Publishers were alerted to the coming change in December, and subscribers were notified last week. (If you have any of these subscriptions, you can see the timing for how they’ll be phased out; you won’t lose money.)

The Kindle was once seen as a possible savior for digital journalism (though Nieman Lab was always skeptical). In 2009, then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger appeared on stage with Jeff Bezos to introduce the larger-screened Kindle DX, saying, “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper.” From 2011 until 2020, people who subscribed to the Times on the Kindle got free access to NYTimes.com, too.

Amazon hasn’t shared its exact reason for the change (the company’s statement to publishers is here), but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn’t make financial sense to continue to support them. Instead, Amazon wants publishers to add their content to its $9.99/month digital subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which includes a bunch of magazines and access to one newspaper that I saw — USA TODAY.

Anyway, while this all feels very 2011, news publishers in particular should check out some of the comments on last week’s Reddit thread, where customers talk about why they liked reading newspapers on Kindle, and why they’re sorry to lose the subscriptions — and it still has to do with the “satisfying reading experience” Sulzberger talked about more than a decade ago.

Very disappointing. I had only recently discovered that I actually enjoy reading my local newspaper when it’s on the Kindle as opposed to the paper’s poorly designed website and frequently broken app.

In addition to the sheer legibility/readability of the Kindle screen display, I liked the Kindle editions for the Table of Contents feature and other navigational aids. These made it easy to skim, particularly in large issues of a pub like the daily New York Times…

I currently subscribe via Kindle Newsstand to the publications below. It will be a hassle to manage the subscriptions separately now, for each publisher, via their websites. This mirrors the mess that streaming television has become, fragmented into many different providers with their own payment schedules, subscriptions costs, log-in credentials, Terms of Service, etc. etc.

I have:

The New York Times – Daily Edition for Kindle
The New Yorker
Foreign Affairs
New Republic
The New York Review of Books
New York Magazine

Woke up to the email and I’m pretty pissed. Loved having a few magazines and newspapers on my Kindle. Much easier on the eyes than a phone/tablet, better battery life, and things just worked (some of the apps reload and you lose your place between sessions).

Very disappointing. I’ve subscribed to many newspapers and magazines via my kindle for many years and prefer its layout to most crappy apps. At this point, i have been only using my kindle to read newspapers and magazines (usually use the app for books).

This is hugely disappointing. I have been a NYT subscriber on the Kindle for so many years…more than 10. One of my fondest memories is on a trip to Greece, staying in a hotel on the side of a cliff, and barely getting enough 3G signal to download the Sunday Edition. During the summer, I wake up every day and sit on my deck and read the NYT while I drink a cup of coffee. I subscribe to the paper edition on the weekends but I actually prefer the Kindle edition in a lot of ways because it’s ad-free and easy to navigate.

I was mad enough about dropping support for 3G but this might be the end of my relationship with Kindle. I’ll switch brands to whatever I can get NYT on, or I’ll just skip the Kindle entirely. And I was hoping to upgrade soon… Kindle probably just lost a customer.

If you like reading news sites on Kindle, here’s a hack to keep you going.

In the past year, page A1 of The New York Times has frequently featured stories with one similar theme: “whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast,” in the words of Tom Scocca writing recently in Popula. By his estimate, these front page stories have totaled more than 15,000 words combined, not counting coverage of similar topics in the Opinion section and New York Times Magazine. He added:

Page A1 is where questions go. Is the number of young trans people suddenly unusually large? Is it good for young trans people to be getting medical treatment as drastic as breast-removal surgery? If they’re deferring more drastic medical treatment by taking puberty blockers, is it harmful for them to take those puberty blockers? If they’re not getting medical treatment at all, are their schools letting them socially transition too easily?

On Wednesday, in two separate open letters to Times leadership, two different groups argued that the Times’ coverage of transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people is biased. (The timing was coordinated, the organizations said.)

“The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” reads the open letter organized by the Freelance Solidarity Project, the digital media division of the National Writers Union.

The letter is addressed to Philip B. Corbett, the Times’ associate managing editor for standards. Initially signed by more than 200 Times contributors, including Alison Roman, John Herrman, Jia Tolentino, and Virginia Sole-Smith, the letter has gained thousands more signatures since Wednesday morning.

The letter notes that Times coverage has been used to support anti-trans bills across the country:

Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: [Emily] Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” As recently as February 8th, 2023, attorney David Begley’s invited testimony to the Nebraska state legislature in support of a similar bill approvingly cited the Times’ reporting and relied on its reputation as the “paper of record” to justify criminalizing gender⁠-⁠affirming care.

The letter draws parallels between the Times’ coverage of trans people and, in earlier decades, its coverage of gay people and HIV/AIDS and its treatment of gay employees. “New York Times managing editor and executive editor A. M. Rosenthal neglected to put AIDS on the front page until 1983, by which time the virus had already killed 500 New Yorkers,” they write. “He withheld planned promotions from colleagues he learned on the grapevine were gay. Many of his employees feared being outed.”

That last link is to a 2018 piece in the Times’ T Magazine, “Six Times journalists on the paper’s history of covering AIDS and gay issues.” Reading the Times’ early HIV/AIDS coverage, T Magazine editor-at-large Kurt Soller wrote then, is “to be reminded how news coverage shapes perceptions and policies, particularly when it comes to oppressed communities.”

In an interview with Hellgate NY, Jo Livingstone, a critic and writer who helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project’s letter, argued that the Times’ reporting on trans people is intended in part to drive views and outrage:

There are really not that many trans people in America. There aren’t that many trans children in America. This is an issue which affects a lot of people, in theory. In practice, maybe not so much.

But because it’s a question that seems to relate to institutions that people feel a lot of ownership over, for example, schools, especially primary schools, you know, “what are people doing with my child when I’m not around?” I think that there’s a paranoia at the heart of what makes people want to read about this stuff, which is only getting more and more intense, the more the coverage.

Newspapers have a passive explanation — what people want to read is the news that we report. And just to go back to what I was saying before, that is a willful misreading of what journalism does in society.

GLAAD also published an open letter on Wednesday and protested outside Times headquarters, calling out the Times’ “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people.” That letter was signed by more than 100 equality and media organizations and individuals including celebrities like Judd Apatow and Margaret Cho.

GLAAD’s letter includes specific demands for the Times, including a meeting with trans community members and more hiring of trans employees. The Freelance Solidarity Project’s letter simply asks for a response.

Charlie Stadtlander, The New York Times’ director of external communications, provided a statement on Wednesday afternoon:

“We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.

As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.

The very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society — to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.”

I asked Stadtlander to clarify which letter this statement is referring to — just the one from GLAAD, or also the one from the Times contributors? He responded:

The letter you linked to with the numerous signatories was delivered in person by GLAAD reps to the NYT this morning. GLAAD issued press releases and letters of their own simultaneously, but the open letter you’re talking about came to us through GLAAD. The statement applies to both.

On Thursday, the group of Times writers behind the letter told me, “GLAAD confirmed to us that they did not deliver a copy of our letter to the New York Times. We look forward to clarification from the Times.”

You can read the Times contributors’ letter here or sign it here. You can read GLAAD’s letter here or sign it here.

180 (and counting) past and present New York Times contributors have signed an open letter to the paper’s standards editor condemning the ongoing unethical anti-trans bias in its coverage of trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people. Read it here https://t.co/0A9Ryp4R5K

— stasis baby (@HarronWawker) February 15, 2023

Permit me a thread on something I have first-hand knowledge of. My child transitioned when he was 20. This is a good letter Chris links to. What is most disturbing to me about the treatment of trans issues even by the mainstream media is how facile it can be, lacking nuance.
1/5 https://t.co/Ck6Ji1Fyj8

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 15, 2023

Last week, NYT published a (very rare) column defending trans people from right-wing attacks. Then an editor went in and removed mention of trans people from the headline. https://t.co/FLGVWFPd0F pic.twitter.com/z2MDWAxqYn

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) February 15, 2023

…from 1963 to 1987 was deeply problematic. At the time, the first instinct of all those involved would doubtless have been to claim they were just telling all sides of the story. But bias can often disguise itself as neutrality/objectivity. This merits real self-examination. >

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 15, 2023

…but those pieces no longer look expert or objective. Many other stories assigned by crime or city-desk editors treated homosexuality only as an urban scourge, a blight on the streets. They don’t look great either. It’s always worth asking: How will this be read in 10 years? x

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 15, 2023

“To suggest that there is no relationship between the way that we are using language at the newspaper to discuss people’s lives, people who are also being debated in court, is to really be willfully ignorant of what it is that we do as journalists.”https://t.co/7xXOgedB1A

— Hell Gate *subscribe today!* (@HellGateNY) February 15, 2023

“It was very important to me when I was writing that tweet that even though the metaphorical Gray Lady would try to use slang, it was still very proper grammar,” Jacob Harris, the Times developer behind the Twitter account, told Nieman Lab in 2017. “‘It is I’ versus ‘It’s me.’ It’s like the Queen trying to use slang. It had to be that combination of fusty and fashionable.”

Fast-forward to January 2023. The queen is no longer with us, and corporate social media has undergone a vibe shift. When The New York Times launched its flagship TikTok this week, on January 24, it started with hard news, featuring Brandon Tsay, the 26-year-old who disarmed a gunman at a dance hall in Alhambra, California.

@nytimes

A mass shooting at a popular ballroom shocked a small community east of Los Angeles. The police praised a man as a hero after he disarmed the gunman at a second dance hall. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since the massacre at Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.

♬ original sound – The New York Times

I am not on TikTok, but the NYT is, and now a story I've been working on for the NYT this week has become the NYT's first story on TikTok. https://t.co/JKhyrYwNGC

— Scott Dodd (@scottdodd) January 24, 2023

The Times is a few years behind other publishers in creating a flagship TikTok account but already had some subbrands on the platform, including NYT Cooking and the Hard Fork podcast. It’s looking to hire social media video journalists. And it’s published three more TikToks. Topics: “A Times reporter and photographer rode along with a team gathering data on the colossal atmospheric rivers that have drenched California,” “A barrage of gun violence left the nation’s most populous state groping for answers on Tuesday as the death toll from back-to-back mass shootings in California rose to at least 19 people in less than three days,” and “The deadly trek to the U.S. through the Darién gap.”

“nytimes on the tok?! ” Brut, a mobile-first video publisher, wrote.

The Times’ official TikTok account had 747 followers as of Thursday morning.

With just a three-year delay compared to its major competitors, The NY Times has finally joined TikTok.

It sounds like the right time to remind journalists looking into TikTok that there are +700 examples of publishers worldwide on the platform here: https://t.co/23DTjrymmC pic.twitter.com/pMpAUR2GyR

— Francesco Zaffarano (@FraZaffarano) January 25, 2023

The Times journalists join employees at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, many of whom have been on strike since October, and journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who have been on strike since November 28.

The New York Times Guild argues that while the paper is flourishing economically, profits haven’t been shared fairly with workers. Times employees on strike plan to protest outside the company’s headquarters in Manhattan at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.

From CNN:

The act of protest, which has not been staged by employees at the newspaper of record in decades, will leave many of its major desks depleted of their staffs, creating a challenge for the news organization that millions of readers rely on.

An executive at the Times, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged to CNN on Wednesday that the work stoppage would certainly create difficulties. But, the executive said, management has readied for the moment and could rely on the newspaper’s other resources, such as its international staff which largely are not part of the union, to fill the voids.

Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, said in a note to staff, “We will produce a robust report on Thursday. But it will be harder than usual.”

Times journalists encouraged readers not to engage with any Times products during the strike, and yes, that means reading about Brittney Griner’s release elsewhere and breaking your Wordle streak. Critic-at-large and VP of the Guild Amanda Hess:

We’re asking readers to not engage in any @nytimes platforms tomorrow and stand with us on the digital picket line! Read local news. Listen to public radio. Make something from a cookbook. Break your Wordle streak.

— Amanda Hess (@amandahess) December 7, 2022

I try not to cross picket lines, but for Nieman Lab purposes was curious to see specific ways that the strike was affecting Times output Thursday, so I fired up an RSS reader that I hadn’t used in several years. A few things I noticed:

• Breaking news alerts are still being sent out.
• A new episode of The Daily was released Thursday, as was a new edition of The Morning. Those products were presumably produced on Wednesday before the strike began, though, and I’ll be curious to see if they come out tomorrow.
• A liveblog on Brittney Griner’s release primarily consisted of posts bylined by international correspondents, who are not part of the Guild. Most other stories in the Times’ “Top Stories” RSS feed for Thursday were also by international correspondents. A very brief Celine Dion story was written by an editor. Some pre-written stories by journalists who are on strike today were published as well.
• Two top Times reporters are not participating in the walkout, and their bylines appeared in the Brittney Griner liveblog Thursday.
• The Washington Post’s Elahe Izadi notes that comments may go unmoderated.

NPR’s David Folkenflik:

“From my point of view, this is an absolutely necessary shot across the bow,” says guild member Michael Powell, a veteran reporter who covers free speech matters for the New York Times national desk. “We’re approaching two years without a contract, which means we’re approaching two years without a raise….Each month that goes by, they’re taking more money out of our pocket.”

Several managers at the Times, speaking to NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment, acknowledge concern about the tensions and the burden of putting out the paper without hundreds of their colleagues.

Editors are scrambling to make sure long-held stories are ready for publication. Some are preparing to flex dormant reporting muscles. Others are unlikely to miss a step. But the sheer volume of copy produced by the paper’s newsroom each day is unlikely to be matched with more than half of the chairs metaphorically empty.

NYT management is trying to ride out the walkout using a mix of pre-written stories from guild staff (it has a lot of those) and a skeleton crew + editors to handle breaking news. Here’s the un-bylined story for Griner’s release: pic.twitter.com/sZW5MWfojY

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 8, 2022

If you see someone's name on a story on Thursday or Friday, it does not necessarily mean they crossed the picket line to write it. Newspapers often have reporters write portions of stories ahead of time when possible.

— NYTimesGuild (@NYTimesGuild) December 8, 2022

A rare unbylined @nytimes story: https://t.co/sYUJwcO7kQ

— David Gura (@davidgura) December 8, 2022

A news alert with my name on it just went out. It was a pre- written story ahead of an expected vote.

I stand with the guild!

— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) December 8, 2022

Folks couldn’t help but compare the offerings:

The Times: See if you could be a … major league umpire!!! ( ᴜ ω ᴜ )

The Post: I bet you’d make a great rat.https://t.co/FG2ilBp9jm

— Philip Bump (@pbump) October 28, 2022

The NYT: Think you can call balls and strikes better than an MLB umpire. Here’s an interactive game with real life examples and video

The Post: SimRatty https://t.co/MPYy2QuISt

— Derek A (@Son_DeeRRF) October 28, 2022

Games, I probably don’t have to tell you, can be pleasantly diverting, especially when the rest of the news is about election deniers, political violence, and tragic mass-death events.

In the quest to create the daily habits that many publishers see as critical to retaining subscribers, news organizations have invested in digital games and puzzles, from the classic crosswords to shelling out seven figures for a game called Wordle.

The rat and umpire games we’re talking about here are a little different than those examples in that they’re not ones you’d play again and again. (Though some wouldn’t mind changing that!) Instead, the creators  described them, alternatively, as “gamifying the news,” “interactive, fan-centered service journalism,” and “evergreen news-you-can-use.”

With news fatigue and news avoidance on the rise, the thinking goes, being able to deliver your core product — journalism — in a ~~~fun~~~ format can’t hurt.

Jonathan Ellis, deputy sports editor at The New York Times, said on Friday that the interactive umpire game has been one of the most-read pieces across the site since it published last week. The Times has turned sports news into interactive games in the past, too, challenging readers to beat sprinter Usain Bolt off the blocks or predicting whether an N.F.L. pass is complete or incomplete.

For the umpire challenge, the Times created a social-friendly shareable score reminiscent of Wordle:

This is a great example of the newsgame genre. Does well to intersperse the gameplay with explanation and analysis — always the trickiest thing in something like this.

You Be the Ump 7/7
https://t.co/RESrtTmYVd

— Martin Stabe (@martinstabe) October 28, 2022

This somehow makes me feel worse

You Be the Ump 7/7
https://t.co/2xKr7nCnxV

— Ashley Lauren (@ashleyleylauren) October 27, 2022

Ellis edited the piece, while graphics and multimedia editor Sean Catangui, The Upshot’s Kevin Quealy, and other editors on the sports and digital news design teams made contributions. Ultimately, though, Ellis credited graphics and multimedia editor Mike Beswetherick for coming up with the idea and pursuing it as a “passion project.”

“[Beswetherick] was intrigued that Major League Baseball was talking about the idea of using an automated strike zone to call balls and strikes, replacing the umpires’ traditional role, and wanted to explore just how accurate or inaccurate human umpires are,” Ellis explained. “There are already various websites that track umpire accuracy, but we quickly came up with the idea of letting readers see for themselves how hard (or easy?) it is for umpires to make the right calls — and so that in turn became the idea for a gamified format.”

“We felt that a simple game could really show, not tell, readers what it was like to try to make accurate calls as pitches sped toward them,” Ellis added.

The Times converted data provided by the MLB — including the starting position, velocity, and acceleration of each pitch — to create the three-dimensional game.

I did, embarrassingly, manage to slip in that I got a perfect score under the pretense of asking Ellis what percentage of readers “also” called all seven pitches correctly. He told me that the Times didn’t track how well users played in the game — but that I shouldn’t wait at home for a call from the MLB.

“I’m sorry to say you’re not alone atop the standings,” he said, noting that many of the scores shared to social media were also 7-for-7. “The game wasn’t intended to make umpires’ jobs look too easy — and we note in the piece that the professionals are highly accurate. Even if you miss just one of the seven pitches, you only got 85.7% correct, which is lower than the M.L.B. umpires’ 2022 rate of 93.8% correct.”

(The last pitch, a fastball on the outside corner, did trip up many players, Ellis added.)

Staff at The Washington Post described their game as a “passion project” as well. Inspired by “the nearly endless stream” of videos of rats around the city on social media, designer Tara McCarty conceived of the initial idea for a rat-based video game. The Metro desk’s Dana Hedgpeth and Alisa Tang, designer/developer Joe Fox, illustrator Shelly Tan, and several others contributed to the game, part of a bigger package about rats in D.C. that also includes a rat quiz and a feature with rat catchers sharing tips as well as videos of their epic “showdowns” with the large rodents.

