NYTimes.com Extends the Platform: News Video and Blogging Lessons
Important Details: Amid this week’s report of continuing, deep declines in U.S. print circulation — 7% down daily and 5.3% Sunday — we see the acceleration from print to digital picking up speed.
At the New York Times, we can see the broad numbers, in print and online. The Times was down 3.5% for the daily edition, and 1.7% on Sunday, for the six-month period through this March. Online, though, it is still the biggest news company-owned site, with more than 20 million unique visitors monthly in the US spending, on average, more than a half-hour on the site. Its unique visitors count has grown 7% year over year.
The Times continues to innovate, with such solutions as Times Extra (See Insights, Times Extra’s Outside-In Approach Aims for Greater Engagement, January 22, 2009), a new Global Edition, and the opening of its APIs to developers.
For readers, much of the daily change has come in a wider range of news choices, with news video and blogging two of the most prominent features.
The Gray Lady is now a significant news video producer, creating about 25 new video segments per week, according to Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor. They range in subject matter from politics to culture to health to sports.
Supporting this news video move is a staff of 18 in videography. The videography staff both produces and creates — and supports non-video staff as they get their feet wet in moving pictures. Not that all those feet will get wet. “It’s a misguided notion that modern journalists have to have equal skills at Flash, video, audio,” says Landman. Rather, the Times is looking for the most interested staffers and building on those interests, believing that specialization, just as in basic reporting, will prove to be the better model. “We train people in a way that makes sense.”
In addition, the Times is moving forward in its partnership with NBC. It started as a fairly straightforward video and text swap and is now becoming more nuanced. NBC is acutally using some Times-produced video, in cases where the Times reporters have gotten to stories NBC journalists haven’t. In addition, NBC is producing new shows around Times correspondents.
The Times is also moving the video around, finding new distribution outlets. Get on a Jet Blue flight, and you’ll see the Times channel prominently. It is also taking in other news company video, most prominently CNBC’s, in its business section.
Going forward, says Landman, the Times plans to embed more video within stories, as technological issues are resolved.
Blogging has become a more important tool at the Times as well. The site now hosts more than 70 blogs, powered on the WordPress platform. For the Times, Landman says, blogging is more another tool than a distinct form of journalism. “I don’t think of it as separate. People make too much of what’s a real blog. Is it snarky, personal?” More important is what the blog format can offer journalists — immediacy, informality, interactivity.
There are individual blogs, about 20 of them opinion-based ones from key Times columnists, and some that run more to reporting and Q and A, like that of health reporter Tara Parker-Pope.
The Times has also applied the form to whole areas of reporting, like business deal-making (DealBook) and politics (The Caucus). The latter peaked at 18 million page views last October. Deal Book, of course, is in head-to-head competition with the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street, the long-time print feature that saw a significant reporting and web expansion last year.
In a move that foretells greater use of blogging in ad-friendly niches, the Times has been using group blogging by students around the college admissions process.
Blogs overall represent about five percent of the Times sites traffic. We can see rough 80/20 laws coming into play here, as the top blogs significantly outdraw the rest. Typically, about 10 blogs draw more than 1 million page views in a month, half of those pulling in 2 million, and a few totaling more than 3 million. Which blogs make it in the top 10, though, can vary with the vagaries of the news.
Implications: Outsell believes the Times experience is indicative of the product models that need to be built — and more quickly. The basic philosophy is right: the new Web tools, video and blogging among them, are simply great, new storytelling tools, means to an end, rather than an end unto themselves. That’s a a fundamental truth that should spur more newspaper companies to adopt and incorporate them appropriately and speedily.
In a more competitive news environment — where the Times, the Journal, the Guardian and the Telegraph, to name a few — are increasingly competing against major broadcasters and cablecasters, and against blog-forward aggregation sites like the Huffington Post, smart use of video and blogging is an essential. Some companies have gotten there earlier — Telegraph TV is a good example. Today, if you compare the sites of companies with a newspaper legacy and those with TV legacies, you can immediately see the visual difference. Outsell believes this distinction will wane considerably in the next five years. Readers and viewers are increasingly expecting the brand they know to deliver them the news and comment they want, in the form best suited to it.
That means more internal training, faster adoption, faster integration and more deal-making, both in syndicating the “new” content the companies produce and in bringing in relevant partner content to augment its own offerings. The race will go to the smart and the swift.