USA TODAY International Edition
THE ‘ TIMES’ PIVOTS TOWARD THE FUTURE
Reorganizes news operation in attempt to flourish in digital age
It’s the overarching challenge for all legacy news organizations: how to reconfigure and reposition themselves to be relevant and successful in the digital age.
There’s no denying the newspaper industry was slow to grasp and react to the severity of its existential threat. But the financial upheaval triggered by digital disruption certainly has everyone’s attention now — or it better. Which brings us to the memo
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet sent to his staff Friday outlining some steps to further shape the evolution of one of our leading news outlets.
Given its pre- eminent role in our news culture, the machinations of the Times are always interesting to anyone who cares about where the news media is headed. And while the Times freely conceded in its much- discussed innovation report two years ago that it was lagging dangerously behind when it came to digital adaptation, the paper now seems clearly committed to the mission. The steps Baquet cited, while hardly revolutionary, mean major change for an outfit that deeply values its traditions. And many of the measures have relevance for other news outlets.
Several of Baquet’s prescriptions for the future jumped out at me as absolutely essential, never mind that they should have been implemented quite awhile ago. In some instances decades ago.
Baquet is calling for fewer “commodity” stories, run- of- themill news that can be found everywhere. The emphasis instead should be on distinctive journalism. He wants fewer incremental, turn- of- the- screw articles. He wants brighter writing. He wants stories to be told in a variety of ways, many of them visually. And soon assigning editors won’t be worrying at all about the print edition. They will simply be trying to get their reporters to produce the best stories possible, without a thought about their print destination, if any. A separate hub will be set up to assemble the print newspaper from what Baquet calls “the great wealth of journalism.”
“Fewer stories will be done just ‘ for the record,’ ” Baquet wrote. “In fact, fewer traditional news stories will be done overall. Stories will relax in tone.”
All of that is good news, and it would behoove outlets that aren’t already doing so to follow suit.
As Baquet writes, “To do nothing, or to be timid in imagining the future, would mean being left behind.”
One of the things the advent of digital journalism has underscored is that over the years too many newspaper stories have been simply dull, not engaging at all. Restrictive rules squeezed the life out of too many stories. Overreacting to the need to be “objective” led to too many “he said, she said” stories that reached no conclusion and shed no light. The latest hiccup in an ongoing saga, worth no more than a paragraph in a briefs column, resulted in a treatise.
The digital era, with all its excesses, had a liberating effect, showing it was possible, indeed essential, to communicate information in a more accessible, less stilted way. You could “relax in tone.”
Of course, newspaper writing was livening up to some extent even in the analog era, with anecdotal leads and narrative approaches. But old habits die hard, and too many vestiges of the past remain.
And in today’s oversaturated media marketplace, there are so many options; there is brutal competition for attention. Boring is not going to be a successful business model.
And there’s another factor. While Baquet said the Times’ newsroom staff is larger than it ever has been, he added, “I’ve made clear that the changing economics of journalism make it unlikely we can sustain a newsroom of this size.” Many less fortunate newspapers have staffs that are a fraction of what they were in the past. And reporters today have far more to do; writing the story is just the beginning.
Once a reporter knocked out a story for the print paper and that was that. Today, reporters file a few graphs for digital, update and build out the story, tweet it and post it on Facebook, massage the story for print, do a video, do podcasts, and on and on.
It’s exciting. But it’s time- consuming and draining.
The bottom line is that often far fewer people are doing far more work. Something has to give. Tough choices have to be made. It’s critical that reporting firepower be focused on stories that are important, interesting and hopefully both. If for- therecord stories that no one really wants to read are the casualties, it sounds like a cheap price to pay.
The digital- first approach urged by Baquet also is important. Print editions, written off as dying or dead for years, have stubbornly refused to go away and remain valuable. For how long is an open question. But so much news today is consumed digitally, increasingly on mobile devices. That has to be the top priority. ( USA TODAY adapted a digital- first approach a number of years back.)
“Assigning editors, in the very near future, will not worry about filling space,” Baquet wrote. “They will worry over coverage and the best ways to tell stories.” Makes perfect sense. The key, of course, is making sure all this change is undergirded by a strong commitment to journalistic values. The form and content can and must change. The values can’t.
When I visited BuzzFeed last year to check out its burgeoning news operation, I asked news director Lisa Tozzi, who had spent 13 years at The New York Times, what she missed most about her prestigious former employer.
“I underestimated how liberated I would feel not worrying about a legacy product,” she replied, adding that she loved “working in an environment where everyone is sold on the Internet.”
Sounds like that is becoming the case at the Times. Not a moment too soon.
“To do nothing, or to be timid in imagining the future, would mean being left behind.” Dean Baquet, executive editor of ‘ The New York Times’