A Review of The New York Times Innovation Report

The full New York Times Innovation Report was leaked last week.

It’s worth reading if only because it lets you look at a paradigm – an entire way of thinking, laden with it’s own explanations of culture, causal factors, jargon, assumptions, myths, systems, and heretics.

It enumerates the preferences and aspirations of a small group of people (including their preferred org-chart re-org!) and highlights a long-standing tension between technologists and journalists. It may also serve as a wake-up call that continuous improvement and scientific management is already a reality at several disrupting media startups.

Let’s begin.

Summary if you didn’t read it (and won’t):

The document contains 97 pages.

The term “Competitor” is mentioned on 39 of those pages. Analytics on 18 pages. Personalization on 8. Decisions on 7.

There are two chapters, one labelled “Growing our Audience” and the second “Strengthening our Newsroom”.

The first chapter for growing our audience contains three proposals, called:

• Discovery
• Promotion
• Connection

Each of those chapters contains specific recommendations:

Discovery contains a recommendation to create an audience development role, surface the New York Times archives, packaging multiple similar articles into a bundle/experience, personalization, and more robust meta-data tagging.

Promotion contains a recommendation for the ‘business side’ to work with the newsroom to promote stories, have editors promote stories (using a compact toolbox), and mapping influencers.

Connection contains a recommendation to facilitate user generated content by way of expanding the number of op-eds, creating TED/NPR style events (paid conferences), getting to know their readers more.

The second chapter contains three primary recommendations:

• Collaborate with the business-side units focused on reader experience
• Create a newsroom strategy team
• Map a strategy to make the newsroom a truly digital first organization

In that last point, the authors enumerate three steps in “how to get there”:

• De-emphasize print
• Assess digital needs
• Explore more serious steps

Analysis

The greater the dissatisfaction, the greater the effort and the wider the search for alternatives (March, 2009).

This passage appears to be the stimulus for such a search:

“…over the last year The Times has watched readership fall significantly. Not only is the audience on our website shrinking but our audience on our smartphone apps has dipped, an extremely worrying sign on a growing platform.” (p. 3)

A point reinforced with four ‘key measures’ (p. 23):

• Home page visitors are down (error on the axis – cosmetic design can have drawbacks).
• Pageviews are flat.
• Time spent is down.
• iPhone active users are down.

The digital business is perceived as stagnating or in decline.

There is no single, unified, causal analysis as to why this is the case. The document suggests that money from well-funded new entrants and technological change are driving this. A direct link isn’t made. And perhaps this wasn’t part of their mandate.

“This report represents our best attempt to provide answers.” (p. 9)

This wasn’t designed for the world to read it. It’s org-centric. There are key passages that are indicative of why they believe their organization isn’t structured to win:

“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. But the growth in our subscription revenue and the steady decline in advertising — as well as the changing nature of our digital operation — now require us to work together.” (p. 60)

And a few cultural points are made:

“Our mindset is to perfect, then release. This should always be the case for our journalism. But we must question whether everything needs to meet this standard. Our competitors are launching new products or features as betas, and then using vital feedback from readers — rather than another round of internal feedback — to improve.” (p. 86)

And especially because,

“Because we are journalists, we tend to look at our competitors through the lens of content rather than strategy.” (p. 24)

That strategy lens was particularly strong in the late 90’s when distribution was the dominant strategy. That’s what the whole ‘portal’ strategy was all about – Canal+, AOL, Yahoo all pursued a portal distribution strategy.

Many of the competitors listed in the document look at their competitors through the lens of audience. Several of them are extremely audience centric, they are not traditionally-strategy focused.

There’s a gap between what the news desks are, and what they aspire to be:

“To succeed in the coming years, news desks need to be building digital skills. Indeed, a major reason producers have seen their access to tools and templates curtailed is because of the concerns that the editors on these desks are unable to recognize substandard work.” (p. 77)

Which is in part because:

“There has been a longstanding tension between dispersing and centralizing our digital talent. The choices that result affect the ebb and flow of experimentation in the newsroom.” (p. 76)

So to solve this problem:

“We have identified five areas that warrant more investment: strategy, analytics, product, platforms and audience development. Our competitors — old and new — have been staffing up in these disciplines, and we must join the battle to better meet our digital needs and to build a deeper bench of digital talent.” (p. 94)

And:

“Create and distribute a clear organizational chart of the Reader Experience departments that includes a contact person and their newsroom counterpart.” (p. 69)

Which means a new strategy group in the newsroom:

“A strategy group could help provide conceptual help, structure and guidance to experiments launched at the desk level, allowing more producers, editors and reporters to innovate and learn. They would be familiar with the tools and talents in the newsroom, Technology, Product and Analytics that could help bring such ideas into reality. This would allow us to use desks as laboratories to answer pressing questions and to develop best practices.” (p. 77)

And will enable: