Making News at The New York Times

Front matter

ee i (ig te Ss I, Wiha P AN Making News at

The Nem York Times

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Contents

Introduction: The Times in the Digital Age 1

. Setting: News about the News: The Times in 2010 30

. The Irony of Immediacy 87 . Immediacy: To What End? 125

Introduction

THE TIMES IN THE DIGITAL AGE

The new New York Times building that stands blocks away from its namesake Times Square is a fifty-two-story, Renzo Piano-designed office tower between Fortieth and Forty-first streets on Eighth Avenue. The ground floor of the building is dedicated to a New York Times auditorium, rented out for events and used by The Times for “Times Talks,” where New Yorkers have the chance to meet their favorite Times critic or other public intellectual—or in some cases, a baseball player for the Yankees. The building itself is, as the leasing office proclaims, the first “high rise curtain wall with ceramic sunscreen to be built in the United States”! Practically, what this means is that the glass-walled building has light-sensitive blinds that open and shut of their own accord, based on passing clouds or bright afternoon sunlight. The magic of this system wore off quickly for many of the staffers inside, who learned to look up when the loud flaps move and promptly reconfigure the blinds to their liking.

The new building is a great contrast to the paper’s home since 1913 on West Forty-third Street. The old building was a dour, sparsely windowed gray stone edifice hidden on a side street away from the bustle of Times Square. Known to generations of journalists as “the factory,’ it surely contributed to the paper’s image as the “Gray Lady” of American journalism. The new home of The New York Times for the digital age, though, is smack-dab in the middle of its audience. You almost have to pass the building to get between the Port Authority and the Times Square subway stop. Journalists who happen to be eating lunch in the fourteenth-floor cafeteria, or simply looking out the window, can see the city in endless motion.

This new building is the symbol of a collection of promises: the start of The Times as a fully integrated Web newsroom; The Times as a shining glass beacon for innovation in news; The Times as a stamp upon the New York skyline, marking its continued relevance. And it is, at the same time, a symbol of the challenge inherent in achieving each of those aspirations.

The architecture itself tries to embody these hopes. Over each of the three entrances to the building hangs a The New York Times sign in the distinctive font that has been the legendary banner of the newspaper for decades. Each sign is bold enough to inspire tourists to take photos, but the entrances are not foreboding; in fact, each one is open to the public. People are invited inside the sun-soaked lobby to admire the public art and the glass atrium, though of course they are stopped by security should they try to go inside the elevators leading to the actual newsroom. All the glass, all the open space—the entire interior look of the newsroom is intended to signal a new era for the newspaper in the digital age.

Inside, the three main floors of the newsroom are all connected by red, painted stairways with a big, wide gap for everyone on the fourth floor to peer down at people working on the second and third floors. The most important seats in the house are on the third floor. Here, The Times has deliberately tried to place the people charged with deciding the most important print stories of the day directly next to the people who make the up-to-the-minute decisions about what goes on the Web page. The top brass—the executive editor and two managing editors— sit next to the two most prominent members of the online staff.

Gathered in a few cubicles located in the center of the newsroom is the locus of production for the home page and the hub of the Web operations. The cubicles, a medium wood, are situated low enough to make it easy for people to have conversations with each other. This cluster is home to the continuous news desk editor,’ the domestic and global home page editors, and the Web photo editors. The Web operation, then, is supposed to be a centerpiece of the newsroom, and symbolically, it is also close to the powerful people charged with setting the entire editorial strategy of the newsroom.

But seating plans and architecture do not mean that people will actually talk to each other. During my five months immersed in the newsroom, the activities of the home page editor were generally ignored by executive and managing editors, who, at least on a daily basis, remained preoccupied by deciding what would go on Page One—the front of the physical print paper. Yet just one of these rotating Web producers was responsible at any given time for what more than thirty million unique vistors would see each month.

Those in the newsroom justified the “noninterference” between print and online—a polite way of saying lack of engagement—this way: “These people are chosen because they have great news judgment, are great copy editors, can work quickly, and rarely make mistakes.”

The relationship between print and online is bundled with contradictions: the new reality of online work in the digital age at The New York Times simply doesn’t mesh with the essential character of the daily, print newspaper. It has only been since 1996 that The Times has had a Web site of its own, a blip in its 160-plus-year history, and print still pays the bills and builds egos. On the other hand, “traditional” print journalists do write for the Web—in fact, almost everything they will write appears online. They are accustomed to writing breaking news stories on tempo with the latest developments. Their long-form features appear online, often with multimedia complements. Top editors routinely proclaim in missives to the newsroom and to the public that nytimes.com is the newsroom’s future.

