Baquet, who served as the executive editor of The New York Times from 2014 until this year, will lead its new local investigations fellowship program. At the Independent News Sustainability Summit on Thursday in Austin, Texas, Baquet talked about his plans for the pilot program, which will launch early next year.

Baquet told the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith that he’s looking for “straightforward, classic investigative reporting.” (He also tweeted about the fellowship on Wednesday — the first tweet in eight years from a man who thinks reporters should, generally, tweet less.)

The fellowship is designed to help local outlets publish investigative journalism that they otherwise might not have the resources to do. The stories will also be published in the Times. Baquet said he’ll visit newsrooms to help the shape the proposals he’s interested in:

“Some of the editors we talked to said they don’t have time to come up with proposals. They’re overworked. The last thing they want to do is spend time on another thing. I also think, frankly, in some of the newsrooms we’ve talked to, the editors and the reporters — particularly the reporters — are not advanced enough to know what they have.

And frankly, some of this is selfish. I like being in newsrooms on the front end of stories. I like sitting down with a reporter who has a half-formed idea and trying to figure out what it could look like at the other end…I think that it’s been helpful for the newsrooms to just talk to editors who have a little bit of time. And for the first time, in my career, I have a little bit of time.”

How much pre-reporting should the applications include? “For somebody who’s already got a five- or six-part series reported out already, I’m not sure what we bring to the table,” Baquet said.

“If you have the smoking gun, that’s great, but we don’t have to have the smoking gun,” he added. “When we’re sitting down with editors and reporters, we may look at an application and try to figure out if the inkling is truly an uneducated inkling or an inkling based in reality. Some of the finest journalism I’ve been associated with started out as an inkling.”

Local journalists, both freelancers and staffers, can apply to spend a year working on investigations that hold power to account in their communities or regions. The stories must be local in scope, but applicants should think beyond local governments. Baquet:

“If you want a pitch for why you should do investigative reporting: First off, when we did the Harvey Weinstein stories, it broke the internet for us. The audience for investigative reporting is tremendous. I also think we should not just stick to government in investigative reporting. That’s started to change in the last decade. In a weird way, one reason people came to believe governments were inefficient and screwed up is because they didn’t get a look at bad businesses. Now we’ve gotten a look inside businesses, we get that maybe government is not as bad as we thought by comparison [laughs]. I would argue, if you’re a business publication, do investigative reporting on businesses. It’s harder. You can’t walk into a local business with a FOIA request and demand stuff. But they, too, have former employees. They, too, are regulated.”

Baquet and a team of editors will select eight to 12 fellows and cover their salaries for the year, though the application doesn’t specify how much the fellowship pays. Baquet also declined to share the budget for the program. (Evan Smith: “Well, that’s not very transparent.”)

The fellowship was Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger’s idea, Baquet said. As his retirement approached, Baquet said Sulzberger suggested that he lead an investigative journalism program.

“I immediately loved it. I grew up in local news. I’ve spent much of my career as an investigative reporter,” Baquet said. “And I actually feel like I owe something to journalists. I grew up in a working [class], poor neighborhood in New Orleans. I’ve seen so much of the world through journalism. I want journalism, and local journalism in particular, to survive and thrive. Anything I can do to contribute to that would make me very happy.”

Smith asked, “How much of this is about what’s lacking in local news, and how much of this is about what’s lacking at The New York Times?”

“If The New York Times just wanted to go do a bunch of local investigations, frankly, we could do it,” Baquet said. “I could send 20 New York Times reporters to do local investigations. But the reason you want to work with younger journalists is just for the reason we said — to teach the next generation.”

Smith also asked Baquet to list some of the ways the Times improved — and worsened — during his tenure. Baquet:

“It’s better than we found it in the sense that it’s a far better investigative operation. It’s better than we found it in the sense that it is no longer truly a print newsroom. It’s a newsroom that actually experiments. It’s got a ginormous podcasting operation, and is creating a whole world of visual journalism. It’s become a very large, modern organization, as it should be, and I think one of the results of that is [that] it’s much stronger financially than it was a decade ago.

What is not stronger? I don’t think we, or any other news organization, has quite licked the trust issue or has figured it out…[Trust] was something we focused on but we didn’t know fully how to do it. We still try. We have a whole group of people working on trust and transparency, but we just haven’t figured it out. Some of the questions of journalism that we face are really big and are going to take a long time to figure out.”

The Independent News Sustainability Summit is focused on financial health, journalistic impact, and operational resilience for independent news outlets. It’s organized by LION Publishers, the News Revenue Hub, and the Texas Tribune’s RevLab, with funding from the Knight Foundation, Lenfest Institute, and Google News Initiative. Find the full schedule here and follow along on Twitter here. And if you’re here in Austin too, come say hi.

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.”

Similar symbolic boundaries between a product’s content and its form and mode of distribution have long existed in many cultural industries. In his study of labor in cultural fields, Bill Ryan notes that management of workers who produce creative content — such as composers, screenwriters, and journalists — was “remarkably benign,” because heavy-handed labor rationalization was seen as counterproductive for creative work. But this relative autonomy was strictly limited to the production of creative goods. By contrast, the reproduction and distribution of cultural commodities was thoroughly mechanized. Especially given this established historical precedent, the appeal of a boundary between content, on the one hand, and form/distribution, on the other, is clear: It allowed journalists to simultaneously feel that they were keeping up with technological change and reaping its benefits while also reassuring them that their professional judgment remained uncorrupted.

But choices about the form and distribution of news have never been neutral, nor are they irrelevant to discussions of how well the news media is fulfilling its role in democratic societies. Media scholars Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone have argued that design elements like page layout, typography, and story format have both expressed and shaped modes of civic participation throughout U.S. history. For example, newspaper front pages in the late twentieth century were less cluttered than their late nineteenth-century counterparts, with more white space and stories that were arranged in a clear hierarchy of prominence. This shift aligned with the norms of the modern era, which favored order and standardization, as well as journalists’ growing sense of themselves as an established profession with a responsibility to help their readers make sense of a chaotic world.

Yet if the form of news is inherently political, we don’t often think of it as such. Once a style of news presentation becomes standard across the industry, it is taken for granted in ways that render invisible the normative values and assumptions embedded therein. Similarly, processes of news distribution play a central — if overlooked — role in shaping how people congregate (or don’t), imagine their communities, engage in political participation, and exercise freedom of speech. In other words, the idea that news content can be neatly cleaved from news formats and modes of news distribution — and that the latter are neutral and normatively insignificant — has always been more a fantasy than a reality.

The untenability of the content versus form or distribution boundary has become even more apparent in the digital age. The algorithms that curate our personalized feeds on social media platforms, and which nearly all contemporary news outlets rely upon for distribution of their content, are now widely recognized as being inherently editorial and having enormous civic implications.

Online-only news organizations have also experimented with news form in controversial, even offensive, ways. To take one particularly high-profile example, after the ouster of Mohamed Morsi by the Egyptian military in July 2013, BuzzFeed published a piece titled “The story of Egypt’s revolution in ‘Jurassic Park’ GIFs.” True to its headline, the post consisted of a scant 404 words of text summarizing Egypt’s political upheaval, interspersed with GIFs from the classic Steven Spielberg film about an ill-fated dinosaur amusement park. Among them was a GIF of a hatching dinosaur egg to symbolize Egypt’s new constitution.

While undoubtedly optimized for clicks, the post might have been construed as an ill-conceived attempt to cover a complex subject in an attention-grabbing format that might attract readers who would be otherwise uninterested and uninformed about the situation unfolding in Egypt. Instead, the post, by Benny Johnson, a BuzzFeed writer who was eventually fired for plagiarizing Wikipedia, provoked widespread outrage in the industry. Slate editor L. V. Anderson called the post “the worst thing [BuzzFeed] has ever done,” while others pronounced it “the bottom of the barrel” and “a new low” in journalism. The general consensus was that the Egyptian conflict was too serious a subject to be covered in such a lighthearted, cheeky way. Slate’s Anderson argued that “BuzzFeed’s GIF-ification of Egypt’s civil conflict belittles the pain of people whose lives have been upended by violence.”

The backlash from other online news organizations against the BuzzFeed post illustrates, first, the infeasibility of a clear-cut normative distinction between news form and content in the age of social media distribution; second, the practical difficulty of drawing and maintaining consistent clean/dirty boundaries around uses of metrics; and, finally, how much those contested boundaries hinge on comparison with rival publications.

As U.S. journalism came into its own over the course of the 20th century, it gradually settled on foundational norms and rules that were supposed to guide ethical journalistic practice (for example, most journalists would agree that it’s wrong to plagiarize or accept large payments from sources). But there is not yet a widely agreed-upon normative standard within the profession for how to use metrics in an ethical way. My research revealed that journalists respond to this uncertain and stressful situation by devising symbolic boundaries that designate some uses of metrics as clean, such that they do not contaminate the newsroom or the journalists who work in it, and some as dirty. Creating and maintaining boundaries between clean and dirty metrics gave journalists a sense of control, however minor, over what might otherwise seem like a clear managerial imposition on their editorial decision-making.

Nguyễn wrote about how those slides, while attention-grabbing, ran the risk of oversimplifying issues, stripping them of their importance, and potentially spreading misinformation:

Coincidental or not, creators are applying this millennialesque visual language to their work, which makes it easy for savvy brands (or anyone who can replicate that design style) to jump on and pervert the movement by using it to further their own corporate mission. Then there’s the question of whether it’s even appropriate to aestheticize these human rights-related issues. As corporations and individuals become attuned to the widespread adoption of memes and certain creative aesthetics in online spaces, they could further be used to “commodify tragedy and obfuscate revolutionary messages,” wrote the Instagram creator @disintegration.loops, later referencing how Breonna Taylor’s death has devolved into a meme.

Most of these activism slideshows don’t appear to be made with malicious intent, nor are they actively harming anyone, but some are worried about the long-term neutralizing effect of making advocacy more digestible and consumable for a large audience.

But slides like these, when done right and with care, make complex stories (about, say, a mutating virus!) more digestible and accessible. At The New York Times, the audience team has been experimenting with variations of these slides and cards on its social media platforms, deputy off-platform editor Jake Grovum said.

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“When there’s either an important, complicated news story or something that [would benefit from] context, there’s a real good journalistic reason to do this kind of thing,” Grovum said. “If you look at some of the examples when it works best, it’s almost like you get the first three or four grafs of a news story all in one post. You have the copy of the tweet, a couple of lines in the card, and then it’s just a lot more information and context, and everyone knows that context can be lacking on social.”

At the Times, using slides and cards on social became more of a priority around the beginning of the pandemic last year. The audience team wanted to have a more “visual presence” on Times platforms and wanted to make more use of the maps and data visualizations that lived on the website.

“It all came from wanting to be more visual,” Grovum said. “We made it part of our daily routine to have these visual presences for whatever news or whatever story we’re trying to share.”

Single cards work better on Facebook and Twitter because those apps don’t have a carousel feature (you know, where you swipe left to see more images in a single post) the way Instagram does. Grovum said he’s found that Facebook and Twitter lend themselves well to text-heavy cards and that users are actually taking the time to read and share them.

The cards have been particularly useful to the Times in debunking misinformation, though Grovum said a broader challenge is designing cards in ways that are still helpful even if they’re screenshotted and stripped of context.

Here, a Facebook post from this past April about a vaccine-related false claim had more than 8,300 shares and 25,000 likes, a sign that users want to share factual information with others.

Compare that to the engagement on another Facebook post from the same day that explains what the word “cheugy” means. Just over a thousand likes and 534 shares.

Grovum said the Times looks at metrics and qualitative feedback (like comments) on the cards as proxy for utility. More engagement is a sign that people found the information helpful, even if they didn’t click the link.

“We’re pretty aware and upfront with ourselves about how these are optimized for off-platform engagement, reach, and sharing. If you wanted to optimize for people clicking through the site, you wouldn’t put a third of the story on a card,” Grovum said. “We’re very aware that there’s a trade-off here, and we’ll usually do bot — we’ll have a link post or something and [also] do the shareable version and get the best of both worlds. Link posts without a visual can drive more actual click-through, [while] the cards are better for engagement.”

Because the text cards are usually image files, they can be difficult to read or even access for people who are visually impaired. Grovum said the Times is still working through those accessibility issues by adding alternative text to some posts, but noted that many social media management tools still don’t have an efficient way of including it, which can cause problems in workflow.

Trying out these new formats is helpful to the Times because it gives journalists a chance to learn about what their audiences want to see.

“Even with templates, these are labor-intensive no matter how easy your processes are. It takes longer to do [a card] than to write a tweet and just get that out,” Grovum said. “But I think it pays off to understand your audience and lean into things that you know are going to resonate with them.”

The first major publication to use its prestige as a platform for vintners was the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times, which debuted its wine club in 1973. Laithwaites, an importer founded a few years prior by a husband-wife team, partnered with wine writer Hugh “Life’s been rosé since I put wine on the map” Johnson, who came on as president of the club. Almost 50 years later, the club is still in existence, Johnson is still president, and Laithwaites is still privately owned and responsible for the majority of mail-order wine in the region. (Its brand name is often licensed in the states, too.)

In the United States, clubs were slower to catch on — not for a lack of interest, but because of the complexity of operating a national operation that had to contend with fifty different liquor laws — “52, if you count D.C. and federal,” says Neil Rhodes, CFO of Direct Wines. Today, companies like his facilitate relationships between brands and retailers operating in a given state, allowing a brand to have a national presence without having to deal with local logistics. When The Wall Street Journal launched its club, it partnered with Direct Wines, a move that pushed the company into the forefront for then-novel publication wine clubs in this country. (Forbes and The Washington Post are among the many media brands that tried to convert readers into club subscribers over the past decade.)

When the NPR Wine Club launched in 2017, it, too, collaborated with Direct Wines, along with Wines That Rock, a private labeling company responsible for the Nina Totenblend Lodi Red and the All Grapes Considered Malbec. (It goes on: It’s Vin a Minute Sauvignon Blanc 2019…)

Jane Scott, head of consumer products at NPR, says that the club has seen a significant increase in signups since the pandemic began in March, a boon to the already strong, high-retention subscriber base. “In the alternative revenue streams that support NPR programming, our efforts are always to extend the reach of the brand, deepen the brand connection, and provide a financial surplus that can feed back into the mission,” she says.

Wine clubs are, of course, not the only alternative revenue stream for publishers — there’s affiliate revenue, software as a service, build-your-own cookbooks, podcasts, events, spinoffs, money management, the list goes on — but despite the wide range of potential revenue sources made possible by digital distribution, wine clubs have endured. Still, the opening fo these clubs initially created by a lack of general knowledge and access has been narrowing in recent years. Many of today’s avid wine consumers are less interested in being told what to drink or what’s the best and are more inclined to learn how to choose for themselves. Punny exclusive bottles may be less important than bona fide expertise. The idea of wine buying as a skill to be developed rather than a service to be off-loaded applies at a certain income level that matches up well with the model wine club subscriber.

That’s where Eater is trying to be different. Most wine clubs fall into white or red binary — it’s usually the first question in a sign-up form. But for consumers accustomed to orange wines, pét-nats, and rosé, there’s the Eater Wine Club. The value proposition here is slightly different from that of other offerings on the market in that the expertise comes from the editorial team. While publications like The New York Times take pains to ensure readers that their wine club is not at all affiliated with what’s printed in the paper, Eater takes the opposite approach. “It’s the only wine club out there that’s actually curated by the editorial team itself,” says Jill Dehnert, general manager at Eater. The wine club, which launched in October, evolved out of small, ticketed community events that were once held in the company’s test kitchen. Dehnert says that aligning the club with the local city network, what she calls the brand’s “differentiator,” is essential to making sure that the first consumer product with the Eater name “feels very Eater-y.”

City editors suggest wine clubs and restaurants that would be a good fit, and then Eater partners with sommeliers who personally curate the selections for the month. The somms also supply tasting notes that jibe with the Eater voice, (“a little bit wonky, a little heady, but also super-accessible and fun”), and write a newsletter with things like recipe pairings and favorite local spots. Eater partnered with Mysa, a wine ecommerce site that specializes in natural wine to ensure access to interesting, “restaurant-quality” bottles.

On top of the revenue stream, the club has the added benefit of making the Eater brand more valuable on both a national and local level. By giving a national profile to local restaurants, Eater supports small businesses. By giving a local spin to a national wine club, Eater reinforces its editorial mission and distinguishes itself as a tastemaker in a new way. The brand relies on the personality-driven appeal of, say, the NPR Wine Club, but it’s able to keep things interesting (and outwardly focused) with a rotating cast of curators.

Price varies widely across clubs. The New York Times Wine Club has two tiers, the “Sampler” ($90.00 for 6 bottles) and the “Reserve” ($210.00 for 6 bottles). That excludes shipping ($9.95) and tax. NPR offers 12 bottles for $149.99, plus tax and shipping. The Eater Wine Club ($110 per month for 4 bottles) seems high, but unlike most offerings, that number is all-inclusive. It comes out to about $27/bottle, ten dollars less than the total cost of a New York Times Reserve bottle. This month is the busy season for wine clubs, but in a year like no other, it seems unlikely that subscriptions will lapse once the new year rolls around.

That’s not all. In addition to the acquisition, the Times also announced that it has entered “an ongoing creative and strategic alliance” with This American Life. This one’s pretty strange and complicated, so pay close attention: while Serial Productions will now be a New York Times property, This American Life will remain an independent operation, though this “strategic alliance” means that Serial Productions and This American Life will continue collaborating creatively. This arrangement is also distinct for another reason: the long-time public radio show and podcast will now be collaborating with the Times on co-marketing and advertising sales efforts.

PMM had been This American Life’s main ad sales rep for a long time, and I’m told it will continue to represent the show through the end of the year. The Times will take over sales in January.

And that’s also not all. Squeezed into the press release is word of Serial Productions’ latest project, slated to drop on July 30: Nice White Parents, which features Chana Joffe-Walt examining the role that white parents play in the shaping of public education.

Okay, let’s go back to the acquisition. This is a stunning development, but it’s been in the hopper for a while. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Mullin first drew attention to the possibility back in January, when he reported that Serial Productions was shopping around for a sale. The Times was the lone company cited as a potential buyer in that write-up. The possibility was raised again in a media column by the Times’ own Ben Smith, published in early March, which reported that the studio was for sale at a $75 million valuation, though it was expected to go for much less. Formally, though, the size of the deal is not being disclosed at this time. Believe me, I asked.

Speaking of which, I was able to jump on the phone a few hours ago with Julie Snyder, Serial Productions’ CEO; Sam Dolnick, New York Times assistant managing editor; and Stephanie Preiss, Times VP of audio and TV, to talk about the development.

Here’s what I learned: to begin with, the deal apparently came out organically, as the Times, working off the blockbuster successes of The Daily, sought to figure out what heights to go after next. “We have been enormous admirers of This American Life and Serial for a long time,” said Dolnick. He went on to say:

Over the past year or so, as audio became more important to the Times, we started thinking: “What could this look like? What’s the biggest swing we could take?”

So we started to talk with Ira Glass about This American Life and what kind of partnership that could look like. He pretty quickly introduced us to Sarah and Julie, and we started talking about possible arrangements, and it was clear from the beginning that we had a shared sense of journalistic values, a shared sense of mission, and the same kind of drive to tell these stories right now. So we tried to figure out the right way to tell these stories together, and this ended up being the way.

When I asked if This American Life was ever on the table as an acquisition, it was a flat no. “Ira made it pretty clear that it was his company, that it was going really well, and that he wasn’t interested in selling,” said Dolnick.

For Serial Productions, the decision to sell fit neatly into its philosophical priorities. Snyder pointed to S-Town as a starting point in the way the team thought about what it wanted to do moving forward. “It felt exactly like something we wanted to be doing more of,” she said. “We wanted to keep on doing the Serial podcast, but we also felt like there were a lot of different types of stories that we wanted to pursue.”

But Snyder also noted that Serial Productions wasn’t created with the intent that it would be handled as a conventional capitalistic enterprise. “We didn’t have startup entrepreneurial visions of saying, ‘We want to be pumping out podcasts,’” she said. “[It also wasn’t] the kind of thing where we were like, ‘Let’s set ourselves up to be acquired.’”

The vision was to be a story-first company, but the managerial mechanics involved in expanding within that vision were constraining. Long having operated as a “one project at time” kind of team, Serial Productions wanted to set things up such that it could publish more than one project every other year.

Plus, Snyder just didn’t have a huge interest in running a company. “It’s not where I come from, you know?” she said. “I feel like I’m really good at supporting reporters and producers and helping them get the shows, Actually thinking about the company strategically was the type of thing that people would suggest to me. I would feel like it all made sense, but I would always wonder, ‘Isn’t there someone else that could be thinking about this for us?”

Hence the decision to sell to the Times, which would provide the infrastructure and stability sothat she wouldn’t have to worry about it any more.

Once over at the Times, Serial Productions will be largely independent from the rest of the Times Audio operation for now. “We’re thinking about Serial Productions as being adjacent to the Times newsroom,” said Dolnick. “Julie and her team already have the next three to four projects in flight — they have a full plate, and they’re moving fast — and their stories are going to come from the This American Life pool. The Daily and the Times Audio team, on the other hand, are pulling more from the Times newsroom.”

He added: “Operationally, they’re going to be distinct for a while…as the partnership unfolds, I think we’re all excited about different kinds of collaborations that we can do, but that’s not day one.”

There’s one more piece worth exploring: whether this acquisition is part of an effort leading up to some sort of new paid audio product. The possibility of this was first raised in Ben Smith’s column from March, when he highlighted a strategic idea among some Times executives that a Serial Productions acquisition, bundled together with The Daily, could serve as the basis for something akin to the popular and revenue-generating Times Cooking app. An “HBO of Podcasts,” as it were. Indeed, the fact that the Times made another audio-centric acquisition earlier this year — of Audm, a subscription audio platform that produces high-quality performed reads of select magazine articles — further supports the possibility that we might see such a gambit.

Preiss suggested that the value of Times Audio is best realized as a free product, at least for now. “I think what The Daily has taught us is that audio can help drive our consumer subscription business by acting as an entry point for people to Times journalism…we are very interested in how we can add fuel to that fire,” Preiss said. “At the same time, audio is a great advertising business for us, and it’s a growing business.”

So there you have it: the legendary studio behind the one of the biggest podcasts of all time is going to the company that publishes one of the other biggest podcasts of all time. And while it might not end up amounting to some sort of paid audio product, this move nonetheless deeply contributes to the Times’ increasing power in the space. “We want to establish the Times as a real center of gravity for audio journalism, news, and storytelling,” said Dolnick. “Our goal is not to change Serial’s DNA at all…For the people who love Serial — and there are millions of them — the idea here is to have more Serials.”

This deal comes during a year that’s already rich with podcast acquisitions. In February, Spotify bought The Ringer, Bill Simmons’ podcast-first digital media company, in a deal reportedly valued up to $250 million. In May, the longtime celebrity-to-podcast pipeline facilitator PodcastOne was bought by a sorta-kinda music streaming platform called LiveXLive for $18 million in an all-stock deal. And earlier this month, Stitcher switched hands from Scripps to SiriusXM in what has been the biggest podcast deal to date, at $320 million.

Indeed, the volume of acquisitions is such that, with each new deal, there’s a wave of uneasy groans and jokes across certain corners of the podcast community about how consolidated and corporatized podcasting is becoming. Can’t blame ‘em, frankly.

But I’d argue that Serial Productions is perhaps the most deserving of this. That organization was, in my opinion, in a complicated place within the industry context. It’s a legendary creative studio in what has become an incredibly hot market. Incentives were building to sell, to capitalize on what may be a fleeting moment — and the team has every right to cash in on an industry it helped forge. It was also a situation where there probably weren’t many appropriate buyers, with both deep pockets and a compatible editorial culture. I mean, who else is out there? Spotify? SiriusXM?

In the Times, the team had a logical outcome. The Times offered a home that’s in line with Serial’s editorial and journalistic values, a home that actually adds to its brand, and perhaps most importantly, a home that insulates it from the anxieties of wherever the Apple-Spotify podcast platform war — to the extent that it exists, which it does, but not in the way I think people traditionally assume it looks like — goes.

I suppose it’s all good validation too. In this hyper-capitalist American society, it is the unfortunate case that we tend to overemphasize acquisitions as successful legacy-sealing outcomes for any enterprise (whether or not they are actually valuable), while flattening out the achievement of simply being successfully independent (shout-out to Radiotopia).

Serial Productions — the creators of a phenomenon that radically accelerated the growth of an entire medium — wanted to do more, but they couldn’t do so independently. So they cashed out for greater institutional support, and they are deserving of it.

The special package, featuring illustrations by artist Hayley Wall, was published online Tuesday and will appear in print on Sunday. In its coverage, The Times looked forward (at gene-editing technology that may someday eradicate disabilities) and back (at the life of a Blank Panther member who organized a historic sit-in). At the heart of the project is the story of “the ADA generation,” the millions of young Americans who grew up under the act’s protections and who are quicker than previous generations to claim disability as an important part of their identity.

Amy Padnani — creator of a series that revisits notable lives overlooked by the Times’ obituary desk — said the anniversary project grew from an idea to collaborate with the opinion section’s Disability series. The project quickly grew in scope, especially once editors met with consultants in the disability community to help shape the coverage. Editors working on the project, including Padnani and Lynda Richardson, said they went out of their way to give writers with disabilities their own bylines.

“The more you talk to somebody about an issue, you realize there’s a personal connection there that a reporter cannot quite bring to life the same way,” Padnani said. She pointed to actors and musicians with disabilities sharing their first-hand experiences of navigating Hollywood or the stories of “coming out” as disabled to family, friends, and dating app matches.

Using “a set of language guidelines distinct from the rest of the The Times,” sources and writers were asked whether they preferred “people with disabilities” or “disabled people.” The newspaper also capitalized the D or B in deaf and blind upon request within the special section. (Last month, The Times announced they would capitalize Black when referring to someone’s racial or cultural identity throughout its pages.)

Editors have also seen the anniversary project as an opportunity to experiment with disability-friendly production and design. Dan Sanchez, a Special Projects editor who works with emerging platforms and technologies, said plans for making the package the Times’ most accessible to date began almost immediately. In 2019, a team at the Times made the homepage better navigable by keyboard and provided closed captioning for videos, among other changes, but, Sanchez said, “there was definitely more work that could be done.”

His team began by creating an audio version for every article in the project. Some were recorded by professional voice actors through the recently-acquired Audm, a few authors recorded their own work, and the rest were generated with text-to-speech software from Microsoft and Amazon with editors selecting “some of the newer, more realistic and natural-sounding voices.” (You can judge for yourself here.)

Improving alt-text — alternative text that allows descriptions of images to be read out loud to those using assistive technology like screen readers — was another priority.

“The Times provides alt-text by placing photo captions in the HTML through an automated process,” Sanchez said. For the ADA anniversary package, though, “We wanted to use our editorial muscle and have our story editors craft alt-text for the specific purpose of describing images for people who can’t see them.” The process yielded a style guide for alt-text that’s since been shared with editors around the newsroom.

The special section will be available in Braille, too. Working with Clovernook Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, each article was converted to digital Braille files that can be downloaded and read with an electronic Braille reader. The Times also commissioned a limited run in hardcopy Braille that will be distributed through the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled. (A few hundred copies will be available through The NYT Store, too.)

“We are really trying to make strides as an organization toward accessibility but it was clear that if ever there were a reason to make a concerted effort to push the operation forward, it would be for this package, knowing that there will probably be a large audience that would find value in that,” Sanchez said. “It’s also an opportunity to develop new processes and guidelines around things that we would love to do at a larger scale down the line.”

Sanchez added, “It’s difficult to create a completely new workflow that touches every part of the newsroom, but we’re looking forward to seeing how we can systematize some of what we’ve been doing and to keep the conversation going.”

Some of that conversation will emerge through a relatively new program at the Times called Your Lead, which asks readers about the types of coverage they’d like to see on issues that are important to them. (The National desk has used the program to shape coverage of California.) In addition to the online form, the Times created an email address and voicemail specifically for disability-related feedback. The project’s editors say they’ve already seen a “remarkable” response from readers, including more stories than they could possibly include in one special section.

“When you hear about the ADA, it sounds like some dry law,” Richardson said. “And yet it has had such power and it’s been so transformative in what it’s done to America.”

“We probably had a dozen other story ideas,” Padnani added. “We are hoping that there will be ongoing coverage.”

But none of this greetings revisionism has stopped anyone from launching pop-up news products. If you’re itching for more information about coronavirus and its specific impacts, there’s a product for you and it’s probably free. There are so many coronavirus newsletters popping up that even the same Twitter jokes are going viral.

A newsletter about all your coronavirus newsletters.

— erin mccann | (@mccanner) March 3, 2020

Sign up for my newsletter about the spread of coronavirus newsletters.

— Meg Marco (@meghann) March 3, 2020

A (necessarily partial) list:

Yesterday, CNN launched Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction, a free daily podcast hosted by chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. In the first episode, Gupta addresses some of the most common questions about the virus. Today’s episode is about the effectiveness of face masks in reducing spread of the virus.

Quartz’s newsletter Coronavirus: Need to Know is also free and will inform subscribers about how the virus is affecting the global economy a few times a week. The first edition is expected to go out today.

The Coronavirus Newsletter by BuzzFeed News breaks down the number of cases in the U.S. and around the world and provides one update a week, including a “tip of the day.” The first one: Don’t go shopping for face masks because they don’t prevent infection. (Another tip: Click on the tweet below to see the payoff at the bottom of the image.)

Awkward email cut-off point for @BuzzFeedNews' new coronavirus newsletter pic.twitter.com/31K68ByR3w

— Rob Price (@robaeprice) March 2, 2020

Morning Consult, which specializes in survey research and polling, is now updating its weekly consumer confidence indices every day to track consumer responses to the virus.

Viral: Coronavirus, a weekly podcast from the studio Three Uncanny Four, launched yesterday with a 28-minute primer on what the virus is, why this virus has a specific name, and the effects it’s had on the market.

The Washington Post’s To Your Health: Coronavirus newsletter is a takeover of the regular To Your Health newsletter and is focused on general interest coronavirus news, with bullet-point updates on major stories and links to other reporting by the Post on the virus.

NEW: We launched the @washingtonpost's special coronavirus newsletter today, which I'll be authoring with @ReisThebault. As long as virus dominates the news, we'll deliver the latest straight to your inbox.

Sign up here — then wash your hands. https://t.co/5A0lI8EhgO pic.twitter.com/NCXCKlqI6N

— Angela Fritz (@angelafritz) March 2, 2020

The New York Times’ Coronavirus Briefing daily newsletter sums up the day’s major developments and offers tips on what you need to know after reading the updates. It also includes an FAQ at the bottom of the newsletter with answers to basic questions about the virus.

sorry to tell you this, but you should probably sign up for the Coronavirus Briefing, a new @nytimes newsletter that will send you non-hysterical updates every night. sorry. https://t.co/xnU8oZHM5p

— Sam Dolnick (@samdolnick) February 26, 2020

The NYT's pop-up coronavirus newsletter. You can print it out and use it as a facemask. https://t.co/JwJxW7ofiO

— Neal Freyman (@Neal_Freyman) February 26, 2020

USA Today has launched its own Coronavirus Watch newsletter, which includes answering questions from readers. (“Gary in Victorville, Calif., wants to know: Are medical masks effective in preventing infection?”)

In local news, The Dallas Morning News will send out breaking news updates in a newsletter starting tomorrow about “the latest on the coronavirus and how it’s affecting Texans locally, across in the U.S., and internationally.” The DMN’s homepage also lists “Coronavirus Updates” as the top issue under its “What Matters” section.

We're launching a #coronavirus popup newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest on how the disease is affecting us in D-FW — for free — straight to your inbox. https://t.co/e4Y9CUs2BS

— Jesus Jiménez (@jesus_jimz) March 2, 2020

In the Pacific Northwest, the region of the U.S. hardest hit thus far, The Oregonian is publishing Oregon Coronavirus News each day at 1 p.m. PT, starting out with local updates then spreading out to news from the region, country, and world.

KUOW in Seattle has live blog updates in English and Spanish on its website as there have been 17 confirmed cases of the virus in Washington.

Stephen Stirling, the project editor for Columbia Journalism Investigations, started his own daily newsletter Coronaviral on updates in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (and Pennsylvania, depending what you include in tri-state). Stirling wants to track the fluctuation of people wearing surgical masks on the subway compared to major news updates and asks for submissions.

Tired of the coronavirus info firehose? I started a free, evening coronavirus newsletter for the NYC metro.

Sourced, local data and info. Apolitical. If we're all gonna die, you might as well have a handle on why.

Sign up here: https://t.co/S4oGGK3HIn

— Stephen Stirling (@SStirling) March 3, 2020

McClatchy launched a daily update newsletter called Coronavirus: Latest News that rounds up coverage from all of its 29 properties and goes out at 5 p.m. ET. Some of its local newspapers will send out the same daily newsletter to its subscribers while other properties on the west coast will be more locally focused.

And all of that isn’t even counting the various Substack newsletters and podcasts coming from non-media sources, even random citizens. (Searching your favorite podcast app will turn up dozens of shows, a number of them seemingly from people just looking to ride the wave of interest.)

these coronavirus podcast episodes are so bleak guys

— Amy Pedulla (@amypedulla) March 2, 2020

No thank you. I don't want to watch your coronavirus webinar, listen to your coronavirus podcast, read your coronavirus blog, newsletter or special report, subscribe to your coronavirus text alerts or participate in your coronavirus roundtable discussion 1/

— Joar (@JoarGarrosh) March 3, 2020

So if you’re sitting in your newsroom right now and wondering if you should jump on this train, here are some tips from the Asian American Journalists Association on how you shouldn’t report on coronavirus.

We urge media to be mindful of photos, context and word choice surrounding #coronavirus.

We warn against usage of:

-images of people wearing face masks without proper context
-generic images of Chinatown if unrelated to story
-the term “Wuhan virus”https://t.co/5pEN7WT0i0

— AAJA National (@aaja) March 3, 2020

Now wash your hands.

Amid some light self-aggrandizing — Smith makes much of his six-years-earlier job offer to New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger — Smith argues that the Times’ incredible success doesn’t look like a tide that will lift all newspaper boats. (If you’ve read Nieman Lab much over the past half-decade or so, you’ve heard that before.)

The Times, which has more digital subscribers than The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and all 250 local Gannett papers combined, may evolve into something like a monopoly, he argues, vacuuming up top talent from competing newsrooms and crowding out competitors with overwhelming resources (like a starting salary for reporters in the six figures, though the NewsGuild gets much of the credit for that).

The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington.

(Those former top editors would be Choire Sicha, Kara Swisher, and Kevin Delaney, who are the editor of Styles, a regular columnist, and leader of some secret project in Opinion, respectively.)

As a journalist this honestly is a very real career consideration and I'm glad that someone is saying it out loud in the pages of the Times. Thanks, @benyt. https://t.co/V7ZPC9yn5B

— Dara Lind (@DLind) March 2, 2020

The piece was published online on Sunday night and the Times sent a push alert to promote the column, evoking the days when a Carr column’s Sunday p.m. reveal would set the tone of the week’s discussion around media. Journalists and media types on Twitter starting chiming in immediately — once it got past mocking Smith’s Twitter evolution from @BuzzFeedBen to…@benyt? (BeNYT? BenYT?)

David Carr used to tell me that (one of) the reasons people outside The Times liked to read him, was because he “would bring a baseball bat inside the building when it was needed, and start swinging.”

Looks like Ben just picked up the bat. https://t.co/xcKxT3z5is

— Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) March 2, 2020

Smith also broke some interesting news from inside the house. Though The Wall Street Journal had reported in January that podcasting company Serial Productions was for sale and that the Old Gray Lady was considered a potential suitor, Smith confirmed the Times is in “exclusive talks” to purchase the company behind the true-crime podcasts Serial and S-Town — for “significantly less” than its initial $75 million sale price. (Our Nick Quah recently noted some internal shuffling that seemed to augur a sale soon.) Smith also says the Times’ audio offerings, led by flagship podcast The Daily, could become a paid product, like the company’s subscription-based Cooking or Crossword packages, “that executives believe could become the HBO of podcasts.”

(Flashback to 2015: “Gimlet wants to become the ‘HBO of podcasting,'” in the quality-content sense. And Luminary was supposed to be the “HBO of podcasting” in the charging-money sense, and it’s now run by an HBO guy.)

BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti sounded less than impressed that Smith managed to publish his first scoops before his first official day at the Times.

This article was reported out last week when ⁦@benyt⁩ was still on BuzzFeed payroll. Usually we only provide free content to Facebook and Google https://t.co/iv6Nk07RDy

— Jonah Peretti (@peretti) March 2, 2020

BuzzFeed PR had its own tongue-in-cheek styleguide concerns.

Said goodbye to @benyt less than 48 hours ago and he’s already forgotten to capitalize the “F” pic.twitter.com/EpIKGmLCqP

— BuzzFeed PR (@BuzzFeedPR) March 2, 2020

We know that Americans are more willing to pay for local news if they know local outlets are struggling. The very visible success of the Times, some suggested, might prevent people from noticing that newspapers are struggling in their own towns and cities.

I'll add another argument to this @benyt column: People look at the success of the Times and assume journalism is rebounding writ large. It shocks me how often people are surprised when I tell them that local journalism is doing poorly. https://t.co/xJkRyevRxV

— David Kroman (@KromanDavid) March 2, 2020

Smith also got some pushback from editors with a vantage point outside New York City.

I have spent my whole career reporting on tech monopolies, and I told @benyt (but apparently not in punchy quotable form) that @nytimes (and most news) is the opposite of a monopoly. It gets less valuable to readers the bigger it gets. https://t.co/JkUd7lQqiF

— Jessica Lessin (@Jessicalessin) March 2, 2020

I think it’s great @benyt took this on as his first column. But also: as a local newspaper editor I don’t think the @nytimes’ success has anything to do with our own future. If anything, we’ve learned a lot from it’s digital subs business and more. https://t.co/uAadiKKtRB

— Mitch Pugh (@SCMitchP) March 2, 2020

Good read from @benyt, but this quote [not from Ben] is just wrong. NYT representative of one model that will work in future (subscriptions based on acquiring the top talent), but we will also see a big rise in product-backed media in the next decade. https://t.co/KDMsiAemNU pic.twitter.com/ajthRFhqop

— brad (@bradesposito) March 2, 2020

The @nytimes is stronger than ever, but journalism, fortunately, isn’t a zero-sum game. Wherever you live, support local news—newspapers, nonprofits, public media—because our democracy can’t survive without it. https://t.co/gxU58MTZOU

— Sewell Chan (@sewellchan) March 2, 2020

Proud to remain a holdout :) https://t.co/CQy5diQElg

— Shani Olisa Hilton (@shani_o) March 2, 2020

Immediate reax to @benyt column: If NYT has found a solution for running a newspaper (invest in journalism, drive online $), and it works, then will investors demand that Gannett & others running the strategy of "job cuts + dividends & hope" change course?https://t.co/VnpWXFRfO4

— Derek Wallbank (@dwallbank) March 2, 2020

"I worry that the success of The Times is crowding out the competition," writes @benyt, who left his job at @BuzzFeedNews to work for said @nytimes. https://t.co/SVdRYJqAQw

— Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) March 2, 2020

Reminded why I (genuinely) love twitter this morning. Keeps you honest https://t.co/54XCc82K7B

— Ben Smith (@benyt) March 2, 2020

We called that target “ambitious” when first announced in 2015; the Times was generating about $400 million a year from digital at the time. The paper now sits well above its national newspaper peers and breathes an entirely different atmosphere than its local newspaper brethren.

We read the earnings release, the Times’ own coverage of the report, and listened to this morning’s earnings call with top executives. Print and digital ad revenue fell, but new record-breaking numbers confirm the Times’ philosophy that it is “a subscription-first publisher.” Here’s what caught our attention:

The Times had a record-breaking year.

As it had pre-announced last month, the Times hit several milestones in 2019. The paper of record added 1 million new digital-only subscribers and ended the year with a total of 5.25 million total subscriptions across all of their digital and print products. Both were new records for the paper.

On the earnings call, CEO Mark Thompson said “the single biggest reason” behind the paper’s success was the decision to give more autonomy to teams working on the publication’s various digital products. Having multiple cross-disciplinary teams working on converting digital subscribers means the Times is able to “continually optimize” by having “parallel tests running in the background,” he said.

Big news in @nytimes quarterly earnings:
• 2019 was a record year for digital subscriptions.
• 5.3 million total paid subs, of which 4.4 million are digital-only.
• In 4th quarter alone, 342,000 new net digital-only subs.
(Thank you, readers!)https://t.co/I2ti2oZXeP pic.twitter.com/oKpvzdwfmz

— Cliff Levy (@cliffordlevy) February 6, 2020

Advertising revenue still fell by 10 percent — a rough forecast for other publishers having less success converting subscribers.

Print and digital advertising revenue each fell by slightly more than 10 percent apiece. Other revenue made up for the loss, with executives pointing to an increase in podcast advertising and the spike in digital subscribers as particularly helpful. The company expects the advertising losses to continue in 2020.

“The Times is a subscription-first publisher,” Thompson declared. Woe betide the newspaper that isn’t.

The @nytimes Company continued to grow digital revenue in 2019 and met the goal of $800 million in annual digital revenue a year early. pic.twitter.com/VFbuijwKVQ

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) February 6, 2020

Prices are going up — but not for everyone.

Our Ken Doctor talked with Thompson in November about upcoming price increases for subscribers:

Thompson: …we’ve added hundreds more journalists. We’ve got eight years of not raising prices. As a subscriber, I think the idea that I might have a price rise after eight years is not unreasonable.

Doctor: How much am I going to pay next year?

Thompson: We haven’t disclosed that yet. We did some testing this year with a significant number of subscribers and, generally I’ve found that, when we explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, their willingness to pay more was very high, indeed.

We now know the increase: two bucks. (From $15 every four weeks to $17.) But the hike will only apply to 750,000 digital-only subscribers, representing roughly a quarter of overall digital-only subscribers.

How will the Times choose the lucky ones to get a price hike? The chief criteria will be tenure, meaning readers who’ve been subscribed at the current rate for the longest. (Other ingredients will go into the secret sauce of deciding which subscribers will see the raise, but executives declined to disclose them.)

Starbucks and Facebook News each had an impact on the Times’ bottom line.

Starbucks’ decision to stop selling print newspapers in their stores had a “meaningful” impact, accounting for 2 percentage points of the Times’ 3 percent decline in print distribution. (The Times made up part of the decrease among print subscribers.)

A 30 percent increase in “other” revenues in Q4 was primarily the result of earnings from the Times’ Hulu series The Weekly and licensing revenue from Facebook News.

In response to a question about whether the Times might renegotiate with partners like Apple News in light of this revenue — the Times declined to be in its weak-selling Apple News+ bundle — execs said they expect to review their relationship with “every significant company” in 2020. “Digital platforms gain real value from having our brand presence, and that should be reflected,” Thompson said.

Readers still like recipes and puzzles.

The Times’ Cooking product had “a spectacular end to a strong year” with 68,000 new subscriptions in the last quarter, Thompson said. Crossword subscriptions were up roughly 40,000 over the same period.

In a nutshell, journalism is now firmly a product that needs humans to carry it out. The deep integration of a distinct product role — something that shares characteristics of both editorial and business-side — is a years-old story at many of national news organizations, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox Media. And more have rightfully built out teams of product thinkers fiddling with the sites, goals, and strategies to get there — because, well, they can afford to.

The New York Times’ product team is getting a new infusion with the new leadership of Alex Hardiman, most recently chief business and product officer at The Atlantic as it built out its paywall, head of news products at Facebook for two years before that, all built off 10 years at the Times culminating in a VP of news products role.

Axios’ Sara Fischer had the news Thursday morning: “Hardiman will oversee a team of roughly 60 product managers and hundreds of additional designers, engineers, data scientists, and more. ‘The Times’ approach will be much more like the product thinking at a big consumer tech company like Facebook as opposed to the way a traditional newsroom would approach product,’ says Hardiman.”

She’ll be reporting to chief operating officer Meredith Kopit Levien, who sees habit-building as a big priority. “The thing we have to do that is make this product as compelling and addictive as our journalism to get people to keep coming back and forming habits with us,” Levien told Fischer. Engagement will also have a larger focus, with former Zynga product head (blame him for Farmville) Jon Tien leading that product push.

From Levien’s announcement to staff:

It’s been nearly a year since we launched our new organizational structure designed to accelerate our digital product development. And it’s working! There are signs everywhere that we’re on the right path, from the volume of our testing to the velocity of our shipping to the strength of our subscription growth. Together, we’re proving that our digital product itself can be a powerful engine of growth.

Product work — and therefore product leadership — matters enormously to our future.

If this is of interest, consider applying for The New York Times’ entrepreneur-in-residence to work on new product development for the company. (The application portal is still open!) Or ponder the Times’ product thinking questions for your own work:

• Will consumers pay for a subscription product in the domain?
• If not, what other business models are available?
• How can we create [a] differentiated product in a crowded market?
• What acquisition targets might we evaluate to accelerate our goals?
• How might we leverage our existing assets, content, franchises?

Over a year and a half, then-Vox senior editor Sarah Kliff (she joined The New York Times as an investigative reporter in June) went through 1,000-plus bills from hospitals and emergency rooms. Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t a simple process (ever heard of HIPAA?). She and Vox built a system for patients to submit their own bills to their database and ended up collecting bills from each state and the District of Columbia. Kliff wrote 20 articles about the emergency department costs and increases. And last week, she did something remarkable: She published a piece for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine about it, a clip not many working journalists can claim:

We felt it would be in the public interest to give patients greater access to those prices. But we realized the only way to get the data would be from patients themselves. So we built an online portal that would allow readers to submit their billing documents and a narrative description of what happened during their visit, and the financial consequence, if any, the visit had on their lives…

One of the most common problems we documented was surprise medical bills: instances where a patient went to an in-network hospital but received care from an out-of-network clinician. Between 2010 and 2016, the percentage of in-network emergency department visits with an out-of-network bill increased to about 43%, and the average potential financial responsibility increased to $628, in 2018 US dollars, according to a study in this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. In my reporting, I was able to see how these bills came about and what effects they had on patients’ lives…

After I reported on that billing practice, Zuckerberg San Francisco General in 2019 changed its policies and put new limits on what it would charge patients. The hospital will no longer engage in a practice called “balance billing,” where the hospital sends the patient a bill for the balance that an insurer will not pay. The hospital has also limited how much it will charge patients for emergency care, with a maximum bill of $4800…

Between 2017 and 2019, I wrote approximately 20 articles for Vox on the high cost of emergency department care and its effects on patients. This series has led to the cancelation of more than $60,000 in medical debt. It has also inspired legislative proposals to better protect patients from surprise medical bills for emergency department and other health care services…

If Congress and state legislatures act, surprise medical bills for emergency department and other medical care can become a thing of the past.

It’s not too common to see an article in JAMA Internal Medicine or other elite academic journals where the author’s educational credentials list only a BA where you’d normally expect a lot more letters. Of the 11 other articles JAMA Internal Medicine has posted online so far this month, the authors collectively list 49 MDs, 12 PhDs, 6 MPHs, 2 JDs, 1 MBA, 1 EdD, 16 other master’s degrees — and 3 bachelor’s.

She even got the honorific “the great” in a JAMA Internal Medicine tweet:

My first article for an academic journal! All about what we learned from a year and a half analyzing emergency room bills. https://t.co/ljRlOIMZ02

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) August 12, 2019

(Kliff also walked through this process and findings in a Vox piece that is not behind an academic journal wall.)

