Internal schisms at The New York Times over the firing of its executive editor Jill Abramson has led to the leakage of a crucial document on Digital Innovation. The document, which was prepared by a high profile team after months of interviews and research, is an invaluable tool kit for the arsenal of anyone interested in Digital Media. This is the concluding part on this series on the insights from the document

HOW THE US DIGITAL MEDIA IS FINDING ITS AUDIENCE
In print, if the story gets printed, it gets an audience. In online, you have to go find that audience. At The New York Times, the report says, the story is done for writers and editors when they hit ‘Publish’. In contrast, at HuffingtonPost, the article begins its life when the author hits ‘Publish’. HuffPo expects all reporters and editors to be fully fluent in social media. A HuffPo story cannot be published unless it has a search headline, a photo, a tweet, and a Facebook post.

The Guardian has a promotion team inside the newsroom. The Atlantic expects reporters to promote their own work and mine traffic numbers to look for best practices, the authors say.They note that many digital media organizations place a team in the newsroom to track the most popular stories in real time. The team helps the desk to draw more traffic. Other sites repackage unexpectedly poor performers and try to find them a new audience. For instance, Reuters has a two-member team to find up to seven hidden gems per day, which they then repackage and re-publish. According to Dan Colarusso, executive editor of Reuters Digital, “All web editors engage on social, and are also tasked with finding related communities and seeding their content.” At Circa, the document notes, each article is divided into atoms of news such as facts, quotes, and statistics.

The Washington Post will look at data in real time to track which stories are drawing readers from Twitter, and then they show those same stories to other people who visit from Twitter.

The NYT team also found that competitors treat platform innovation as a core function. Buzzfeed spent years investing in formats, analytics, optimization, and testing formats. These are Buzzfeed’s secret weapons:

•   Publishing formats, viz. lists, quizzes, videos, long-form, short-form, breaking news, photo essays, explainers.
• Stats and Analytics.
• Optimization and testing formats.
• Integations with social platforms.
• Native mobile apps.
• User-friendly design.

PROPUBLICA AND STORY MARKETING
The report goes to some length to describe the extraordinary efforts made by ProPublica to publicise its investigative journalism. At ProPublica, an editor meets with search, social and PR specialists to develop a promotional strategy for every story. And reporters are expected to submit five tweets along with each story they file.

Specific strategies are identified for each story ahead of its publication.

1.    An expert is identified to focus on ways to boost a story on Search through headlines, links, and other tactics.

2.    A Social Editor decides which platforms are best for the story, and then finds influential people to help spread the word.

3.    A Marketer reaches through phone calls or emails to other media outlets, as well as organizations that are interested in the topic.

4.    The Story Editor ensures journalism is being promoted appropriately.

5.    A Data Analyst evaluates the impact of the promotion.

(The series concludes here. Earlier installments in this series can be found at the following links: Part 3, Part 2, Part 1)

HOW OLD PRINT HABITS TRIP THE NYT’S DIGITAL PUSH

Internal schisms at The New York Times over the firing of its executive editor Jill Abramson has led to the leakage of a crucial document on Digital Innovation. The document, which was prepared by a high profile team after months of interviews and research, is an invaluable tool kit for the arsenal of anyone interested in Digital Media.

We continue with our learnings from the document.

• The vast majority of The New York Times’ content is still published in the evenings, following the traditional practice of print journalism. This is despite web analytics consistently coming out with the finding that the publication’s digital traffic is busiest early in the morning.
• Again, the newsroom targets ambitious stories for Sundays because on that day the publication has its largest print readership. But online, weekends bring the slowest traffic.
• Coming to the length of stories, the 700-800 word story is considered the sweet spot for print. But print has limited shelf-space, whereas the scarcity economy doesn’t operate online. So why not experiment with more long-form content online?
• The report notes that newsroom leaders spend a lot of time reading stories from other outlets, whereas few are studying their digital strategies, viz., presentation, social presence, search optimization, navigation, and mobile strategy. Even few are looking at the smartphone apps of competitors. The authors found that several stories invited readers to post comments even though the iPhone and iPad apps of the NYT do not allow users to comment!
• The scarcity economy of the limited shelf space of print is affecting digital operations in other ways too. NYT receives quality submissions for Op-Ed articles from hundreds of contributors. But at any given time only a few of them can make it to the print edition. The report notes that many otherwise relevant articles are thus lost merely because the print edition cannot accommodate them. It has, therefore, suggested that these articles may be uploaded to the website where space isn’t a constraint.
• The authors of the report found it amusing that the publication’s content management system, known as Scoop, organizes content in its mobile apps according to web sections, even though the readership of both are different. This can lead to dysfunctions, like when the Business Day columnists, who are a draw with the mobile audience, are organized at the very bottom of the Business Section in the mobile apps just because it is uploaded straight from the web sections. Interestingly, despite this process, graphics made for the NYT’s website still cannot upload to the mobile versions.

While the NYT is saddled with all these legacy print traditions, its competitors are increasingly organizing their operations around digital-first strategies. As Digital First Media said when it announced its Project Unbolt, “Newspapers are still largely print newsrooms with digital operations bolted on”. The authors of the report found this a relevant observation for the digital operations of the NYT as well.

(The series continues. Other installments in this series can be found at the following links: Part 4, Part 2, Part 1)

Internal schisms in The New York Times over the firing of its executive editor Jill Abramson has led to the leakage of a crucial document on Digital Innovation. The document, which was prepared by a high profile team after months of interviews and research, is an invaluable tool kit for the arsenal of anyone interested in Digital Media.

