New York Times Study Calls for Rapid Change in Newsroom
The New York Times has deftly adapted to the demands of digital journalism, but it needs to change even more quickly, according to an internal report that recommends the company expand training for reporters and editors, hire journalists with more varied skills and deepen engagement with readers as a way to build loyalty and attract the subscriptions necessary to survive.
The report, released to The Times newsroom on Tuesday, is the culmination of a year of work by a group of seven journalists who were asked by Dean Baquet, the executive editor, to conduct a review of the newsroom and determine a blueprint for its path forward. Titled “Journalism That Stands Apart,” and known internally as the 2020 report, it provides a set of broad principles to accelerate the pace of transformation while maintaining a commitment to high-quality journalism.
The report comes at a particularly sobering time for the legacy media industry. The steep and continuous decline of high-margin print advertising has led to significant financial challenges for most newspapers, which in turn are cutting costs and trying to find new revenue sources to bridge the gap. News organizations, including The Wall Street Journal and Gannett, are reshaping their newsrooms and have made significant cuts in staffing. The Journal is currently conducting a newsroom review similar to that of The Times, called WSJ2020.
Among the other recommendations in the Times’s report were reducing duplicative layers of story editing, and having visual experts play “the primary role covering some stories, rather than a secondary role” — part of an urgent call for more visual journalism. It also calls for renewed efforts on diversity as a way to ensure that the paper’s journalists “reflect the audience we seek.”
“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 report’s recommendations, saying they outlined an “opportunity we have to produce an even more vital, more authoritative, more indispensable report that commands a larger and more loyal audience in this country and around the world.”
The note also laid out some concrete steps for various projects, including a plan to invest $5 million toward covering the incoming president, Donald J. Trump, and his administration. Several of the recommendations in the report have already been introduced, including subject-focused newsroom teams and a restructuring of the copy desk.
Mr. Baquet and Mr. Kahn acknowledged that the transformation would require budget cuts and lead to a “smaller and more focused newsroom,” a harbinger of potential buyouts and layoffs that are expected this year. “We view this moment as a necessary repositioning of The Times newsroom, not as a diminishment,” they said.
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 of the product recommendation site The Wirecutter and its sibling, The Sweethome; and changes in top newsroom management. The Times also recently appointed A.G. Sulzberger as deputy publisher, positioning him to succeed his father, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as publisher.
Many initiatives are intended to support an ambitious goal that The Times laid out in October 2015: to double its digital revenue, to $800 million in 2020 compared with $400 million in 2014.
Last year, according to the report, The Times generated nearly $500 million in purely digital revenue.
The Times and other news organizations are also bracing for the challenges of covering an administration that is openly hostile to the news media, while trying to forge a stronger connection to the large bloc of voters who swept Mr. Trump to the presidency.
At The Times, the election threw the newsroom into a period of self-reflection as it grappled with criticism that it had missed the signs pointing to Mr. Trump’s victory. In the days after the election, Mr. Baquet and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. sent notes to the newsroom and readers reassuring them that The Times remained committed to holding powerful people and institutions accountable.
Mr. Baquet initially planned to release the report in November, but it was pushed back after the unexpected election results, which demanded the organization’s full attention.
Within The Times newsroom, where impending staff cuts already have some employees on edge, the report is unlikely to satisfy those looking for specific guidance on their future. It does not deliver many details on how individual departments might be altered or how specific jobs might change.
Instead, the report emphasizes The Times’s strengths and lays out a series of broad recommendations intended to ensure the company’s survival for years to come. Most important, it affirms The Times’s commitment to its subscriber-based revenue model.
“We are, in the simplest terms, a subscription-first business,” the report says. “We are not trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them. We are not trying to win a page-views arms race.”
At the same time, the report cautions against complacency. “If we rest on our laurels, we are going to put at risk this big lead that we have,” Mr. Leonhardt said. “We need to do more and we need to do it faster.”
Among the report’s recommendations is to improve and expand The Times’s training efforts and accelerate the pace of hiring to shift the balance away from print-focused roles. The goal is to reconfigure its news report so that it aligns with the range of digital offerings audiences now expect. “It’s the single biggest message the committee delivered,” Mr. Leonhardt said.
The report acknowledges that the accelerated pace of hiring will “increase the need for newsroom turnover given budget realities.” It suggests that some of the cuts should come in the editing ranks with a “shift toward front-end editing” — that is, conceptual editing and story shaping — and away from last-minute line editing that has little impact on a story’s quality.
In their note, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Kahn said in no uncertain terms that moving away from “duplicative and often low-value line editing” would lead to reductions in the editor ranks.
“Let’s not be coy,” they wrote. “The changes will lead to fewer editors at The Times.”
The 2020 committee also recommends that The Times continue to reduce the role the print newspaper plays in determining the daily rhythms of its journalism, while maintaining it as a valuable attraction to readers.
“Our future is much more digital than print, and so the question then becomes how do you accomplish both of these at once?” Mr. Leonhardt said. The goal, he added, is to “make sure the print newspaper remains valuable and excellent today but doesn’t get in the way of the digital changes that we need to make.”
To that end, the report calls for a dedicated, autonomous team focused on putting together the daily print newspaper. (The Times has already introduced this concept, with the so-called print hub.)
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.
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/business/new-york-times-newsroom-report-2020.html
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