If that last line made you shiver, you’re not alone. The Post took pains not to make the game too realistic by giving the main character — a long-toothed fellow named “Cheddar” —  a pixelated, retro feel.

“We leaned into a retro theme for the game to make it feel softer and more engaging. People have strong reactions to rats — if it’s too realistic of a rendering, it might scare off potential users,” deputy design director Matthew Callahan said in an email. “Everything from the color palette to the rendering was meant to evoke a retro and soothing game — sort of a Super Mario meets Animal Crossing — rather than something grotesque.”

NYC: “this is NOT ratatouille. rats are NOT our friends.”
the post: “here is a video game you are the rat and the object is to get inside a D.C. home” https://t.co/iO4Xxdbo9s

— Colleen Grablick (@colleengrablick) October 28, 2022

Still, there are plenty of disgusting/amazing moments in the feature. The pet poop left in backyards is described as a nutrient-dense “energy bar” for rats and, as players maneuver into a restaurant’s kitchen as Cheddar, they learn the rodents can squeeze into spaces the size of a marble due to their collapsible rib cage.

“Parsing through fact and fiction when it comes to rats was fascinating,” designer Tara McCarty said when asked what stuck out. “The idea that rats gnaw things to prevent their teeth from growing super long is a myth. Learning about sebum — the dirt and oils that rub off of rat fur onto the sidewalks and cement they frequent — was an eye opener.”

“We can’t unsee or unlearn the things we’ve come across in this reporting process,” McCarty added.

The Post has experimented with newsy games dating back, at least, to the 8-bit-style Floppy Candidate game in 2016, in which presidential candidates navigate news-centric obstacles. They’ve produced various “SantaSearches” every year since 2017 (including one where Christmas elves battle supply chain issues) and, in May 2022, Fox and graphics reporter/illustrator Dylan Moriarty built a game that uses a round of mini golf to illustrate how politicians can use gerrymandering to tilt elections. (“Think of us as your caddie,” the game instructions read. “We’ll show you how the district shapes are the result of careful calculation and offer help to spot gerrymandering in the wild. Can you beat par — and other Washington Post readers — in our first-ever Gerrymander Invitational?”)

“Rather than just reporting the news or trying to explain it, it encouraged readers to engage with it,” Callahan said about these types of games. “It can make it easier for a reader to spend time and create a connection with the story.”

The Post’s rat game is available on desktop and mobile, but the teams said they designed Cheddar’s adventures through a community garden, neighborhood dumpster, and restaurant with mobile in mind.

“A few things were trickier than expected — for example, making sure the user could hold down the on-screen buttons without triggering their phone’s text selection. That was fundamentally a completely new interaction we haven’t really used before,” designer/developer Joe Fox said.

“From a format perspective, The Post is deeply interested in pushing our storytelling — we aim to learn from a technological and editorial perspective on each project like this that we publish,” Callahan added. “By taking these learnings back, it gives us a head start on the next story, enabling us to build faster and smarter, and put tools in more people’s hands. This helps us think more about the story and less about the code roadblocks.”

The Washington Post said they’d seen the topic of rats resonate with their readers on social media, and that even internally, every time they talked about their game idea, “more and more people in and out of the newsroom wanted to share their own rat stories and things that they had learned.” The interest helped get the package off the ground.

For smaller newsrooms with fewer resources than the Times or Post — and that’s most of us — publishing as many interactive games at the same level might be out of reach. But games also don’t have to be high-tech marvels. If your small and/or local newsroom is experimenting with games or puzzles, let me know.

Ranges have to include a minimum and maximum — employers can’t say something like “$15/hour and up.” So some — cough, New York Post, cough — are finding wiggle room with useless ranges like “$15/hour to $125,000.” Some CNN positions included pay ranges of nearly $100,000.

We went searching through the job boards to find what media companies, both those based in New York City and those that have offices or some positions there, are paying — and whether they’re adhering to the, um, spirit of the law. (By the way, is it fair to expect companies to be complying already? Yes, they’ve had months to prepare and the rule was already delayed once.)

This list is up-to-date as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

ABC

Examples:

• Producer (consumer investigative) – GMA, ABC News: $99,400–$136,730
• Digital editor, hard news – ABC News: $75,200–$103,400

AP

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic appears to be providing salary ranges for all positions, including those with the option of working remote. Examples:

• Senior photo editor: “Salary Minimum: $100,000, Salary Maximum: $120,000.”
• Staff writer, The Daily: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $70,000.”
• Product manager: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $130,000.”

Axios

Axios is providing salary ranges for jobs listed under its “NYC Office,” even if they are remote. Salary information is not given for jobs based out of other offices. Examples:

• Associated director, integrated marketing: “On target earnings for this role is in the range of $90,000-$110,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills.”
• Senior software engineer (backend): “Base salary ranges for this role are listed below and are dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills. This range does not include other compensation benefits.
  L6: $160k – $210k
  L5: $160k – $200k
  L4: $130k – $190k”

Bloomberg

Examples:

• Newsletter producer (contract): “35 – 45 USD Hourly”
• News automation content engineer: $105,000–160,000
• Senior video producer: $110,000–$115,000

Bustle Digital Group

Examples:

• Deputy features director: $85,000–$105,000
• Writer and director, branded video: $72,500–$78,000
• Entertainment editor, Nylon: $63,500–$70,000

BuzzFeed

• News editor, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $72,500-$87,000”
• Business analyst, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $73,000-$82,000”
• Features editor, Complex: $83,000–$100,000

CBS News

Examples:

• Editor: $110,000-$120,000
• Senior editor, CBSNews.com: $100,000–$109,000

CNN

Examples:

• Producer, Snapchat, CNN Digital Video: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $85,540.00 – $158,860.00 salary per year.”
• Senior section editor, social: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $113,890.00 – $211,510.00 salary per year.”

Chalkbeat

Example:

• People operations assistant: $50,000–$60,000

The City

Examples:

• Investigations editor: $140,000–$150,000
• Associate director of development, individual giving: $110,000–$120,000

Condé Nast

Examples:

• Executive director, brand marketing, Vanity Fair: $145,000–$180,000
• SEO writer and producer, Glamour: $60,000–$78,000
• Executive editor, news, Wired: $170,000–$225,000

The Daily Beast

Example:

• Entertainment critic: $90,000–$100,000

FT

Examples:

• Associate editor: $95,000–$110,000
• Reporter, FundFire: $65,000–$72,000

Dotdash Meredith

Examples:

• Methodology writer, beauty: “This is a contract role at 40 hours per week and would be hybrid. The rate for this position is $27/hour.”
• General manager, Verywell Health: $146,000–$219,000

First Look Media

Examples:

• Designer: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 65K – 75K”
• Senior analyst, Topic streaming service: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 90K – 100K”

Forbes

Forbes appears to be posting salary ranges for all jobs. Examples:

• Senior editor, newsletters: “The annual base salary range for this role is: $115,000 – $140,000.”
• Breaking news politics reporter: “This is a contract position with potential for full time employment…Hourly Rate Range: $28.85 – $28.85.”

Fortune

Example:

• VP, newsletters: $175,000–$200,000.

G/O Media

Examples:

• Staff writer, Quartz: “This is a position covered under the collective bargaining agreement with the WGA-East which establishes the minimum salary for this position at $62,000. This position is set at a range of $62,000 to $68,000.”
• Editorial director, New York, NY: “The salary for this position ranges from $300,000.00 to $350,000.00.”

The Guardian

Examples:

• Deputy editor, race and equity: $180,000–$190,000
• Reporter, fossil fuels and climate: $88,000–$100,000

The Information

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

Insider Inc.

Examples:

• Business features editor: $150,000–$220,000
• Politics correspondent: $100,000–$140,000

NBC

Examples:

• Reporter, Select: $75,000–$125,000
• Updates editor, Select: $75,000–$90,000

New York Post

• Decider digital project manager: “$50,000–$145,000”
• SEO manager: $50,000- $145,000
• Deputy photo editor, Sunday (Tues–Sat): “$50,000- $145,000”
• Sports digital reporter/producer: “$15/hour – $125,000”
• Tech reporter: “$50,000- $145,000”
• Politics reporter: “$15/hour – $125,000”

New York Times

The Times is providing base pay salary ranges, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• Senior designer: $76,500–$105,000
• Reporting fellowship: $76,168.04
• Legal affairs correspondent in Washington, D.C.: $115,506.56–$170,000.00
• Director, story and audience analytics: $152,000–$185,000.00
• Senior art director, games: $140,000–$165,000
• Supervising editor, style, Wirecutter, in New York, NY or remote: $92,650–$109,000

Penske Media Corporation

Examples:

• Associate director, paid social: $100,000–$110,000
• Vibe music editor: $75,000–$85,000
• Rolling Stone photo coordinator: $52,000–$62,000

Puck

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Reuters

Examples:

• Product manager – video: $122,500–$227,500
• Reader revenue analytics: $60,200–$111,800

Slate

Examples:

• News editor: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $82,000 and $100,000.”
• Podcast host – ICYMI: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $100,000 and $115,000.”

Substack

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Time

Examples:

• Manager of product design: $85,000–$125,000
• Newsletter operations manager: $75,000–$105,000

Vice

Examples:

• Editor, shopping and reviews: “New York/California: 64,000 – 75,000 USD. Outside New York/California: 54,000 – 64,000 USD”
• Associate writer, affiliate: “New York/California: 55,000 – 60,000 USD”
• VP, audio: “New York/California: 190,000 – 230,000 USD”

Vox Media

Vox is providing salary ranges for all positions, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• NowThis director of analytics: “The minimum and maximum salary for this position is $125,000.”
• Cities manager, Eater (temporary while manager is on maternity leave): “The annual base pay range for this job is $77,000 to $108,000.”

Wall Street Journal

Examples:

• Executive producer, news podcasts: $50,000 to $180,000
• Audio reporter, The Journal podcast: $40,000 to $160,000
• Reporter, careers and workplace: $50,000 to $180,000

Washington Post

Examples:

• Sales sector director: $200,500–$334,100
• Graphic designer: $59,167.16–$125,600

WNYC

Examples:

• Major gifts officer: $82,000-$100,000.
• Housing reporter, WNYC/Gothamist: $84,413-$86,000.

There is no shortage of news in 2022. None of these initiatives are compensating for a dry period in political agitation, international catastrophe, or really, any of the stuff that could compel a customer to read some articles. Instead, it feels as if the opposite is true. As reporters continue to file stories from the frontlines of the great American crackup, as more Covid variants bubble to the surface, as the world continues to unspool at an alarming rate, media managers seem to have come to a humbling realization: Some subscribers would rather game than sift through the wreckage. Can you blame them?

“The first [New York Times] crossword puzzle ran in 1942, not long after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The tradition of putting games into the paper as a diversion [has been around] from the tough news cycles of the 1940s to the tough news cycles of today,” Jonathan Knight, the man who has been in charge of the Times’ entire games operation since 2020, told me. “When news went digital, we focused more on the news, but now we’re getting back to that Sunday paper experience.”

Knight took an unorthodox path into newspapers. Before he came to the Times, he was a vice president at Zynga — the company responsible for some of the most profitably addictive games ever made (Farmville, Words With Friends, and so on). That DNA is all over the Times’ game section, which today resembles a suite of tasteful, scholastic brain teasers with a guiding hand behind the screen tracking one’s glacial progress like a string of Call of Duty victories. “You’ve solved eight Mondays in a row!” reads a caption currently plastered to my subscription, residue of my girlfriend’s dutiful morning crossword habit.

Knight speaks openly about the Times’ desire to reach 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027, which can only be realistically engineered by investing in terrain outside of the media’s traditional contours. Case in point, the Times’ Games-only subscription option, where you get access to the entire oeuvre of puzzles for $40 a year, has racked up over a million subscribers. Knight is helping the Times escape the boundaries of a news organization, transforming it into this omnivorous, all-consuming platform with fingers in every pot. It’s become a lifestyle brand rather than a paper, which is exactly what’s allowing it to grow.

“Our strategy is to be the essential subscription for curious people looking to engage and understand the world, and that goes beyond finding out what happened in the world and reading the news,” Knight said. “We’re having a lot of success with that strategy. The subscription bundle is about putting that front and center. We’re saying, ‘Hey, we know you’re interested in at least some, if not all, of these products we have to offer.'”

Knight’s conclusions bear out across the industry. Liz Maynes-Aminzade, the puzzles and games editor at The New Yorker, said that “subscribers who play the crossword or quiz every day are more likely to renew,” according to the magazine’s internal research — which she imagines is mirrored in the analytics of every other media company that has invested into a games section. (This gets to a larger point about the puzzle boom. Maynes-Aminzade noted that The New Yorker has a ton of data on the popularity and usage patterns of its digital games, which simply wasn’t possible when the crossword was bound to ink and paper.) That’s important ammunition, given how competitive the word-game wars have become in such a short amount of time.

“The groundswell does mean that people now have more options to choose from. I think this will make it all the more important for outlets to establish distinct identities for their games sections,” Maynes-Aminzade said. “The bar is getting higher, and generic games won’t necessarily be a draw if readers feel like they can do better elsewhere.”

There will be winners and losers in the games-section renaissance, in the same way there are casualties in any of the fiscal schemes that tell the story of digital media. Journalists tend to get cynical about the bailouts and off-ramps devised by upper management to juice flagging traffic numbers or dwindling ad dollars — particularly when those strategies exist outside the work of reporting itself. One of the recurring, unavoidable facts of this line of work is that there is a hard ceiling on how many people want to read the news, and that contradiction, combined with the VC-honed mandate of expansion, has given rise to a wealth of bad ideas. The bloat and then the contraction, the hires and then the layoffs, the pivot to video and then the pivot to oblivion. I mean, The New Yorker’s union earned a contract last year after 31 months of bargaining; I can understand how it might have been frustrating to watch the company fuss over the crossword during those graveyard shifts around the table.

But Maynes-Aminzade also reminded me that we’ve been solving puzzles in the newspaper for 109 years. Today, the games section doesn’t reek of the same rot that has poisoned so many other, grosser attempts to make money in the media (though, 100 years ago, some disagreed). Look around you: The Ringer is currently sheathed in sponsorships from sportsbooks, and Vice partnered with cigarette giant Philip Morris. The Austin Chronicle, the weekly I wrote for while studying at the University of Texas, recently got into hot water after publishing an advertisement for an “Asian mail order bride” service. The prospects are grim, as they always seem to be, and we could do a hell of a lot worse than our wages being underwritten by a crossword.

“More and more media companies do seem to be catching onto the idea that games can help support their publications as a whole. [But] I don’t see the current interest in games as a bubble,” Maynes-Aminzade said. “Game sections are pretty tried and true: Plenty of magazines and newspapers have had them for decades. It’s not a new idea that lots of people like to mix crosswords into their media diets. Puzzles just pair well with reading the news, and that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.”

The New York Times bought the sports news site for $550 million in cold hard cash back in January, but it’s only this week that bundle subscribers are being offered the chance to hop The Athletic’s paywall.

A slide deck presented to investors by The New York Times earlier this month announced the addition and shed light on what the Times hoped to gain by acquiring the 5-year-old sports news site. The Times sees a “highly attractive opportunity” to cross-sell individual subscriptions and — crucially — add value to its bundle because of the “modest” overlap between subscribers to the Times and the 1.26 million with a standalone subscription to The Athletic, the deck explained. The Athletic joins Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and, of course, news in that all-access digital bundle.

Unsurprisingly, The New York Times sees multi-product subscribers as the most valuable. They pay the most, retain the best, and engage more than any single-product subscriber group. Bundle subscribers churn at rates 40% lower than subscribers who pay for the basic news-only subscription, according to the Times.

In addition to bolstering its bundle, the Times plans to implement a more flexible paywall at The Athletic to give potential subscribers a chance to sample the sports content. It will also use the Times’ digital advertising muscle to “unlock significant advertising revenue” at The Athletic, which currently brings in under $10 million in ad revenue each year through limited sponsorships. (The site’s founders originally envisioned an ad-free site.)

The Times, which has been experimenting with personalization including geotargeting in its news division, also highlighted The Athletic’s customized notifications. “Following one or more leagues is one of our strongest predictors of retention,” according to the Times.

You can see the full slide deck prepared for investors here. Current home delivery and all-access digital subscribers should head to the Times to claim their access to The Athletic.

Kahn, an experienced reporter who currently serves as managing editor, will take the reins from outgoing executive editor Dean Baquet midway through June. (Baquet will stay at the Times to lead an as-yet-unannounced initiative. A spokesperson for the Times said details about his new role would be announced “soon,” but not this week.)

Unlike the last time the top editor position turned over at the Times, this change was expected. Baquet, the first Black journalist to hold the position, recently turned 65 — the traditional retirement age for executive editors at the Times. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s announcement, Kahn was described as the “overwhelming favorite” and “obvious pick” to replace him.

When Baquet became editor in 2014, the Times had about 800,000 digital-only subscribers. Today, the Times has more than 10 million digital subscriptions — and has set its sights on getting to 15 million subscriptions in the next five years. Kahn will also oversee a newsroom that has grown rapidly, and now includes more than 1,700 journalists.

In an interview with Times reporters, Kahn said he plans to prioritize securing public trust. He added, “We don’t know where the political zeitgeist will move over time. Rather than chase that, we want to commit and recommit to being independent.”

Kahn, the Times reported, “charted an ambitious path” in remarks to the staff, “saying the paper should consider itself a direct competitor to dozens of news outlets, ranging from global television networks like CNN and the BBC to niche upstarts like The Marshall Project and The Information.”

For more about the man, the Times’ media reporter Michael Grynbaum has a profile of Kahn. (You’ll learn the F in Joseph F. Kahn doesn’t stand for anything. His Boston-based parents just wanted their son to share initials with John F. Kennedy.)

My profile of Joe Kahn: a decorated journalist who saw the potential of China before others, whose affluent childhood was disrupted by tragedy, and who is now tasked with leading The New York Times amid the challenges of a polarized era. https://t.co/Iu3RPvNM9o

— Michael M. Grynbaum (@grynbaum) April 19, 2022

In case you were curious: Like his predecessor, Kahn is not especially active on social media. His most recent tweet was posted in November 2021.

White smoke from the NYT building this morning https://t.co/Qh7J5GJNud

— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) April 19, 2022

I left the NYT in 2016 and never worked directly with Joe Kahn.

I’ve only heard good things about him as a person.

But he strikes me as the safest choice, a signal that the paper does not see a need for fundamental change, post-Baquet.

