How The New York Times Is Clawing Its Way Into the Future
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The New York Times
Claws Its Way
Into the Future
The New York Times Claws Its Way Into the Future
by Gabriel Snyder | photographs by James Day 2.12.17
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger doesn’t remember the first time he visited the family business. He was young, he says, no older than 6, when he shuffled through the brass-plated revolving doors of the old concrete hulk on 43rd Street and boarded the elevator up to his father’s and grandfather’s offices. He often visited for a few minutes before taking a trip to the newsroom on the third floor, all typewriters and moldering stacks of paper, and then he’d sometimes go down to the subbasement to take in the oily scents and clanking sounds of the printing press. This was the early ’80s, when The New York Times was nothing but ink on paper and was printed in the same building where the journalism was created. His memories are hazy, perhaps because he’s 36 now and it was a long time ago, and perhaps because that building, like the Times, was always just there, a fact of life.
March 2016. Subscribe to WIRED.
James Day
The Times building is still there, except it’s not the Times building anymore. It’s been sold off and sliced up, and the top two floors are presently occupied by Snapchat, while the bottom two were bought by Kushner Companies, the family business of Jared Kushner, son-in-law extraordinaire of Donald J. Trump. A few blocks—but more like a century—away from that old building, Sulzberger sits in his office in the newish glass-and-steel-lattice-encased headquarters of the Times. He looks the picture of a young tech executive—close-cropped hair, tortoiseshell glasses, considered stubble—and I ask him point-blank if he worries about whether The New York Times will ever cease to be a fact of life. “No,” he says, equally point-blank, which is exactly the party line one expects to hear from the deputy publisher of the Times—a recent appointment that put him next in line to lead the paper when the current publisher and chair, his father, retires. But there could be another reason for his confidence. Sulzberger, like more than three dozen other executives and journalists I interviewed and shadowed at the Times, is working on the biggest strategic shift in the paper’s 165-year history, and he believes it will strengthen its bottom line, enhance the quality of its journalism, and secure a long and lasting future.
The main goal isn’t simply to maximize revenue from advertising—the strategy that keeps the lights on and the content free at upstarts like the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vox. It’s to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering (which, for the Times, is journalism) while continuously adding new online services and features (from personalized fitness advice and interactive newsbots to virtual reality films) so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones. “We think that there are many, many, many, many people—millions of people all around the world—who want what The New York Times offers,” says Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor. “And we believe that if we get those people, they will pay, and they will pay greatly.”
Completed in 2007, the current home of The New York Times is a few blocks (but more like a century away) from the old headquarters.
How they reach those people, and how they make them pay, is now the work of hundreds of journalists, designers, engineers, data scientists, and product managers. At stake isn’t just the future of a very old newspaper that has seen its advertising revenue cut in half in less than a decade—it’s the still unresolved question of whether high-impact, high-cost journalism can thrive in a radically changing landscape. Newspaper companies today employ 271,000 fewer people than they did in 1990—around the population of Orlando—and with fewer journalists working with fewer resources, and more Americans getting their news on platforms where the news could very well be fake, the financial success of the Times isn’t an incidental concern for people who care about journalism. It’s existential, especially in the context of the new American president.
Just days after the election, Trump suggested that the Times—or, per his preferred Twitter epithet, “the failing @nytimes”—would be a frequent target of his administration, calling an article “dishonest” for citing something he had said on CNN (which was odd, since he did actually say it, in public, on video) and adding (also falsely) that the Times “is losing thousands of subscribers because of their very poor and highly inaccurate coverage.” In fact, it’s been the exact opposite: Four weeks after the election, Times chief executive Mark Thompson told an industry conference that subscriptions had surged at 10 times their usual rate. To Thompson, the likeliest explanation wasn’t that the Times did a bang-up job covering the final days of the election—like everyone else, they failed to anticipate Trump’s victory—or that readers were looking to hedge against fake news. He suggests a simpler reason: “I think the public anxiety to actually have professional, consistent, properly funded newsrooms holding politicians to account is probably bigger than all of the other factors put together.” In other words, the president’s hostility to the press and the very notion of facts themselves seems to have reminded people that nothing about The New York Times—or the kind of journalism it publishes—is inevitable.
