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How the New York Times can fight BuzzFeed & reinvent its future

Om Malik — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:00:52 +0000

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If I ever run into New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (unlikely as it might be) I will sure as hell let her know that she is absolutely right to be excited about what her paper did with Snow Fall, which in my opinion was one of the first truly post-tablet storytelling experiences. At the Wired Business conference in New York earlier this week, Abramson said:

“Snow Fall” is now a verb. “Everyone wants to snowfall now, every day, all desks,” she said. Reporters are waiting for time to “Snow Fall” their bigger story. She said that the story originated from the sports desk — and took “months and months and months” of time — but Snow Fall-type projects can come from anywhere.

Snow Fall, in case you missed it, was a multimedia project that included a gripping six-part story by John Branch, one of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning writers who was intrigued by the growing number of skiing fatalities. The stories were presented with interactive graphics, videos and bios of various snowboarders and skiers. It is brilliance personified and was rewarded with 2.9 million visits and 3.5 million page views within the first six days after publication. (The Times doesn’t reveal the total traffic it received since its release in December 2012.)

Snow Fall (and other such attempts) represent a great opportunity and the future for news organizations like The New York Times, especially as they are right now in a losing battle for attention with upstart competitors that include everyone from BuzzFeed to The Huffington Post. If you are the New York Times management, it is time to take a gamble: spend $25 million on creating 100 Snow Fall-like projects.

Money for something and clicks for free

In fact, it is important that our media brethren at the Times think even bigger than that, eventhough it would also mean taking a more prosaic, mercantile and business-like perspective to what they do.

They need to NOT think about Snow Fall as an add-on — as something that makes traditional content more web- or mobile/tablet-friendly — and instead treat it as a brand-new kind of media product that is created especially for the multiple device/many-screen world.

I have been involved with online publishing for a very long time — 18 years to be exact. And in that time I have seen the incumbent media make the same mistake again and again. They’ve often tried to adapt the content they’ve created for newspapers and magazines to the online world. And when they did embrace online, even then the online reporters were asked to do the same thing they did for the newspapers or the magazines. (The Times, to its credit, published Snow Fall first online, and then in print three days later, which suggests it had a pretty clear understanding of the digital potential of a project like this.)

Yes Dorothy, the Internet is different

The internet is and will always be an immersive, interactive and communal platform. Many publishers continue to treat it like the old two-dimensional medium. Every time we have some major news events, such as the recent Boston tragedy, the social web brings the consumers of content into our newsrooms and makes them part of the process. It is one of the reasons why most of the big media still don’t get blogs. Sure, some writers like David Carr or Paul Krugman are an exception, but look at some of the Times blogs and you see they are just news stories (or features) retrofitted for the blog medium.

Federal agents descend on the home of a suspect-at-large in the Boston Marathon bombing. Getty Images

Blogging is a way of editing the world and presenting it to my community, and that means everything from photos, links, tweets and videos, in addition to sharing my raw thoughts and fully packaged features, scoops and even basic news. Every act of sharing tells you what I am interested in and what I am willing to learn and talk about.

There is a failure in the media business to understand that the medium and the content are intertwined much like those lovers on the walls of Ajanta and Ellora caves. It was one of the many reasons why Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily failed to impress me. It didn’t really invent a new form of storytelling for the tablet.

Now take all of that as context and then understand why I keep harping on the point that Snow Fall-type products are a brand new media, a whole new style of storytelling and a model for 21st-century journalism — one that doesn’t sacrifice the best of our profession, but takes it by the scruff of its neck, and drags its bloated, aging body into the new world and revives it with a shot of adrenaline.

Mr. Excel meets Ms. Editor

Getty Images

However, that is only part of the story. The trick is not to get married to just the oohs-and-aahs of the Snow Fall, but to think of it as a business opportunity, much like the way Hollywood studios creatively monetize their blockbusters. My question is why can’t newspapers and magazine companies take the same approach and build a business model that actually factors in various opportunities that something like Snow Fall can offer?

So instead of starting with a newspaper story and adapting it to different formats, the Times should start with the Snow Fall. If you look at Snow Fall closely, you can see a cohesive approach to content, one that adapts and morphs to not only the medium of access, but to diverse business models — much like the movies.

From my own experience at magazines, I can tell you producing features isn’t cheap and can easily cost tens of thousand dollars, depending on the publication. The longer the lead time and higher the profile of the story, the bigger the costs. So from that perspective, spending some more on the post-tablet version of the feature shouldn’t break the bank.