Is that right?

— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) April 19, 2022

During my stint as public editor @nycscribe (who supervised international news then) was particularly cooperative and notably non-defensive. I appreciated him

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) April 19, 2022

Because he is a restrained personality, and quite thoughtful, he is likely to minimize the inherent drama of his new role.

— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) April 19, 2022

Good. “Joe has a long history of seeing things clearly, even if he’s lonely in seeing things that way.” https://t.co/o1JOaf5BT9

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) April 19, 2022

“I would not have thought that being a foreign correspondent in China would be good preparation to be executive editor of The New York Times in 2022.” – @nycscribe, on how his career prepared him to lead the @nytimes. (By @grynbaum) https://t.co/qSe3IyqlU7

— Ed O’Keefe (@edokeefe) April 19, 2022

Sometimes the least surprising news is the best news:https://t.co/f1CxZA3Q0W

— Tom Jolly (@TomJolly) April 19, 2022

When crossword puzzles first swept across North America in the mid-1920s, The New York Times sneered, calling them “a familiar form of madness” and the next fad after Mahjong. Claims that these puzzles were good mental exercise and a way to expand one’s personal lexicon, via a dictionary, were dismissed.

In another piece published the following year, titled “See harm not education,” the Times argued that learning obscure three-letter words was useless — but it didn’t stop there. “The indictment of the puzzles goes further and deeper,” it said, citing The New Republic, which posited that there wasn’t a worse exercise for writers and speakers due to it fixing “false definitions in the mind.”

This piece prompted a letter to the editor by a reader who retorted, “I am afraid that a good many of your readers will disagree with the views expressed,” pointing out that it was generally agreed that crosswords were educational.

Crossword puzzles: A national menace

This animosity makes more sense when you understand the origins of crossword puzzles in America: They were popularized via the pages of the original tabloid, The New York World, the “new media” of the day. As far as the journalistic establishment was concerned, crosswords were another mindless fad used as a substitute for good editorial, to keep readers coming back — much like BuzzFeed quizzes were in the 2010s. Tabloids were looked upon as trashy, childish, and plebeian and were labeled the “yellow press” after one of the numerous comic strips contained within them. The New York Times would refuse to publish crosswords for another two decades.

Across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom, the Times of London reported on the U.S. crossword craze with similar disdain, using an ironically tabloidesque headline “An enslaved America.” From 1924:

All America has succumbed to the allurements of the cross-word puzzle. In a few short weeks it has grown from the pastime of a few ingenious idlers into a national institution and almost a national menace: a menace because it is making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society.

The omnipresence of crosswords in the U.S. was described in detail. This “fad” was “in trains and trams on omnibuses, in subways, in private offices and counting rooms, in factories and homes, and even — though as yet rarely — with hymnals for camouflage, in church.” Along with other modern trends, the crossword had supposedly “dealt the final blow to the art of conversations.”

Crossword puzzles: An invasive weed

In the London Times’ estimate, over ten million people spent half an hour each day working out the puzzles when they should be working, noting “this loss to productive activity of far more time than is lost by labor strikes.” It even compared them to an invasive weed, stating “The cross-word puzzle threatens to be the wild hyacinth of American industry.”

Judging by reports at the time, this proverbial “wild hyacinth” had invaded the UK by the following year, when reports appeared of Queen Mary, wife of King George V, taking up the pastime. Crosswords were scorned as the “the laziest occupation” and an “unsociable habit.” One British woman took her husband to court for staying in bed until 11 a.m. doing crosswords. Public libraries fought a “war on crosswords” by blotting out the games in their freely available newspapers and limiting access to dictionaries within reading rooms.

An essay titled “In abuse of the cross-word puzzle” noted that early adopters of golf and bridge were abused for their frivolity but now appeared intellectual giants “in this era of puzzles!” — failing to learn a lesson from history, namely, that crosswords would eventually be seen as intellectual too. “Incredible though it may seem,” it also noted, novel reading was scorned by parents not long ago, too. Crossword puzzles (and jigsaws) were different, according to the author: “Was any age ever given over to such stultifying pastimes or labeled with signs of such mental degradation?”

Less than five years after it derided them, the Times of London would give in and print its first crossword puzzle.

A mental illness called “crossword puzzleitis”

Back in the U.S., the crossword puzzle habit was being pathologized and medicalized, and the term “crossword puzzleitis” was coined — likely in jest — but it would eventually get attention from medical authorities and physicians. One doctor concluded that “crossword puzzleitis” “stole” the memories of his patient​. “Crossword insomnia” was another phenomenon reported, akin to late-night smartphone fiddling. Optometrists claimed the habit caused headaches and weakened eyesight.

Magistrates lambasted court attendants, police officers, lawyers, and their clients for “clogging up the wheels of justice” by pondering over the puzzles. Academics made similar complaints about their students, and the University of Michigan instituted an outright ban in lecture halls.

“Alas! How quickly may happy dreams be blasted.

Crosswords were cited as a reason for divorce in more than one case, receiving widespread press attention, including from The New York Times, which ran the headline “Crossword mania breaks up homes.” Other papers published cartoons featuring weeping grooms and puzzle-engrossed brides.

American libraries had the same complaints as British ones in regard to their effect on library habits, and when a U.S. district attorney was two hours late to a speaking engagement, he blamed a crossword puzzle that he had started on the train ride. Physical assault and even murder-suicide were blamed on the crossword puzzle too.

Many of these sensationalist, possibly tongue-in-cheek reports appeared in the very papers printing them, sometimes right next to the crosswords themselves.

By this time, some newspaper editors were defending crossword puzzles, insisting they were beneficial, but it was unconvincing since they were financially benefiting from the craze. Eventually, The New York Times relented, as the U.S. entered World War II — editors decided people needed a distraction and escape. The Gray Lady printed its first on Sunday, February 15, 1942.

“I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world,” the Times’ first crossword puzzle editor wrote. “You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword.”

Welcome, Wordle

A century later, word game manias are still happening. Scrabble saw a renaissance on the web and then mobile via Words with Friends in the 2010s. Late in 2021, Wordle gained mainstream coverage in the New York Times. It was praised as being free from the pressures of the hyper-capitalist attention economy; the one-game-per-day limit was held up as enforced digital moderation, ignoring its Pavlovian-esque nature. It was supposedly fun for the sake of fun, not profit and attention.

On January 31, 2022, The New York Times announced it had bought Wordle for a price in the “low seven figures” from its creator, promising to keep it free “initially.” Regarding the acquisition, The Times called games an “essential part of its strategy” to increase subscriptions: Brain teasers to make The New York Times a part of one’s daily routine, like The New York World’s strategy almost a century ago.

On Feb. 15, 2022, a jury rejected Palin’s claim. As it happened, its verdict was more or less moot. The presiding judge had already said he would dismiss the case on the grounds that the former Alaska governor’s legal team had failed to reach the bar for proving she had been defamed.

A Times editor admitted a mistake in suggesting in a 2017 opinion piece that there was a link between Palin’s rhetoric and a mass shooting. But under the so-called Sullivan standard — a rule in place for nearly 60 years that makes it difficult for public figures to successfully sue for defamation — neither the jury nor the judge considered the error significant enough for Palin to win her case.

But in reaching his decision in the Palin case, the federal judge suggested that it was likely not to be the end of the matter — indeed, an appeal is expected.

And that has defenders of a free press worried. Legal scholars note that recent opinions by Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch favor overturning the Sullivan standard — a move that would take away a key protection for the press against libel suits by vindictive public officials.

As a media historian, I can see the Palin case providing a vehicle to return libel laws back to a time when it was much easier for public figures to sue the press.

What is “actual malice”?

Before 1964’s Sullivan standard, the libel landscape in the U.S. consisted of a patchwork of state laws that made it easy for political figures to selectively persecute newspapers and public speakers who espoused opposing or unpopular views.

In 1949, John Henry McCray, a Black editor from South Carolina, served two months on a chain gang after being charged with criminal libel for writing a story about a racially charged execution. White publications reporting the same story were not charged.

Similarly, in a 1955 libel case, Dr. Von Mizell, a Black surgeon and NAACP official, was ordered to pay a $15,000 fine for writing in opposition to a Florida state legislator’s idea of abolishing public schools instead of integrating them.

Then came the Sullivan case. It centered around several tiny mistakes in a civil rights advertisement carried by The New York Times. L.B. Sullivan, a public official not even named in the advertisement, sued for defamation, and the case went from Alabama to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In setting the Sullivan standard in 1964, the Supreme Court said in effect that it ought to be difficult for any official at the federal or the state level to prove that a falsehood was libelous enough — and personally damaging enough — to surmount First Amendment protections.

The court said a public official could not win a libel lawsuit by citing minor mistakes, technical inaccuracies, or even outright negligence. Instead, under the Sullivan standard, a public official had to prove that there was “actual malice,” which means that a critic knowingly published something false or was in reckless disregard of the truth.

The court insisted that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on public officials.”

“No relation to the Constitution”

Originalists on the current Supreme Court — that is, those justices who believe that the Constitution should be interpreted as it was by those crafting the original document — seemingly disagree.

Justice Thomas, in a 2019 opinion, suggested the Sullivan ruling failed to take into account “the Constitution’s original meaning.” He followed this up in a 2021 opinion that stated the requirement on public figures to establish actual malice bears “no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.”

Some legal scholars have argued that originalism doesn’t cut much ice when it comes to First Amendment protections. After it passed in 1791, the First Amendment was open to so many state interpretations that there is no agreement on what the accepted interpretation of the day was.

Nonetheless, should Palin appeal against the latest ruling, it is likely that the case could reach a Supreme Court in which at least two justices seem primed to challenge the decades-old Sullivan rule.

Should their views prevail in the highest court of the land, it could chill the freedom of the press for conservative and liberal news organizations alike.

First, a quick recap from CNN’s Oliver Darcy:

Palin sued the paper in 2017 over an editorial that incorrectly linked the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords to a map circulated by Palin’s PAC that showed certain electoral districts under crosshairs. The Times corrected the error and apologized for it, and a judge initially dismissed the case. But a federal appeals court revived it and, as a result, a trial will now take place.

The case is, at its heart, about the limits of First Amendment protections and the standard set in the landmark New York Times vs. Sullivan case. Specifically, the standard that a public figure must prove an outlet operated with “actual malice” when it published defamatory information. Palin has argued The Times did, and The Times has said it made an honest error.

And a reminder on the kind of piece this was, from Slate:

It was an unsigned editorial. These appear in the Times opinion section, opposite the page where bylined opinion columns run. They are composed by a small group of Times opinion journalists known as the editorial board, and are meant to somehow represent the institutional voice of the Times. They are, in general, topical but milquetoast center-left takes.

Listening to Palin v. NYT again. Here's the original Editorial Board piece as it appeared in the June 15, 2017, paper that is at the center of the defamation trial: pic.twitter.com/vXZ5jXlzZo

— Sara B. (@sara_bee) February 9, 2022

A bit more from the Times:

The editorial, which lamented the nation’s increasingly heated political discourse, was written after the shooting at a congressional baseball team practice in June 2017 that left Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, gravely wounded. As [then-Opinion editor James Bennet] was editing the piece before publication, he inserted an incorrect reference to a 2010 map from Ms. Palin’s political action committee that included illustrations of cross hairs over 20 House districts held by Democrats.

That addition — “the link to political incitement was clear” — asserted that there was a link between the map and the 2011 shooting that critically injured another member of Congress, Gabrielle Giffords, and killed six others in Tucson, Ariz. In fact, such a link was never established.

Bennet resigned from The New York Times in 2020 following the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that argued that the United States government should call in the military to quash Black Lives Matter protests. He testified in court on Tuesday and was back Wednesday.

His testimony and corresponding legal documents have provided a peek into some of the inner workings of the case. A few themes emerge.

This trial is very accessible, and it’s generating a lot of coverage

Many of the reporters covering this trial aren’t physically in court, but are calling in from their homes. You can do this, too. It certainly makes live-tweeting the trial easier.

If you’ve ever done any editing, or been edited, you should tune into the Palin v NYT trial now, as James Bennet tries to explain his error that spurred this lawsuit.

844-721-7237, access code 7920433

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) February 9, 2022

Public access to live audio feeds of federal trials is partially a pandemic-related development, and it’s unclear if it will last (legislation is pending).

I am sorry to report that many federal courts are suspending this form of access as the pandemic abates, including SDNY for criminal trials/hearings. This happens to be a civil case. Many fed courts across the South haven’t offered such access for more than a year. https://t.co/rpOIgW3sCh

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) February 9, 2022

Opinion sections are weird.

Many of the details that emerge about how the Times Opinion section works (or, at least, how it worked in 2017) are strange to read from the outside.

Back on the Palin trial today. Judge Jed Rakoff just kicked things off and James Bennet is back on the stand. Times lawyer David Axelrod is asking Bennet about the structure of the editorialk board at the NYT.. Editorial board is basically "a writing collective"

— Sarah Ellison (@sarahellison) February 9, 2022

Elizabeth Williamson was the then-editorial writer who wrote the first draft of the Palin editorial. (She’s now a feature writer at the Times.) David Axelrod is a lawyer representing The New York Times.

That was an email to Elizabeth Williamson with guidance as to how to write the day's main editorial. Axelrod asks why he used "whether," and Bennet replied that it's an "important word" in this context.

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 9, 2022

The mind-boggling component here is that Bennet, later in the day, inserted very definitive incitement language into the published editorial. Yet here he was using more careful language in an email to staffers. Wild.

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 9, 2022

Note: call it intellectually consistent or self-important, or both, but many serious newspaper editorial pages handle prior positions like rulings from an appellate court – meaningful deviations from past stances would take explanation and might require time to evolve.

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) February 9, 2022

Bennet: “It was a terrible mistake. It felt terrible. And it still does.”

Bennet: "It was extremely important to me that the editorial board have a reputation for calling balls and strikes without regard to partisanship."

The error undercut that, Bennet testifies: "It was a terrible mistake. It felt terrible. And it still does."

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) February 9, 2022

Call me weird, but my favorite moment at Palin v. NYT today was Bennet explaining he spent ‘a lot of time’ in 2017 telling ed board members that due to $-saving move they were going to lose the private offices they’d had since ‘time immemorial.' The rest: https://t.co/RbOInpK6mf

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) February 9, 2022

There’s a lot of Twitter in this trial.

Hanna Ingber was founding director of the New York Times Reader Center, an initiative launched in 2017 (shortly after the Times eliminated its Public Editor position) to interact more directly with readers.

Under discussion now is the email from a colleague of Bennet's in the NYT Reader Center — Hanna Ingber — with thoughts about how to present the correction. pic.twitter.com/kXu1P372xj

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 8, 2022

The edit page Twitter account publishes these corrections.
Note that neither mentions Palin. And as is NYT's (and many other news orgs') usual style, they don't apologize pic.twitter.com/pbgUsOVC4U

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) February 8, 2022

This has not been the only discussion of tweet threads.

(As the NYT's attorney shows Bennet a Twitter thread.)

Q: Can you explain what threading the tweets like this means for the jury?

Bennet explains what threading is.

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) February 9, 2022

When do you apologize?

The Times apologized via Twitter from the @nytopinion account, but didn’t run an apology in the actual paper, just a correction. The “Darcy” here is CNN’s Oliver Darcy.

But the apology didn't reach Darcy because the New York Times has a policy against apologizing. 4/ pic.twitter.com/ikqvDgnwiO

— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 7, 2022

The policy against apologizing does not seem to apply to tweets.

Does that policy apply to tweets? They tweeted an apology on June 15, 2017, which CNN included in its story. https://t.co/Hp2BoXlkLV

— An Phung (@AnHaiPhung) February 8, 2022

The Times has gotten there early, though, thanks to its acquisition of sports subscription site The Athletic — and The Athletic’s 1.8 million paid subscriptions — earlier this month. (“Separate and apart from The Athletic, the Company believes it would have reached this target well before 2025 on an organic basis,” per the press release.)

The Times also publicly set a new goal of 15 million digital subscribers by the end of 2027 and “plans to increasingly promote a high-value New York Times bundled digital subscription.” (Will the paid bundle include Wordle, which the Times acquired for over $1 million this week? We’ll see, but uh … enjoy playing for free while you can, maybe.)

Additionally, the Times noted that it had “achieved $2 billion in annual revenue for the first time since 2012.” For a reminder of how much has changed, check out this Nieman Lab piece from the time.

Can I assume you know about Wordle? The one where you have six guesses to get the correct five-letter word using some color-coordinated hints? You may have seen an article about it. Perhaps a tweet or two. The Times purchased the viral game from Brooklyn-based developer Josh Wardle, a software engineer who created the game as a gift for his partner.

Wordle was released to the public in October 2021. The game had fewer than 100 daily players on November 1 but that number shot up to 300,000 just a few weeks later.

Interest really took off in the new year and at the time of sale, the game has millions of daily players.

The New York Times Games editorial director Everdeen Mason demurred when asked, earlier this month, if the Times was considering purchasing Wordle, but she did say its popularity gave her confidence people were “hungry for more games,” and “more word games” and “unique games” in particular.

“The game has done what so few games have done — it has captured our collective imagination and brought us all a little closer together,” Jonathan Knight, general manager for NYT Games, said in the announcement. (I would give this a “mostly true.”)

Immediately after the acquisition became public, there were pay-to-play concerns. Wordle will join the crossword, Spelling Bee, and other puzzles in NYT Games, a standalone subscription that costs $5/month and reached 1 million subscriptions in 2021.

The Times says Wordle — which you can currently play without paying or registering or even seeing an ad — will stay free for the moment.

But how’s this for an ominous clause? “At the time it moves to The New York Times, Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay,” the announcement reads. Or, as the way the Times’ own coverage of the acquisition phrased it, “The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.”

*

*subscribe to earn more greens
**NYTApe owners earn unlimited yellows

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 31, 2022

I asked the Times for clarification — free free or free for now? “We don’t have set plans for the game’s future,” Times spokesperson Jordan Cohen said. “At this time, we’re focused on creating added value to our existing audience, while also introducing our existing games to an all new audience that has demonstrated their love for word games.”

Whether or not the game will be put behind a paywall may influence how players respond to copycat versions. (There’s plenty of Wordle-wannabes in the App Store, and you can play a more difficult version of Wordle, and a, uh, #NSFW version online.) If you can play for free — or less — elsewhere, would you?