The challenges facing The Times in 2010 were more than just about the relationship between print and online news. In a 24/7 news environment, The Times tried to produce and display a rapid stream of content online while still hoping to set an agenda and have a final say. The newspaper was also caught up in the process of trying to build multimedia and interactive graphics, both as new forms of storytelling and as ways to keep readers on the page longer—another way to build clicks and then dollars. And as social media flourished across the Web, The Times as an organization tried to capitalize on the momentum, while journalists debated whether to add another tool (or obligation) to their jobs. The question before The Times and its journalists was one bound up in the new realities of economic pressure, changes to professional practices, and technological innovation: Just how should The Times create content for the Web when simply pasting text online was not enough? What should the process and the values defining news production be in this new era?

In practice, the answer proffered by the nation’s premier news organization in 2010 was a bit like the buffet at a Las Vegas casino, with editors, executives, and journalists trying to make The Times offer everything to everyone. The print paper would continue to set the agenda, but the Web site would be continually updated, and reporters on deadline would write for that immediate push. The Web site would be filled with interactive and multimedia content, and the newspaper would aggressively pursue a social media strategy. But as one journalist put it to me, “We can’t keep doing all this shit—blogging, videos, and writing for the paper. We can't be great at everything” Still another journalist, however, editor Susan Edgerley, told me, “We will succeed in the digital age because The New York Times likes to be the best. At everything.”* Herein lies the great tension at The Times: the reality of what journalists were able to do versus the larger aspirations of the newspaper—the quest to be the best online, as it felt like it was in print. Though this book is history now, in an ever-evolving story of newsroom change, it offers a step back to consider The New York Times and its story in 2010, caught in one moment between the legacy of its past and what it saw as its future. At the time, The New York Times was arguably the most influential journalism outlet in the United States, and it had the most-trafficked newspaper Web site on the entire Web. But stats tell us one thing about the newsroom, and what was happening inside the newsroom tells us another story—about an institution and its journalists adjusting to digital change.

The purpose of this book is to provide an inside portrait of The Times that shows how journalists attempted to negotiate the challenges of creating online and print content according to emergent online journalism values: immediacy, interactivity, and participation. This window into The Times, between January and June 2010, comes from the five months and over seven hundred hours I spent inside the newsroom (principally stationed at the business desk). In this book, you will see how journalists tried to negotiate the challenges of working in an on-demand, instant news world, attempting to iron out routines that would make it possible to keep up with the pressure of constantly feeding a Web site that was ever-hungry for fresh content. You will see the opportunities and challenges journalists faced as they encountered new demands for interactive content, from video to online graphics. This book also documents how journalists reckoned (or didn’t) with a now-active audience able to talk back and create content, thanks to social media. From my experience inside the newsroom, I saw how these three core values of online journalism—immediacy, interactivity, and participation—emerged as points of tension and change. This book, then, offers an analysis and chronicle of how The New York Times dealt with these three values.

My key argument is this: there are new values orienting journalism practice in an online journalism world. Journalists must reckon with how to adjust to the demands of a 24/7 news cycle, an environment of interactive engagement, and a world where one-to-many has been upended. The result has been a restructuring of news routines, albeit in a contested way, which has led to the emergence of new news values: immediacy, interactivity, and participation. In turn, these values are ordering news work and professional practice. The “old” news values, ones that also emerge out of routines and internal and external forces, are still present. Objectivity is still a strategic ritual and a vaunted professional aspiration, for instance. But front and center, journalists are now adjusting the ways they incorporate their workflow and professional aspirations in an entirely different working environment from the past.

This work, then, shows the puzzling battles being fought over the front lines as journalists were caught between tradition and change. The austere Gray Lady, where journalists fought to be one of the five most important stories of the day and strove to be on Page One, also had to be nytimes.com, the leader in the world of newspapers online. This meant that journalists struggled to embrace new imperatives in their work: getting fresh content out on the Web while still working for those Page One victories, making the Web site for users to explore stories beyond text, and reaching out to readers across social media platforms. These “musts” became the new reality; whether journalists liked it or not, these values were emerging to order newswork and set standards for journalism at The Times. Whether these values were liked is less important than whether they functionally signified a reorientation of journalism. What we see here is this battle over the meaning of these values, and their place in the newsroom, through the daily lives of journalists in the newsroom.