This year I read a lot of emergency room bills — 1,182 of them, to be exact!

I read bills from all 50 states. I read bills from patients who were babies, and patients who were elderly.

Let me tell you a bit about what I learned! (1/11) pic.twitter.com/rTPPXAtTFQ

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) December 18, 2018

Her piece in the journal accompanies research by four professors on the practice of out-of-network emergency department billing. It’s an attempt to fix that “although surprise medical bills are receiving considerable attention from lawmakers and the news media, to date there has been little systematic study of the incidence and financial consequences of out-of-network billing,” the authors wrote. They back up her results from the crowdsourced bills with an analysis of 18 million hospital admissions from a private database — the kind of scale that even the most ambitious crowdsourcing would be unlikely to match.

Here’s their key finding: “It appears that out-of-network billing is becoming more common and potentially more costly in both the emergency department and inpatient settings”:

In this analysis of 5,457,981 inpatient admissions and 13,579,006 emergency department admissions between 2010 and 2016 in a large national sample of privately insured patients, the incidence of out-of-network billing increased from 32.3% to 42.8% of emergency department visits, and the mean potential liability to patients increased from $220 to $628. For inpatient admissions, the incidence of out-of-network billing increased from 26.3% to 42.0%, and the mean potential liability to patients increased from $804 to $2040.

After getting more than $100,000 in patient medical debt cancelled through her reporting, Kliff is continuing this work at The New York Times. She’s now seeking patient experiences from people who have ridden in an ambulance, which she says are twice as likely to be out of network than emergency room doctors. (No bill submission required this time, though.)

170 of you have sent me your ambulance bills – thank you!!

But I am greedy and want even more medical bills, so please fill out this form if you've taken one in the past five years. It would be a big help for my reporting on this issue!https://t.co/fIUDCUYMD7

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) August 9, 2019

Noteworthy bits from the Times’ earnings:

— The Times inched closer to being a majority-digital company. Paid digital-only subscriptions totaled 3.78 million as of June 30, 2019. About three million of those subscriptions were to the news product; the remainder were to the standalone Cooking and Crosswords products. There was $112.6 million in digital subscription revenue, up 14 percent over this time last year. The Times now counts 4.7 million total print + digital subscriptions.

— Digital advertising revenue was $58 million for the quarter, or 48.1 percent of the company’s total advertising revenue.

— Revenue from the Times’ “other” category, which includes affiliate revenue from The Wirecutter, licensing, referrals, and so on, was $45 million, up 30 percent from this time last year. In the release, Times CEO Mark Thompson noted that the Times’ weekly news show The Weekly, which launched on FX and Hulu in June, “was the largest driver of the 30 percent growth in other revenue in the quarter.”

— Operating profit decreased a bit, which Thompson ascribed to “continued investment into growing our subscription business.”

Meanwhile, over at The Guardian:

— A bunch of this was preliminarily announced in May, but The Guardian’s parent company confirmed that it broke even for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019. Digital now makes up 56 percent of The Guardian’s total revenue; 80 percent of advertising revenue is digital.

— The Guardian, which has no paywall, now has 655,000 regular paying supporters, and received an additional 300,000 one-off contributions over the past year.

— For the first time, the company broke out details about its digital business in the U.S. and Australia: “Revenue from advertising and reader contributions at the online-only Guardian US and Guardian Australia operations grew to £30.8M in the last financial year, equivalent to 14 percent of Guardian Media Group’s global revenues.”

Choked out by Facebook, Google, and other digital giants for advertising dollars, consolidated by profit-seeking corporations, and ultimately closing up shop as the community watchdogs and drivers of civic engagement, the struggles of local media — especially legacy newspapers — are not unfamiliar to Nieman Lab readers. (Heck, many of you have probably lived through them.) But showing the impact of these closures to the broader public is, the Times believes, a team effort. Since May, when the Baton Rouge Advocate bought the 182-year-old New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Times has been chronicling the demise of longtime local print outlets, with a dash of solutions first featured online Thursday, and it doesn’t plan to stop.

A special print section in Sunday’s Times highlights the loss of the 121-year-old Warroad Pioneer in Minnesota, written by Richard Fausset, who reported at an alt-weekly in Georgia before joining the metro desk of the L.A. Times. Marc Lacey, National editor, started out at the Buffalo News, and deputy editor Jamie Stockwell spent 11 years as an editor at the San Antonio Express-News. Executive editor Dean Baquet, who said this spring that local papers “are going to die in the next five years” (we know at least their seven-day print product probably will) worked his way up from the Times-Picayune and the Chicago Tribune.

But the Times also holds a particular role in the local news lifetime saga: It used to own the Boston Globe and more than a dozen smaller papers, but sold them off to focus on its own business. Obviously the Gray Lady is doing fine on its own now, while local news outlets — even the L.A. Times — are still thrashing their way toward putting together subscription-worthy digital products.

Ken Doctor asked Times CEO Mark Thompson about local investments in February:

Doctor: Is there anything that the Times sees in its future for what it can do on regional news, metro news in a bigger way than it’s doing now?
Thompson: I think I would say that one thing that unites both sides of the house of the Times is shared concern on this topic. Dean Baquet, [managing editor] Joe Kahn, James [Bennet], Meredith [Kopit Levien, the Times’ chief operating officer], and I all talk about this — we sort of stand ready to help if we can. I mean, we would love to help support a successful broad ecology for journalism in the U.S. and the rest of the world…
Doctor: I know your hearts are there, and I’ve talked to Dean about it at some length. But is the Times involved? There’s a whole bunch of people talking about multimillions of dollars that could be invested in local journalism. Is the Times involved in any of these efforts to restart high-quality local journalism?
Thompson: We’ve been involved and are involved in conversations. It’s fair to say I don’t believe to date that we have, on either side of the house, committed to any one specific project. I think it’s currently conceived of. It is a hard problem.

But the Times, at least on the editorial side, sees an opportunity to work with local news outlets in partnerships not — yet — quite as formal as ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network or Reveal’s Local Labs for investigative journalism. The National desk has already collaborated with the El Paso Times and the Voice of Orange County, a nonprofit site in Southern California, among others.

Lacey and I spoke about why the Times is going this in-depth on local news’ collapse, how he wants local outlets to email him to collaborate (yes, that’s right — a certain someone’s email address might be lastname@nytimes.com, just saying), and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Okay, so it was a little more complicated than that. But the departure of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight franchise (first to ESPN, then to ABC News) left a hole where the regular application of statistical modeling to topics of news interest had been.

Less than a year later, the wonky, data-viz-filled subsite The Upshot reinjected some of the formats and techniques of the academic, policy, and political blogging worlds into the Times — with perhaps a more Times-friendly voice. As then-public editor Margaret Sullivan put it, “I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie ‘Moneyball’ disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics…A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work.”

In recent years, The Upshot has taught us about the difference between the Twitter Democrat electorate and the real Democrat electorate, the extent of racism for black boys, how your community relates to others in the U.S., the godforsaken election night needle, your opposite job (reporters’ are physicists), and much more. For the site’s fifth birthday today, the Times pulled together its big-hit Upshots on a single page, highlighting both the team’s favorites and the most-read:

News professionals have devoted countless hours on what makes something popular, and while there are no simple answers, a commonality for us has been that many of these stories have addressed aspects of identity: where we come from, what we eat, how we talk, for example.

People also like thinking about what they would do if they won the lottery, and keeping up to date on whom President Trump has insulted lately.

“You look all over the paper, in all kinds of different ways, and it’s clear that readers had a demand for this sort of journalism. This funny mix of really substantive on really big, complicated topics, but presented in a really approachable way,” David Leonhardt, then The Upshot’s inaugural editor and now an op-ed columnist at the Times, told Nieman Lab in explaining his vision five years ago. “Our hugely successful interactives are another example of this. The most visited page in New York Times history is based on an academic study about linguistics, right? That’s amazing.”

Leonhardt back then:

What this grew out of was Nate Silver’s departure. Nate left, and I was well known internally as a champion of Nate’s. I was a sort of obvious person to put on a committee to figure out to do after he left.

We decided quite quickly — maybe even in our first meeting — that we didn’t want to go out and replace Nate. Nate has a set of skills that is unusual, in a good way. And not only that, but that 2012 wasn’t going to be repeated. There wasn’t going to be, in all likelihood, another election that went the way that one did. Trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle, when other people out there — including Nate — were going to be out there doing it, seemed like not the right way to go.

On the other hand, we said, you know what? The lessons of FiveThirtyEight are not narrow lessons. They’re consistent with a bunch of whole other lessons we think we’ve heard here.

Leonhardt also pointed out the new site would be “integrated in the newsroom. I really want us to work with other Times reporters — on the national staff, on the political staff, on the science staff — who are interested in doing this kind of journalism. We’re not separate.”

We’ve dug into lots of The Upshot’s work at Nieman Lab over the past half-decade, chronicling some of the vertical’s early innovation like The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up in 2015:

Once you have the data, you need to translate it into something useful to users. The Upshot team decided to use prose templates that could be rewritten by a bot based on the data specific to where you live and your neighboring counties. Sharp-eyed readers can see the changes on the page if you enter another county while reading the story.

The 2014 election night voting estimation was “one of the most important innovations we’ve seen”:

So when a candidate takes an early lead in the hours after polls close, is that real or an artifact of where the early votes are coming from? If you know the historical data around specific precincts — how Democratic or Republican they’ve voted in the past — and you can make informed estimates about turnout, you can read into those numbers. (“Our adjusted leads will be based solely on current and historical returns. They will not use data from exit polls, or any forecasts from Senate models.”) Smart analysts have always done this; now readers will be able to see it in real time, not just in tossed-off anecdotal comments. Very smart.

And just a few months ago, we looked at the new way The Upshot reported polling data in real time, phone call by unanswered phone call.

Personally, I find this stuff fascinating, I don’t put any particular emotional weight on a 1-point lead in one direction or another, and I applaud the Times for putting this much work into exposing the inner workings of what typically gets reduced to a plus sign and a positive integer.

But I do wonder if the laudable “transparency” at work here will have any of the intended impact. As I wrote about yesterday in describing a paper from Sweden, it’s unclear that audiences view transparency as anything like the trust salve that many journalists do.

Our upshot? The Upshot is one of the Times’ best efforts to explain high-level policy and data on a truly relatable level. Silver’s departure and launch of FiveThirtyEight added to the growing corner of wonkiness that the internet thrives on. Just be more careful with the needle.

And from a media perspective, better networks tend to produce, or at least emphasize, different types of content. The first iPhone allowed only 2G data, which had roughly the throughput of passing a manila folder with one sticky note inside, and publishers stuck to the relatively basic webpages they were serving their still-partially-dialup desktop audiences. Then 3G came along and enabled the boom in podcasts: downloading shows over the air solved the usability problems attached to transferring MP3s via cable and dock, and podcast episodes were just big enough to be annoying over 2G but still small enough to not choke 3G. Then 4G and LTE made mobile video tolerable and gave us the first janky glimpses of AR and VR.

As you’ve probably heard, 5G’s around the corner, if that corner is “mainstream use is still at least a year away,” and it’s expected to be at least 20× the speed of 4G. So it makes sense that forward-looking publishers are planning ahead for what it might bring.

Among those is The New York Times, which has described some of its plans in a Medium post. Here are Aharon Wasserman, Serena Parr and Joseph Kenol:

To explore what kind of storytelling opportunities 5G might enable, this year we’ve launched a 5G Journalism Lab. We’ve partnered with Verizon, which is providing us with early access to 5G networking and equipment for us to experiment with.

We believe 5G’s speed and lack of latency could spark a revolution in digital journalism in two key areas: how we gather the news and how we deliver it. In the short term, having access to 5G will help The Times enhance our ability to capture and produce rich media in breaking news situations. Over time, as our readers start to use 5G devices, we will be able to further optimize the way our journalism is delivered and experienced.

The Times’ vision for what 5G will do to journalism is still a bit vague, but the 5G Lab’s work includes both internal-to-the-Times uses and the provision of news to an audience with 5G in their pockets:

— Better and more reliable data connections for its journalists in the field, including “exploring how 5G can help our journalists automatically stream media — HD photos, videos and audio, and even 3D models — back to the newsroom in real-time, as they are captured.”

— More and better AR and VR immersive experiences within stories, allowing readers “to explore new environments that are captured in 3D.”

Those are fine areas to explore, but it’s safe to say the most significant impacts 5G will have are probably ones publishers can’t anticipate today. The reality will almost certainly be weirder than we think. So just as a brainstorming exercise, here are a few possibilities that come to my mind.

Always-streaming reporters. Think of what Twitter has done to reporters: turned them from “people who report and write stories that are edited and published online every so often” to “people who are constantly sharing links, commenting on events, live-tweeting press conferences, giving granular updates, asking for help, and having human conversations, all in public and in real time.” It’s a big shift! And it’s one that, let’s be honest, is primarily driven by technology; there was no giant market demand or particular financial incentive for us to become tweeting machines. We did it because the technology — from phones in our pocket to the creation of app stores to Twitter’s underlying instantiation of the social graph and 140-character genius — was easy enough, convenient enough, and rewarding enough to hand over a share of our day.

Twitter is still overwhelmingly text, because that’s the format it incentivizes and that’s easiest to produce. What happens when 5G does that for streaming video or even AR? Could 5G’d reporters become Justin.tv-style livestreamers by default? For high-value segments of publishing, could access to a reporter’s livestream become part of a premium package? (“Join the $500-a-month tier of NYTimes.com and get exclusive access to Michael Barbaro’s livestream as he records The Daily every evening.”) I’d imagine that the most traditional news organizations would also be the most hesitant to do something like this — but why wouldn’t celebrities and athletes want to play in a space that sells both exclusivity and intimacy? And if they do it, why wouldn’t some digital-native outfit like BuzzFeed?

If that sounds implausible, imagine pitching this to a bunch of journalists 10 years ago: “How’d you like to publish 50 little messages a day, some about your beat, some about whatever’s on your mind, mostly from your phone, all while getting yelled at by random Nazis?” And yet Twitter lives.

There’s nothing unique about 5G that would allow this; you can livestream now. But you could also watch videos on your 2G O.G. iPhone; you just didn’t do much of it until fast data became ubiquitous. New technologies often establish new norms as much as they enable new products.

A new kind of rewrite. Let’s say that newsrooms aren’t sure about their reporters streaming out to the public. What about them streaming back to the newsroom?

The age-old tradition of rewrite involved a bunch of reporters working on a story, then sending feeds of what they found to one person back at the office, who’d charged with assembling those raw materials into a final coherent story.

Except those raw materials aren’t all that raw; they’re semi-processed ore that has already gone through the notebooks and minds of the reporters involved. What if the story needs a key stat that a reporter has in her notebook but didn’t include in the feed? What if something important that happened at that city council meeting that the reporter didn’t notice?

When high-throughput video streaming from our Apple Spectacles becomes normal — with the processing offloaded to our iPhones and the data streaming over 5G — reporters might be expected to stream their day back to the newsroom, where a rewrite reporter might work with (or at least have access to) those truly raw feeds. Need a quote from the mayor? You know the city hall reporter was talking to him this morning, and you know what the mayor looks like — ask the computer-vision/video-search app on your computer to look for the mayor’s face in the reporter’s stream and pull out everything he said. Did the cops reporter mention an interesting police report about James Smith at the watercooler? If she ever saw the report, it’s in her stream and OCR’d; just search her stream for “James Smith,” limited to video streamed from the police department, and it’ll pop up.

These sorts of things may seem far-fetched. (Not to mention a little authoritarian; reporters aren’t used to the sort of employer surveillance that, say, Amazon delivery drivers face.) But advances in machine learning, computer vision, and other segments of AI will make finding that needle in a haystack as easy as a Google search before long. And what it’ll need is a lot of haystacks — the raw material that will make up an incredibly rich archive of a city. Reporters will be their miners.