1500 word essay on whether the NYT buying Wordle changes the moral calculus of Wordle clones in various app stores. This will be 30 percent of your grade and there will not be extensions https://t.co/yfgbxJtvLO

— nilay patel (@reckless) January 31, 2022

Reactions to the sale ran the gamut, but trended toward “I hope this thing I love doesn’t get ruined.”

The reason I find this depressing is because Wordle felt a bit like an earlier version of the internet – one where stuff was free, wasn’t stealing your data/tracking you, wasn’t bombarding you with calls to download apps. And that can’t really exist on the web anymore, I guess! https://t.co/weG9xOqqaW

— Hannah Williams (@hkatewilliams) January 31, 2022

Nyt buying Wordle has “scab vibes” no I will not be explaining this any further

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 31, 2022

Creator of Wordle: I can’t keep running this thing; I love the NYT puzzle peeps, they inspired me to make this thing you love, so I sold it to them! Twitter: How dare you give this thing we love a sustaining home!

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) January 31, 2022

The NYT is investing in the lettaverse send tweet

— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) January 31, 2022

assume the price negotiation process for wordle was like
“ok, $1,200,973”

— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) January 31, 2022

Others had suggestions for Wordle’s new owner.

Slam-dunk new upsell perk for @nytimes All-Access subscriptions:

A SECOND DAILY WORDLEhttps://t.co/eKXLt2Y84A

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) January 31, 2022

If I were the NY Times I’d make Wordle free to play but charge 99 cents to post your score on Twitter.

— Hemal Jhaveri (@hemjhaveri) January 31, 2022

Congratulations to both sides of the deal. For the Times, how much pleasure must there be in reading old (but not that old) takes arguing the Old Gray Lady would soon breathe her last? Instead, it’s built a world-class subscription engine that throws off enough sparks that they can drop half a billion on something and pay in cash.

And for The Athletic, they’ve proven out part of its original thesis: that you could create a high-quality national sports product that, even in such an overcrowded space, gets more than a million people to pay for ir. The web has spawned a zillion sites that cover sports from coast to coast, but they’ve almost always been free to read, funded by ads. The Athletic thought The National was just 30 years too early to build a big paying audience, and they were right.

(That that last link is to a Grantland oral history of The National is a reminder of how unforgiving certain corners of the sports media market can be.)

The part of The Athletic’s thesis that still awaits its Andrew Wiles is: …and you can be profitable doing it. The Times — with its subscription prowess, its huge marketing platform, and its plug-and-play ad system — has as good a chance as anyone to figure that one out.

But this team-up has re-raised questions about The Athletic’s impact on local newspapers. Back in 2017, one of its co-founders famously let these words come out of his mouth in front of a reporter:

We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing.

We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment.

We will make business extremely difficult for them.

Which were very jerky things to say! And, maybe worse, saying it in front of a reporter solidified the impression that these upstarts saw an industry to be fleeced more than an audience to serve.

Hmmm. I subscribed to a humble startup that I was rooting for. Perhaps, before being poached, I’ll cancel my subscription. https://t.co/PuFEDsg27Y

— Barry Svrluga (@barrysvrluga) October 23, 2017

Damn, The Athletic pivoted to evil

— max (@MaxOnTwitter) October 23, 2017

Silicon Valley founder nerds talk like Marvel villains. “Hear now: we offer no quarter. Expect none.” Okay man, good luck with your website.

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) October 23, 2017

And now, combining that attitude (which The Athletic immediately regretted voicing) with the Times’ reach and power is resurfacing many of those worries. Here’s the always perceptive Aron Pilhofer, for instance:

It turns out, The New York Times does really care about local news — just not in the way we thought. By purchasing The Athletic, which covers 270-plus sports teams in more than 47 local markets, The Times has placed itself in direct competition with every local news site for the same pool of subscribers. And since the average number of news sites people will pay for is one, that is very bad news indeed for local legacy news organizations.

Newspaper execs will say The Times has been competing with them for decades, which is true. But The Times has never competed as directly in a domain (local sports) that, until now, was largely owned by local news.

Sports is among the last vestiges of the regional monopolies local newspapers enjoyed before the internet era. Granted, sports isn’t the only reason people subscribe to a local newspaper, but it is one of them. It is also one of the topics local newspapers traditionally do well. Passionate fans can name their favorite columnists, their favorite writers. Those are the folks The Athletic was courting when it launched in 2016.

You can bet those newspaper execs slept not a wink last night imagining their hard-won subscribers receiving solicitations for a future bundle that includes the nation’s best news site, Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, and all the local sports coverage anyone could ever want.

At the risk of being proven wrong (and Aron laughing at me at some future post-Covid gathering): I’m not as worried about the impact this will have on local newspapers. I think those newspaper execs can probably go back to sleep. (Or, perhaps more accurately, there are lots of other things that should be giving them more nightmares.) Here are a few reasons why.

The talent pool isn’t dry

Let’s get this out of the way first. The Athletic did, in fact, hire a lot of talent away from newspapers. Some of them were big names famous in their markets; others were the younger reporters stuck behind those bigger names in the newsroom hierarchy — the journalism equivalent of talented adjuncts bitter toward the full profs who somehow lucked into an endowed chair.

But the market for sports reporting is strange; there are always more people who could be capable sports reporters than there are jobs to employ them. So as a profession, it can take a little, er, “pillaging” without too severe a talent drop-off.

(It is, in other words, precisely the opposite of NFL quarterbacks.)

Bet you can’t eat just one

It is often said that, as Aron puts it, “the average number of news sites people will pay for is one.”

First off — how great would it be if the average American actually had one digital news subscription? In reality, the median number of news sites people will pay for is a big fat zero.

Second, not all digital subscriptions compete directly with one another — and those that do don’t all compete in the same way.

I mean, there’s a zero-sum sense in which people only have so much total money to spend, and all digital subscriptions “compete” for those dollars in the same way that McGriddles, parking tickets, HBO Max, and rent are all constrained by a common overall budget. But most digital media subscriptions aren’t as interchangeable as, say, print newspapers used to be in a two-newspaper town.

Take a market that’s hits-driven — streaming services. There, multiple subs can be the norm. 92% of Apple TV+ subscribers also get Netflix, as do 90% of HBO Max subscribers, 87% of Disney+’s, 85% of Hulu’s, and 84% of Amazon Prime Video’s. Now, Netflix is obviously the big game in town, but there’s plenty of overlap elsewhere too. (Of Hulu subscribers, 79% get Amazon, 68% get Disney+, 38% get Apple TV+, and 32% get HBO Max.) It makes sense: Netflix might be your go-to evening watch, but a lot of people will be happy to pay a bit more not to miss “Ted Lasso,” “Succession,” “The Mandalorian,” or “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The average American household pays for four streaming services.

But look at a different kind of market: streaming music. Apple Music and Spotify will each give you access to pretty much all the music you need. There’s very little reason to have a subscription to both; witness Spotify’s attempts to differentiate itself through having its own exclusive horse-paste enthusiasts.

Now, to be blindingly obvious, digital news is not like either streaming video or streaming music as a market. For one thing, a larger share of high-quality news is available for free than the share of, oh, high-quality dramas about Waystar RoyCo. Individual news stories are shared socially, of course, but they rarely become must-consume cultural touchstones in the way a TV series can. And the total time most people spend seeking entertainment from a flatscreen dwarfs the total time they spend looking for news.

For streaming music, a subscription gets you access to (practically) all music. You could buy a dozen digital news subscriptions and there’d still be thousands of paywalls all over your Twitter feed.

But it’s also true that different outlets compete on different playing fields. The Washington Post and The New York Times? Definitely direct competitors. The New York Times and, say, Slate? Yes, competitors — they cover broadly similar topics — but it’s unlikely someone who subscribes to one would cancel the day they started paying for the other. They’re differentiated in tone and editorial approach; one aims to be comprehensive while the other picks its spots; one puts a huge amount of its subscription value on podcasts, the other almost none.1

The Atlantic and The New Yorker? Definitely direct competitors. The Atlantic and Wired? Yeah, there’s some overlap there, but not one-for-one. Wired and Vogue? Very little.

Axios and Politico? Definitely direct competitors. Axios and The Skimm? They’re both free email newsletters that aim to bullet-point the news for busy people — but their subject matter, tone, and relative tether to the news cycle make them quite different.

There’s a big difference between products that might be competitive and those that might be substitutable. I think a sports product like The Athletic and a local newspaper are distinct enough that, for consumers, they’re pretty weak as substitutable goods.

A rising tide

Has The Athletic wrecked the digital subscription business of local newspapers? Not really. And, to be honest, neither has the Times.

Digital subs for local newspapers are way up from The Athletic’s threatened continuous bleeding. In 2017, Gannett had 341,000 digital subscribers; in 2019, it had 712,000; today, it has 1.5 million, up 46% year-over-year. Less than two years ago, the smaller chain Lee was psyched to announce it had 100,000 digital subscribers; last month, it said it had passed 400,000.

Now, would those numbers have been, say, 5% higher if The Athletic had never come along? Maybe — but I doubt it’s actually made much of a dent. The markets for “local news and information” and “national sports teams, some of which are based nearish my house” overlap less than you might think. And the same is true for the Times: All of that local digital sub growth has come at the same time that Times subscriptions have been rocketing up too.

There’s no question: The Times has been wildly more successful than your local daily at signing up digital subscribers. But why? I think there are two ways to look at it — and one, derived from the days of print, can lead people astray.

Thought 1: “The New York Times and the Townsburg Daily Gazette are both newspapers. They both assemble similar bundles of information — news, opinion, sports, arts, food — and compete for the audience’s attention and dollars.”

Thought 2: “The New York Times and the Townsburg Daily Gazette are fundamentally different products. One of them is all about national and global news, politics, culture, business, and discovering that monocles are a trend. The other is all about this community, Townsburg — what’s the mayor’s up to, why’d that restaurant close, what’s that construction project on 4th Street, is Townsburg High’s football team any good this year? Both of them produce “news,” broadly defined, and they both have tremendous value. But there’s rarely a story in the Gazette where I wonder, “Huh, I wonder what The New York Times says about this” — and almost never a Times story I expect the Gazette to be competing on.”

I think the misconception is that the Times and your local daily are making the same thing, just at different levels of quality and with different levels of resources. They’re not. In the print days — when huge swaths of newsprint were given over to national and international news, wire sports and agate, syndicated columnists and national ads — there was an argument for that view. But not in a digital world.

“Local” isn’t local

Finally, I think it’s a misconception that The Athletic is offering “local sports.” The Athletic covers national sports leagues, professional and quasi-professional, which happen to have teams in large metropolitan areas around the country. An NFL game will be more interesting to people who live in the urban conglomerations that the teams call home — but it’s in no way only interesting to them.

Is The Athletic a competitor to, say, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for Falcons news? Sure.2 But it’s hardly the first. ESPN, Fox Sports, Yahoo Sports, SI, Bleacher Report, SB Nation, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, Defector, the corpse of Deadspin, wire stories, Twitter, the Falcons itself, Matty Ice’s sparkling Facebook presence — there’s a ton of competition.

What have been the three biggest drivers of interest in those national sports leagues over the past decade? Social media, fantasy sports, and gambling. Social is all about individuals — players and reporters tweeting cryptic diss tracks and free agent scoops. Fantasy is also about individuals — all the players league-wide, not just your local team’s mediocre tight end. And if you let your personal fandoms drive your gambling habit, well, you won’t be a very good gambler. All three of these forces push fan attention away from your local team and up toward the league and its array of personalities.

(It’s also worth noting here that of the 1,200-plus daily newspapers in America, the vast majority of them don’t cover a single team that The Athletic does. We’re really talking about 40 or 50 metro papers here.)

“Local sports” isn’t the Lakers or the Yankees, from a local publisher’s perspective. That’s a slice of national sports that’s been deposited in your region, and the competition over it is already fierce. If someone is really buying the L.A. Times only for its Lakers coverage, well, they likely weren’t going to stick around for very long anyway. There’s just too much competition, the vast majority of it free.

And not to harsh on The Athletic too much — but their output makes it clear that their editorial ambitions for deep-market coverage are…constrained.

I root for the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns, who had a very good football team this year. They went 13-1, won a bowl game, and finished the season ranked No. 16 in the nation. I follow The Athletic’s coverage of the Cajuns — want to guess how many stories they actually wrote about the team this year? Two.

I also root for the New Orleans Saints, who had a super-dramatic finish to their season on Sunday afternoon. How many Saints stories has The Athletic run in the nearly 48 hours since? One. It’s a good story! But the hometown paper, The Times-Picayune, has run 10 in the same time.

“Local sports” is high school football, the volleyball star getting all the D-1 offers, the D-III college that no one else covers. The Athletic is never going to touch that. It’s not as sexy as the big leagues — just as covering city hall isn’t as sexy as covering the White House, and covering the logistics company that’s your region’s largest employer isn’t as sexy as covering Google or Apple.

But that’s just…reality. The Townsburg Daily Gazette isn’t going to win by putting reporters on Joe Biden and Tim Cook full time — a newsroom should stick to what it can do best. For a local newspaper and The New York Times, there’s almost no overlap between those two “bests” — even with The Athletic aboard.

1. I’m not saying the Times doesn’t put lots of value on podcasts — of course they do. I’m saying they don’t put a lot of subscription value on them, because The Daily and its other shows are free to everyone. They convert people into subscribers, but access to them is not why people type in their credit card number.
2. This is a trick question: No human alive today has ever cared about the Falcons.

The New York Times Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship, which will be open to applications for a month starting Feb. 7, is one answer to criticism that the Times has been slow to diversify its crossword clues, answers, editors, and (yup) stable of constructors.

“You’ll get a rejection from the Times saying ‘This is not something that the average solver will know,’ which carries with it this connotation that an average solver is a white man in his 50s,” one crossword constructor told me last year. “There’s an expectation that the person solving your puzzle looks like Will Shortz.” (Until editors Wyna Liu and Tracy Bennett were hired in 2020, the Times puzzle team consisted of three white men.)

The chosen fellows will receive three months of mentorship from one of five puzzle editors — that’s Liu, Bennett, Joel Fagliano, Sam Ezersky, and the legendary Shortz — as they work to construct a puzzle for general submission. Only those who have not yet had a puzzle published by The New York Times will be considered.

The new constructor fellowship is the brainchild of Everdeen Mason, who joined the Times as editorial director for Games almost exactly a year ago. Mason said creating a fellowship has been on her mind from the very beginning.

The New York Times, even while interviewing Mason for the job, had acknowledged it need to change. Part of the diversity problem was self-perpetuating, Mason saw. Constructors seemed to have a fixed idea of the kind of puzzles that The New York Times chose to publish.

“It was becoming clear that people were sending us the kinds of puzzles they thought would get in rather than really pushing the limits and trying to show us new things,” Mason said.

The fellowship, she hopes, can help kick off a new pattern. “I think that in mentoring these constructors, we’re going to learn stuff, too,” Mason said. “And we’re going to be able to model certain things. If we see a really cool puzzle with new kinds of clues and fills and publish it, hopefully that encourages people to give us more like that.”

The learning curve for potential constructors can be steep, and the digital tools most popular with professional constructors can be costly and user unfriendly. Mason noted the barrier to entry and ensured the fellowship application does not require a fully-constructed puzzle. Instead, applicants can submit “a theme set with theme clues,” a partially filled 15×15 grid, and a grid as small as 7×7.

Under Mason, the Times has also launched a new weekly column to give insight into puzzle answers new, old, and evolving. (The first edition gave the story behind the answer to “Italian cheese city.”) Mason has also debuted a testing panel that gives feedback on puzzles and has described the panel as “a vibe check” that — aside from looking for typos and fact checking, done separately — is particularly interested in whether the puzzle is fun for a diverse group of people to play.

The crossword editors also now meet for editorial workshops where the entire team gets to “argue and philosophize” about puzzles, Mason said. “It’s a really good chance to equalize the playing field. The editors have an opportunity to talk about their point of view when editing puzzles, so it wasn’t just trying to replicate what Will would do.”

It’s in these editorial workshops that the NYT Games team asks itself, when does a word or bit of slang or cultural reference become puzzle-worthy? Those creating puzzles tend to consider whether the term has longevity (or will go the way of, say, “tubular”) and what portion of their audience can reach the right answer from reading a clue.

Editors at the Times have long checked newspaper and magazine archives to test a word’s popularity and now take online search results and social trending topics into account, too. Clues for perennially popular answers can evolve as well. Take “ogle,” for example. The New York Times recently shared that the term has been used 438 times in its crossword, but that “descriptions of the word have gone from ‘flirt,’ in 1942, or ‘gaze amorously,’ in 1994, to ‘It’s not a good look’ or ‘eye lewdly,’ in 2021.”

Mason considers herself a word game lover but doesn’t go in for streaks or solving for speed. She’ll often use AutoCheck, she says, and gets more delight from clever clues and personality-filled themes than competing against her previous times.

“Frankly, I’m Black and Puerto Rican and queer and I’m in my early 30s,” Mason said. “Any time I get to a solve a clue, and it’s something that I know, something that feels really relevant and fresh to me — whether it’s pop culture that I’m familiar with, or a food — I get so excited.”

She recalled seeing “mofongo” — a plantain mash — in an unpublished puzzle, and said she’d love to see more submissions with specific points of view.

“I’m really on the lookout for removing fill that’s not relevant but we just decided everyone needed to know,” she said. If clues can be solved with “a ventriloquist from the 70s,” why can’t they also be solved with answers taken, say, from early aughts rave culture?

Sharing more of this behind-the-scenes work is just one part of a larger plan to, as Mason says, “beef up” the “context and storytelling side” of NYT Games as it seeks more daily solvers and more subscribers. (Games, along with Cooking, passed 1 million subscriptions in 2021.)

“A lot of what I have been working on is building what I call an ecosystem. I don’t want people to just come in and play a game and leave,” Mason said. “Our games provide not just an outlet for people to self soothe and improve their mental health, but also to connect with other people. You want to provide a place where people can get a full experience.”

“It’ll be a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall in the beginning,” Mason added. “But I hope that it helps us connect with new and different audiences who are maybe interested in nerdy things like etymology or the culture behind different words and slang — and brings them in in this other way. That’s something I’ve been really mapping out and working towards.”

I had to ask Mason about Wordle, that dead-simple-but-seriously-addictive game that has been clogging up your Twitter feed with gray, yellow, and green squares. Mason said that she hadn’t played the game yet herself but that everyone else on the Games team was giving it a go.