These values of immediacy, interactivity, and participation emerge from the routines that were (or were not) in place at The Times, and they are overarching terms that help categorize the new priorities, goals, and felt imperatives organizing news production at this time. In turn, these values shape the structure of the book and help us interpret the underlying dynamics at work inside the newsroom. The values are embodied by journalists as they attempt to structure their understandings of what news ought to be—and how it ought to be made. They map onto the relationship between print and online, the drive for multimedia, and the push for social media engagement. I also use these terms because they are resonant with a legacy of theoretical work on both the networked digital environment and scholarship about journalism. With immediacy, interactivity, and participation as a backdrop, a study of The New York Times in 2010 can also be placed in dialogue with many of challenges facing other newsrooms at the time. However, before moving forward to introduce these values in the context of The Times and journalism more generally, I offer some reasons why studying this particular case offers important insights for journalism studies as a whole.

Why The Times?

The Times is a pivotal institution in American democracy. Since 1851, it has shaped the contours of elite political discussion and provided substantive reporting from across the world and the nation. Though it is not a perfect paper and can be judged for many failures throughout its history, the Gray Lady continues to retain its gravitas. There are a number of jokes one can make about the future of the news industry; one says that there are two rules: First, all discussions about it must reference The New York Times. Second, anyone invested in the larger project of changing journalism ought to stop with The New York Times obsession. But here we have an account of The New York Times as it underwent a period of digital change—not a remarkable disjuncture marked by organizational overhaul, but rather the fine-tuning of adjustments to the pace of news in 2010. This story about the future of the news is already an account of the past, but it deserves to be recorded because it shows how this tremendous institution grappled with the pressures of doing newswork under social, economic, technological, and professional pressures unique to this moment in journalism.

So why should we care about The Times? Fundamentally, The New York Times is a special place; its stature, its size, its place in the public imagination, and maybe even its sense of its own importance make its transition to the digital age notable. It has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other newspaper (over one hundred and ten and counting). And at least for now, publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., though controversial for his lack of business acumen, remains devoted to keeping the newspaper inside the family trust. Despite claims by New York Magazine that the Sulzberger children of the fifth generation will sell out to corporate interests,° the two-tiered stock structure that keeps the Sulzberger family in control of the newspaper’s direction means that there has been at least some insulation from layoffs. Sulzberger’s willingness to spend money on journalism that ostensibly does not make the newspaper a profit (e.g., covering Iraq and Afghanistan) was seen as proof to some that he remained committed to an ideal of public service journalism.

There have been some pretty terrible moments for The New York Times in recent memory; two such moments, in particular, tarnished the newspaper’s image. One was the Judith Miller scandal, where the reporter's erroneous reporting on weapons of mass destruction may have played a significant role in leading the United States into the war in Iraq—or at least pushing the Bush administration’s claims to the top of the news agenda at the time.’ Prior to this, reporter Jayson Blair fabricated enough stories to merit a fourteen-thousand-word public “mea culpa” in the Sunday Times.’ But I am not alone in arguing that

The New York Times is a formidable institution with tremendous journalism muscle that has staying power, as well as the eyes and ears of decision makers, the elite, and increasingly the ordinary public.

Reams have been written about The New York Times as an institution. Much of it has personified the people and publishers who have led the newspaper, noting how their visions shaped Times coverage. For instance, consider Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power, where he reminisces that Eisenhower once asked of the top editor at the newspaper, “Who the hell does Reston think he is, telling me how to run the country?” Chroniclers Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones, in The Trust, offer a different perspective—how The Times owners, “America’s most powerful family”—created a global imprimatur for the newspaper. *°

Even for critics, The New York Times remains the most important newspaper in the United States. In fact, William McGowan’s Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of “The New York Times” Means for America chronicles how an institution beset by credibility problems and a penchant for more tabloid journalism may destroy the very watchdog fabric of quality journalism that is necessary for a strong democracy."!

Thus, The New York Times is special in many ways—its size, its publisher (for better or worse), its reputation, its ego. At the same time, The Times is facing the same kinds of challenges faced by all newspapers: how to create and inform users in a networked information environment. For this reason, the values that I suggest are influencing newswork at The Times—immediacy, interactivity, and participation—are also found elsewhere. But what happens as the journalists who work there adjust to these new values and change their practices has profound consequences because of the stature of The New York Times. Thus, it is important to take a closer look at each of these values in the context of The Times, as well as in the context of larger debates and observations about journalism generally.