On May 25, 1994, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., who had stepped down as publisher of the Times two years prior but was still the company’s chair, was delivering a speech in Kansas City, Missouri, and turned to the burgeoning “information highway.” He didn’t like it much. “Far from resembling a modern interstate,” he predicted, it “will more likely approach a roadway in India: chaotic, crowded, and swarming with cows.”
That same day, back in New York City, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded his father as publisher (which he remains to this day), was also giving a speech about technological change. “If they want it on CD-ROM, I’ll try to meet that need. The internet? That’s fine with me,” he said. “Hell, if someone would be kind enough to invent the technology, I’ll be pleased to beam it directly into your cortex.” It was a line the young publisher liked to repeat. “He said that in my job interview,” says Martin Nisenholtz, who was hired in 1995 as the original architect of the Times’ digital strategy. “Arthur’s notion was that these technologies were principally delivery systems for Times journalism.” When NYTimes.com launched on January 22, 1996, it was updated once a day with stories from the print edition. Like most everything then, it was free to read for anyone in the US with a dial-up connection.
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who goes by Arthur but is known as A.G. around the Times, was 16 at the time, and the bulk of what happened next in journalism—the rise of blogs, social media, podcasts, and mobile; the fall of print circulation, advertising, and prestige—happened while he was learning how to be a journalist. He graduated from Brown with a degree in political science in 2003 and started writing for The Providence Journal and The Oregonian before joining the Times as a metro reporter in 2009. The financial crisis that coincided with his homecoming so damaged the Times’ advertising revenue that many started to speculate about when the Times would go bankrupt. Though digital advertising increased from an asterisk in financial reports to well over $100 million between 2005 and 2010, it wasn’t nearly enough to offset the $600 million loss in print advertising over the same period. The Times managed to survive through savvy financial maneuvering—taking out a $250 million loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in exchange for what is now a 17 percent stake in the company; selling its gleaming Renzo Piano–designed Manhattan headquarters and leasing it back from the buyer; shedding assets like About.com and a stake in the Boston Red Sox—but its continued existence was no longer a foregone conclusion. “The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without the Times,” one critic wrote in The Atlantic. “Perhaps we should start.”
Over the next few years, finding new digital revenue became the Times’ top business priority, and in 2014, Sulzberger, by then an editor on the metro desk, was tasked with overseeing an internal assessment of the paper’s digital efforts to date. The result was a 97-page document known as the Innovation Report, which found that editors too often said no to programmers and product designers from the technology group. “The newsroom has historically reacted defensively by watering down or blocking changes,” read the report, “prompting a phrase that echoes almost daily around the business side: ‘The newsroom would never allow that.’ ” Initially intended for only a handful of senior managers, most Times employees first learned of the report from a grainy photocopy that was leaked to BuzzFeed; one employee said they cried when they first read it because, as Harvard’s Nieman Lab reported, “it surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years.”
The BuzzFeed leak was devastating for Sulzberger—“a moment of panic,” he says. “We had written a pretty frank and candid document expressly for a small group of leaders of this organization, and suddenly it felt like our dirty laundry was being aired.” Even worse: It was a Sulzberger, of the Sulzbergers, doing the airing. Still, he realized within a few days that the public scrutiny had turned an administrative white paper into a media rallying cry. “You couldn’t read that report and think that the status quo was an option. Once it’s clear that that is not an option, then the conversation all of a sudden becomes much more productive. It’s not should we change, it’s how do we change.”
The privileging of print journalism over the web, the sclerotic approach to change, the lack of coordination between the growing number of digital disciplines and specialists—Sulzberger and his team laid it all bare, lighting a digital-first fuse that still burns today. “It’s not like I’m the first person who came into this newsroom and said, ‘Social media is something that needs to be accounted for in our future,’” Sulzberger says. “But it wasn’t until the Innovation Report that those points really landed.”
The Innovation Report was also the first time that most people outside of the Times had ever heard of Sulzberger, though Times watchers had for several years pitted him against two of his cousins—David Perpich and Sam Dolnick, an executive and an editor at the Times, respectively—as a leading candidate for the publisher’s job when Sulzberger’s father eventually retired. Public scrutiny has been, by all appearances, uncomfortable for Sulzberger. He started his career at a time when snarky newsroom chatter found a public outlet on blogs and social media, and his reaction to that unwanted attention was to recoil from many of the digital platforms that are second nature to his peers.