“I think if anything, it has sort of lit a fire under my ass because it’s clear people are hungry for more games, more word games, and more unique games,” Mason said. “I’m excited to hopefully work on new games in the future so it’s really inspiring.”

The raid was conducted on the suspicion that O’Keefe and former Project Veritas staffers were implicated in the theft of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley’s diary before the 2020 election. The Department of Justice said the cellphones sought in the raid would reveal evidence of aiding and abetting the transport of stolen property worth $5,000 or more across state lines, and of failure to report the theft to law enforcement in violation of federal law.

Project Veritas says that the phones contain attorney-client privileged information and newsgathering materials protected by the First Amendment.

O’Keefe is the self-described “progressive radical” and founder and CEO of Project Veritas. His organization has a long history of conducting undercover sting operations, frequently targeting progressive nonprofits, politicians and the news media with the stated aim of disclosing bias, hypocrisy and illegal activity.

Many journalists repudiate Project Veritas and its methods, contending that the organization is ideologically driven and routinely violates established norms of media ethics.

As a professor of media ethics and law, I’ve been grappling with how to think about Project Veritas and its escapades for years. Like many media lawyers, I wish it would just go away.

Nevertheless, media organizations and their supporters, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, of which I served as executive director from 1985 to 1999, rallied to protest the searches and seizures as a possible violation of the First Amendment right of a news organization to gather information. They demanded answers about why Project Veritas was targeted in the investigation. And they made clear that they were concerned about more than just Project Veritas, whose methods they have often decried.

Unorthodox methods

Project Veritas bills itself a nonprofit journalism enterprise, and its website touts its many efforts to “achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”

But its work doesn’t look much like traditional journalism. One of its more notorious undertakings involved making secret recordings at various offices of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in 2009, purporting to show ACORN staffers advising O’Keefe and his associate how to evade taxes and engage in human trafficking.

Although a subsequent investigation by the California Attorney General concluded that the videos had been “severely edited,” their release prompted Congress to freeze federal funding to ACORN.  ACORN was eventually exonerated by the Government Accountability Office, but Project Veritas continues to brag about its takedown of the organization as one of its “successes.”

Project Veritas also revels in exposés of what it calls “political bias in the mainstream media,” including CNN, ABC, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post. Recently, it sued The New York Times in state court in Westchester County, New York, claiming that the newspaper defamed it by calling its videos alleging voter fraud in Minneapolis “misinformation.” It has now used that case as the means to obtain a court order to compel the Times to curtail its reporting about the investigation, which Project Veritas claims came from government leaks — an extraordinary request for prior restraint unprecedented since the Supreme Court’s Pentagon Papers case in 1971, and hardly consistent with support of the First Amendment.

Disclosing illegally obtained information

The Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment provides some protection for newsgathering, although it does not permit the news media to violate laws that apply to everyone. Because the government does not issue licenses to journalists, anyone who gathers and disseminates information to the public can claim to be “the press.” That’s why the FBI raid concerns members of the news media. They fear they could be next.

For their part, the attorneys representing Project Veritas say that two anonymous individuals, who claimed they had legally acquired the diary after Ashley Biden “abandoned” it at a house in Florida, offered to sell it to Project Veritas for possible publication. After the lawyers for both parties negotiated an “arm’s length agreement,” Project Veritas took delivery of the diary.

Project Veritas claims that it couldn’t authenticate the diary to its satisfaction and after trying unsuccessfully to return it to Biden’s lawyer, sent it back to local law enforcement officials.

If this version of events is true, U.S. Supreme Court precedent established in a 2001 press-related case, Bartnicki v. Vopper, should apply. There, the high court ruled that a media organization can disclose important information illegally obtained by a third party, as long as the organization itself was not involved.

“A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote.

If Project Veritas was not involved in the theft of the diary, it could also be covered by the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which bars both federal and state law enforcement from seizing journalists’ work product and documentary materials except in very limited circumstances.

In fact, the Justice Department has been prohibited from even subpoenaing journalists by Attorney General guidelines that date back to 1974 — although investigations into leaks of classified information led to notable exceptions to this rule during the Obama and Trump administrations.

Earlier this year, Biden said it was “simply, simply wrong” to compel journalists to reveal their sources, and Attorney General Merrick Garland promised in July to beef up the guidelines and make them law to ensure that future administrations would also be bound by them, though he has yet to do so.

Project Veritas says it is covered by the Privacy Protection Act, which protects those engaged in “public communication,” as well as the guidelines.

But in defending the FBI raid on O’Keefe’s home, the government contends that it has followed all applicable regulations and policies regarding what it calls “potential members of the news media” — suggesting that they think Project Veritas isn’t one.

Until the underlying affidavits supporting the warrants are unsealed, we won’t know whether the U.S. Attorney thinks that Project Veritas committed a crime, or that it isn’t a news organization. Either possibility has serious ramifications for all media.

If Project Veritas is found guilty of a crime, any journalist who transports leaked or “stolen” information across state lines could be charged with violation of the law. It’s unclear what that means today when so many documents are transmitted electronically.

Or, if the government narrowly defines “the press” based on its political outlook or ethics, then no news organization is safe from attacks by future administrations.

Either way, the mainstream media are holding their collective noses and supporting Project Veritas in its fight. It’s a matter of principle, but also of self-preservation.

The news was first reported by Bloomberg.

Wirecutter Union members are prepared to walk out during the Black Friday shopping week, our busiest and most profitable time of year, unless @nytimes & @wirecutter management agree to a fair contract.

— Wirecutter Union (@wirecutterunion) November 8, 2021

Last week, we sent this statement to @wirecutter and @nytimes leadership. Our members deserve fair and competitive pay, and the security that comes from guaranteed annual wage increases. Over 90% of us are prepared to walk out if a deal is not reached. pic.twitter.com/0OK6NwsAbt

— Wirecutter Union (@wirecutterunion) November 8, 2021

We are asking readers and supporters not to shop through Wirecutter from Black Friday through Cyber Monday unless we reach a fair deal. Sign up for updates about the status of our picket line and our contract talks: https://t.co/zn6UvTmbrq

— Wirecutter Union (@wirecutterunion) November 8, 2021

The New York Times put The Wirecutter behind its paywall in August. It’s $5 a month or $40 a year — the same as other Times standalone products like Cooking and Games — and continues to be included with Times all-access digital subscriptions, but not basic digital subscriptions. In her comments around the Times’ most recent earnings report, New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien noted that paywalling Wirecutter content was “off to a promising start, especially among existing Times subscribers, with 10,000 net subscriptions in the first month.”

In their letter to Times management, Wirecutter’s union wrote, in part:

Despite the fact that our work now regularly appears on The New York Times’ homepage — side by side with the work of our colleagues in the newsroom — the median salary of Wirecutter Union employees is $43,000 less than that of the Times-Guild members. We’ve demonstrated at the table that our starting salaries are lower than those at comparable publications often cited as being our direct competitors. And over recent months, we’ve lost too many colleagues who’ve cited low pay as being one of their top grievances.

“We look forward to continuing to work toward an agreement with the Wirecutter Union in our standard process at the negotiating table,” New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told Nieman Lab. “Our compensation proposal is more generous than what they’ve described and seeks to maintain a similar compensation structure for Wirecutter employees with programs in place for others at The Times Company.”

The New York Times doesn’t break down the affiliate revenue it earns from Wirecutter over Black Friday or any other time, but noted in its earning results for the fourth quarter of 2020 — which included shopping over Black Friday and Cyber Monday — that declines in the “other” revenue category “were partially offset by an increase in Wirecutter affiliate referral revenue.”

I use The Wirecutter for almost everything, especially Xmas shopping. I stand in solidarity with its employees, and will take my shopping elsewhere until management can agree to a fair deal. https://t.co/CP5xGCuOJy

— Kevin Slane (@kslane) November 8, 2021

Marking your calendars so you won’t cross our (possible) picket line on Black Friday/Cyber Monday? I suggest using the Uniball Jetstream pen… https://t.co/hJsOKed7UB https://t.co/PzKZQn5kv5

— Philip Ryan (@WirecutterPhil) November 8, 2021

The Times’ own Ben Smith noted that shows like Serial and This American Life, if packaged with other hits like The Daily, could form the basis of a “HBO of podcasts.” A year later, the Times appears ready to test that theory. It announced last week that it’s been building a standalone app — “New York Times Audio” — to house its audio journalism and will be inviting beta testers to give feedback. (You can volunteer here, though only U.S.-based iPhone users need apply.) The survey for those interested in participating has a number of questions about paid subscriptions and asks users to indicate how much they agree or disagree with statements like, “If one of my favorite podcasts started charging a fee for access, I would stop listening.”

The new app will feature the Times’ own podcasts alongside narrated versions of news, opinion, and magazine articles across a handful of publishers. For those who aren’t participating in the closed beta, nothing will change for the moment. The Times is not putting any podcasts behind a paywall or making them exclusive to the new app with this announcement; you can still listen to The Daily or The Ezra Klein Show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and wherever else you like to hit play.

Despite a mixed history with standalone apps — Cooking and Games live on, but R.I.P. NYT Now and NYT Opinion — the Times decided to move forward with a separate home for its audio journalism because it was the best environment to run tests and solicit feedback. (A similar beta test is underway for NYT Kids.)

And it’s clear the Times is still in test-and-try mode at the moment. Sam Dolnick, assistant managing editor at The New York Times, described the app as a “first attempt” and “just one experiment” in audio-first products. To start, the new app will act as a kind of homepage for the Times’ catalog of audio journalism. A rotating selection, curated by Times editors, will guide listeners through a mix of formats and topics — from newsy pieces and short updates to feature stories and longer, “more suspenseful” narratives.

“Something that has the dynamism and serendipity of a great homepage — does that appeal to listeners?” Dolnick said. “Does that become something that they could build a habit and relationship with? We don’t know, but we want to find out.”

Stephanie Preiss, the Times’ VP of TV and audio, underscored the importance of habit by pointing to The Daily, which sees more than four million downloads per day and a majority of listeners tuning in at least four times a week. (The listenership also trends much younger than the average print subscriber — meaning podcasts like The Daily reach an audience that the Times would love to, eventually, convert into paying subscribers.)

“From a business perspective, we’re interested in figuring out what are habits that we can scale,” Preiss said. “The Daily is a huge habit, but what are audio experiences inside our app — and maybe in this new one — that we see evidence of people not only sampling and exploring but returning to day in and day out, week over week? Because that’s what we know drives willingness to pay. That’s what we’ve learned enables us to start to get those people into a paying relationship with The New York Times.”

The Daily, of course, is currently free and widely distributed, something Dolnick says the Times has “no plans to change anytime soon.” Much like the popular morning newsletter that the Times keeps free as a way to build a daily habit with readers both paying and not, The Daily is more valuable to the Times outside a paywall.

“Over many years, the Times has figured out a way to both have a huge audience of readers and also have a paying audience of readers. We believe that the same thing is possible in audio,” Preiss said. “We believe there’s a way to make sure that this morning’s episode of The Daily is going to all of the places where people listen to audio and reach a huge audience and at the same time, that if there is somebody who is listening to five episodes or listening to something from us every single day, that those people are making their way into our ecosystem and into our pay model.”

The app will also help address a mismatch between the resources the newspaper is devoting to audio journalism and its digital footprint.

“Some of the most important and clarifying and ambitious journalism that The New York Times produces these days happens in audio, but audio is not a part of our digital experience almost at all,” Dolnick said. “You could spend hours a day on our home page and read seemingly everything that our newsroom produces and not come across much of our audio. That has increasingly felt odd to us.”

Preiss added that New York Times app users could open the app “every day” and still miss the Times’ audio offerings there, too. “It’s there, but it’s not a central or signature part of what we present to you,” she said. “That’s out of sync with how we have scaled and grown our audio journalism over the last several years.”

So the Times knows it wants to better incorporate audio into its digital experience. It just isn’t sure the best way to do it quite yet. Alongside this new beta app, there are experiments underway to present audio within the existing New York Times app — such as having journalists read their own work and incorporating the ability to play some podcasts. (You can see an example here.) It’s also serving Daily listeners Audm narrations — like one of Dolnick’s recent favorites, about the composer Nicholas Britell — through existing feeds.

Ultimately, the hope is that behavioral data and feedback gathered via the new app will help the Times get in on the ground floor of paid audio products. “I would say the market for people paying for audio is pretty nascent, with the exception of audio books,” Preiss said. “Certainly there are products that people pay for in the audio space but it’s not a huge market at the moment.”

“It’s a packaging question and it’s a digital question: What’s the best way to present this stuff?” Dolnick added. “But journalistically, the work is already there.”

The New York Times is launching a first-of-its-kind talent pipeline program for early-college students to receive career guidance from Times journalists over a multiyear period…

The program, named The New York Times Corps, will pair college freshmen, sophomores and some juniors who aspire to have journalism careers with Times journalists. Students will talk with their advisers perhaps two or three times a year, up to the duration of students’ undergraduate careers. Those conversations will focus specifically on career-building advice. Occasional speakers, training and activities will punctuate the experience.

Students who complete the program will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City, where they will tour the newsroom and meet Times journalists in person. The best-performing Times Corps members, after they graduate, also may receive consideration for The New York Times Fellowship, an immersive, yearlong work program.

The Times Corps will specifically target students based in the United States from underrepresented groups, such as students of color and/or students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The program is replacing the Student Journalism Institute, our two-week annual boot camp, which finishes a successful nearly 20-year run supporting students of color.

They’re explicit about wanting the Corps to benefit “not only the participants and The Times, but other newsrooms.” (After all, it won’t hire the whole Corps.) Class size will start at 25, but could grow; applications will open next spring.

European and Asian newsrooms have long had more concrete talent-development systems — actual outlet-owned schools in some cases — than their American peers. For generations, the Times could simply treat smaller metro newspapers as their minor leagues, but their decline has meant more staffers entering via other routes. (Counting on metro newspapers also means, at least to an extent, counting on their own hiring practices building the pool your draw from — so their diversity problems becomes yours, too.)

All that said, a program focused on identifying talented college freshmen and sophomores has its own limitations. Recent graduates, career switchers, and young people who aren’t enrolled in college won’t be caught by this net. But at least you can always build more nets.

The first coattail perk arrived in November, when Apple announced that smaller publishers — those with less than $1 million a year in App Store sales — would now be able to hand only 15% of their subscription dollars to Apple instead of 30%.

Yesterday brought a second bump. Apple announced a set of changes to its App Store policies as part of a negotiated settlement of a class-action suit brought by developers. (Most important is probably giving developers more leeway to let customers know they can pay outside Apple’s in-app payment system.) But it also announced a new program aimed just at news publishers:

Apple today introduced the News Partner Program, a new slate of initiatives to expand Apple’s work with and support for journalism. The News Partner Program aims to ensure Apple News customers maintain access to trusted news and information from many of the world’s top publishers, while supporting publishers’ financial stability and advancing efforts to further media literacy and diversity in news coverage and newsrooms.

The News Partner Program is designed for subscription news publications that provide their content to Apple News in Apple News Format (ANF). ANF enables an exceptional reading experience on Apple News and unlocks the full benefit of the platform for publishers, and empowers publishers to create brand-forward stories, immersive issues, and audio stories, with designs that scale seamlessly across Apple devices. ANF also supports advertising, and publishers keep 100 percent of the revenue from advertising they sell within Apple News.

To support publishers who optimize more of their content in ANF, Apple News is offering a commission rate of 15 percent on qualifying in-app purchase subscriptions from day one.

In other words, if you commit to publishing “a robust Apple News channel,” you can now get access to that lower 15% revenue share. (There are two ways to publish to Apple News. One is to use Apple’s special formatting standard that publishes the full text of stories in the app and allows all sorts of design tweaks. The other is to drop it an RSS feed. To be appropriately “robust” here, you’ll need to be using the first way.)

So, to recap, these are the revenue share options currently available for a news publisher:

• The standard deal: When someone first subscribes in your app, you give Apple 30% of their money. If, after 12 months, that user is still subscribed, Apple’s cut drops to 15%. Available to: Anyone.
• The small-publisher deal: When someone first subscribes in your app, you give Apple 15% of their money. That rate is flat for however long the user stays subscribed. Available to: App publishers who make less than $1 million per year in App Store sales.
• The new News Partner deal: When someone first subscribes in your app, you give Apple 15% of their money. That rate is flat for however long the user stays subscribed. Available to: News publishers who publish a “robust” channel in Apple News.

The careful reader will note that the small-publisher deal and News Partner deal are identical in terms of its benefits. Only the eligibility rules are different: sales under $1 million for the former, being in Apple News for the latter. So, in practice, the News Partner Program only matters for publishers who already make more than $1 million in annual App Store sales.

Which is a lot for a news publisher! Remember, the vast majority of news consumption on phones doesn’t happen inside publisher news apps, which are still an acquired taste reserved for a publisher’s super fans. It happens on the web — either in standalone browsers like Safari or Chrome or in social apps like Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp.

The one-tap ease of use of subscribing via Apple is excellent, but that 30% share has disincentivized publishers from pushing that option too hard to potential subscribers. To generate $1 million a year in App Store sales, you’d need to sell 10,000 in-app subscriptions at $100/year — and I doubt there are very many news publishers who can do that. Probably the national daily newspapers and some big national magazines.

I’ve never seen any hard data on what share of news subscriptions go through the App Store, but I always knew it was very low. Mike Orren, chief product officer for The Dallas Morning News, says it’s a rounding error for them.

Anecdotally, I’d think it pretty low. It’s probably less than 1% for us.

— Mike Orren (@mikeorren) August 27, 2021

And most of the few publishers who probably do hit that number — think The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Time — are either already part of the Apple News+ upsell package or already “robust” Apple News publishers. They’ll appreciate the extra bucks, no doubt, but their behavior won’t change.

So who is a big news publisher that generates a lot of money from in-app subscriptions but isn’t currently in Apple News? There’s one answer that keeps coming to mind.

Last year, The New York Times pulled its content from Apple News:

The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”

“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”

I totally believe that line of reasoning; owning the customer relationship is critical to a subscription business. But that said…money is also nice.

Let’s imagine — and to be clear, this is some real back-of-the-envelope stuff here — that 2% of Times subscribers pay via Apple. The going rate for an annual sub in the Times iPhone app right now is $129.99 a year. As of June 30, the Times had 5.334 million digital news subscriptions. That would mean something like 106,000 people are currently paying through Apple.