Remember George Allen, the former Virginia governor and senator who lots of people thought would be the GOP nominee for president in 2008? In 2006, his Senate reelection campaign got derailed when a tracker for his opponent recorded Allen calling him a racial slur. If that tracker, S. R. Sidarth, hadn’t been filming, it’s entirely possible that Allen would have won reelection and changed the 2008 presidential race. And the reason he was filming is that video technology — the cost to observe and record, essentially — had dropped so much by 2006 that giving a camera to a college kid and asking him to follow Allen around made financial and logistical sense it wouldn’t have 20 years earlier. Ubiquitous data creates new use cases that sporadic data doesn’t.

The Newsroom of Things. If ingestable streams of real-world experiences become the currency of the realm, well, do they all need to be attached to reporters? Early experiments with sensor journalism have sometimes run into roadblocks caused by the cost of connecting lots of little devices to the network; 5G should make that easier in the long run. Writing about traffic on the downtown loop? Put up a few sensors that can monitor and stream the flow of vehicles 24/7 to figure out where the roadblocks are. Is Little League big in your town? Put up a camera at the local diamond that can livestream games to your readers and automatically generate game stories. Are water board meetings boring 95 percent of the time but highly newsworthy the other 5? Put a camera in the meeting room to stream it and to watch for those rare bursts of importance.

A lot of these ideas rely on AI improvements as much as far better networks — but those will improve in tandem. The more raw data there is to analyze, the more tools will be built to analyze it.

More competition for people’s attention from everything else using 5G. A sad but inevitable outcome for those of us who care about a broadly informed public. At every stage of the Internet’s development, technology that has made it easier to distribute information has brought benefits to news organizations. But it’s brought many more benefits to everyone else. That’s true both for those who previously had little access to publishing — think bloggers and emergent social media successes — and for those who will use those technologies for entertainment purposes. When all you had access to in daily print was a newspaper, the front page was guaranteed to feature news. When all you had access to was your local broadcast TV stations, roughly 1/5 of the available content was news of some sort.

When cable TV came along, the news junkies could watch CNN — but it was also easier to avoid news altogether. Every technological gain from the web or smartphones was also available to game builders, fake news merchants, meme makers, and your racist Uncle Ted. Nothing wrong with entertainment! But it’s worth noting that the near-instantaneous delivery of huge amounts of video and spatial data is much more likely to benefit Hollywood, game makers, and others who will create amazing immersive experiences than it will journalists.

It’s an initiative recently tweeted out by the Times’ editor of digital storytelling and training and digital transition editor, with the pure headline “Help Us Cover The News”:

The perspectives of our audience are invaluable to our journalists, helping us better understand the news and our world. This year, we are expanding our efforts to include readers’ experiences, and we would love to add your voice…

We hope that you’ll sign up to participate in our future reporting projects. The questions below will help us know what kinds of stories you might be able to help out with. Our journalists may contact you based on your answers, but we promise that the information will only be used for journalistic purposes.

That means the Times’ advertising department won’t be using the Facebook profile links and email addresses to target running shoes or swim goggles in the sprint triathlon-ers’ newsletters, as per the reader submission terms: “Your phone number(s) and email address (‘Your Contact Details’) will not be published by us, nor will they be used or disclosed for any marketing purposes.”

A spokesperson said the initiative (and the form) is being run by journalists with the Interactive News team and Reader Center, beyond “The Times is always experimenting with how we engage with our readers.” (I filled out the form, FWIW, though it was weird to try to explain my relationship with religion to a news organization’s database field.)

The New York Times has achieved huge success signing up digital subscribers, a group that likely includes a healthy number of potential sources. (Though of course Times subscribers — wealthier, more educated, more liberal — are not a particularly representative sample.) It’s also a sign of readers seeking more of a voice in the organization’s reporting responsibility and process. The Times’ 2020 innovation report noted:

Our readers must become a bigger part of our report. Perhaps nothing builds reader loyalty as much as engagement — the feeling of being part of a community. And the readers of The New York Times are very much a community…

Asking readers to invest their time on our platform creates a natural cycle of loyalty. Network effects are the growth engine of every successful startup, Facebook being the prime example. But the Times experience doesn’t get more interesting or valuable as more of a reader’s friends, relatives and colleagues use it. That must change.

The Times is not the first in this area. We wrote in 2012 about American Public Media’s then-nine year old Public Insight Network, which today holds a database of 233,262 sources serving up insight for newsrooms including KPCC, Marketplace, and Minnesota Public Radio. The Times highlighted its reader response-infused journalism about evangelical millennials and politics and personal experiences with Jerusalem. PIN is helping the public media outlets report on “12 ways your fellow Angelenos are reducing their plastic waste” and “what makes your favorite lake” — out of Minnesota’s 10,000, obviously — “so special”.

Krautreporter, a crowdfunded digital magazine based in Germany, has also asked its users to create a profile about themselves to help the journalists pin down experts in their own database. Theirs is only five questions, though, compared to The New York Times’ 20.

That’s not a joke; it’s the goal of 25 news organizations’ engagement initiatives studied by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. The 2016 (and 2018) elections effed up a lot of people and their trust in media, as we all know, and news organizations have been experimenting with ways to improve trust face-to-face and across wrenching divisions.

But…what comes out of those events besides a lot of extroversion and handshake germs? How many gatherings are needed to finally start whittling away at stereotypes? Is convening community members with drastically different views a service or a spectacle used for reporting? Can these meetings possibly change people’s perceptions of “the media” — and each other?

Looking at the examples of bridge-our-differences programming can’t fully answer those questions, but new research by Talia Stroud and Caroline Murray, funded by the News Integrity Initiative, provides a decent landscape of the impacts. (Disclosure: I helped corral some of the examples at Murray’s request.) They’re a creative bunch, from the Evergrey’s Melting Mountains road trip bringing Seattleites to meet rural Oregon residents to 60 Minutes’ Oprah Winfrey roundtable in Michigan to a Chicago photojournalist bringing residents from the city’s booming North Side to meet the folks living at their mirror address on the underinvested South Side and vice versa.

“One reason that ingroups [an exclusive group of people with a common interest/identity] develop animosity toward outgroups [groups that aren’t part of the ingroup] is that they are unfamiliar with members of the outgroup,” Stroud and Murray wrote in their findings. “If you’ve never met anyone from an outgroup, encounters with dehumanizing mischaracterizations of the outgroup are not checked by actual experience. And if most of your interactions with members of the outgroup are negative, it’s unsurprising that you might hold intolerant views. Creating circumstances where people have positive interactions with outgroup members is key.”

True, but easier said than done. Here’s what newsrooms have learned and could keep in mind for planning future events, followed by the list of events in the sample:

• Encourage a receptive and empathetic frame of mind. Stroud and Murray cited previous research that showed that “when people were in an empathetic frame of mind, trying to imagine how the other person feels, narratives were more effective than numbers at encouraging people to feel that they understood where someone with a different point of view was coming from.”
• Make sure outgroup members are seen by ingroupers as representative of that particular outgroup: “If people perceive the outgroup members as atypical, re-fencing can occur whereby people believe: ‘Yes I liked those people, but they are certainly different from the rest of their group.'”
• Use mediated and imagined contact. Mediated means having someone keep the exercise on track, and imagined contact serves the adage of seeing yourself from someone else’s shoes: “This kind of journalism should truly make audience members feel like they are the person in the outgroup, experiencing life as they experience it.”
• But the contact does not have come directly from people of the outgroup — ingroupers speaking sympathetically about the outgroup’s experience can promote tolerance without the outgroup having to be present, Stroud and Murray wrote.
• Keep in mind the novelty and uniqueness of the experience — like the 60 Minutes/Oprah roundtable. Oprah was probably an influential draw for some participants, but 60 Minutes’ follow-up showed that the group stayed in touch regularly over social media and even planned their own outings together.
• Curse you, selection bias: “Those most in need of outgroup contact may be least likely to hear about it or seek it out.”
• It’s about quantity and quality: Contact between in- and outgroup members needs to be substantive and positive to make a difference and counteract previously-held beliefs.

And here are the projects Stroud and Murray examined:

• Guns, an American Conversation organized by Advance Local, Alabama Media Group, Essential Partners, Newseum, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Spaceship Media, and Time: “The project began during the March for Our Lives protests, during which 21 citizens from across the country joined in D.C. for a weekend workshop on gun violence and gun rights. The participants included survivors from school shootings, police officers, teachers and those who felt like they were often left out of the national conversation on guns.” The conversation continued after in a moderated Facebook group.
• AL.com and Spaceship Media’s Alabama/California Conversation: “A chief goal of the project and other Spaceship Media initiatives is to dispel the negative assumptions people normally have about the ‘other side.’ From December 14, 2016 to January 15, 2017, the women engaged each other in a closed Facebook group.”
• Alaska Public Media’s Community in Unity series: “The events attract representatives from community organizations, government officials, activists, academics, as well as ordinary citizens. Some of the events have been public forums featuring a group of panelists who discuss these big issues as they relate to Alaska…. Participants bounce ideas off of each other and ideally come away with a more nuanced understanding of an issue in their community than they had before.”
• The Bay Area News Group, Southern California News Group, Spaceship Media, and Univision’s Talking Across Borders: “After a month, Tom Bray, the managing editor for content with the Southern California News Group, told the California Newspaper Publishers Association that although consensus was not reached, he felt the project resulted in ‘a passionate, compelling but respectful collection of conversations, coming at a time when chats that end in “thank you” are rare.'”
• Capital Public Radio’s Story Circles: “The radio station purposefully designed each circle to include diverse residents with different backgrounds. Participants were affluent homeowners, developers, affordable housing advocates, or even homeless themselves. To start, the participants sat for a meal together and each person shared a personal story about their experiences with housing….In a post-meeting survey, more than 80 percent of residents said that they felt the event had enhanced their awareness of the issue, increased their empathy for others and inspired them to act on the issue.”
• The Oprah roundtable: “In the fall of 2016, Oprah Winfrey hosted a panel of 14 Michigan voters on CBS News’ 60 Minutes. Seven of the participants voted for Donald Trump and seven did not. The roundtable participants agreed on very little during their first discussion, but when CBS reached out to reconvene the panel after Donald Trump’s first year in office, they discovered that members of the panel had actually kept in touch and had become friends.”
• Colorado Public Radio’s Breaking Bread: “The six participants included three Trump voters, two Clinton supporters and one Green Party voter…. The participants, along with CPR reporters, sat down to dinner to have their discussion. They showcased complex political views that defied stereotypes, such as a liberal’s distaste for Obamacare and a Clinton voter’s support for gun rights…. CPR reporters have followed the two participants from the original conversation on their visit to the mosque, started a series on how to overcome political divisions at work and documented conversations between new pairs.”
• The Dallas Morning News and This American Life’s discussion with Texas hate mail-writers: After the paper endorsed a Democrat for president for the first time since the Roosevelt administration, editor Mike Wilson “invited two readers to come into the newsroom to talk over their differences with him face-to-face. Both were conservative, long-time readers of the paper, but were recently considering giving up their subscriptions. The two readers sat in on an editorial meeting with the paper’s senior staff and although they still worried about how a few pending stories would ultimately be portrayed in the paper, overall they found the meeting surprisingly ordinary and professional. They then talked to Wilson about the main issues they saw with the paper, liked skewed messaging in headlines and lack of diverse story selection.”
• The Evergrey’s urban-rural Melting Mountains: “Following the 2016 presidential election, about 20 residents of Seattle made the 10-hour drive to meet the people of nearby Sherman County. Seattle is part of a largely urban county that voted overwhelming for Hillary Clinton during the election, in contrast to rural Sherman County, where the majority of residents voted for Donald Trump. The Evergrey, a local digital news publication in Seattle, organized a meeting between residents of both counties to talk about their political outlooks and what they hoped to see for the future of the country. The participants sat down for lunch and discussed their political concerns in rotating one-on-one conversations for nearly four hours.”
• Jubilee Media’s Middle Ground series: “In each video, three people on each side of a debate in American society come together to have a productive dialogue. Jubilee Media has them stand, and then the participants are read a statement, such as ‘Sometimes I question my beliefs,’ ‘I am proud to be an American,’ and ‘I was surprised by someone’s response today.’ If a participant agrees with the statement, they are invited to sit down in a nearby circle of seats and voice their thoughts about the statement.”
• KPCC’s Across the Divide: “As a part of KPCC’s live event segment, reporters brought together four Hillary Clinton voters and four Donald Trump voters after the election to discuss their hopes and fears for the future. KPCC said they were inspired to put on the event when they heard from many of their listeners who didn’t have a single friend that voted for a different candidate than them.”
• KQED’s Start the Conversation: “KQED paired up Californians with contrasting outlooks on political or cultural issues to see if they could find common ground. The first segment featured a Trump delegate from LA and a gay man who went to D.C. to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration. … KQED also facilitated conversations between people who already knew each other, such as two teachers in the same high school and a granddaughter and grandfather who disagreed about her job as a journalist.”
• KUOW’s “Ask A…” series: “The Seattle-based radio station selects people who are members of a group in the news and pairs them with other people who don’t typically interact with that group and wish to learn about them. In speed-dating style, each pair has a few minutes to talk, then everyone switches partners. KUOW’s “Ask A…” series has featured Trump voters, Muslims, immigrants, transgender persons, cops and other groups… They found that there were statistically significant increases in participants’ knowledge about and empathy toward the group, even three months after the workshop.”
• NPR’s Divided States: “The show brought together voters from four hotly contested swing states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Ohio. … The series featured stories in several formats, including roundtables after the televised presidential debates where participants shared their reactions to candidate’s rhetoric and policy positions. Although some of the roundtables became heated, participants from each state expressed positivity about being able to talk to one another.”
• Your Vote Ohio by Ohio News Media and the Jefferson Center: “They hosted a series of three events to discuss the candidates’ positions and what Ohioans considered robust and fair election coverage. Each of the discussions had 18 participants, all residents of Akron, Ohio, but diverse in their race, income level, age and political beliefs…. After the election, the initiative shifted its focus to the opioid crisis and renamed itself Your Voice Ohio to reuse the discussion model for issues other than elections.”
• Philadelphia Magazine: Can These People Agree on Anything? ” brought together two Hillary Clinton voters and one Donald Trump voter to see if they could find middle ground on an issue…. One of the participants remarked that ‘Whenever you have an individual interaction, a lot of the bluster, a lot of the generalizations, a lot of the group identifications fall away.'”
• The New York Times’ political podcast The Run Up’s Let’s Talk series: “All three pairs were guided by a set of questions designed by The Village Square, a civic organization that works with social psychologists to encourage open and civil conversations. The list included questions like ‘How do you think our views came to be so different?’, ‘Do you feel ignored or misunderstood as a voter?’ and ‘What do you think we agree on?'”
• The Skimm’s No Excuses dinner parties: “The goal of the program is to encourage its readers to get informed, take action and break out of their bubbles. theSkimm later expanded the program to host dinner parties for strangers to discuss immigration. They brought together 14 women from different cities across the nation, some of whom were undocumented immigrants themselves.”
• Spaceship Media’s The Many constituted “5,000 women across the country with diverse political convictions in a closed Facebook group to share personal stories, political thoughts and policy ideas. The group was moderated by Spaceship Media journalists in order to provide relevant facts and to ensure that the dialogue remained productive and civil. Spaceship Media ran the project up until the November 2018 midterm elections.”
• StoryCorps One Small Step: The interview structure is designed not to be political and to steer away from current events and specific policies. Instead, they are meant to be personal and highlight the experiences and people that have shaped the other person’s worldview. StoryCorps provides guiding questions such as ‘How did your childhood shape your view of the world today?’ and ‘Can you talk about a time you experienced doubt over your beliefs?'”
• Talking Eyes Media’s Bring It to the Table: “Winokur traveled around the country with a table and set it up in shared spaces, such as barbershops and book stores, and tried to engage in deep conversation with people who held different political views than her. … After the documentary, Winokur expanded the Bring It to the Table concept and began creating
  workshops and hosting live events as a part of the Talking Eyes Media team, which includes journalists,
  producers and other media professionals.”
• TEGNA’s An Imperfect Union: A Facebook Watch show which “brings two people with opposing views together to talk and participate in a community service project, such as cleaning up a park or volunteering at a food bank.”
• The Tennessean’s Civility Tennessee: “On the day of President Trump’s State of the Union speech, The Tennessean launched a year-long campaign designed to encourage civic dialogue around challenging and divisive issues. The mission of the series is not only to strengthen trust in local news media, but to satisfy a hunger for these civil discussions.”
• Tonika Johnson’s Folded Map: “She began connecting people from opposite sides of the city so that they could share what living in their two communities was like and have a conversation about the divide, one that is predominantly defined by race. Johnson also had her pairs visit each other’s houses and photographed them standing in front of the opposite residence. For several residents from the North Side, it was their first time ever visiting the South Side.”
• Zeit Online’s Germany Talks: “Over a thousand people were matched with their ideological opposite after answering a series of yes or no questions that addressed contentious topics in Germany, such as the refugee crisis. ZEIT Online provided the pairs with guidelines for how to have a productive and civil conversation and then let them organize their face-to-face meetings independently.”