He has no public presence on Facebook or Twitter, which Sulzberger can get a little defensive about—he was promoted to management in 2015 to help implement the recommendations of the Innovation Report, and he knows there’s an easy joke to be made about how the person charged with leading the Times into a digital future has never liked, tweeted, or snapped. When I ask him how he knows what he knows about these new platforms, he says, “I’m not active on social media; I am a student of it,” and waves an arm at a wall of his office covered in dozens of color printouts of pie charts, tables, line graphs full of digital metrics—proprietary information that he asked remain off the record. “I spend a lot of time thinking about the trends that are reshaping our industry. I spend a lot of time talking to people on the front line of those trends,” he tells me, “and a big part of my job is making sense of that.”
With its open floor plan, the third-story newsroom is home to much of the Times’ vast reporting operation.
On the ninth floor, where the Beta Group works, each new app, blog, and vertical under development has its own conference room lined with whiteboards, diagrams, mock-ups, and Post-it notes.
The Times is a big organization, with about 1,300 journalists, and management has created a number of task forces to workshop new approaches to reporting and storytelling. One committee, the 2020 Group, studied the newsroom for a year, and its report, published in January, detailed how Times journalism should evolve over the next three years. (Among the recommendations: Greater emphasis on visuals, greater variety of formats and voices. They also announced that the Times would be introducing an alternative metric to pageviews that would “measure an article’s value to attracting and retaining subscribers.”) Another division, Story[X], was created last spring to experiment with emerging technology like machine learning and translation. And then there is the Beta Group, which has become a hub for most of the Times’ digital initiatives. Beta was launched by Sulzberger’s 39-year-old cousin, Perpich, who, after working at two tech startups out of college, helped launch a DJ training school called Scratch Academy. He went on to Harvard Business School for an MBA and landed at Booz & Company as a management consultant. When he joined the family business in 2010 as an executive director for paid products, he and his team oversaw the rollout of the paywall that for the first time required people to shell out cash for full and regular access to NYTimes.com. The project has become the Times’ biggest business success of late. Five years on, more than 1.5 million people pay more than $200 million every year for a subscription.
Even with the success of the paywall, though, “it’s a very, very steep uphill battle to simply sell people on the idea of buying one more news story,” Kinsey Wilson, the Times’ executive vice president for product and technology, admitted at a conference last year. He later told me: “I believe that the only way you create value is if you’re able to bundle various services together.” Which is where the members of the Beta Group come in. They’re tasked with developing a new suite of editorial products (apps, blogs, verticals) that, in the way of expensive original programming on HBO and Netflix, keep existing subscribers coming back and new subscribers coming in. Central to Perpich’s original vision was having Beta’s product people work alongside designers, developers, and—most radically for the Times—editors. No one on Beta has an office; instead, each product is assigned its own conference room lined with whiteboards covered in colorful diagrams, design mock-ups, and Post-it notes where members of the team immerse themselves in what they are trying to build.
In addition to Cooking and Crossword—two of the original Beta apps—the group is now working on Real Estate, an app for home listings; Well, a health and fitness blog the group wants to turn into a suite of personalized training and advice services; and Watching, a vertical dedicated to TV and movie recommendations. The newest addition to Beta was an acquisition: In October, The New York Times paid $30 million for the Wirecutter, a gadget review site. (In a show of confidence in the deal, Perpich stepped back from the Beta Group earlier this year to become general manager of the Wirecutter.)
“Working hour by hour, day by day, with software developers and designers and product managers—to me that was a real revolution, a kind of epiphany,” says Clifford Levy, who won two Pulitzers at the Times before being promoted to the assistant managing editor overseeing digital platforms. “This is standard operating procedure in Silicon Valley, but it was radical here.”
And the radical shift was felt, and heard, throughout the newsroom. “It is not incorrect for me to say that I had no idea what people were talking about in my first couple months,” says Sam Sifton, the Times’ food editor, who started working with the Beta Group to launch the Cooking app back in 2013. “‘We can iterate on that.’ What? We spoke different languages, different cultures.” Still, Sifton has embraced his new digital mission, agreeing this past November to host a text message experiment called “Turkey Talk” to help cooks with their Thanksgiving dinners.