Immediacy: The Times and Beyond

At any one point from my main vantage spot on the business desk at The Times, a variety of news production processes were happening all at once. The business desk was spread over nearly half a floor, with about one hundred journalists at work. At any one moment, journalists could be writing for the daily paper, thinking about long-term news series, blogging, or continuously updating content for the Web. Immediacy reigned, even when the 24/7 pressure didn’t seem to be staring down journalists. On January 20, 2010, Diana B. Henriques had a daily deadline to work on a big story about an FBI sting and big businesses that had been bribed to sell guns to presumed African warlords. The story was headed for A1, and she was free to spend the day pursuing it without worrying about the Web. Yet the next morning, when a source called to ask where the story was on the Web site, Henriques couldn’t find it without some dedicated searching; on nytimes.com, it had vanished into the netherworld of small headlines on the business and national pages of the Web site. Her story had fallen victim to the constant churn of demand for new news on the home page.

Other journalists were entirely dominated by the forces of the Web. Online editor Mark Getzfred remained so glued to his computer refreshing the Web site with new content that he barely had time for a single morning meeting. His days were generally spent with this kind of constant intensity: looking for stories from the AP and from Times journalists that would respond to the imperatives of more, now, new to feed the hungry Web. He kept the business Web page filled with updated content, even if it meant that, early in the morning, he might be promoting a minor story from Europe or an obscure development with the US Federal Reserve. Only at four p.m., when he got ready for the massive email blast of the day’s top stories, which was sent out to Times readers, would he sit down to gather his thoughts about the most significant stories of the day.

Within the newspaper were many conflicting rhythms and routines for creating news in the Web world. Immediacy—or “fresh” and “freshness,” as Times journalists called it—took on a heightened level of prominence whenever the Web was involved. The dynamics for creating Web content for an ASAP world were grueling and unyielding. Though The Times prided itself on avoiding the production of commodity news, or news that everyone else would have, and instead hoped to find “value-added” content that only Times journalists could provide, the reality was often more complicated.

To journalists, immediacy may actually be considered a core, defining value of news—not just now, but always. Scholar Mark Deuze notes that “from its earliest days, journalism has relied on certain forms, archetypes, themes and routines enabling its practitioners to manage an ever-increasing volume of information within the confounds [sic] of continuous deadlines”! Immediacy has a legacy in the long history of news: the Romans and Han Chinese can be credited with pioneering daily news. The printing press allowed for the rapid dissemination of what were then called newsbooks and later pamphlets, which recorded major events like earthquakes and voyages to the New World. By the 1600s, European merchants had begun publishing weekly newspapers. Even then, the demands of content and speed wore upon journalists. One Venetian publisher complained that he simply couldn’t keep up with the demand for fresh news on this weekly basis.’

More recent history continues to tell the story of journalists’ collective relationship with immediacy. With the telegraph, for instance, we saw the rise and development of the Associated Press, as well as the first reliable and speedy wartime correspondence, during the Civil War. The advent of the telephone made it possible for journalists to relay detail-heavy stories to editors and also to reach people beyond geographical boundaries, opening up the potential for new information gathering and stories with greater breadth for readers. To remain commercially viable and relevant, the form of news (and news organizations) simply had to adapt to changing technological conditions for the spread and distribution of information.“

Radio brought the capacity for instant mass communication into people’s homes for the first time, perhaps best illustrated by the Munich Crisis in 1938. For the first time, people got live broadcasts of news as it was happening, or at least as fast as journalists on the scene had time to process it. Newspapers responded to radio by continuing to publish multiple editions throughout the day, but they struggled for differentiation from this new medium.’ Multiple deadlines and multiple editions helped newspapers compete, but this was ultimately unsustainable, as distribution outside of the suburbs became more complicated. In fact, the afternoon paper, once a way to respond to the day’s news, all but died with the rise of the evening news broadcast, local TV news, and a changing suburban landscape.

Morning newspapers then hoped to retain their position of authority based on the sheer number of correspondents and the advantage of a longer news cycle to provide more comprehensive coverage. Immediacy (or timeliness) for newspapers took on a different meaning: newspapers were the place to go for the historical record and the big story, and, hopefully, this edge in reporting muscle would lead to the scoop. The rise of event-driven cable news signified two things: the demand and desire for immediate news and the special function newspapers now fulfilled as a way to provide context and depth beyond all of the noise on cable (and network) TV. Each medium had its own deadlines and purpose, as well as its own sense of time.

But all of this changed with the fundamental revolution in Internet communication technology and the rise of the networked information environment. Manuel Castells, a scholar of global flows, argues that the emergence of high-speech communication technology has brought about a tremendous change in the speed and exchange of information. The monetary value of instant information alone is significant. Bound up in this technological revolution are the spheres of commerce, social life, politics, and the like. Theoretically, anyone who has access to this networked information environment can demand access to information at all times.

