Of all of the tasks we discuss in this report, the challenge of connecting with and
engaging readers - which extends from online comments to conferences - has been
the most difficult."
As the Times struggles to grapple with this, they've come to realize that transparency may play a role
in making a deeper connection with their audience: "pulling back the curtain and providing
readers a bit more insight into how we do our work."

Evidently, their reporters and columnists are happy to connect with readers, but are doing so on other
sites or platforms to talk about the behind-the-scenes approach, rather than on Times properties. This
leads to a fracturing of attention and platforms.

Additional opportunities under this section include user-generated content and events, where the
voices of readers can be more clearly heard and where the Times team can have better interactions
with them.


Strengthening Our Newsroom
Another quick history lesson from the Times: the print and digital teams were housed in separate
buildings until just seven years ago. And while the institution has been known for quality of its
journalism and the support system in place for journalists, the digital side has not kept pace.
In this bastion of venerable tradition, it is refreshing and eye-opening to see the Times acknowledge:
To become more of a digital-first newsroom, we have to look hard at our traditions
and push ourselves in ways that make us uncomfortable."
This is exactly what brands need to do if they espouse a newsroom mentality. The traditional roles of
communicators and marketers may not fit with the way the world is changing. And making tweaks
here and there is not going to suffice. Wholesale change is needed.
The Times proposes: better collaboration between newsroom and business sides, the creation of
anewsroom strategy team, and mapping a strategy for digital-first.
Collaborate with Business Side
This is probably the most controversial of the sections, as traditionalists will gasp at the thought of
journalism mixing with advertising. But it's been happening for years, albeit under different names or
executions, and for purposes related to reader benefit, not one influencing the other. The NYT admits
in the report:

The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for
decades, allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on
advertisers."

Now, the newsroom and business side are both focused on readers and any deviation from that
strategy will not fit with the view of the Times. In fact, one of the elements that led to the firing of
executive editor Jill Abramson was that she opposed native advertising.

Not that there's any danger of advertising influencing journalism; the report indicates that no one
interviewed "ever suggested tinkering with the journalistic values and integrity that make the Times
the greatest journalistic institution in the world," and that the advertising arm "should remain walled
off."

Here's the thing that many of us miss when thinking of "The Wall," "Church and State," or
"Communications and Marketing" - readers/customer don't care. They don't discern a difference
between which department is surfacing and sharing content or ideas. To them, it's one entity. So
enough of the squabbling over who "owns" what. The "One NYT" vision (or similar ones at any
number of other companies) should make that clear.


The Buzzfeed piece noted:
The papers Twitter account is run by the newsroom. Its Facebook account is run
by the papers business side.
More broadly, the newsroom has "abdicated completely the role of strategy," a
masthead editor is quoted, speaking of their digital strategy.
Here's where better collaboration and shared goals would come into play. More often than not, I hear
from colleagues who say that their communications teams have given up on digital/social strategy
because of the budgets that marketing departments wield. Done well, it shouldn't be an either/or
position, but a collaboration.

In addition, the report noted that developers, designers and product managers are on the business side
at the Times (sidebar from the report: "the perception that their roles were 'on a different side' was a
source of confusion"), while at competitors, they are part of the newsroom or report to both teams.

These colleagues have specialized skills that most editors simply do not possess and
they are trained in the processes of turning ideas into successes."

Designers seem particularly ostracized and in need of connection to the newsroom:

...newsroom editors needed to be more engaged when designers are wrestling with
major questions about our digital future, like experimenting with personalization,
rethinking how we organize our content, and even changing the architecture of
stories to meet new needs."
The recommendations that are guiding the way at the Times should serve as a recipe for any brand
trying to tackle a newsroom/content culture:


1. Clarify which reader experience units should be interacting with the newsroom.
2. Ensure the newsroom is working collaboratively with reader experience.
3. Hire collaboratively and encourage employees to move freely between the newsroom and reader
experience.
4. Communicate the new message for collaboration broadly.
Strategy team
The NYT recognizes that most of the newsroom leaders are too focused on delivering content, so
there's little focus on the overall strategy.

"...strategy is becoming such a pressing need at this juncture that it should become a
permanent newsroom function, with dedicated staff."
By creating a small advisory team to watch the competition and give feedback on readers' habits, the
newsroom team could be kept informed of developments outside of their purview and the approach
could be kept fresh. Interestingly, the backgrounds of those selected is to include journalism,
technology, user experience, product and analytics.

The strategy group will have a leader who will report to a single person in the newsroom who is
senior enough to implement the recommendations from the team. Ideally, the team will serve as a
grooming ground for future leaders and will foster the culture of collaboration that is so urgently
needed.

When you think of those who are responsible for content in your organization, how much of your
communications or marketing team is focused on the creation and delivery of content versus the
strategic, experimental and analytical work to help drive the strategy? Are you a slave to your content
demands and constantly trying to meet your metrics? It may be time to step back and look at the
bigger picture.

Old-school goals and metrics have driven the focus at the Times:

including a sense that the Times will simply serve as a destination leading to a
neglect of social promotion. One factor is an obsessive focus on the front page of the
print paper, with reporters evaluated in their annual reviews on how many times
theyve made A1."
How many of you are judged on traffic to your company's home page / shopping site or by how
many top stories you've generated via pitches to major reporters? Or that you have colleagues that
seem to be blissfully ignorant of how the digital space is evolving?