This shift toward personality-driven personal service echoes an earlier chapter in Times history, when, in the 1970s, the paper rolled out an array of advertiser-friendly sections like Weekend, Home, and Living. The goal, according to then-executive-editor Abe Rosenthal, was to figure out “ways that would get more revenue, more readers.” Just as those new sections were greeted with howls of derision both inside and outside the paper—James Reston, a Times elder statesman, said, “It goes against my original concept of what the Times ought to be”—today’s emphasis on news you can use (“What We Know and Don’t Know About the Trump-Russia Dossier,” “15 Ways to Be a Better Person”) has provoked accusations of clickbait. To Jill Abramson, who ran the newsroom between 2011 and 2014 (and whose firing was, as firings go, public and acrimonious), the choice between publishing quality journalism and clickbait is a false one. “In my years, I used to laugh that everything you agreed to in terms of lighter or more advertising-friendly content would be because we needed that advertising revenue to support the Baghdad Bureau,” she says. “So if a certain audience wants lighter content, they can click on it. If others don’t want it, there’s still plenty of great international or investigative reporting at the Times.”
In the 2020 Report, the authors announced that management would be dedicating an additional $5 million every year to its presidential coverage. They also wrote that service journalism like “15 Ways to Be a Better Person” is essential to attracting new online readers. For the Times to grow, they argued, there must be room for both.
Five recent standouts from the Times’ multimedia expansion.
NYT Politics Bot
An AI-powered chatbot deployed for the 2016 election. Subscribers could type in questions and the bot would offer up-to-the-minute polling data and analysis.
Still Processing
A weekly podcast from Wesley Morris and (WIRED alum) Jenna Wortham about the intersection of pop culture and public policy.
The Fight for Falluja
An 11-minute VR film from the Pulitzer Prize–winning video journalist Ben Solomon. Viewers “embed” with Iraqi soldiers battling to retake the city from ISIS.
Puzzle Mania
A special print-only section in the Sunday Times last December. It contained the “MegaPuzzle,” a 728-clue crossword that was the largest ever created for the Times.
Race/Related
A weekly email newsletter with features and essays on race and ethnicity in America.
“There’s this fashion for media companies to call themselves technology companies,” says Jake Silverstein, editor of The New York Times Magazine. “Our job isn’t to make technology. Our job is to figure out how to use technologies.” Or, as Sam Dolnick puts it: “We’re not going to create augmented reality. We’re going to figure out how to use that in a journalistic way.”
Which is to say, a “Timesian” way, a shorthand you frequently hear for what the Times can and cannot do in the interest of protecting its exalted status (and nowhere is it more exalted than within the Times itself). What Timesian means or doesn’t mean often depends on who’s defining it, but it’s typically in the same general neighborhood as authoritative, or maybe stuffy. Editors are infamous for their lengthy divinations on whether new headline styles are sufficiently Timesian, and, per the Innovation Report, nothing slowed down a new initiative more than when management deliberated on just how Timesian it was or wasn’t.
It’s been Dolnick’s mission to drum up enthusiasm in the newsroom for testing out new applications, from VR to livestreaming, without worrying too much about the Timesian thing. After stints at the Staten Island Advance and the Associated Press, Dolnick started at the Times in 2009 as a metro reporter—the same year as his cousin A.G.—and wrote a prizewinning series on halfway houses before becoming a senior editor for mobile and then an associate editor. Inside the Times these days, he is known for the regular companywide email newsletter “Digital Highlights.”
One such highlight: At the Olympics last summer, deputy sports editor Sam Manchester sent short, frequently humorous text messages to the 20,000 readers who had signed up for the service. One, which sparked a viral meme, was a photo of a lifeguard watching swimmers practice, with a caption: “You know who has the most useless job in Rio? She does. That’s right, they have lifeguards in case Olympic swimmers need saving.”