Let’s say half of those are in their first year of subscribing — meaning the Times is currently paying Apple 30% of the revenue they produce. That would mean the Times is paying Apple more than $3 million a year out of its subscription revenues. Joining the News Partner Program would slice $1 million off of that — in exchange for rejoining Apple News.

Now, The New York Times doesn’t even get out of bed in the morning for $1 million. If they think Apple News is a bad strategic fit (and I believe they have good reason to), $1 million isn’t going to be tempting enough to change their mind.

But…cutting new-sub rates in half could mean some existing publishers see less of a reason to pull out of Apple News. Or, more importantly, it could mean that publishers get more comfortable directing more of its customers into Apple. It is, after all, a really smooth and easy way to subscribe — a lot easier than creating an account, typing your credit card number and address on a phone screen, checking for a confirmation email, et cetera, et cetera.

As Mike put it, one reason so few news subscriptions go through Apple is that publishers spend a surprising amount of energy trying to convince customers not to.

Although, it would be higher under better terms. We go through a lot of gymnastics to try to avoid selling through App Store. I assume others are similar.

— Mike Orren (@mikeorren) August 27, 2021

Publishers are very hesitant to pay 30% of their sales to a middleman. But 15%…that’s within shouting distance of an acceptable finder’s fee/processing charge in many minds. We’ll see if any of those minds get changed.

[UPDATE: The Times folks told us it was 2001, but Lisa Tozzi notes that she was writing a campaign newsletter for the paper a year earlier.]

The news org recently passed the 8 million subscription mark and, as executives have emphasized each and every quarter, the number paying for The New York Times is still a fraction of the 100 million people who have registered with their email at nytimes.com. Alex Hardiman, chief product officer at the Times, described introducing subscriber-only newsletters as “both a retention play and a conversion play.”

“When we look at the intersection between our subscription model and newsletters, newsletters are already really important,” she said. “We see that almost half of subscribers open a newsletter in a given week, and people who do receive newsletters are far more likely to pay and to stay.”

Which newsletters will be exclusive to subscribers?

The existing newsletters going subscriber-only include Well, Watching, Parenting, Smarter Living, At Home and Away, On Politics, On Tech With Shira Ovide, On Soccer with Rory Smith, and those from columnists Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman, and Frank Bruni. A new slate of newsletters, also announced Wednesday, will launch as subscriber exclusives; they include new newsletters from linguist John McWhorter, sociologist and essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren, longtime economics writer Peter Coy, and New York Times Magazine critic Jay Caspian Kang.

Notably, the subscriber-only list does not include the Breaking News email or the business-focused DealBook or the uber popular daily newsletter, The Morning, which has a whopping 17 million subscribers.

There have been signs of a new focus on newsletters at the Times for a while now. Managers asked news and opinion staffers to get approval for any newsletter (paid or free) in a memo that called platforms like Substack and Twitter’s Revue “direct competitors” earlier this year. (One of the subscriber-only emails being highlighted, by Paul Krugman, began as a free Substack before being brought into the Times fold and Substack has repeatedly tried to poach top Times writers and columnists with advances “well above” their Times salaries.)

The three kinds of newsletters at the Times

The Times says at least 19 newsletters of the Times’ roughly 50 newsletters will be available only to subscribers. How did the Times choose which to, effectively, paywall? Hardiman outlined three broad categories of emails — briefings, personalized alerts, and (now) subscriber-only newsletters — and said that each type plays a different role in their subscriber strategy.

Briefings like The Morning from David Leonhardt “are really effective at building relationships and daily habit for all readers — paying or not,” Hardiman noted.

That newsletter will stay free, in part because it’s so effective at pointing readers to news articles (which are, of course, subject to the Times’ metered paywall) as well as podcasts, puzzles, and recipes owned by the Times.

“The Morning is helping people every day in their inbox to establish a relationship with the Times, get caught up on the latest news, and experience the breadth of value that we offer across the Times,” Hardiman said. “We feel that is one of the best relationship-building tools that we have, so it very much plays a deliberate role in being open and accessible to all.”

The Morning, in other words, is designed to promote discovery, as you can see if you take a peek at any recent edition. The weekday newsletter starts with an agenda-setting essay from Leonhardt followed by a bulleted list of other noteworthy stories. The newsy bits are followed by links to a smattering of other Times work. On the last day of July, those included an anti-Keurig screed from Wirecutter, a noteworthy obituary, a Modern Love column, and recommendations on what to eat (a freestyle chicken parm recipe via Cooking), play (today’s Spelling Bee), and watch (via a Times review of a recent documentary).

After briefing-style emails, the second category of newsletters are ones that, essentially, function as personalized alerts to help readers follow their favorite writer or stay on top of issues they already care about. The subscriber-only newsletters, Hardiman said, will fill a third — and distinct — user need.

“The subscriber-only newsletters offer exclusive journalism from experts who go deep on the topics that our subscribers are most passionate about, and do it within the convenience of the inbox,” Hardiman said. “When we look at our addressable market of subscribers, it’s an audience of curious people who are lifelong learners and getting a real connection to the experts that we have at The New York Times is one of the reasons why they’re motivated to pay. So that’s why we’re really leaning into newsletters with this roster.”

Anchored by Opinion writers, but showcasing the Times’ breadth

That roster, you might have noticed, features a good number of Opinion columnists. The new newsletter effort is not the first time The New York Times has anchored a play for subscribers around columnists and Opinion content. A very early subscription product, called TimesSelect, offered readers access to editorials, opinion pieces, and columnists back in 2005. A few years later, another standalone product (and app) offered readers the ability to subscribe only to Opinion. (Both efforts were abandoned.)

Kathleen Kingsbury, the Times opinion editor, emphasized personality-driven writing, consistency, and, often, a more casual tone as draws for readers. She also said the Times would continue to experiment with the newsletter form, mentioning serialized fiction and including audio and video clips in emails.

“This is just the start,” she said. “We are trying to figure out what works. We will be adding to this portfolio as time goes on, and we see how readers engage and what they’re clamoring for and how we can address those wants and desires.”

The Times sees one of its strengths as the sheer number of journalists, experts, and personalities it can bring to a reader’s inbox with one paid subscription. It’s a contrast to competitors like Substack, where readers subscribe to (and pay for) newsletters separately.

“If you think about the pricing power of individual newsletters right now, it’s still really nascent,” Hardiman said. “You might for $15 or $20 be able to get three individual newsletters for a given month, whereas with us you can come and get a full subscriber newsletter portfolio and a full subscription for $17 a month. There’s real value in the bundle that we think people will see just because we can help address so many different needs in their news life.”

The Times has shown it’s not afraid to wind down a newsletter or tinker with the format that includes daily, weekly, monthly, and “as needed” updates. Smarter Living, which hasn’t been sent since March, for example, will return with a new focus on going “back to work.” (Speaking of back to work: you can expect a new author. Smarter Living editor Tim Herrera said he quit The New York Times because of burnout.)

Our technology must be able to handle both types of events. Times Engineering ensures that our journalists can get the news out when it happens and that our readers can access information when they need it most.

Over the past few years, our engineering team has put together what we call “election readiness efforts” to prepare our systems to withstand both planned and unplanned news events. These efforts have coincided with the United States election cycle because elections are important to our readers and often generate record-breaking traffic. Elections are an opportunity for us to merge our talents in journalism and engineering to provide readers with extensive coverage of the events and a user experience that helps them understand these moments in history.

To prevent our systems — which are a mix of legacy and modern software — from breaking during these important news events, we have spun up election readiness efforts to systematically improve our systems.

A brief history of our election readiness efforts

The election readiness effort in 2016 was small and centered around the implementation of a Content Delivery Network (or, CDN) that could provide us with protection during traffic surges. During the presidential election that year, we saw no outages and the CDN became a pivotal disaster recovery tool.

In 2017, we kicked off a large project to migrate our data from distributed data centers to the cloud. With a tight deadline, we pushed applications to the cloud using both microservices and the “lift and shift” technique. At the time, Google Kubernetes Engine (or, GKE) was the most mature managed environment for running containers, so we used that for our microservices. For legacy systems, we moved to Amazon Web Service (AWS) using EC2. These methods helped us quickly move our stack to the cloud and we were able to shut down our data center on April 30, 2018.

The downside to this approach was that we ended up with a bifurcated system spanning both clouds. Since this was the early days in Google, we had to make compromises by putting a number of endpoints on the internet with limited ability to extend our corporate networks to the Google backplane. This also meant the only way for our applications hosted in Google to talk to our applications hosted in AWS was over the internet. We spent significant amounts of time finding and implementing authentication solutions that fixed this issue.

This was a large migration and that fundamentally changed our applications. This meant all the data we collected about how our systems ran during the 2016 elections were no longer relevant. There were also new business-critical systems that were built after 2016 that had not been assessed for reliability. We did not know where we were vulnerable, but would soon find out the hard way.

On September 5, 2018, the Times Opinion section published a guest essay by a then-anonymous author from within the Trump administration. The resulting traffic surge caused numerous issues with our website and apps, and showed us how much work we needed to do in the two short months before the 2018 midterm elections. While we saw some challenges on election night that year, our two months of work helped stave off major outages.

2018 was a turning point for us and our site reliability strategy. Rather than hastily address issues in the months leading up to big events where we expected lots of reader traffic, we decided to take stock of our systems as a whole and enact longer term resilience measures. In the fall of 2019, we kicked off the readiness effort for the 2020 presidential election.

Assessment phase

Many of the engineering teams at the Times are small and operate independently of each other. They don’t share programming languages, software development life cycle, project management methodology, or deployment strategies. The teams monitor their own systems and performance, which was a strategic decision made when we migrated to the cloud. While this is great for agility and feature releases, it complicates the overall resilience of our systems.

Leading up to the 2020 election cycle, there was no one person or team that fully understood our entire federated architecture. We needed a strategy and fast — or, there was little chance we would be able to meet what we expected to be a historic news moment.

Step 0: Team formation

We first had to form a team that could assess the state of our architecture. The Times technology landscape is vast and tough to parse at a holistic level. We have our main website and apps that interact with numerous APIs; a CMS that creates and delivers data to our printing facilities and front-end applications; standalone products such as NYT Cooking and Games; our user and subscription platforms; data and analytics platforms; as well as the infrastructure (like CDN, Cloud and DNS) to deliver our content to readers.

In order to gather information about all of these systems as quickly as possible, we made sure the team was composed of engineers with different expertise from all over our Engineering group.

Step 1: Scope

Identifying the scope of this work was a fundamental part of the process. We knew we couldn’t address every resilience gap, so we needed to build consensus among the team and our stakeholders on which workflows and systems were most critical for the successful performance of our platforms for the 2020 presidential election.

We identified and ranked workflows — which might be the process by which we publish the homepage or the ability to take payment for a subscription. We then mapped which systems were critical to these workflows and created a tiered system.

Our most important workflows were assigned “Tier 0” and qualified as “mission critical.” Most of our Tier 0 workflows centered around publishing because if any of them failed during the election, the Times would not be able to get the news out, which would severely impact our report and business. There have been five moments in our history where we’ve failed to print the daily report in New York, the most recent being a 1978 labor strike.

Our “Tier 1” workflows qualified as critical and related to subscriptions, push notifications, and marketing. The “Tier 2” workflows were designated as important and included features such as commenting, targeted advertising and data capturing.

This tiered schema helped us define the scope of this work so we could strategically focus on improving our systems’ resilience.

Step 2: Assess and test

Once we had a team and a scope, we were ready to assess our systems. We used architecture readiness reviews and operational maturity assessments to gauge the status of each system and measured them against formalized standards we created for each tier. We aggregated the scores from both assessments, which helped inform us and our stakeholders where investment and prioritization was required.

It can be difficult to prioritize resilience work and technical debt on feature teams’ roadmaps. A product manager often plans a few quarters ahead with work that includes new features and improvements that address user needs; It can be hard to fit resilience work into these plans. It can be difficult to split developer time between infrastructure improvements and product requirements, particularly on smaller teams or newer teams with significant greenfield development tasks ahead of them.

As we assessed the teams, some did not have enough resources to split up the work, while others had to sacrifice new feature development in favor of the fortification of their systems.

As the first two election events of the year — the Iowa Caucus and Super Tuesday — rolled around, we gathered in an office war room at The Times’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. The stack held up. In between bites of food and sips of coffee, we talked about the news of a virus spreading around the world.

By mid-March, we had begun working remotely because of the coronavirus. We found ourselves in the midst of a news moment with many competing headlines and daily elevated traffic. When we began our election readiness work for 2020, we knew the election would likely be unprecedented, but by April we were planning for the unknown.

Stress tests are one of our primary tools for preparing our systems for big news events, and we have conducted them for many past election cycles. However, we quickly learned that remotely coordinating and conducting production stress tests for over 20 systems was challenging.

Over the course of the election cycle, we ran seven load tests on production — simultaneously hitting dependent systems to see how much of a load they could take before breaking, and any downstream impact. Because we couldn’t sit in a room together, we set up video calls and Slack channels so team leads could observe how and where systems degraded.

The election leads floated from hangout to hangout, observing how and where systems degraded, pitching in as needed with issues with load testing software. We iterated on the process after every stress test, improving test operations and communications as we could.

By September 2020, we were regularly stress testing our website. More teams were able to handle record breaking traffic and engineers were more comfortable with the process. As November grew closer, we were becoming confident. There were only a handful of systems that needed work; they were identified, and we had a plan to move forward.

The publication of The Times’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s tax information on September 27, 2020 provided a true stress test of our systems, as readers came to our platforms in high numbers. It was a glimpse of what the election might look like. Most systems were able to handle the traffic, but there were gaps in systems that were not easily stress tested. We knew that degradation on this key night would be catastrophic. We had more work to do before November.

The gift feature became available to a majority of news subscribers on web last week, said New York Times product director Anna Mancusi. All subscribers will have access by August and the Times plans to add the gift button to its news apps (iOS and Android) soon, too.

Subscribers can find the gift button alongside other social and email share options. The gifted articles won’t count towards the limited number of articles that non-subscribers can click before hitting a paywall and recipients have 14 days to read ’em.

The Times is only making the offering to news subscribers — not those who only have standalone Cooking or Games subscriptions — but if a reader finds an article they love, they don’t have to be stingy. “Once you’ve shared an article, you can continue to share the same article with multiple recipients for the remainder of the calendar month without it counting toward your overall monthly allotment,” according to the paper’s help center.

Mancusi called gift articles “one of our first subscriber-only features” and the emphasis on “gifts” rather than, say, links or shares seems designed to underline that it’s an added value for those paying for the Times. (The Wall Street Journal and The Information, among others, allow subscribers to share articles to non-subscribers for free, but don’t use the “gift” framing. The Financial Times, meanwhile, introduced a “gift” feature way back in 2013.)

The New York Times tested the idea with a subset of users back in 2020. Based on how often those initial subscribers used the feature (and feedback they solicited through user research), the Times decided to roll it out more widely.

Mancusi said it was too early to determine whether gift recipients were more likely to convert to subscribers, but said the Times could already say they were, at least, more likely to cough up their email to register at nytimes.com.

“We know that non-subscribers who come to our site from a link that was shared with them are more likely to start a relationship with us by registering, compared to those who arrive on site via other avenues,” she said. “We will be monitoring registration and conversion rates for gift article recipients, as well as subscriber sharing behavior and retention, in the weeks and months to come.”

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Mather said. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

Four years later, is the business of local news extremely difficult? Yes. Will The Athletic be the last ones standing? Probably not, according to a report in Axios.

The New York Times is in talks to purchase The Athletic and it would not be a “joint venture” or partnership but a full acquisition, Sara Fischer reports. (A Times spokesperson declined to confirm the talks: “As a general matter of policy, we do not comment on rumors about potential acquisitions or divestitures.”)

The Athletic gobbling up all the local beat reporters to then be swallowed up by the Times is a perfect window into the modern media landscape. https://t.co/0gqrUbCEz2

— Aaron Nagler (@AaronNagler) May 25, 2021

You could argue that the NYT’s share of wallet in news subscriptions puts it in direct competition with local publishers. This has the potential to do it further. https://t.co/xIu9rchk69

— Daniel Petty (@danielpetty) May 25, 2021

The New York Times is a more natural home for The Athletic than Axios, where previous acquisition talks fell apart. Unlike Axios, the business models of the Times and The Athletic both revolve around subscriptions. But though The Athletic brought in a reported $80 million in revenue last year, the sports news site is not profitable. It also employs 600 full-time staffers — including 400 in editorial alone. What might The New York Times want from the deal?

Some of The Athletic’s 1.2 million subscribers, for starters. The Times could be thinking about a building out a subscription product for sports, like Cooking for recipes, Games for puzzles, or Audm for audio. (The Times is already testing subscription products around its consumer review site Wirecutter and content for children.)

The Athletic has generated other revenue streams, including a paid partnership around online sports gambling. Here’s how The Athletic put it to readers when announcing its partnership with BetMGM:

We’re going to be getting data from them that will make stories and columns deeper and more insightful. Yes, we’ll be linking lines and odds back to their sportsbook (and most links will carry a generous sign-up offer) — but you have to play somewhere, right? […]

We’re well aware that sports betting isn’t for everyone — and chances are it’s not even legal yet in your state — but a good sports betting story is a good story, period, and we think you’ll enjoy nearly everything we publish, regardless of what you do with the information afterwards.

Is sports betting a revenue stream that The New York Times is willing to embrace? The other scoop in Fischer’s newsletter — she’s good, people! — suggests legacy news organizations may be getting comfortable with the idea.

Fischer reports that the Associated Press is partnering with the online sports gambling company FanDuel, who will pay the AP “an undisclosed amount” to link, exclusively, to FanDuel when referring to betting odds. (The AP will not link directly to betting pages, so this is more paid content than direct affiliate marketing.)

See this, to me, is how The Athletic *really* monetizes; I’d have guessed there’d be no way in hell for the NYT to get over that hurdle, but if the AP is in on the sports gambling bonanza, I likely guessed wrong https://t.co/It1wun8Oke

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) May 25, 2021

As we learned this week, top leaders at the Associated Press are very concerned that the wire service’s stories may appear biased, but not so concerned that they won’t allow FanDuel to pay to include the company’s betting odds in AP sports stories. https://t.co/R1QS43qc9Q pic.twitter.com/FVYWgvS7Lz

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) May 25, 2021

Dirty secret about The Athletic is that it’s actually a sports gambling play. I paid like $10 for six months and while the articles are good, they don’t even write up every game. Plenty of odds though. Interesting to see how hard the NYT/AP are leaning into sports betting.

