New York Times 2020 Report

Cisforkoke,
Not that I disagree with all of your points here, but I do have to say you are really off base with the first paragraph. It's about one step away from saying the people who put this massive report together don't know what real newspapering is like because they never handled the desk on a Friday night in sports.

One of the members, Karron Skog, is a good friend and has a long background in...copy editing. She's also in her mid 40s. I worked with her at a small daily paper in MN where she copy edited. She then eventually landed at the Virginian Pilot as the copy chief. She went to the NY Times as a copy editor. She rose through the newspaper ranks because of her skills and experience on the copy desk. She then moved up in the Times to become a staff editor. To say she has never been involved in the development of complex articles or doesn't care about strings of text or isn't aware of neutral edits is absurd. I don't know the backgrounds of all of the other people who wrote the report but another, David Leonhardt, won a Pulitzer and also wrote a book that, according to Wiki:

Again, the idea that hasn't been involved in complicated stories is ridiculous.

The ones who worked on this report had a pretty thankless gig. Has any report like this ever been met by people saying, yeah, they nailed it! Of course there will be and should be disagreements about the findings or conclusions, but I just wanted to note that the people who put it together have deep knowledge about all aspects of the biz and brought that to a yearlong project that, ultimately, will hopefully help the most important paper in the country maintain its stature.

 

Yeah, I could have gone on an adventure to research the background of each and every one of the people who signed off. Or I could have reached a conclusion based on what was written. I chose Option B.

A report for what the newspaper should be doing in 2020 should be about more than eliminating layers of editing so the writer's voice isn't lost.

You're saying these people have handled complicated articles, but I don't recall many details in the report about how that process should work in 2020. They were too busy trying to spin graphics into gold -- well, as soon as someone tells them how to do graphics.

 

The pressures facing the industry are forcing people to be working way outside their comfort zone, even at metros. There's a reason why you don't want your plumber fixing your brakes.

 

New York Times thinks more diversity in the workplace, not, you know, coming to the 21st century when it comes to digital, will solve their problems. Shocker

 

They're only 20 years behind Gannett.

 

Newsroom 2000!

 

It's not even diverse. Unless you think a newsroom made up of whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, men, women, gays, straights and transgenders --- 98 percent of whom vote Democratic in every election --- is a "diverse" workplace.

 

Those pesky transgenders.

You know this, but diversity doesn't have to be about political viewpoints. Nor does it have to be about race. It's art, not science.

Good troll, though. You compelled me to respond.

 

Just checking ... where is that business model where digital-first supports a newsroom?

 

Hey, I'll probably wind up regretting this, but here goes anyway. Perhaps I can add some context and clarity. Or perhaps I'll just give the trolls a target. Anyway, for the better good.

Let's start with the idea that I am very wary of reducing the editing we currently do. It's one of the things that has made us stand out from our competitors, especially when other outlets are cutting way back in this area. That said, we've long had a problem with duplicative copy editing -- where an article is backfielded as we call it, given a full read by the copy desk and sometimes slotted or at least read again by the producer either before it's published online or shortly after. It's just not a smart allocation of resources to have that story sent back through the copy desk again for the print edition hours later. Are things caught? Of course. But you can read things over and over and over and catch a lil something every time. At some point, you have to move on.

On "visual experts:" that doesn't mean you stop breaking news. It simply means that you have visual people involved in story ideas early in the process to add their expertise on how stories can be presented, and that includes breaking news. It's not about replacing shoe-leather reporting. But it also does mean that you empower visual journalists to produce content that doesn't necessarily have a written story with it. That can take many forms.

As for your point here on videos, well, I'll give you the fact that most readers probably don't even realize we produce videos. But we're hopefully not doing too many half-ass ones, or any one-alarm fires. Sure some of our facebook live productions are pretty raw, but that's the nature of the platform and I think pretty well accepted by that viewership. Instead, we're hoping to produce things like this, which has been nominated for an Academy Award, or this from the Olympics.

Can small shops do that? Of course not. So it's a matter of scale. And when you find yourself scaling down to schmucks eating Cheetos at one-alarm fires, you've gone too far. Spend that same amount of time building up to one big project, and I bet you'd have a bigger impact.

 

So, some interesting things here. You "skimmed" the report and then made assumptions. Well, as has been pointed out, one of the authors of the report made her bones as a copy editor. While there were no current reporters on the team, there was a Pulitzer winner (also previously pointed out) and two other veteran reporters who have moved on to editing. Among them, they have bylines from 49 states and a number of countries. This was not a team of 20somethings. The Pulitzer winner, by the way, was an economics reporter. I think there were some complex articles there.

As for your take on graphics, we're not talking about static maps and tab charts. We're talking graphics like this one. Take a moment and scroll to the bottom to see the credits on this piece. It was part of a series that, quite honestly, was like "climbing Everest." And when you talk about "compatibility issues," you're now talking about how something like this plays on desktop and a half-dozen or more mobile platforms, not to mention some sort of print version. So it's more involved than you might think.

 

It's been almost a couple of weeks since I've read the full report and management's action plan that went with it (I'm not sure if that was public), but if it's not clear I can assure you that we're going in the opposite direction. I can guarantee we'll be producing fewer URLs every day, but hopefully more appealing and more attractive. Doesn't mean breaking news won't be pushed up fast; that's still the business.