The current editorial effort is to create something for a day or two of attention in the newspaper and hopefully for tens of thousands of pageviews. Why not start with the apps and e-readers (both paid), then follow up with the web version and then get to the newspaper. While apps and selling e-reader-oriented content might involve the Times learning new tricks, the company doesn’t need to change much for the latter two channels.

Blame my enteprenurial tendencies, but when I was experiencing Snow Fall, all I could see was stunning brand-advertising opportunities, that went beyond the dumb, commoditized advertising the Times is forced to put on its website. Why not embed a tasteful Land Rover ad or throw in one for Moncler? That is native advertising that actually allows organziations like the Times to live by their ethos and maintain the fidelity of their brand.

Hollywood, Baby

Now, let me explain why the Times can do it. And for that I will point to Hollywood again. One of the reasons why Hollywood studios succeed with the multi-tier approach to their “product” is because they do their best to ensure that they create an optimum experience. And they can do that with the right story, the right stars, the right production values and, most importantly, they have distribution. And gobs of money.

The Times and other big media companies have a lot of those same capabilities. They have great stars (real people, for god sake, are better stars than anything Hollywood can produce — see the Cleveland samaritan), they have great storytellers (editors and reporters, whose Pulitzers are testimony enough) and they have the ability to create the right production values (photographers, visual artists and designers). The Times also has a big audience – 35 million monthly visitors to their website in the U.S. alone, according to comScore – which means it has a lot of attention, which can be channeled effectively to promote new concepts.

Distribution Matters

Just as blockbuster movies get a lot of attention from media, Snow Fall got a lot of attention from the rest of the media community. Those millions of monthly visitors and lots of advertising space on print means distribution isn’t really a problem. And despite the financial headwinds, many of them — including the Times — still have a lot of money to try and finance a few dozen Snow Falls.

It isn’t clear how much money the Times spent on Snow Fall, but let’s just assume it was a small fortune. (Yes, I asked them and got this response: “We can’t disclose details about costs. Really, this is a newsroom effort. The business side works with the newsroom, of course, to provide the infrastructure and technology they need to tell stories in innovative ways.”)

And in exchange, it got a few million page views, but I am guessing they also built a nice backend infrastructure to create more such projects. As a result, the next Snow Fall is going to cost less, with most future spending going to the creative: words, photos, other multimedia elements and design.

So what will the Times (or someone like them) need to get it done? Simply put, a departure from the incumbent thinking, embracing today’s reality and re-imagining the work flow of a big city newspaper. In other words:

Re-imagining its business model to factor in the reality of today’s world and forget the legacy of newsprint.
Create a new breed of “producer” who can switch between Excel and content.
Create a whole new breed of a journalist — one who has old-school values but also the ability to tell a story that works in many mediums of today.
Build an editorial creative machine that works differently from a print-centric editorial group.

Now, if they can actually overcome their angst — and it hurts me to say this — they can change the conversation in the media business away from the increasingly shallow content and instead bring the focus back to quality and in-depth journalism, which is their stock in trade. If the New York Times management were feeling bold, it would put $25 million to work on creating 100 other Snow Falls and basically change the reader’s expectations of what long-form digital content and journalism are in the new century.

So if you want to fight BuzzFeed and HuffPo, there you go, Jill!

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7 Stories to read this weekend

Om Malik — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 08:00:48 +0000

And I am back after a two week break — I was in Paris for Le Web — with seven stories for you to enjoy this weekend.

Nobel laureate and economist Paul Krugman says that for some, Ayn Rand’s novels or Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings have a lasting impact. For him that lasting impact came from Asimov’s Foundation novels and have had a lasting influence on his economics.
Six things that suck the life out of your productivity: Just read this, bookmark it and read it every day to remind you how to get it all figured out.
The rise and fall of Nails: The story of Lenny Dykstra, a well-known baseball player, is a cautionary tale of how fame goes wrong.
Adam Brault quit Twitter for a month and found his soul and sanity. One of the best pieces you will read this week.
The empathic machine: Sherlock Holmes was right that seeing through another’s eyes needs a detached mind and not just a warm heart, writes Maria Konnikova, author of forthcoming book, MasterMind.
In the Rust Belt, a teenager climbs out of poverty: This is a great, heart warming story of Tabitha Rouzzo. It is inspirational and uplifting.
In memoriam, Ravi Shankar: The influence and legacy of late sitar maestro.