— Gautham Nagesh (@gnagesh) May 25, 2021

You can read the full report — including a recap of the Times’ rather “mixed track record” in dealmaking — here.

The conference gathered top editors — and one prominent, opinionated Substacker — to discuss the growth of opinion in online journalism. There to talk about the proliferation was Karen Attiah, global opinions editor for The Washington Post; Sewell Chan, editorial page editor at The Los Angeles Times; Katie Kingsbury, opinion editor for The New York Times; and Matthew Yglesias, a writer and editor who left Vox to launch his Substack, Slow Boring. ISOJ said it was the first time the conference had explored online opinion journalism in its 22-year history.

“Ours is a very narrative era,” Chan said in opening remarks. “The power of storytelling is driving everything that we’re seeing in media, regardless of the medium — the podcast boom, newsletters, video. The voice and the opinionated voice are more powerful than ever before.”

Here are a couple of our takeaways.

“Why don’t we let people speak for themselves?”

The editors each called a particular subset of op-ed contributor something different — “professors,” “the interpreter class,” “think tankers” — but agreed they were actively trying to create more space for different types of writers, who draw on different forms of authority, than have been featured in the past.

The impulse is not entirely new. Early feedback on The New York Times op-ed page singled out the section’s “propensity towards ‘names'” and running too “much junk by the famous.” (The New York Times editorial page editor John B. Oakes, who first envisioned the op-ed page, warned specifically against scholars and professors. “Ivory tower equals ivory head,” he quipped.) Resisting the temptation to publish “names” hasn’t gotten easier, but with the ability to publish more perspectives online, it may make for a richer section as a whole.

“I think op-ed pages have become more interesting, in part, because, at least at our page, we are trying to move away from the traditional reliance on elected officials [and] policy experts,” Chan said. “There’s still room for professors and scholars — they are a big part of what we publish still — but we’re increasingly searching for the real voices of people’s authentic, lived experiences, which is oftentimes as important a form of authority, as traditional research scholarship.”

At The Washington Post, Attiah said she was stacking her section with bylines from people actually living in the countries they were commenting on.

“There was a push on my part to push back against what I would call the interpreter class, particularly in Washington, where you have foreign correspondents and think tankers tasked very often to explain [foreign events] to us,” Attiah said. “Why don’t we just let people from the countries, from these cultures, speak for themselves about what’s going on in their country?”

Going local, going global

There was a divide between the regional news organization focused on serving the country’s most populous state and county – and the national publications eyeing an international audience.

Like other regional papers, The Los Angeles Times is moving toward “an ethos of community and service,” Chan said.

“Here at The LA Times, I’m really focused on trying to promote and publish the broadest array of California perspectives as possible, knowing that nationally-known politicians and characters and commentators are already amply reflected in the pages of national publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal,” Chan said. “What we can do to try to restore trust and community at the local and state level is an issue that interests me a great deal.”

Attiah said that, at The Washington Post, they were casting the net much wider, and trying to “cultivate and court and appeal to international audiences,” including English speakers in India, Europe, and Africa.

“The digital marketplace is a global marketplace,” Attiah noted.

Attiah — who edited the late Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and Virginia resident who was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — said her section could be “a refuge” for activists and writers barred from speaking freely in their own countries.

“Being an American newspaper, we’re trying to be a home for international writers,” she said. “We often are getting writers who have not had opportunities or a voice in their countries, whether it’s due to authoritarian governments or something else.”

What readers want

Kingsbury presented some reader research that had driven recent changes at The New York Times’ opinion section, including renaming op-eds “guest essays” and expanding biographies for contributors.

“[Readers] crave more differentiation, clarity, and context,” she said. “In particular, they want to better understand when and why we’re publishing outside writers.”

Opinion content — whether “guest essays” or editorials written in-house — have long drawn on original reporting and sources cultivated by the opinion writers. But readers, Kingsbury said, are starting to see more of that themselves.

“When I arrived, the Times very, very rarely quoted people in [editorials],” she said. “We have to gain trust with readers at every turn, so that is something that we emphasize: showing our work and trying to be more transparent.”

Readers also want a certain amount of curation, the group agreed. The acceptance rate for outside op-eds at major publications hovers in the low single digits, and opinion sections spend a lot of time and effort on standards given the flood of pitches coming across their desks.

“I wouldn’t suggest that anybody, like, browse Substack,” Yglesias said, at one point. “It’s a lot of people out there op-ed-ing and writing and doing whatever.”

Both legacy and independent writers have to work to differentiate themselves from commentators on cable news and armchair experts on social media, Yglesias noted.

“Our question as people who are trying to be professionals and trying to build businesses that are grounded in opinion, is, ‘How do you differentiate yourself from this maw of opinions that are constantly being voiced out there on social?'” he said. “I think you hear all of us on the panel talking about different ways to do that.”

Fact-checking, editing, and elevating different — and differing — opinions are all part of “a business strategy,” Attiah said.

“Our pages, in many ways, are facing competition from right-wing media, individual Facebook accounts, social media accounts, and other alternative forms of voices and viewpoints,” she said. “I think our challenge is to add value. We add value to the conversation with fact-checking, editing, and inclusion. I think we’re realizing that inclusion of various voices is not only a luxury, but an imperative. If we are going to remain relevant and [continue] adding value, we have to continue to uphold these standards.”

Looking ahead, Attiah also said an important shift for opinion sections would be thinking not just about developing writers, but developing audiences.

“There’s a lot more understanding of the importance of digital communities and audiences, what those conversations are like, and how our journalism fits into them,” she said. “It’s more of an audience-first ethos. I think legacy [media] is sort of like, ‘Oh gosh, audience editors really matter? Social media really matters?’ We’re catching up — quickly, I think — to what people are interested in that doesn’t have to do with traditional left-right politics.”

If you want to listen to the entire panel, ISOJ is posting recordings of its events on YouTube, including the one headlined by opinion editors.

But on the flip side, a very common complaint about the media (particularly from those on the political right) is that reporters spend too much time decoding intentions, describing trends, and deriving meaning — and not enough on reporting. just. the. facts.

There’s a similar debate in academia. How much should researchers invest in answering what versus why and how? Will your work be better if it investigates a hypothesis that might explain a phenomenon? Or would it be more useful to make your goal simply to describe that phenomenon?

In the field of media research, those on Team Describe got a valuable new ally today: a new publication called the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. Its co-founders are Princeton’s Andy Guess, the University of Zurich’s Eszter Hargittai, and Penn State’s Kevin Munger, all of whom work on issues in and around journalism. Here’s their explanation of their no-explaining model:

We would not be undertaking this endeavor if we thought our journal would simply add to the accumulating stock of existing scholarly venues, mirroring its structure and pathologies through some inescapable process of institutional isomorphism. On the contrary, our hope is that this intervention into the social science journal publishing space pushes the boundaries of the feasible along multiple dimensions methodological, disciplinary, and financial.

We are here to address some of the failures in the existing structure of publishing outlets, particularly those that cater to quantitative social science researchers. Such failures are many:

1. Trending away from “mere” description. There are macro trends in social science that affect all journals. Many of these trends are good; we applaud the growing attention to causality, for example, and to concerns about generalizability that drive attention to sample composition. But as we describe below, these trends come at a cost to quantitative work that can provide a descriptive foundation for research agendas.

2. Lack of clear standards for substantive importance. The topics that are deemed important too often reflect path dependence, the biases of established scholars and institutions, approved theoretical frameworks from the dominant canon, and the focus of media interest. The whiplash of the past few years of digital media research, the attention paid first to “echo chambers,” then to “fake news,” now to “radicalization,’ is inimical to the accumulation of knowledge. All of these topics are worth studying, but we need a more stable metric for “topical importance” than media attention.

3. Adherence to disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Most peer journals are explicitly connected to a single discipline, and all of them are overly concerned with the United States and Western Europe. The topic of digital media is of obvious importance to the entire world.

4. Artificial constraints. Most journals have strict requirements for the length and format of what they publish, making it difficult to find outlets for important contributions of modest scope or idiosyncratic topic. (How many of us have written 8,000-word papers around one interesting finding, or have shelved neat findings because we did not feel like writing an 8,000-word paper around them?)

5. Inefficiencies of peer review. Most will agree that the current mode of journal reviewing is suboptimal. Too many authors wait months only to be told that their submission has been desk rejected; at the same time, too many scholars receive an endless stream of reviewing requests.

Their new journal is meant to address these issues. It has no preset limits on length; it sets its field as “digital media, broadly construed” rather than one of the many disciplinary niches within it; its acquisition process aims to reduce the number of papers that go out for peer review (and increase the share of them that get published). And it’s only interested in “quantitative description…a mode of social-scientific inquiry [that] can be applied to any substantive domain.”

Also, it’s all open access, and it doesn’t require a publishing fee (at least not now).

JQD:DM is interesting both as a concept and as a container for interesting work. The first issue, out today, is probably packed with more papers I’d be interested in reading than an academic journal has had for a long time. A few of the highlights:

Cracking Open the News Feed: Exploring What U.S. Facebook Users See and Share with Large-Scale Platform Data, by Andy Guess, Kevin Aslett, Joshua Tucker, Richard Bonneau, and Jonathan Nagler

In this study, we analyze for the first time newly available engagement data covering millions of web links shared on Facebook to describe how and by which categories of U.S. users different types of news are seen and shared on the platform. We focus on articles from low-credibility news publishers, credible news sources, purveyors of clickbait, and news specifically about politics, which we identify through a combination of curated lists and supervised classifiers.

Our results support recent findings that more fake news is shared by older users and conservatives and that both viewing and sharing patterns suggest a preference for ideologically congenial misinformation. We also find that fake news articles related to politics are more popular among older Americans than other types, while the youngest users share relatively more articles with clickbait headlines.

Across the platform, however, articles from credible news sources are shared over 5 times more often and viewed over 7 times more often than articles from low-credibility sources. These findings offer important context for researchers studying the spread and consumption of information — including misinformation — on social media.

Value for Correction: Documenting Perceptions about Peer Correction of Misinformation on Social Media in the Context of COVID-19, by Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga

Although correction is often suggested as a tool against misinformation, and empirical research suggests it can be an effective one, we know little about how people perceive the act of correcting people on social media.

This study measures such perceptions in the context of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, introducing the concept of value for correction. We find that value for correction on social media is relatively strong and widespread, with no differences by partisanship or gender. Neither those who engage in correction themselves nor those witnessing the correction of others have higher value for correction.

Witnessing correction, on the other hand, is associated with lower concerns about negative consequences of correction, whereas engaging in correction is not.

An Analysis of the Partnership between Retailers and Low-credibility News Publishers, by Lia Bozarth and Ceren Budak

In this paper, we provide a large-scale analysis of the display ad ecosystem that supports low-credibility and traditional news sites, with a particular focus on the relationship between retailers and news producers. We study this relationship from both the retailer and news producer perspectives.

First, focusing on the retailers, our work reveals high-profile retailers that are frequently advertised on low-credibility news sites, including those that are more likely to be advertised on low-credibility news sites than traditional news sites. Additionally, despite high-profile retailers having more resources and incentive to dissociate with low-credibility news publishers, we surprisingly do not observe a strong relationship between retailer popularity and advertising intensity on low-credibility news sites. We also do not observe a significant difference across different market sectors.

Second, turning to the publishers, we characterize how different retailers are contributing to the ad revenue stream of low-credibility news sites. We observe that retailers who are among the top-10K websites on the Internet account for a quarter of all ad traffic on low-credibility news sites.

Nevertheless, we show that low-credibility news sites are already becoming less reliant on popular retailers over time, highlighting the dynamic nature of the low-credibility news ad ecosystem.

Generous Attitudes and Online Participation, by Floor Fiers, Aaron Shaw, and Eszter Hargittai

Some of the most popular websites depend on user-generated content produced and aggregated by unpaid volunteers. Contributing in such ways constitutes a type of generous behavior, as it costs time and energy while benefiting others.

This study examines the relationship between contributions to a variety of online information resources and an experimental measure of generosity, the dictator game. Results suggest that contributors to any type of online content tend to donate more in the dictator game than those who do not contribute at all.

When disaggregating by type of contribution, we find that those who write reviews, upload public videos, write or answer questions, and contribute to encyclopedic collections online are more generous in the dictator game than their non-contributing counterparts. These findings suggest that generous attitudes help to explain variation in contributions to review, question-and-answer, video, and encyclopedic websites.

Characterizing Online Media on COVID-19 during the Early Months of the Pandemic, by Henry Dambanemuya, Haomin Lin, and Ágnes Horvát

The 2019 coronavirus disease had wide-ranging effects on public health throughout the world. Vital in managing its spread was effective communication about public health guidelines such as social distancing and sheltering in place. Our study provides a descriptive analysis of online information sharing about coronavirus-related topics in 5.2 million English-language news articles, blog posts, and discussion forum entries shared in 197 countries during the early months of the pandemic.

We illustrate potential approaches to analyze the data while emphasizing how often-overlooked dimensions of the online media environment play a crucial role in the observed information-sharing patterns. In particular, we show how the following three dimensions matter: (1) online media posts’ geographic location in relation to local exposure to the virus; (2) the platforms and types of media chosen for discussing various topics; and (3) temporal variations in information-sharing patterns.

Our descriptive analyses of the multimedia data suggest that studies that overlook these crucial aspects of online media may arrive at misleading conclusions about the observed information-sharing patterns. This could impact the success of potential communication strategies devised based on data from online media. Our work has broad implications for the study and design of computational approaches for characterizing large-scale information dissemination during pandemics and beyond.

Information Seeking Patterns and COVID-19 in the United States by Bianca Reisdorf, Grant Blank, Johannes Bauer, Shelia Cotten, Craig Robertson, and Megan Knittel

In this paper, we describe how socioeconomic background and political leaning are related to how U.S. residents look for information on COVID-19.

Using representative survey data from 2,280 U.S. internet users, collected in fall 2020, we examine how factors, such as age, gender, race, income, education, political leaning, and internet skills are related to how many different types of sources and what types of sources respondents use to find information on COVID-19. Moreover, we describe how many checking actions individuals use to verify information, and how all of these factors are related to knowledge about COVID-19.

Results show that men, those with higher education, higher incomes, and higher self-perceived internet ability, and those who are younger used more types of information sources. Similar patterns emerged for checking actions.

When we examined different types of sources (mainstream media, conservative sources, medical sources, and TV sources), three patterns emerged: 1) respondents who have more resources used more types of sources; 2) demographic factors made less difference for conservative media consumers; and 3) conservative media were the only type of source used less by younger age groups than older age groups.

Finally, availability of resources and types of information sources were related to differences in factual knowledge. Respondents who had fewer resources, those who used conservative news media, and those who engaged in more checking actions got fewer answers right. This difference could lead to information divides and associated knowledge gaps in the United States regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

All interesting stuff, and there’s more of it.

But it’s also a fun thought experiment to consider what the approach of JQD:DM would look like if it was being used in the world of journalism rather than academia. I’ve always believed that people who want “just the facts” from news outlets wouldn’t actually like it if media companies moved in that direction. (Wanting “just the facts” is often just a cultural signal for conservatism. Trump supporters were far more likely to say they want “just the facts” than Clinton supporters in 2016; a strict allegiance to fact-based reality was not a hallmark of the Trump administration.)

On the other hand, I know there are a thousand things I’d love to write about — that I think would be interesting information that would make the world an ever-so-slightly better place — but which don’t have a particular analytical hook attached to them. “This is some really interesting data I discovered/gathered/generated” is more likely to lead to posting a dataset on GitHub than writing a story for a news site.

I don’t think abandoning analysis and explanation makes any sense for news organizations — especially at a time when subscriber-based business models make the delivery of benefits/service more key to revenue streams than it was decades ago. But I do wish there were more spaces for “quantitative description” in journalism.

I think of Jeremy Singer-Vine’s email newsletter Data is Plural, which highlights “useful/curious” datasets. I think of The Pudding, which “explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays,” but does just as much to be a platform for compelling quantitative data. And I think of some of The New York Times’ best interactives, like its ridiculously popular 2013 dialect map, which are more like UIs for datasets than “stories” or “explainers.” People like this stuff! Let’s do more of it.

After every protest, it’s a familiar story: journalists, just trying to do their jobs, are harassed, jailed, or injured by police.

But words from within the industry — both from reporters and organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists — never seem to go far enough. They often paint a lopsided picture, where the only thing worth mentioning is the harm done to themselves, ignoring the violence occurring against the communities they are supposed to be serving.

I shudder when I hear authorities in Minnesota saying, “Media and press, leave the area.” Journalists, protected by the First Amendment, go where stories take us. We will cover protests. Don’t arrest us. Let us do our jobs because we, like law enforcement, work for the public.

— Matthew T. Hall (@SDuncovered) April 14, 2021

These sorts of comments are callous, overlooking that protestors are also protected by the First Amendment. Calling attention to journalists, as if we should be protected from police violence but our communities should not, is ridiculous.

Here’s a letter today from @spj_tweets and 23 other orgs. Why do letters like this keep ignoring communities of color?

Journalism is important. But you can’t ignore the ways in which police demonstrably treat communities of color around the country. https://t.co/ZFKIkMHaB2 pic.twitter.com/PHDIYDEFl7

— Gabe Schneider (@gabemschneider) October 30, 2020

We should be using the platforms we have to support communities impacted by police violence and call attention to the fact that police are kettling, harassing, and beating people without journalism credentials in the streets. We should be using the tools we have at our disposal to help people hold their police departments accountable.

As journalist Linda Tirado wrote after police shot her in the eye with a foam bullet last year: “All anyone wants to talk about is freedom of the press, if I am angry, what I will do next. I think that I am angry — but no more than I was this time last week, when I was watching America burn…”

Covering the Chauvin guilty verdict. While de-centering journalists is often a goal for newsrooms, whether reporters should acknowledge the personal effect events like Derek Chauvin’s sentencing have on them is up for debate according to the internet. Some media professionals warned young reporters against commenting on the event, especially because editors and hiring managers may be watching their social feeds. But it’s impossible for many Black journalists to distance themselves from their lived experience, and that should never be asked of them by editors or hiring managers, especially considering that white experiences are often framed as “objective.”

Meanwhile, media professionals have an extensive history of exploiting Black trauma, as contributing writer Hannah Getahun laid out this week in The Objective. The “objectivity” surrounding police violence has negatively affected community relationships with papers. As papers fail to hold power to account, relationships with those directly harmed also fail.

