- A ten-person task force at the New York Times assembled to do a "a deep-dive reporting project on our own paper and industry" to "develop smart, sound ways to lift our fortunes through our journalism." The resulting, bluntly worded report had a very limited distribution. After executive editor Jill Abramson's abrupt firing, someone at the Times leaked the report.
The Full New York Times Innovation ReportAn internal report on digital innovation at the New York Times, obtained in full by Mashable, highlights the paper's struggle to embrace online publishing. BuzzFeed on Thursday published an almost-complete version of the report, which highlights some of the issues that former executive editor Jill Abramson was meant to address.
The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media ageThere are few things that can galvanize the news world's attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson's ouster yesterday afternoon probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter's GDP numbers.- When the weekend rolled around, Derek Willis took a crack at it.
- From the report, emphasis ours throughout:We have a tendency to pour resources into big one-time projects and work through the one-time fixes needed to create them, and overlook the less glamorous work of creating tools, templates and permanent fixes that cumulatively can have a bigger impact by saving our digital journalists time and elevating the whole report. We greatly undervalue replicability.Driven in part by the success of Snowfall, we have gone to extraordinary lengths in recent years to support huge single-story efforts. The ambitions of such projects are central to our brand. But Graphics, Interactive, Design and Social are spending a disproportionate amount of time on these labor-intensive one-offs. Meanwhile, we have repeatedly put off making the necessary improvements to allow our graphics to appear on mobile.
- ProPublica's Scott Klein calls out a passage from the report's next paragraph, which quotes the editor of Quartz:That runs counter to the approach at so many of our digital competitors. “We are focused on building tools to create Snowfalls everyday, and getting them as close to reporters as possible,” said Kevin Delaney, editor of Quartz, which is known for innovative storytelling formats. “I’d rather have a Snowfall builder than a Snowfall.”
@derekwillis “I’d rather have a Snowfall builder than Snowfall” understands neither what made Snowfall great nor how to build new things.
@kleinmatic and begs the follow-up: "Do we have anything like that?" To which the answer is, emphatically, "Yes."- At which point Willis begins the lesson:
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