“A generation ago, or even five years ago,” says Dolnick, “there’d be a lot of this Timesian stuff, ‘Oh, The New York Times doesn’t do that. We don’t make jokes in text messages.’ ” The audience responded, though, and Manchester buckled under the thousands of questions that readers texted him. That explains why, for its next engagement experiment with readers, the Times turned to artificial intelligence. Running up to the election, they created a Facebook Messenger chatbot that offered daily updates on the race in the voice of political reporter Nick Confessore. Running the backend was a tool created by Chatfuel that combined natural language parsing (so it could understand the questions posed to Confessore) with a conversation tree (so that the bot could respond to readers’ queries using prewritten answers).
One of the biggest initiatives Dolnick has been involved in is virtual reality. He says it started with an email he sent to Silverstein last year: “Hey man, want to see something cool?” Dolnick had just visited a VR production company called Vrse (since renamed Within) and brought one of their films, Clouds Over Sidra, into his office. The Times has since jumped into VR, partnering with Google to send its Cardboard VR viewers to all of its 1.1 million Sunday print-edition subscribers, creating an NYT VR app that’s been downloaded more than 1 million times, and producing 16 (and counting) original films about topics as varied as displaced refugees (The Displaced), floating movie stars (Take Flight), and battling ISIS in Iraq (The Fight for Falluja). It remains a working experiment. The floating movie stars, for example: “People liked it, it got pretty good views,” Silverstein says. “But it didn’t feel like we were advancing the ball. It had a little whiff of ‘Look at us. We have VR.’”
Even as Sulzberger boasts, “We employ more journalists who can write code than any other news organization,” there are some at the Times—usually those who can’t write code—who chafe at these endless waves of experimentation. “When we’re told this is the new best practice, everyone marches in lockstep,” says one editor who asked to remain anonymous. “Facebook Live? Yep! Video? On it! The New York Times isn’t a place where people say no, and we’re flat-out exhausted.”
The Pew Research Center recently asked Americans whether they prefer to watch, read, or listen to the news. Here’s what they said.
In March of 2016, Alex MacCallum, the Times’ senior vice president for video (and at the beginning of her career, one of the first three hires at the Huffington Post), went to Baquet with a proposition from Facebook: If the Times would commit to producing dozens of livestreams a month for Facebook Live, its new video platform, the social media giant would pay the Times $3 million a year. Like most major media companies, the Times has a complicated relationship with Facebook—a 2015 deal to publish Times journalism directly on Facebook Instant led some in the newsroom to worry about cannibalizing subscriptions and losing control of their content—but following the Innovation Report, the pull of a new social platform was hard to resist. Baquet gave the green light. “We spun up a team and started producing within two weeks, which is like a land speed record in this organization,” MacCallum says.
Over the next few months, the Live team recruited more than 300 Times journalists to livestream anything and everything: press conferences, protests, political conventions. It was too much for some, and the public editor of the Times, Liz Spayd, said as much in a column headlined “Facebook Live: Too Much, Too Soon.” Spayd complained that some of the videos were “plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long … or are simply boring.” She urged editors to slow down, regroup, and wait until the Times could stay true to its past model of “innovating at a thoughtful, measured pace, but with quality worthy of its name.” (Timesian!)
MacCallum concedes that some of the early efforts may have fallen short, but today she puts them in the perspective more common in tech circles than media organizations. “I disagree that it’s possible to have every single thing be up to the standard. Otherwise you can’t take any risks.” What’s more, Baquet says, the project helped train hundreds in his newsroom in how to frame a shot, speak on camera, and all the other skills necessary to produce journalism in the years to come. “If you buy that our future is the phone, and you buy that that means our future is going to be more visual than it’s been in the past, then New York Times journalists have to be comfortable with video.”
The alternative is stark. For most of the last year, the Times offered buyouts to employees, in part to make room for new, digitally focused journalists. As one editor (fearful of being quoted by name) put it: “The dinosaurs are being culled.”
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David Perpich, former head of the Beta Group, is now general manager of gadget site The Wirecutter.
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Meredith Kopit Levien, chief revenue officer, is managing the ongoing transition from an advertising-driven business model to subscription-first.
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Alex MacCallum oversees the Times’ video strategy (including its Facebook Live experiments).
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Sam Dolnick, an associate editor, spearheads innovation in the newsroom, from AI bots to VR films.
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Kinsey Wilson, executive VP for product and technology, oversees the hundreds of developers and engineers behind the Times’ digital expansion.
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Dean Baquet, executive editor, has led the newsroom since 2014.
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