Read the report in full here.

The Times and the Post are, however, alike in one crucial way that disinvites comparison to other local news products, which is that their importance hinges on their coverage of national, not local, news. Both papers use their city as a lens on the world, and much of their respective coverage reflects the view through that lens. As a result, both have become indispensable in their coverage of U.S. politics, trade, and the economy. The only other paper that can reasonably claim this local-out perspective in 2018 is The Wall Street Journal.

Whereas other news products compete locally, the Times and the Post compete nationally and enjoy large markets of voracious news consumers around the world. Doctor estimated in February that the Post earns around $100 million annually from digital subscriptions, at approximately $100 per reader and 1 million readers, a number CNN the Post passed a year ago. Weekday circulation of the Post peaked in 1993 at 832,332; Sunday circulation peaked at 1,152,272. With just its digital product, the Post has surpassed its peak paying weekday audience and is approaching — or has perhaps already surpassed — its peak paying Sunday audience.

Likewise, The New York Times has expanded its digital audience; it counts 2.9 million digital subscribers, a figure that also includes subscribers to its crosswords and cooking products. That bundle of products makes a direct comparison to the Post’s totals more challenging, but the Times’ diversity of digital products — including Wirecutter, a popular digital-only consumer review site — is its signature. If the Post is like Amazon, happy to sell individual slices of its vertically integrated whole, the Times is perhaps more like Apple, bringing its ethos and voice to a more diverse array of products.

The Times and the Post are the rare breed of newspapers able to use digital disruption to their own advantage. While in one sense, the internet has taken a great deal from newspapers — it has terrorized print circulation and most kinds of advertising — it has also given new strength to those news organizations that do have a truly national platform. But where does that leave regional dailies like those recently acquired by billionaires in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Boston? Certainly less sure of their foothold and envious of the fortunes of the likes of the Times and the Post.

One path could lie in the towering map of New England that greets those entering the headquarters of The Boston Globe — if a newspaper could leverage its digital reach to better serve an entire region, it could potentially turn the threat of the internet into a strength, albeit on a scale smaller than The New York Times or The Washington Post. With its regional importance, the Los Angeles Times has had success building its digital subscription base, reaching 105,000 digital subscribers as of September 2017, though its accomplishments pale in comparison to those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. And these gains came amid a terrible pattern of turmoil for the L.A. Times that seems perhaps to have concluded this summer with the purchase of the paper by Patrick Soon-Shiong. The largest of the regional papers in the United States, the L.A. Times has at points set its sights on instead being the smallest of the national papers.

While the D.C. bureaus of local newspapers as a group have shrunk or vanished in the past decade, the L.A. Times and Boston Globe have continued to cover national politics and economic issues. The L.A. Times lists 23 editors and reporters on its international and national desks, 16 in its D.C. bureau, and 14 on its politics desk. At face value, more reporters covering those in power seems like a net asset to society. Los Angeles certainly needs an editorial team to hold its elected officials accountable to their constituents. Still, those responsible for the L.A. Times news product must carefully navigate the tension in allocating resources between national news — some of which will certainly be covered elsewhere but which could bring a national scale of pageviews — and local news that may otherwise go unreported but that would naturally attract a narrower audience.

It was against the backdrop of Lewis D’Vorkin’s chaotic tenure that the newsroom voted to unionize, publisher Ross Levinsohn was placed on leave during an investigation of his workplace behavior at prior employers, and Tronc reached an agreement to sell the paper and its recently adopted sibling, the San Diego Union-Tribune. Still, the staff of the LA Times might not take a deep breath just yet. After making a $70.5 million investment in Tronc, Soon-Shiong told Bloomberg in 2016 that he hoped to bring “machine vision” to the L.A. Times: “For example, a reader could pan a camera across a physical newspaper and the photos could be turned into video. Focus the camera on a photo of basketball star Kevin Durant or Donald Trump and ‘you’d hear him speaking or Kevin Durant would be dunking,’ he said.” If D’Vorkin sought to marry Instagram to Forbes at the LA Times, Soon-Shiong seems eager to breathe new life into the CueCat, the barcode-scanning device publishers gave for free to their readers in the hope of boosting engagement and bringing e-commerce revenue to print media.

In fairness, Soon-Shiong’s concept does away with the inelegance of the printed barcode and the computer-connected barcode scanner, replacing them with printed images and the reader’s smartphone, placing such an experiment closer to the trendy realm of augmented reality than to the retrospective uselessness of the CueCat. Yet the user’s action is essentially the same: find something interesting in print; learn more on the web. In further fairness to the machine-vision idea, most newspapers are brainstorming ways to bridge the gap between print and digital, not ways to make the print product more valuable and more connected. But the newspapers that are flirting with augmented reality are still only flirting — The New York Times’s occasional technology experiments, like its 2018 Winter Olympics feature, feel high-touch and expensive, and do not appear to feature into the print edition.

Assuming Soon-Shiong takes a more moderate approach to leading the evolution of the news products at the L.A. Times, it could come to resemble John Henry’s Boston Globe in some ways. Among regional papers, with nearly 100,000 digital subscriptions, the Globe only narrowly trails the L.A. Times. The Boston metro area, however, has only barely a third of the population of the Los Angeles metro area, with 4.5 million and 12.8 million residents, respectively, in 2016. And while New England as a whole is home to about 14.44 million people, California is home to 37.2 million by itself. The cultural demographics of California versus New England could yield further opportunities for the L.A. Times, which also produces Hoy, a daily Spanish-language newspaper.

The Globe, of course, has had recent and well-documented struggles with its printed product. When it changed printing plants in summer 2017, problems with the transition left many subscribers without their newspapers. And as of March 2018, the Globe’s annual seven-day subscription cost appeared set to climb to levels that would make it the most expensive newspaper in the United States — though not far from the price of a midrange gym, and on a daily basis, still cheaper than most drinks at Starbucks. Perhaps, as Dan Kennedy says, print is destined not to be a mass-market product — “print is becoming a niche product for people willing to pay for it.”

In Minneapolis, Glen Taylor’s Star Tribune has managed to collect about 50,000 digital subscriptions, roughly as many as the Chicago Tribune, and avoid the level of scrutiny or intrigue that coastal papers now owned by billionaires have faced. Taylor purchased the Star Tribune in 2014, five years after it emerged from bankruptcy, a victim of the steep decline in value of newspapers since the 1990s and the great recession. His purchase of the paper was praised by R.T. Rybak, then the mayor of Minneapolis, and welcomed by the NewsGuild, which represents the Star Tribune’s reporters. The Star Tribune has since become a strong example of funnel-driven consumer marketing, which treats the subscription process like a conventional e-commerce experience, and has invested in data tools and technology to identify the readers most likely to pay for subscriptions.

Conversely, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2015 in secret. His purchase of the paper was revealed by its own reporters. The $140 million sticker price outstripped Taylor’s $100 million price tag for the Star Tribune and doubled John Henry’s $70 million for The Boston Globe, which led to speculation that his motives were to use the newspaper to promote his own political agenda. That theory was borne out by his request, as negotiations to purchase the paper were coming to a close, that Review-Journal reporters monitor three judges in the city, one of whom was overseeing a lawsuit that imperiled Adelson’s casinos. The New York Times called this an “ominous coincidence.” By early 2016, newsroom anxiety had given way to firings and resignations; a new publisher and editor were appointed; and stories involving Adelson were routinely killed. The market size, about 1.9 million people, of the Las Vegas metro area pales in comparison to Minneapolis–St. Paul, with its 3.3 million. This underscores the odd nature of Adelson’s purchase. Adelson’s net worth, as reported by Forbes, was $31.8 billion in 2016, far higher than Taylor’s $1.9 billion, making his purchase of the Review-Journal a far smaller fraction of his net worth than Taylor’s. Adelson has the means and the motive to take a major metropolitan newspaper and turn it into a puppet.

Why does a billionaire decide to buy a newspaper? Of the five considered here, four purchased papers in their hometowns or adopted hometowns. Bezos grew up in Miami and built Amazon in Seattle; his purchase of The Washington Post underscores the national importance of that paper rather than show a billionaire committing an act of civic charity. Each of the five men in question exhibited some combination of civic-mindedness, profit motive, and raw self-interest in using the power of the news organization for their own purposes, though those purposes range from holding the government accountable to suppressing negative coverage of related business ventures. Thus far only Gerry Lenfest, the owner of the Philadelphia Media Network who donated the Inquirer and Daily News to the Lenfest Institute before passing away this month, officially abandoned profit motive as his rationale for owning a newspaper. In contrast, many newspaper owners emphasize their view that newspapers should be profitable and link their profit potential to their sense of civic pride: If our readers truly care about their community, we can have a profitable newspaper.

The motivations of billionaires hearken back to a core question of whether our society needs newspapers — or just news. Why not apply one’s civic pride, resources, and business acumen to a new way of distributing news, one not so decimated by declining print revenues and advertising? There’s also a sense of inequality in the fate of newspapers: Will cities with struggling local media and no interested saviors simply become local news deserts? How does that impact the accountability of state and local governments? Still, newspapers that have had the advantage of such a patron — especially the Globe and the Star Tribune — have much more experience growing reader support of their digital products than most other papers. As such, they are the furthest down the path between reliance on advertising and reliance on reader support. Those that trail might look to them as examples to follow.

The Times publishes around 160 articles a day, and most of those will never be on the homepage of the app or in the section fronts. “Your Feed” is designed to help readers follow content they might miss otherwise. They can select from 24 channels to follow — some organized around section or topic (“From the Magazine,” “Gender & Society,” “The Mueller Investigation,” “Books of the Week”), others based on specific columnists (Nicholas Kristoff, Farhad Manjoo’s State of the Art column).

The feed also contains exclusive, tweet-length content from Times newsroom staffers and columnists, using a bot to pull that stuff straight from the Times’ Slack channel. (The fact that this Slack thing is just a tidbit in a story about a much larger feature provides another reminder, if you needed one, of how far ahead of almost all other newspapers the Times is in everything from app development to user research to developer resources.) Outbound links to non-Times stories will occasionally be included as well.

The Times’ previous experimentation with customized content and messaging provided the necessary foundation to pull off the launch, said Norel Hassan, the lead product designer of Your Feed. “It took about six months,” she told me, including in-person research. Hassan’s post announcing the launch of Your Feed is interesting to read all the way through, but one key thing she notes is that the Times’ first assumption about what readers would want from a new feature proved wrong:

Our initial hypothesis was that readers wanted a better way to save content, but in the end, we discovered that the ability to follow different types of content was the greater user need…

It became clear that the ability to follow New York Times content was a promising opportunity to serve unmet user needs. Of all the hypothetical features we tested, Follow proved to have the fewest number of workarounds, while also solving for several different user needs at once. It was the biggest hole our team could fill in our product.

(You can also save articles on the Times app, by the way.)

“Your Feed” is entirely curated by editors — there’s no AI at work here the way there is in another recent Times product launch, the “Your Weekly Edition” newsletter that surfaces some content based on what logged-in users have read on the site in the past. “We don’t want to send an overwhelming amount of content to our readers,” Hassan said. She explained in the blog announcement:

We couldn’t make topic-based channels draw content algorithmically because it could inundate users’ feeds — we may publish dozens of stories on a particular topic in a given week, for example. So our topic-based channels (Climate Change, Health & Fitness, Space) are curated by New York Times editors who ensure we deliver a diverse selection of stories.

More personalization might ultimately be built into Your Feed, said product manager Kika Gilbert but not without explicit signaling. “We don’t want to put anything in there that will surprise people,” she said. (I was pleasantly surprised that this is a women-led product team.)

The most surprising thing in my week-long test of Your Feed, in fact, was that when I opened it, I often saw articles I’d seen in in previously. It’s not updated 24/7 — and this, according to Hassan, is by design. “

“Interview after interview, users discussed how they feel overwhelmed and want solutions for navigating a nonstop news cycle,” she wrote. In previous messaging experiments, “Too many new stories resulted in users ignoring the feature. Readers said it was too close to their real email inboxes and it made them feel like they were working through a to-do list, instead of catching up on their interests in an enjoyable way.”

The New York Times now has around 2.33 million paid digital-only news subscribers (not counting subscribers to Crosswords and Cooking). 15 percent of those subscribers are from outside the United States. The New York-based, East-Coast-centric news organization is now seeing higher growth rates outside the U.S. than within it.

Canada was the biggest market for the Times outside the U.S., even before the Times began officially devoting more resources to growing its reporting and subscriber base in the country. Now Canadian subscribers make up around 27 percent of the Times international subscriber base, according to a Canadaland interview with Times Canada bureau chief Catherine Porter this past spring; that works out to something like 94,000 subscribers. (2,330,000 × .15 × .27 = 94,365.) By some estimates, that’s more paying Canadian digital subscribers than any Canadian news organization can claim.

The Times officially began building out its presence in Australia at the beginning of last year, as part of a three-year, $50 million-plus global expansion plan — and now Australia is its fastest growing market for subscribers. (Again, by percentage growth — the Times didn’t share country-by-country subscription numbers.)

So how has the Times approached building up coverage, using a relatively lean editorial staff, that can convince English speakers in other countries to pay for the Times, despite many local alternatives have been covering their respective countries for longer?

“One of the things we always talk about is our cocktail of content — that is, what mix of New York Times stuff is going to make somebody, particularly somebody far away, or somebody who doesn’t feel today the Times is for them right now, think that this is totally relevant for me, and I want to have a relationship with that news organization?” Jodi Rudoren — newly promoted to associate managing editor for audience this month — told me. (Rudoren will still be overseeing the Times’ international expansion efforts as part of the new role; the work is just reframed slightly to fall under the wider mandate of expanding coverage and identifying underserved audiences.)

The individual components aren’t surprising.

“Local stuff will overindex everywhere,” Rudoren said, so a Times push into a new geographical region necessarily means more geographically specific coverage. Then, “we make sure we make stuff that’s big everywhere. Every piece of content we produce for Australians may be overindexing in Australia, but that’s still probably a smaller number of Australians than all the Australians who are reading, say, our Harvey Weinstein investigation.”

She pointed to the organization’s approach with Peter Goodman’s piece on the repercussions of a near-decade of budget-cutting in Britain; about 20 percent of the story’s readers came from the U.K.

“Then, when we’re able to connect the global and local, it’s very powerful for people,” Rudoren said. A Q&A with Maggie Haberman (American) and Times Sydney bureau chief Damien Cave (also American) in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s meeting with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is one example of that Timesian cocktail.

“Then the last ingredient, is how we stir that cocktail. We don’t want to do commodity news in local markets. We need to have the Times special sauce, whether that’s more analysis, more visuals. We are not trying to match The Australian page-for-page, or any other local paper that might be in that market.”

This approach muddles a simplistic demographic portrait of an international Times subscriber. In Australia, for instance, “we’re still aiming for an audience of Australians, and a global audience at the same time, to some degree,” Cave, told me. “Our audience both in Australia and outside Australia is diverse, and includes a whole lot of people in the country who may have moved here from other countries, and includes Australians who live in other parts of the world. I get emails from Australians in Malaysia. I get emails from Americans in Sydney.”