The changes, then, were quite significant: The deadlines for ALL news organizations became NOW! As all news organizations had Web sites, the question became one of differentiation. What made any one news outlet different from any other news outlet? And increasingly, social media sites became not just places to congregate and discuss news events, but the very sources of breaking news. In short, news organizations themselves were now part of the culture of the immediacy of the networked information environment. And audience demands about immediacy were not just imagined but actually had significant impact upon the potential revenue of a news organization.

Thus, at the dawn of the 2000s, something new was added to the idea of immediacy for journalists—this was now going to be an overarching, defining feature of online journalism, a value that would define and orient journalism practice; it would reverberate among the profession and among consumers. By 2010, one of the implications of the speed of online news was that journalists were constantly producing online journalism. The result is that the process of journalism was laid bare, mistakes and all: news items were published before they were ready in their final print- or broadcast form, and there was radically diminished time between the production and the consumption of news.!°

Immediacy has become part of the normative culture of online journalists, whether they like it or not. In an overview of scholarly studies on journalists’ perceptions of immediacy, Swedish scholar Michael Karlsson notes, “A somewhat divided conclusion from these studies is that immediacy is an important and sometimes esteemed trait of the online journalist?” In American journalism, journalists have resisted an occupational value that seems forced upon the newsroom. At the heart of this frustration lies a larger comment about the idea of journalistic authority and autonomy—whether journalists still have the ability to tell the story and shape the narrative or whether the pace of the story and the felt demand for constant churn destroy journalists’ control.

Life in newsrooms obsessed with immediacy has been compared to that of hamsters—the “hamsterization of journalism.” As Dean Starkman of The Columbia Journalism Review put it, journalists had become little more than hamsters running on a wheel: “The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say nos

The emphasis on getting more news out faster and faster had the effect, as one editor put it, of “everyone running around like rats”? The hamster wheel is a metaphor for news production in the digital age, where speed is more important than fact checking, and quantity is more important than quality. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) noted the impact of immediacy on news production in one of its quadrennial reports, suggesting that instead of reporting quality stories, journalists were responding to constant, rolling deadlines.”

In many newsrooms, Starkman argued, this “news panic” resulted from the compulsion that journalists felt to work faster and harder, lest they risk economic failure. Writing more stories with faster turnaround had financial rewards: bumps in Web traffic that could then prove the case for higher rates for online ads. Newsrooms were thus rewarding work that was generating bumps in Web traffic, rather than the kind of substantial reporting once found on Page One or in investigative features.” Generally, journalists at The Times were not obsessed with economic failure in the same way that plagued other newsrooms, but, at times, they certainly did appear to be running around like the hamsters Starkman and others have described. At the same time, these journalists also had to reconcile their work with their simultaneous desire to have the final say and be the final authority on the daily news cycle—both manifested in the guise of the print paper. Immediacy oriented and motivated news production at The Times in conflicting ways, signaling a larger debate about the importance of first and fresh versus the authority of the journalist, the quality of news, and the enduring news story.

Interactivity: The Times and Beyond

Sewell Chan was hard at work on The Times’ first big profile of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in May 2010. In fact, the interview with Bernanke had been the first long interview Chan had been able to have with the chairman since starting the beat earlier in the year. But as part of putting together that week’s Sunday business profile, Chan was also doing something other than massaging text—he was digging around for material for an interactive timeline of Bernanke’s life to accompany the story. In fact, he had actually managed to find the Fed chairman’s high school and college yearbooks. Along with Web producer Danielle Belopotosky and a few others, Chan, a straight-up traditional reporter, worked to craft “A Fed Chairman’s Life” to bring pictures (and bad moustaches), dates, anecdotes, and context to the otherwise serious story.” For journalists like Chan, it was additional work—work he didn’t mind, but extra work nonetheless—and for Belopotosky, it was a pretty serious undertaking to accomplish in about a week’s time. The Monday after the story ran, she acknowledged to the other Web producers that she was exhausted.

This effort was the sign of another imperative in the newsroom: an avowed focus on interactives, including multimedia, interactive graphics, photo slideshows, and audio. For every story that required serious planning, someone, either a Web producer assigned to the business desk or journalists on bigger teams with more resources like the programming whizzes and documentary film experts, was likely to be involved. Each potential Pulitzer story (“special project”) for the year involved a sit-down meeting not just with the reporter, top editors, individual editors, and the photo and graphics desks, but with people from desks with names like multimedia, interactives, and video. They would help the story come alive on the Web in ways beyond words.