Getahun wrote:

This summer, after a police officer killed George Floyd, mainstream and social media played a role in perpetuating the trauma of Black people by constantly replaying the infamous videos of his final moments. In my mind, it was a gruesome reminder of our place in American society. That people like me must be forced to operate normally after watching these images is a feat in itself. But the news media should not be a part of the problem.

A union with impact. Tech workers at The New York Times might have a union. This is not only a big deal for The New York Times, which has had a union for reporters since the 1940s, but a huge deal for tech workers on the whole. If created, the new unit would contain around 650 workers, making it the largest union of tech workers in the country. That unit would be larger than the one formed by employees at Google this year and significantly larger than the one formed by Kickstarter employees in 2020 (the first union formed by tech workers at a major company).

As KQED’s Sam Harnett put it: “The biggest tech unionization effort is happening at The New York Times.”

Management has denied voluntary recognition of the union and asked representatives to file for an election.

In other union news:

• 300+ newsroom employees at Insider announced their intention to unionize. Their slogan is “a union with impact,” likely riffing on the company’s policy of “impact points,” where retweets from certain journalists are used to measure success.
• Thirty-seven out of thirty-eight employees voted affirmatively for a union at Marketplace.
• The Ziff Davis Creators Guild, which includes the editorial staffs of AskMen, Geek, Mashable, and PCMag, has staged a walkout after two years of slow and grueling bargaining.

Q&A with Jude Ellison S. Doyle on why Substack isn’t about Substack. Substack is still chugging along as a company and a content management system (although we’ll be leaving it soon). The company, now in a fresh new round of fundraising, has either ignored or combatively engaged with the criticism it’s fielded over the last few months — namely, that it does not enforce its community guidelines when it comes to the harassment of trans people, and that it has been (opaquely) providing money to a selection of writers in its “Pro Program.”

Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, a prominent non-binary writer on Substack and beyond, was one of the first people to publicly denounce Substack’s approach. Doyle has now left Substack for Ghost, after clearly breaking down what they think is wrong with Substack and clearly the way The New York Times’ Ben Smith wrote about Substack.

Here is a snipper of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. You can read more here. 

What do you think of writers who remain with Substack or are joining Substack now? Or those that say it’s too hard to find another alternative?

I’m not Jesus. You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I can’t absolve you of sin. I also can’t tell anyone to move their newsletter. I think you should, but there’s a thin line between “protester” and “drill sergeant,” and you have to stay out of people’s faces if you don’t want to cross that line.

What I will say is that I’ve been frustrated by some performative allyship. I saw a few cis people make a big deal about Substack’s transphobia being unacceptable, with all these posts about how they wanted to organize and improve the material conditions of the workers and etc. They’d be raging against the machine, and then they’d get bored, and you’d see, like, a little post about how it doesn’t matter because we’re all compromised under capitalism. We’re all compromised, Debra, but some of us moved to Buttondown.

A bit more media.

• What does movement journalism mean for journalism as a whole? The Objective’s Gabe Schneider writes about “movement journalism” and the journalists that practice it. One definition of the practice is as follows: “Movement journalism is journalism in service to liberation. This does not mean turning journalists into soapboxes for activists, but fostering collaboration between journalists and grassroots movements, and supporting journalism created by oppressed and marginalized people.”
• CNN parachutes into Myanmar. Eleven Burmese sources were arrested after speaking to CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, who visited the country on a parachute journalism trip sponsored by the state military. In a story for New Naratiff, reporter Aye Min Thant says, “CNN endangered 11 people and their families just to pursue celebrity-driven, parachute journalism that serves no purpose other than chasing higher ratings.”
• The “fringe extremists” pushing flawed science to target trans kids. For Buzzfeed News, Aviva Stahl reports how disinformation groups spouting anti-LGBTQ claims and flawed science wormed their way into state legislatures and were cited by Reuters.
• The spectacle of anti-Asian violence on Instagram. “For the young or tech-savvy, who are arguably the diaspora’s most vocal proponents, sharing such content is a subversive reaction to conditioned expectations of silence. Posting has become a means of processing.” Terry Nguyen reports on the vicious cycle of attention and traumatic imagery that’s become central to Asian Americans news distribution on social media.
• Journalism as infrastructure. As Congress continues to shape its annual infrastructure bill, The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu argues that allocating even 1% of the bill’s expected $3 to $4 billion total toward local newsrooms would be a “historic and legacy-defining investment in America’s civic infrastructure.”
• “Clean Slate.” A new six-month pilot program at Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader will offer story subjects a chance to have stories about them reviewed and potentially updated, deprioritized on Google, or even removed. The Boston Globe started a similar initiative earlier this year. According to The Sacramento Bee’s Alex Yoon-Hendricks, the pilot may eventually be rolled out at all other McClatchy papers.
• Media’s “utter lack of humanity.” Journalism professor Arionne Nettles writes about Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who wrote that the public should “wait before turning slain 13-year-old Adam Toledo into a martyr.”
• Who defines a mass shooting? The media. For Chicago Weekly, Madison Muller explains how a newsroom’s definition of mass shootings can shift coverage away depending on a communities demographics.
• Leah Finnegan’s Gawker (2021). Almost five years after it shuttered, Gawker will rise again — this time under the leadership of Leah Finnegan, who will revive the publication under Bustle Digital Group. New hires include reporters Jenny Zhang, Kelly Conaboy, and Sarah Hagi.

What’s happening.

• April 23: 2021: Journalism Ethics & Local News Now at the University of Wisconsin. A conference that aims to tackle how local outlets, with fewer resources than ever, can cover stories “fully, equitably, and ethically.”
• April 28: “Belonging in the news: Part 3” with Lewis Wallace and Manolia Charlotin. Martin G. Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, will interview Lewis Wallace and Manolia Charlotin, co-founders and co-directors of Press On, a Southern media collective that seeks to advance the practice of movement journalism.
• April 29: How we report on police. This webinar moderated by Lakeidra Chavis of The Trace includes reporters from WGN, the Chicago Tribune, and City Bureau.

In 2014, The New York Times produced its pivotal Innovation Report. The report, which was the product of six months of work by Times staffers and was meant to be an internal document before it was leaked, outlined the digital challenges that the paper faced and argued that The New York Times must become a digital-first organization in order to survive. “We are falling behind in … the art and science of getting our journalism to readers.”

That 2014 Innovation Report was written by 10 white people and does not mention the words “diverse,” “diversity,” “racial,” or “race” once. In 2014, as the paper recognized that growing its audience and was crucial to its survival, it did not, in this report, recognize that readers and staff members of color were a key part of that mission. The 97-page report mentions race exactly once, in an aside about how reporters use social media (“Jon Eligon wrote a gripping first-person account on Facebook about his experience as a black reporter approaching a white supremacist in North Dakota”). The report does not include a single photo of a Black employee.

Another report, “Journalism That Stands Apart: The 2020 Group,” was released, publicly, in January 2017. This time, the report acknowledges that “increasing the diversity of our newsroom — more people of color, more women, more people from outside major metropolitan areas, more younger journalists and more non-Americans — is critical,” and it includes a couple relevant quotes from newsroom employees: “The Times should invest more in career planning, and should do more to not only hire people of color or people who aren’t from the usual talent pipelines but also help them with mentorship and career advancement,” and “We need more diversity at the top, in the traditional sense and in the sense of diversity of skills.”

Four years later — and following the high-profile resignations of reporter Donald McNeil Jr. (for using a racial slur) and opinion page editor James Bennet (for running an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that called on the military to quash Black Lives Matter protests), The New York Times on Wednesday released a report, “A Call to Action: Building a Culture that Works for All of Us,” that brings race in the newsroom front and center. “Without following through on our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion internally, we will inevitably speak to and reach only certain readers through our journalism,” the report’s authors Amber Guild, president of T Brand; Carolyn Ryan, deputy managing editor; and Anand Venkatesan, SVP of strategy and head of operations, write. “We want a subscriber and readership base that more fully reflects the breadth of the society we serve.”

As Nieman Lab did with both the 2014 and 2017 reports, we’ve pulled out some key passages from the new report.

There’s been some progress. The percentage of people of color at the company has increased slightly since the end of 2019 when the Times last made figures available (from 32% to 34%).

Last year, 48 percent of new hires were people of color. Since 2015, we have increased the overall percentage of people of color at the company from 27 percent to 34 percent; and we have increased the percentage of people of color in leadership from 17 percent to 23 percent. We have also increased the percentage of women at the company from 45 percent to 52 percent; and we have increased the percentage of women in company leadership from 40 percent to 52 percent.

The authors stress that hiring isn’t the end of the story and that good intentions aren’t enough. “Because we’re making a difference in society and have a mission, we feel like we’re already equitable and inclusive,” one staffer told them. “Because we care, we don’t have to work as hard. But that’s wrong.”

Elevate how we lead and manage people. We will define clear expectations for leaders who manage people and for how they will be assessed. We will significantly increase the feedback, training and support we provide managers. We will set a goal of increasing the representation of Black and Latino colleagues in leadership by 50 percent by 2025.

Leadership here is defined as director and above on the business side and deputy and above in the newsroom, which equates to roughly the most senior 10 percent of the company.

Here’s that element that was entirely missing from the 2014 Innovation report:

We will make our newsroom more diverse, our editorial practices more inclusive, and our news report one that provides a truer, richer and more textured portrayal of the world. By doing so, we will ultimately attract a reader and subscriber base that more fully reflects the breadth of the society we serve.

The authors outline a number of “cultural inhibitors” that “stand in the way of us becoming a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive company”:

— Success and belonging at The Times are guided by a set of complex, unwritten rules.
— A narrow view of excellence limits our ability to benefit from difference. “That’s not Timesean” can be used to exclude.
— We have discomfort with vulnerability, which is a barrier to taking risks, innovating, acknowledging mistakes and working on self-improvement.
— We often focus on how smart one person is, versus how smart that individual makes the team.
— Some people make the flawed assumption that there is a tradeoff between diversity and excellence.

Ideas that may have felt “implicit” to some people must be made explicit:

— Explicitly tie diversity, equity and inclusion to our stated values. We will ensure that principles on diversity, equity and inclusion are reflected in our stated values.

Set clear expectations for norms and behaviors for all employees. A team of news and business leaders, with input from a range of employees, will define the behaviors that lead to success at The Times — and those that don’t.

There are no names named in this public report, but the authors suggest that the Times has focused too much on individual stars (“people who make outsize individual contributions”) and while not rewarding the practices of “successfully leading people or contributing to teams. This fact can be detrimental to everyone in the organization, but we know it takes a disproportionate toll on people of color.”

Managers need to be effective leaders; the definition of “effective” includes the ability to “successfully lead diverse teams.”

To ensure that managers develop as people leaders and both benefit from and are evaluated based on the experience of those who report to them, we will build a feedback process that gives employees the opportunity to provide upward feedback for their managers. We will also provide new learning and development opportunities to support the growth and development of leaders as we set new expectations. And we will ensure that promotion rationales and compensation decisions for managers consider leadership abilities, making explicit in policy and practice that poor leadership of our employees will hold them back from advancing through the organization.

All employees will be able to give upward feedback for their managers, who will be assessed directly on their performance as managers in their evaluations. Starting in 2022, we will ensure that clearly defined diversity, equity and inclusion expectations are woven into all leaders’ assessment and compensation.

In addition, the report says the Times must work to ensure that “stars” aren’t treated differently from other staffers. (The “recent events” mentioned likely refer to the resignations of Donald McNeil Jr. and Andy Mills; I am guessing that Michael Barbaro and Rukmini Callimachi‘s names also arose in conversation with staffers.)

Amid recent events, employees have pointed to a “star” culture. They have questioned The Times’s commitment to fairly enforcing its policies and rules — and whether they are clear and rigorous enough in the first place.

The Times’s leaders have committed to a review, now underway, of our procedures for investigating employee behavioral issues, and for determining the appropriate discipline. The goal of this work is to clarify for all employees what our procedures are, to assess whether they are rigorous enough and to determine how to make them more transparent. The result must leave colleagues with confidence that standards are applied consistently, that processes are rigorous and fair, and that action is taken when violations are found to have occurred.

Times employees, especially employees of color, are often unsure of how to advance at the organization and unfamiliar with how promotion decisions are made, the authors write. “All employees deserve to know where they should aim, to have opportunities to put their hands up, and to have a fair shot at advancement and opportunities to grow in their existing roles.” The newsroom will need to take a cue from the Product Development teams:

There, career paths are well defined and promotions for those who are ready to rise in the organization are granted in specific windows each year. Managers and employees know when and how to propose promotions, and at the end of the process, employees receive clear decisions and feedback. While these processes are by no means perfect, they have the power to bring considerable rigor and fairness to personnel decisions.

The newsroom has begun to develop its own set of clear, fair career development processes. We need to ensure that people of color share in the opportunity for stretch assignments that can lead to more senior roles or growth in employees’ existing positions. And senior leaders should be judged by how well they create pathways for a diverse group of deputies to succeed them.

When the Times doesn’t create dedicated positions focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the work needed in those areas goes unpaid and falls to employees of color, the authors note.

Our lack of clear ownership and uneven systems has meant that people of color have shouldered a disproportionate share of this responsibility, often on their own time and without additional compensation. They lead employee resource groups (E.R.G.s), like Black@NYT, the Latino Network, the Asian Network, the Arab Collective and others. They serve on diversity committees (including this one) and participate in focus groups and listening tours. And they often read and edit articles concerning race to ensure accuracy and fairness in between their other duties. All of this work has been essential and has illustrated the commitment of so many people of color at The Times to the institution and to improving our workplace culture.

The Times has already taken some steps to bolster our companywide approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. We recently announced, for example, that E.R.G. leaders and committee members will receive annual stipends to recognize the work they do.

More broadly, we will build out an office within Human Resources to add expertise and oversee our efforts at making the company more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

“Sensitivity reads” should be made obsolete, the report’s authors write; they’re a symptom of “coverage that remains rooted in white perspective, from characterizations and discussions of race to notions of what’s newsworthy.” Employees of color should not be brought in at the last minute to ensure that “story framing and language hold up to our news standards and do not play into tired stereotypes.”

And while the term “objectivity” doesn’t appear in this report, this passage is noteworthy.

As we continue to diversify our newsroom, we will see more coverage that captures the lives of people and communities of color with deeper understanding and nuance. After all, while our journalists rely primarily on reporting and expertise in the subjects they cover, personal experience can also deepen and enhance their work.

The Slack app is part of The Times’ larger exploration into reaching new audiences, deputy audience director Anna Dubenko said.

“We need to understand how a Times reader, in their personal life, uses The New York Times in a professional context,” Dubenko said. “How are we useful to their lives, in their careers, in the ways they build company culture with their colleagues? … More and more people are working remotely. We need to understand the ways in which our coverage is useful to people in different contexts.”

If you feel a jolt of panic when you hear Slack’s knock brush notification sound — and already get too many news push notifications — don’t worry too much. The Times’ Slack app won’t send you breaking news alerts. Dubenko said her team is more interested in providing content that sparks conversation.

“There’s a certain kind of news that’s really exhausting and fatiguing and depressing,” Dubenko said. “[But] we’re also really good at telling really delightful stories. If you read that great real estate story about the tower in Midtown that billionaires live in, that’s just a fun read. I don’t think that’s the kind of news that fatigues people.”

The New York Times has experimented with Slack apps in the past. A Slack bot for the 2016 presidential election focused on a two-way conversation with readers, allowing them to submit questions that would be seen and responded to by Times staffers. (“Uh…Trump’s not going to win, right?”) An internal Slack app called Blossom, launched in 2015, helps Times staffers decide which stories to feature on social media.

The new app has three main features. First, it provides a daily recommended read that’s personally curated by one of the audience editors at The Times. You have to manually navigate to the NYT app in Slack to see it in the Home tab. Then, you can enter “/nytimes” into any Slack channel in your workspace to surface the recommended read there.

The second feature is a “Save for Later” button. If a colleague sends the day’s recommended read (or any other Times URL) to your workspace’s general channel, the button will appear underneath and you can save the story. You can then find your saved stories in your Read Later list in the app.

The third feature is sort of like a virtual water cooler. It identifies when one story has been shared in multiple public channels (The Times isn’t reading your DMs). If you paste a Times link into Slack and someone else in your workspace has already done so in a different public channel, it will alert you that it’s also been discussed in those other channels.

The idea, Dubenko said, is to help foster healthy conversations in the workplace. First, Dubenko, with the audience product team led by Scott Sheu, created a separate Slack workspace to test out the app. Once they wanted others to test it, they figured that installing it on the main New York Times workspace would be unproductive, given how many Times URLs are already shared there on any given day. Instead, they had the Wirecutter team test it out, because as a Times company, they share some volume of Times links and are experts in reviewing products.

Right now, the daily recommended read is the same for any Slack NYT app user. The one I get in my Nieman Lab Slack is the same as the one Dubenko gets in her NYT Slack. In a daily news meeting, Dubenko and her team discuss what story should be featured. One day it might be a longform story; another day, it might be one more focused on tech. Overall, they think about what stories would be both appropriate and interesting for the workplace. In the future, Dubenko said the team would like to personalize the reads to the user’s interests.

Andy Pflaum, the director of platform solutions for Slack, said that having an app integrated into Slack can help keep a user organized if they’re already referencing news stories often in their work conversations.

“One of the benefits is being able to bring relevant information and services to users where they’re doing that work with their teams, so that they’re not constantly hopping around to other applications throughout the day,” Pflaum said. “They can share [content] right there or collaborate and discuss around it immediately with their teams.”

The data that the Times collects is de-identified and aggregated for analytics purposes, so The Times can’t read public or private messages.

“We know if you’ve come in through a Read Later save or Recommended Read save,” Dubenko said. “That’s one of the benefits of the app. We can understand, with more granularity, how people are engaging with it — it’s not just like, ‘Somewhere, someone on Slack sent a link and clicked on it.'”

Other news organizations with Slack apps include Protocol, Nikkei, Fox News, Hacker News, and Anti-Racism Daily. Before moving to the Times, Dubenko worked at Digg, which has its own Slack app, so she had been thinking about Slack as a content sharing platform since she arrived.

“Early tests show that readers and users like it, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to do all sorts of really neat things in the future that maybe tap into personalization and work with other parts of the building like Cooking, Games, and Wirecutter,” Dubenko said. “We just want to get this thing out in the world and see how you respond to it. This is by no means the final version of what the Times looks like on Slack.”