Rudoren was hesitant to pin down a playbook for how the Times launches in other countries, though the editorial push in Australia was something of an incubator for audience development ideas and testing that “cocktail of coverage.” Both she and Cave used “experiment,” “learning,” and “audience-focused” liberally.

“We’re starting to experiment with things like going to audiences that have already gathered, whether it’s a large Facebook group like Yanks Down Under, or poetry groups, or arts organizations that have gathered audiences — anyone we think naturally could be New York Times subscribers,” Cave said. “These are things we’re thinking about now: If someone doesn’t know about us, how do you get the Times present in their lives as often as possible?”

The Times manages its own Australia Facebook group of more than 7,000 members, which Cave said has been a useful audience sample and sounding board, helping the Times “learn more quickly how to cover this place in a way that’s less likely to offend.” (When the Times announced its Australia bureau, its illustration of a kangaroo and a reporter coming out of its pouch set off a few “American outlet writes about quaint little Australia” concerns.)

Hiring requirements for @nytimes in Australia:
* Kangaroo riding a must
* Drop bear fighting desirable
* Good with cliches
* BYO cork hat pic.twitter.com/6YXY9yAvyb

— Karen Sweeney (@karenlsweeney) January 23, 2017

Editors of a new Australian literary magazine Liminal, focused on the Asian Australian experience, took over the Times Facebook group for a couple of weeks, for instance, and led discussions on the country’s changing demographics and culture. The Times has adapted its Metropolitan Diary into Australia Diary, which collects reader-submitted stories about the place (only one segment on vegemite so far).

The Times Australia also added a food critic who follows a traditional anonymous-reviewing, multiple-visits process, and it’s looking to add another correspondent. Times reporters have done events across Australia. The influence sometimes flows the other way: The Times style guide requires Indigenous and Aboriginal to be capitalized when used in reference to Australia’s First Peoples.

In Australia, Times subscriptions have “doubled over the past year,” according to a spokesperson. Cave’s Australia newsletter hits open rates above 75 percent. The main Times app now has an Australia section, and on NYTimes.com, there’s some small-scale geotargeting for some regions.

“We’ve been looking at more metrics like: If you read, say, two stories, what are the stories you read? What I’m trying to figure out is what are the proxies for deeper engagement — what are the proxies for repeated use and habituation in a place like this?” Cave said. “It’s what the whole NYT is trying to do, but I’m trying to figure that out on a more granular scale. Our readers are not going to read 100 Australia stories. So what’s the right mix?”

Along with the U.K., Canada and Australia are the company’s three largest non-U.S. markets right now — a group obviously unified by the strong market for news in English. Translating Times stories opens a new window to more readers, but it also adds layers of complexity. The Times’ Chinese and Spanish sites publish around 12 stories per day in their respective languages; it’s also starting to add landing pages for other languages, like French. The Times now has a Montreal correspondent, who kicked off a “road trip” based in part on reader suggestions, with some of the reporting and promotion process conducted in French and some of the stories also translated into French.

“Now we’ll add a more focused program of translating content into French for the Quebec audience to see how that works with engaging them,” Rudoren said. “We’ll probably try different versions of that with other audiences where we think we have bigger opportunities, like Germany and South Korea.”

The Times hasn’t formally tried to convert Chinese and NYT en Español readers into subscribers yet. (The paywall for readers coming to the main Times site from all regions is the same across the board.) It’s still trying to add to the available coverage in these languages.

After a consistent experiment with Spanish translations, The New York Times en Español officially launched in early 2016, and puts out an email briefing with a “quarter million subscribers or so,” according to Rudoren, gathering original, fully translated, and English-language stories from around the Times as a sort of “guide” for a bilingual readership.

The Times site in Chinese launched in 2012 and was swiftly blocked in China, which has left the Times targeting the Chinese diaspora more than mainland readers. A new briefing in Chinese is also in the works.

“Both sites are in their own ways refining their strategies in actually similar ways. We are going to integrate their offerings more into our core English report,” Rudoren said. “There are a lot of readers in both Spanish and Chinese who can read across languages to whom we want to offer a more robust experience that can lead to subscriptions. We’re continuing to refine our choices of what and how best to translate, and that is a much more complicated cocktail.” The Modern Love column in translation, though, is a consistent hit every week.

“The important thing in all these teams is that we are not doing it from New York, and they aren’t all American: They’re from the places their audiences are from,” Rudoren said. “Their decisions are completely informed by the local news cycles, the local social media conversations, the local search terms. They are looking at the Times report with the lens of readers in those markets and those languages.”

The conference call The New York Times held for some of its subscribers Friday featured Times ISIS reporter Rukmini Callimachi, producer-reporter Andy Mills, and the editorial director of the Times’ international expansion efforts Jodi Rudoren. It kicked off with about 15 minutes of technical difficulty — a confusing total silence for any subscribers who dialed in (including me, trying to figure out how I’d write this story if I didn’t end up getting on the call).

Finally, a voice came onto the line: “I think we just spent 10 minutes talking to ourselves.”

The next 30 minutes — the call was extended to make up for the technical hiccup — was anything but routine business. Callimachi, Mills, and Rudoren chatted like old friends. They teased each other (Mills is the one who cries easily, Callimachi will run into rooms soldiers are afraid to enter). They talked about how the narrative of Caliphate, the Times’ podcast about reporting on ISIS, came together. They talked about its closing music. They talked about reporting risks. They talked about helping sources understand the risks of talking on record to the Times. They talked about reporting while female (“ISIS is a male beat. It’s a bunch of bros, writing about a bunch of guys, doing things with guns”). Callimachi has done a lot of press and events already on these subjects, but she sounded unpracticed, lively, and totally normal on the call.

The New York Times has now held around 10 of these calls for its subscribers who pay for the All Access Plus or Home Delivery tiers. In addition to the Caliphate call, Times reporters and editors have discussed with subscribers everything from racial inequality to Game of Thrones to the opioid crisis. “Several hundred” subscribers typically dial into these calls, according to senior manager of events marketing at the Times Elizabeth Weinstein, and the demographics are “a broad mix.” (The Caliphate call featured a question from someone in the Netherlands.)

“We’ve tried live chats, we’ve tried livestreams. And then just experimentally, we’re trying conference calls. We weren’t sure how they would work out initially — the format sounded a little analog to us,” Weinstein said. “We’ve really been encouraged by the number of people on these ‘participatory podcasts,’ as I like to think of them. As we’ve continued to do them, we noticed momentum building.” (The Atlantic has held similar calls before. The Information holds frequent conference calls for its subscribers. They’re more common for the trade press and niche publishing than for general-interest outlets like the Times.)

The calls follow a tried-and-true two-way format, with an editor as host asking journalists about the reporting process, followed by call-ins from interested listeners, chosen by Times staffers managing the call from an online dashboard, which queues up all caller questions. How very radio!

The Times then makes the recording of the call for subscribers (though the audio versions of many previous conference calls are accessible on the main Times events page to anyone who’s looking right now). It turns out the subscribers who are happy to pay a higher price for Times content and interested enough to dial into a conference call are forgiving of call interruptions, too.

“In one of our early calls, the reporter was actually on the phone on the road and our editor was sitting in the office with us. The reporter and the line dropped at one point, the reporter cut out, and we were sitting there, horrified. We thought, this is really embarrassing,” Ben Cotton, the Times’ executive director for retention and customer experience, said. “But then we got an overwhelming amount of positive feedback about the call — that to the listeners it felt really real, that yes, the line cuts out when a reporter is in a bad service area. Of course, we hope that doesn’t happen all the time, but here is this experience into the real life of a journalist.”

The Times added 139,000 digital-only subscribers in the first quarter of this year, bringing its digital-only subscriber total to around 2.8 million (a number that includes targeted paid products like crosswords). It’s understandably ramping up all things subscriber-focused in order to keep these paying readers interested and paying. It’s been experimenting with how to advertise subscriber-only events like conference calls to a wider group of people, and how best to promote events more broadly as encouragement for people to pay for that first subscription or to bump their subscription to a higher tier.

This year, it’s rolling out a guide a month, all available only to subscribers, centered around “living better.” Each Caliphate episode is available a week earlier for subscribers. It’s letting subscribers enter a lottery to attend the Times’ morning news meetings on May 17 and May 30, with five slots for each day (editors have brought guests in plenty of times before).

“We find that subscribers are really intrigued by things that the newsroom is putting a lot of energy and effort into and making a priority of. It’s very much a two-way dynamic,” Cotton said. “When people come in for the first time, we try to give them a flavor of the best of the newsroom through some of the things we’re doing. We’re always soliciting ideas from subscribers or anybody else, and I think the whole program will continue to evolve over the course of this year.”

That was the tease from New York Times assistant managing editor Sam Dolnick at the Times’ 2018 Digital Content NewFronts presentation. (There are many more presentations coming throughout the week, and Digiday published this overview of the advertising industry’s mega-event.) AdWeek shared this exchange:

“What does The New York Times know about television?” asked [Times COO Meredith] Kopit Levien, somewhat rhetorically.

“Over the past decade there has been an explosion in TV. The Times hasn’t been a part of it and we should be,” said Dolnick.

He added: “We think (dating column) Modern Love should be a series on TV. The Crossword Puzzle. That could be a game show.”

Dolnick is charged with exploring other avenues for Times content after the gateway success of the 15-month-old The Daily podcast, so thinking outside the (crossword) box is helpful. The Times is already bringing its medical investigative column to Netflix, announced earlier this month: “Dr. Lisa Sanders, the creator of the long-running column in the New York Times Magazine, shares details of unsolved patient cases for you to diagnose. Whether you’re a doctor, a patient or an amateur medical sleuth, your ideas could potentially help save a life. Readers with the most promising suggestions may be included in an eight-part Netflix series that will air in 2019.”

The New York Times will also be featured in a film about its investigation into Harvey Weinstein and a Showtime behind-the-scenes documentary series about its reporting on the Trump administration, though neither of those projects are produced by the organization itself.

Where is the line between repurposing reporting for streaming or TV shows and showing behind-the-scenes production? Columbia Journalism Review’s Mathew Ingram was not enthralled with the idea of the latter when BuzzFeed’s weekly Netflix show was announced last month:

It’s easy to see why BuzzFeed would jump at a Netflix series — it could potentially give the site a higher profile with a different audience, act as a teaser for upcoming stories, and maybe even teach the public some “news literacy.” And it’s easy to see why the streaming service would be interested in doing it: Netflix has a desperate need for more and more content, and Follow This is a good way to experiment with the 15-minute format (which Facebook Watch is also going after). But is there any real demand for this kind of content, apart from journalists and their friends?

But back to crosswords. The crossword puzzle is over 100 years old and remains a print mainstay, but crossword apps are available (and have not always been perfect; see the Times’ crossword app circa 2014). The New Yorker just introduced a weekly online crossword, two decades after an earlier attempt. Are crosswords making a comeback in the digital age? Does that comeback mean we get a show about it?

My favorite thing about the New York Times' digital success is how much of it is due to the crossword puzzle — almost a third of its subscription growth comes from people signing up for the puzzle

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) February 8, 2018

Crosswords are a big success, but here are the facts: pic.twitter.com/tnDky8ZbaZ

— Eileen Murphy (@NYTeileen) February 8, 2018

New York Times added 308,000 digital news subs Q1 2017 (plus 40,000 for Crossword) https://t.co/DcVd8kuCrO

— Shan Wang (@shansquared) May 3, 2017

The story behind The New York Times’ largest and most ambitious crossword puzzle https://t.co/Hs9ofZEfre via @Verge

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) December 19, 2016

Elisabeth Goodridge, editorial director of newsletters and messaging at The New York Times, presented a selection of the Times’s 55 different email newsletters (the Times newsletters benefit from some serious internal investments on the product side as well: it’s building a new email service platform for them).

“You can’t just be an editor and write something and send it to somebody else,” she cautioned. “You have to know how the product is doing, how you’re going to refine it — and not just your text, but your product, your audience, and your deliverability.”

Thinking about a more niche newsletter targeting a subset of your audience? Here’s The New York Times basic checklist when it thought about launching its Game of Thrones newsletter:

Make sure you consider send time: that GoT newsletter also went out on Tuesdays, because readers would watch the shows on Sunday night, read internet recaps on Monday, and then read the mother of all recaps from Times on Tuesday. 80,000 people subscribed, the newsletter went out eight times, and every email had a 60 percent unique open rate.

Monica Guzman, of The Evergrey newsletter in Seattle, which is focused on building (and serving) a dedicated local audience, spoke about her small team’s guiding principles when crafting the emails: curious, honest, useful, bold, and inclusive. Every day, the newsletter opens with a good morning or a hello, and then moves into a piece of original Evergrey content.

It focuses on residents who feel they haven’t found a “tribe” yet in a city they’re still trying to settle into, and maintains a (no “ICYMI”-type lines, which make busy people feel guilty they’ve somehow missed something they shouldn’t have missed).

“Pro tip for local: Anything that is a hidden gem, delight, that people feel they have insider knowledge, they love to share,” Gúzman said. A callout for hidden murals around the city, for instance, generated a ton of reader responses.

The presenters made it clear that newsletters, done well, with real staff behind them, are serious revenue streams. Poder360, a Brazilian political outlet styled like Politico in the U.S., now has around 11,000 paid subscribers, sustaining a staff of more than 30 at the entire Poder360 organization (the news site, its various opinion verticals, an events business). 95 percent of the organization’s audience comes via mobile phone.

The morning newsletter The Skimm — which has been branching into a paid calendar app and podcasting and other products — is now a true behemoth (including registering 110,000 people to vote). It’s built up an audience of seven million female “millennial” subscribers, slotting into a busy day:

So how does an organization get to so many subscribers? How do you get people to give you their email in the first place? Make sure there’s encouragement to forward to their friends. Find the people who already have a lot of connections in their communities, and get their input and partner with them before you even launch the newsletter. Build a good, prominent email signup page (“TheSkimm.com, almost to an extreme, is just an email sign up,” Dheerja Kaur, the head of product and design at the company, said).

You can watch the full panel here:

Adobe is sunsetting the software, which powered so many early web games and videos, in December 2020; browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari have already choked off or limited support for Flash Player over the past few years.

The fate of so many Flash games and interactives, absent proper guardians, is part of a broader problem: how to rescue work painstakingly built on now-outdated formats from the dustbin of internet history.

It’s one The New York Times has been grappling with for its two decades of online content. The entire organization is moving from a previous version of the system that had been powering NYTimes.com to the latest framework. (For those following extremely closely, the stack was called NYT4 from 2006 to 2014 and NYT5 starting in 2014; the new system is called VI.) With these changes, article pages can get broken or shoehorned into a new page format in which important elements of the original piece disappear. The Times has recently started moving its published content — that’s everything from web pages to images to fonts to CSS files — from its own data centers to cloud services, spurring a concerted internal push to systematically un-break and preserve as many of its older pages as possible.

Readers can now see some public-facing fruits of that labor. The Times started directing some traffic to old stories to archive.nytimes.com in the past few months. If you go searching for the Times’ real-time coverage of the 9/11 attacks, for instance, you might get to the this archived page, where you’d see the page nearly exactly the way it appeared to site visitors on that day in time. (There aren’t live ads on these archived pages, mostly since the old ad technologies being used on those pages no longer work. Nor would you see modules like “Most Read” or “Most Emailed.”)

These preserved pages are all in front of the Times paywall for now; there’s an interesting thread going here about making the case for archiving in newsrooms and practical archiving approaches, from Ben Welsh of the Los Angeles Times. (Welsh is himself the man behind the homepage-archiving site PastPages, which we first wrote about back in 2014.)

“When we started this effort last summer, it was exciting to have people involved who believed it was important to preserve the original presentation of things,” Eugene Wang, a senior product manager at the Times, said. Wang is part of a core team that works on the Times’s archiving efforts, which are part of a broader internal effort called Project Kondo (as in, life-organizing phenomenon Marie Kondo) to review old features and initiatives on the site — and then decide what to save and what to shut down. “There was one path we could’ve taken where we’d say: We have all these articles and can render them on our new platform and just be done with it. But we recognized there was value in having a representation of them when they were first published. The archive also serves as a picture of how tools of digital storytelling evolved.”