Summarized, the responsibilities of the strategy team are:


1. Build a strong team
2. Tracking the media landscape
3. Assessing needs and setting priorities
4. Running experiments and sharing results

Digital First
While it can be argued that the digital progress at the Times has been extraordinary, it's incredibly
informative to know that they're still being held back by their traditional processes and thinking:
filing stories by print schedules, organizing apps according to print sections, traditional skills being
prioritized in hiring.

They admit:

The continued profitability of this newspaper has bought us time. But that head
start is eroding. Several billionaires have pledged parts of their fortunes to creating
digital newsrooms. Start-ups, backed by venture capital, are redefining digital
media. And traditional competitors, have moved aggressively to remake themselves
as "digital first."
In defining what digital first means, they note that it's more than simply publishing to the Web before
print; it's an all-encompassing strategy. And the transition "requires rethinking staffing, structure
and work processes from top to bottom."


To date, changes have been incremental and there has been a great deal of frustration internally.
While having an "integrated" newsroom was a step, some argued that it isn't enough: "We need to
become a digital newsroom, a small subset of which produces a print product."

Think of that with respect to your own teams and the priorities placed on traditional placements or
advertising. We'll wager you could replace "Snowfall" below with any successful initiative or
campaign:
While we receive accolades for our digital efforts like Snowfall, we nevertheless are
at risk of becoming known as a place that does not fully understand, reward, and
celebrate digital skills.

The challenge presently is that the leadership lacks the ability to effectively evaluate talent:
journalistic skills are overvalued for digital hires and digital skills are undervalued for journalistic
hires. And the complaints of the digital employees are well known:

...their expertise isn't put to good use, [they] have few growth opportunities and
believe their bosses do not understand their skills."
Those who recently left the Times did not see opportunities for growth, as newly open positions were
more frequently given to traditional journalists; there seemed to be no career path for digital types.
Without more digitally savvy members of the senior leadership team, there is trouble understanding
the potential or new career paths for digital team members, and the digital staffers are forced to
accept a more traditional role or path.

There is a danger, according to the report, of continuing the time-honored succession process of
leaders. They admit struggling "to groom our digital journalists for leadership, in part because we
don't know how to use their skills," and they move traditional journalists into leadership roles -
including digital leadership roles. There simply doesn't seem to be any room for helping their digital
talent succeed.

This pattern of promotion risks, among other things, sending the message that the
only way to move up in the company is through traditional journalism, even on
digital career paths."

Putting in place leadership that understands digital, its role and its future, will ensure that the
fossilized hiring patterns are kept more fluid.

Beyond cultural and leadership change, it is likely that the very structure of the organization will
need to change. An editor of a competing publication said,

You can't take new talent and put them in old structures where they are second-
class citizens. That' is not real change. You must change the structure of power."
But anything that's built will likely be built for a snapshot in time, rather than built for the ages.
Strategy, products, platforms, audience development an analytics are key elements to any newsroom.


Wanted: Makers, Entrepreneurs, Reader Advocates and Zeitgeist Watchers
The company also acknowledged the need to win at talent wars with a tallying of skillsets that any
business would be fortunate to have in its communications and marketing team members:
The only way to ensure that [we keep] pace is to build a newsroom with a deeper and broader mix of
digital talents: technologists, user experience designers, product managers, data analysts and, most of
all, digitally inclined reporters and editors."

...we want makers, who build tools to streamline our newsgathering; entrepreneurs,
who know what it takes to launch new digital efforts; reader advocates, who ensure
that we are designing useful products that meet our subscribers' changing needs;
and zeitgeist watchers, who have a sixth sense for the shifting technology and
behavior. Most of all, we need those rare - and sought after - talents who can check off
many of those boxes."

How the Times plans to focus on its digital first imperative:


De-emphasize print
Shift away from Page One, creating additional measures of success
Ask editors to read more like readers
Rethink the competition
Make digital a key part of evaluations
Assess digital needs
Assess capabilities of each group
Make the newsroom flexible and responsive to the developing industry
Add digital specialists to staffing committee
Maintain a list of the best digital talent and court them
Acknowledge that digital talent is in high demand and be prepared to accommodate that with more
money, persuasion and freedom
Find ways to empower current digital staff
Let employees transfer between newsroom and operational units
Identify rising stars, show them they're appreciated, help develop their careers
Make a star hire
Explore more serious steps
Task force on digital-first excellence
Digital fellowship program to attract new talent
Conclusion
On the one hand, it may seem jarring that so venerable an institution as the Grey Lady is undergoing
such self-scrutiny. However, the fact that they're taking the time to assess and address the issues
themselves - and quite deeply, we might add - is encouraging.

While the Times may not have all of the answers, we think that they raise the appropriate questions
and chart a course that is bold and different, rather than the tweaks here and there. Will it be
successful? On behalf of journalism and brand newsrooms, we certainly hope so. The Times is a
leader and will be viewed as such for a long time.

Brands should pay close attention and give the report a full read. While we live in the era oftl;dr, it's
essential reading for anyone who thinks of himself or herself as a digital leader.