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Why it’s better for fact-checking to be done in public

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 22:32:49 +0000

There has been a lot of sound and fury this week about a Newsweek cover story written by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, a piece that many critics — including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman — argue should never have been published because of the factual and other errors they say it contains. Meanwhile Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a post praising the nameless fact-checkers who prevent mistakes from appearing in magazines like his and Time. But isn’t there a public value to seeing mistakes that are made before the fact-checkers get to them and seeing them corrected? I would argue that there is. If what we are after is more transparency when it comes to journalism, public fact-checking and debate is an integral part of that process.

Just to recap for those who haven’t been following the drama, Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard and the author of several books — wrote a cover story for Newsweek (which merged with Tina Brown’s online entity the Daily Beast in 2010) in which he argued that President Obama has failed to fulfill a number of promises related to the U.S. economy and therefore doesn’t deserve to be supported for reelection. The piece triggered an outpouring of criticism from a number of observers and complaints that Ferguson’s argument was based on faulty numbers and deliberate misinterpretations of the evidence.

Why is it wrong to outsource fact-checking?

Politico writer Dylan Byers has been one of those holding Ferguson’s feet to the fire for the story, saying the writer used a flawed argument based on skewed figures and arguing that Newsweek should never have let the piece see the light of day. As Byers put it:

“Newsweek has stayed silent on the controversy, choosing instead to ‘monitor the debate’ as if the editor and publisher bear no responsibility for what appears in their pages.”

Coates, meanwhile, said in his Atlantic tribute to fact-checkers that what the magazine had really done was “unwittingly outsourced its fact-checking to the web.” But is that such a bad thing? The Ferguson piece has been thoroughly fact-checked, debunked and otherwise dismantled by Byers and a host of others, including Krugman — and the Atlantic, which does a line-by-line critique of the piece and the flaws in the historian’s logic — as well as Andrew Sullivan at Newsweek’s sister publication the Daily Beast and Matthew Yglesias at Slate.

My point is this: Isn’t it better to have those criticisms and counterarguments out where readers can see them and inform themselves if they wish? And if Ferguson is the type of academic who plays fast and loose with the truth in order to make his argument, as Atlantic writer James Fallows seems to suggest he might be, isn’t it better that we know that by seeing his arguments in as clear a light as possible? If those errors or logical inconsistencies had been fixed by nameless fact-checkers at Newsweek, all we would really know is that the magazine has a good fact-checking department.

One of the most controversial aspects of the idea of “news as a process” is that in some cases it involves distributing information before the truth of that information is fully known, something I have written about before as it applied to what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio was doing during the revolutions of the Arab Spring: Carvin says he used his Twitter followers as a kind of “public newsroom” that helped him confirm and verify information coming from Egypt and elsewhere. In a similar way, Reddit and Twitter have been used as public fact-checking engines and have shown they can be very effective.

It’s valuable to see errors made and corrected

Some, including former Poynter writer Steve Myers, have made the argument that some kinds of news — such as the shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colo., where the gunman was initially linked to the Tea Party political group — shouldn’t be treated as a process, because of the risk of making serious mistakes. And others have argued that an ABC News report this week about director Tony Scott (who committed suicide) having an inoperable brain tumor should never have made it to air, because it turned out not to be true.

Obviously, no one wants publishers or media companies of any kind to just print, air or distribute information they know to be wrong. But in cases like the Aurora shooting and the revolutions in Egypt, the reality is that the availability of “true” information is in a constant state of flux. And in cases like Ferguson’s Newsweek piece, the validity of an argument like the one he is trying to make is also open to interpretation, as Krugman himself admits. So why shouldn’t that interpretation be exposed and debated in public instead of behind closed doors in some editorial office?

One point some critics have made about such an approach — including during a Twitter debate I touched off a few months ago when I asked why we need editors — is that not everyone will see or read the corrections to a report or will have the time to follow up on the allegations about a piece like Ferguson’s, and that is undoubtedly true. That is why it’s almost as important to have places that collect those kinds of things, whether it’s “Regret the Error” author Craig Silverman’s column at Poynter or next to the source of the original report, as with the Daily Beast’s list of criticisms and outlets debunking Ferguson’s piece.

In his post, Krugman describes how when he writes a column for the New York Times, he has to submit a list of links and sources for the claims he makes, which an editor then uses to test his arguments. In an ideal world, I think we’d be better off if the columnist just added those links to his column and let his readers fact-check the validity of his claims — and if others did the same. To paraphrase Jeff Jarvis: “Do your best, and let the internet do the rest.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz and Shutterstock/Swellphotography

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