Here’s “Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games,’” a 2012 New York Times magazine story, as it appears on the site today.

Click on “see how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com” and it’ll take you to the archive.nytimes.com version of the article, which has mostly replicated the original flash game that accompanied the story online in 2012:

(We wrote about that story when it came out in 2012 if you’re interested in how it was made.)

“Because we were moving things from one domain another, from www.nytimes.com to archive.nytimes.com, some of them depended on assets existing on certain paths that wouldn’t be on those specific paths anymore. So we needed to figure out how to identify in an automated way these pages that were not maintained but being shown to readers,” Times software engineer Justin Heideman, who built internal tools to help create the online archives, said. “A lot of the things we discovered were already broken. These were things built 10 years ago, maybe more, that nobody had been maintaining for maybe 9.5 years. And when we do come across a thing that’s broken, it’s a bit of web archaeology to figure out why it’s broken, if it’s broken for any unique reason, or if there’s a whole class of pages that are broken that can be fixed as a class.”

The Times team first made sure to screenshot via Google Chrome and save to Google Cloud 740,000 articles that would at least be preserved in that way, should something go seriously wrong in the archiving process. I’ll let Heideman describe what he built to actually move pages into the official Times web archive. (He also described the technical process in depth at a talk last November at RJI’s Dodging the Memory Hole, if you’re interested in additional nitty gritty.)

For the archiving itself, we built a tool I called the ‘munger.’ It’s basically a big complicated find-and-replace engine in JavaScript, where we find references to servers that aren’t running, dynamic code blocks, old tags, and all kinds of other junk and strip it out or clean it up. The end result we get is tidied, clean HTML that we can share with the world and that has a more reliable set of dependencies. The munger runs with un-modified data we copied into Google Cloud Storage and outputs archival HTML into another GCS bucket, so we can re-run the pipeline again and again as we discover/fix bugs.

We also tried to update pages from HTTP to HTTPS, and to facilitate this we used the same tooling for screenshotting to analyze the pages in a real browser and see if they would throw mixed content errors (where an HTTPS page tries to load HTTP content), which could break a page. So our archive is a mix of HTTP and HTTPS pages. It is simply not practical for us to fix every page. We do this by injecting a bit of data about the page into the page itself, which lets a script we also inject figure out if it should be HTTPS or not, in addition to adding a visual header on the page letting visitors know that it’s an archived page.

“Some stuff just keeps working fine. For the most part, this is a thing that people rarely think about except when things go wrong. These stories are so dependent on code, on special designs, and everyone needs to be focused on their next stories, so there’s overall not much thought given to how old stuff works,” Albert Sun, assistant editor of news platforms at the Times, said. “When we make a transition to use the latest and greatest website system — one that gives us the latest ad framework, that plays well with the subscriber model, is nicely mobile-optimized — we can lose a lot of that original work. Given the amount of work and attention and care that’s gone into producing all of these pieces over the years, this seemed like a real shame.”

Visitors to broken pages have sent in feedback. There’s also an internal form for reporting issues. Still, pages will always be breaking. Tens of thousands of NYTimes.com pages, for instance, contain Flash graphics, Heideman said. After 2020, when Flash support formally ends, what will places like the Times do with all that content? And Flash is far from the only issue. To name just one other major headache: Last year, the Times started enabling HTTPS on NYTimes.com, but stories before that were not being served over a secured connection. (Meredith Broussard and Katherine Boss at NYU have been thinking additional steps ahead and researching methodologies that would allow newsrooms to fully preserve their news apps and interactives even as the technologies they were built on change.)

“There are some instances of old stories where, when we put them into the archive we were still getting a ton of reader interest on them, or it turned out a story ranked really strongly in search and people were upset their links stopped working,” Sun said. A 2005 David Leonhardt project around income and class in America, for instance, was being assigned as part of class reading. “A bunch of people actually wrote in to say: I can’t do my homework. That was a good reminder that people, over a decade later, still find value in that page.”

“For us, there are implications outside just our own pages to making sure things we served back then on a particular path, continue to be there forever. For instance, Google Search may have indexed one of our photographs of George Bush, and if we broke that image, people may lose that search, and we lose that referral traffic,” Heideman said. “We like to think of ourselves as the paper of record, but then it’s important that we actually keep those records.”

(Somewhere, Nicholson Baker is laughing — and here’s an archive.nytimes.com article page to prove it.)

2018 is likely to finally be the year that more Americans get news online than from TV (we were almost there last year). Right now, it’s primarily an older crowd that watches TV news: 58 percent of those over 65 often get news from cable, for instance, versus just 10 percent of those 18 to 29, according to Pew.

But — young people have to get their hard news video somewhere, right? (Uh…right?) Enter Facebook and Netflix. Twin reports yesterday: Facebook is launching a hard news section on its Watch portal (as Campbell Brown had previously suggested at Recode’s Code Media conference). Axios’s Sara Fischer reported that “Facebook is in touch with both legacy and digital-first news publishers to test a daily video feature that would run for at least a year,” and content would need to be at least three minutes long.

Netflix, meanwhile, seems to be thinking something much longer than three minutes: It’s reportedly planning a “weekly news magazine show” to rival 60 Minutes and 20/20. “Netflix has spotted a hole in the market for a current affairs TV show encompassing both sides of the political divide and [is] seeking to fill it,” an unidentified source told MarketWatch.

The success of The New York Times’ The Daily with young audiences seems like a positive sign for a Netflix news show: The Times announced in October that two-thirds of The Daily’s listeners are under 40 and more than a third are 30 or younger. Meanwhile, even back in 2012, more than half of 60 Minutes’ audience was 55 or older. And Netflix has already found success as a platform for documentaries; perhaps it could optimize some of its news output to have a longer life on the service.

The potential for Facebook seems less clear. For one thing, Facebook and its video experiments garner approximately zero goodwill among publishers these days.

I don't get you, Facebook. It has annoyed news outlets by fanning then ignoring multiple news video projects, and now it's trying again at a trough in publishers' trust in the platform? https://t.co/sCbKCLgQzE

— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) March 13, 2018

Facebook is "trying to create more meaningful engagement on its platform" by launching a new video silo that doesn't have monetization capacity or metrics to measure its success. OK. https://t.co/HAk2TymInr

— Margarita Noriega (@margarita) March 13, 2018

Brown had said at Code Media that “hard-news video is really hard to monetize, it just is.” It’s also not really what people come to Facebook to watch.

Alongside the new story form, the Times will also use Caliphate to experiment with giving subscribers early access to new episodes through both its website and the Times app, which added podcast playback in an update last December. At the time, The Times said that the new feature would make it easier for readers to listen to podcasts while reading other Times articles, but it’s now clear that the true potential for in-app podcast support is that the feature opens up new ways to offer these kind of audio-focused subscriber perks. (Apple, alas, offers no such functionality in its apps.)

The idea, while new for the Times, isn’t new for podcasting. Last year audio streaming service TuneIn launched its First Play program, which gave users access to shows from WNYC Studios, HowStuffWorks, and Gimlet up to a week early. (Taking advantage of the early access, however, required the use of the TuneIn app, which likely limited the number of people who opted in.) Gimlet has also used the prospect of early access to new shows to entice people to sign up for its membership program.

this is the kind of stuff I was hoping NYT would make the second I heard they were assembling an audio teamhttps://t.co/QBsBN3WKCJ

— nick “idea guy” q (@nwquah) March 10, 2018

The Times has yet to iron out all the details of Caliphate, such has how much earlier subscribers will get access to new episodes of the show. A Times spokesperson said that the company will have more to share as the show approaches its launch this spring.

I asked the story’s author, Jonah Bromwich, how this was able to happen.

Sure, here is the process! (Cc: @mccanner @palafo) pic.twitter.com/qQ2B22MnSZ

— Jonah Bromwich (@Jonesieman) March 6, 2018

For the record, Nieman Lab is a huge fan of this decision (I mean: this, this, this, not that shruggie is an emoji). The decision was criticized in meteorology circles. We’re still not sure how much snow we’re going to get.

The 2018 Winter Olympics are no different, with Pyeongchang, South Korea partnering with its feisty neighbors to the north, the image of an Olympian redefined in the U.S. after gymnasts testified against their doctor convicted of sexual assault, and news organizations exploring all realms of media to cover the Games. Frankly, there’s a lot going on.

Here are some of the Olympic digital news coverage experiments to keep an eye on during the Winter Games, running until February 25. See others? Speak up!

For the latter, NBC is broadcasting much of the Games live in what it’s calling the “most live Winter Olympics ever,” including a portion on Snapchat. It will introduce the Snapchat Live tool designed for TV networks, according to Digiday’s Sahil Patel, to cover key moments of the games. They’ll also utilize cards built into Snapchat’s Our Stories to show the Games’ schedule, medal counts, etc. and launch a handful of new shows on Snapchat Discover. The shows clearly fit Snapchat’s quick-paced, flashy style, which NBC News has already been practicing with its twice-daily show. The shows feature the trials Olympians face to compete and the stories of how they made it to the Olympics in the first place.

Viewers can also satiate their thirst for the stories coming out of the Olympics with NBC’s podcast partnership with Vox called The Podium. (They’re promising “K-pop, of course. Lots of K-pop.”) The Podium was introduced in December, with early episodes focusing on the global political and cultural context of these Games, but it also includes an Intel-sponsored episode on how technology is changing the Olympics. (You’ll never guess: NBCUniversal is also an investor in Vox Media.)

The New York Times

As my colleague Ricardo Bilton reported, The New York Times has brought back its personal messaging feature connecting readers to an on-the-ground reporter. Instead of using SMS, as in the 2016 Olympics, the team has revamped it to run through their mobile app (much cheaper than mass texting, they learned!) and to personalize content sent to users based on specific sports interest.

“One of the big benefits here is that we do control the whole space,” Troy Griggs, graphics editor at the Times, told Ricardo. “So much more is on the table now. Any interactive experience we build now we can tie together in a way that we wouldn’t be able to elsewhere, even on Instagram or Snapchat. We can really integrate our content and experience in a way that is new.”

On the heels of its augmented reality announcement — “Something profound has happened to your camera” — the Times has also introduced Olympics coverage in AR. Its first feature explores the multidimensional dynamics of Olympic bodies and Graham Roberts, the director of immersive platforms storytelling, described the project’s development (in the humbly-titled “How We Achieved an Olympic Feat of Immersive Journalism”):

Bringing the four Olympians into augmented reality required finding a technique to capture them not just photographically, but also three-dimensionally, creating a photo-real scan that can then be viewed from any angle.

We asked each athlete to demonstrate his or her form at specific moments. Nathan Chen held a pose showing exactly how he positions his arms tightly to his body during his quads to allow his incredible speed of rotation. Alex Rigsby showed us how she arranges her pads to best guard the net from a puck traveling at 70 miles per hour.

For the AR experience, we placed these scans into context — for example, placing Nathan Chen at the 20-inch height off the ground he would be midquad, based off photo reference and sometimes motion capture. In your space, this will truly be a distance of 20 inches because this is all true to scale.

The full AR experience is available in the Times’ iOS app, with some nifty-but-sub-AR visuals also available on the website. The Times also translated its AR feature into four pages of print.

POWER OF PRINT: Eye-catching @Olympics special section in NYT. 4-page foldout to capture @nathanwchen @chloekimsnow @MikaelaShiffrin #AnnaGasser #olympics pic.twitter.com/KbikJhMHWV

— sree sreenivasan 谢瑞睿 (@sree) February 9, 2018

The Washington Post

In 2016, the Post used a bot to write certain Olympics results stories (there are a lot of events!). This year, the Post’s Olympic Twitter bot is generating “short multi-sentence updates” about medals won in all events with a medal tally twice a day and reminders before events from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m. EST, though the Messenger bot does not seem to be running this cycle.

The Post also introduced an AR quiz-based game in its classic app for users to play with the speeds of competitors in nine Winter Olympic sports. (I correctly guessed the four-man bobsled over downhill skilling.) I’m not sure what more the AR component added beyond an in-the-room experience as the mini Olympians raced over my desktop keyboard versus just keeping the game within the app, but this game could ride high on the group sofa competition HQ Trivia has thrust upon us.

The paper’s Olympics coverage also includes a daily newsletter and, in a nod to the Post’s recent lean toward demystifying the jobs of journalists, first-person accounts of covering the Games from rookie Olympics reporter Chelsea Janes.

Some news: I’ll be writing a diary-like blog for the next few weeks in which I’ll chronicle my experiences as a first-timer at the Olympics. We all will probably regret this somehow, so I figured I might as well start things in the toilet. Literally. https://t.co/kFKSrD02or

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) February 6, 2018

Other ways news orgs are Olympic-izing

• USA Today is partnering with Google Assistant to provide daily news and highlights to all devices with the assistant after the prompt “OK Google, play the latest news from USA Today Olympics.” It’s updated every day at 3 p.m. EST and it’s an exclusive partnership.
• Amazon devices have some updates, too: “Alexa, who won gold today?”, “Alexa, what happened in the Olympics today,” and “Alexa, how many medals does Shaun White have?” are all suggested phrasings.
• If you’re interested in digging into the data of the Olympics, the Global Editors Network compiled tips on how to report on the numbers behind the Games, or sports in general.
• The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has embraced the time trans-Pacific time difference in a social media campaign encouraging Canadians to “flip the clock” and stay up late to watch the games.

Roper, who returned to the deluge of responses after coming back from maternity leave, said that the Times got the message, and quickly decided to give its young readers what they wanted: The newspaper said Thursday that it plans to bring back the kids’ section as a permanent part of its Sunday edition, with a monthly insert starting November 19, through the end of 2018.

The new section will differ in some significant ways from the initial project, which had a heavy emphasis on how-to stories (how to make slime, how to design a super hero, etc.) With the follow-ups, however, Roper said that the Times wanted to publish something that better reflected both the newspaper’s sections and its desire to inform young readers about current events rather than just entertain them. To that end, the November edition of the section will include stories about how schools respond to natural disasters, the science of gene editing, and explainers about the voting process and gerrymandering. The section will also include a kids-focused advice column designed to help kids navigate awkward social situations. (Harper, a 14-year-old from Colorado, will provide advice from a kid’s perspective.) Joel Fagliano, a Times digital puzzle editor, created three mini puzzles for the upcoming issue as well.

With the news stories, Roper said that the Times wanted to “think about news stories from the point of view of a kid” while not dumbing down the coverage. Its natural disaster coverage, for example, will talk about what happens when schools get flooded and children have to miss school. To make sure that every story is relevant to readers, the Times will travel to a different public school around the country each month to get a sense of how kids think and what they’re worried about. For the November edition, Roper travelled to Charlottesville, Virginia. “The last thing we want to do is talk down to them,” she said.

The Times isn’t alone in its embrace of content produced for kids. NPR’s “Wow in the World,” which launched in May, gets 200,000 to 300,000 downloads per week, and is joined by Eleanor Amplified, But Why, Tumble Science, and Pinna, a new paid offering from Panoply. The efforts are all driven by a desire to give parents educational alternatives to kids’ spiking screen time. The Times, too, is testing the waters on a kids’ podcast, with a special episode of the Daily that children can listen to with their parents, to be released later this month.

As with the Times’ previous print experiments, the Sunday kids’ section is an effort to make the print newspaper a more powerful, compelling experience, said Roper. In particular, the Times is leaning on the print newspaper as a communal experience that parents can share with their kids, who these days are more likely to have heads buried in a phone screen than in a newspaper. All of this resonates with readers. Sara Fenske Bahat, who helped launch the Change.org petition, said that “it’s been a great experience for our family to be reminded that the physical paper is actually something really nice to share.”

Her husband, Roy, agreed. “It absolutely makes us more likely to subscribe. One of the best parts of getting the newspaper on paper is that we can share it as a family.”