We continue with our learnings from the document.

TRIVIA: NYT DIGITAL OPS
Seven years ago, The New York Times housed its digital and print operations in separate buildings.

The NYT’s mobile app, and its international edition home page, have both failed to gain traction with readers.

The NYT’s content management system is called the Scoop.

The sweet spot for print by convention is the 700-1,100 word story.

Arts and Culture stories were among those that were consistently read, long after their publication dates. On the flipside, these stories are found to be difficult to locate once they are more than a few days old.

The report says The Recommended for You tab of personalized stories for registered website readers is not working properly.

NYT could not create a recipe database because its recipes were not properly tagged. So they invested money to retroactively structure the data.

Again, due to the absence of tagging, NYT is unable to automate the sale of photographs.

Also, the NYT is unable to serve relevant content for mobile users because it doesn’t tag stories with geographic content.

(The series continues. Other installments in this series can be found at the following links: Part 4, Part 3, Part 1)

Internal schisms in The New York Times over the firing of its executive editor Jill Abramson has led to the leakage of a crucial document on Digital Innovation. The document, which was prepared by a high profile team after months of interviews and research, is an invaluable tool kit for the arsenal of anyone interested in Digital Media.

THE SCALE OF NYT DIGITAL OPS       

TRIVIA: NYT DIGITAL OPS
The New York Times produces more than 300 URLs for unique stories every day.
In its archives, NYT has 14, 723,933 articles, dating back to 1851.
Less than 10% of NYT’s digital traffic comes through social media.
Both the website audience as well as smartphone app audience of The New York Times is shrinking.
The pull of the website home page is also declining. Only a third of the nytimes.com readers visit the website’s Home Page.
The report says Home Page views as well as minutes spent per reader are dropping by double-digit percentages.
NYT’s Twitter account is run by the newsroom. Its Facebook account is run by the business side.
Many NYT journalists learned social promotion from their book publishers.
Only a fraction of the stories are opened for comments. Only 1% of readers write comments, and only 3% of readers read the comments.

(The series continues. Other installments in this series can be found at the following links: Part 4, Part 3, Part 2)

Last year when Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Charlie Rose for his 60 Minutes TV show, one of the key takeaways from it, besides the sneak preview offered on Air Prime, Amazon’s forthcoming drone-based home delivery service, was Bezos’ defence of his business practices, especially with regard to the book publishing industry.

He said, “The internet is disrupting every media industry. The future is happening to book selling. Amazon is not happening to book selling.” Responding specifically to the complaints about Amazon, Bezos said: “Complaining is not a strategy.”

I was reminded of this today when I made a casual review of several eBookseller sites, which sell a wide selection of eBooks for buyers around the world. One can very well say that when it comes to sale of eBooks, they are indeed competitors to Amazon.

Why are eBook sellers losing money from potential customers?
I did a very basic comparison of these sites to the Kindle eBooks section of Amazon.com. It was shocking to see these sites leave money on the table because they haven’t got their search function right.

Why are they doing it? If they don’t take care of their own interests, can these sites then complain against Amazon for its competitive instincts?

I adopted a simple methodology. I opened The New York Times fiction bestseller list for eBooks from a couple of weeks ago. I had already downloaded this sometime ago for a comparative study. I went there again and randomly picked up a few bestsellers.

First stop, Diesel eBooks (diesel-ebooks.com). I searched for the eBook Innocence (by Dean Koontz), a current NYT bestseller. This is what I got:

It was not there in the first page of 20 results. In fact the first page is entirely filled with adult fiction eBooks, many of them offered free. Please note that the search defaulted to bestselling.

I made the same search in the Amazon Kindle eBookstore to get the following result:

The NYT bestseller was returned as the top result, with Sort by Relevance as the default search method.

I went back to Diesel, and this time searched for the full title plus the author name. It turns out that the eBook is actually available in Diesel eBookstore, and that too at least for Indian buyers, at a much discounted price to that of Amazon:

On digging further, I found that the title is returned as the 25th result in Diesel when you just search for ‘Innocence’.

Twenty-fifth result! Just imagine. No why would any eBookseller offer a full page of adult eBook fiction as the search results page for Innocence, and return a free eBook as the top result? Shouldn’t its internal search default to relevance like Amazon’s does, and give weightage to an eBook listed as a bestseller by the prestigious NYT ? Scott Redford of Diesel, are you listening?  

Why is eBooks.com ignoring Linda Lael Miller? 
Next stop, eBooks.com. I searched for Linda Lael Miller. Her work Big Sky Secrets is currently an NYT bestseller.
But you wouldn’t know if you searched for her name in eBooks.com:

So I went to Amazon and did the same search:

They know a thing or two about relevance. The search for Linda Lael Miller returns her current NYT eBook bestseller as the top result in Amazon, and not the 20th result as it’s in eBooks.com. Now, how many people abandoned their search for Big Sky Secrets in eBooks.com because it didn’t list it as a top offering from the author?
Shouldn’t the search algorithm of the site be changed to give some weightage to the NYT bestseller list? Stephen Cole of eBooks.com, are you listening?

Why can’t eBookmall.com not search for full title and author? 
See what happened when I searched for the full title and author name at ebookmall.com:

I turned disappointed to Amazon.com even though as a matter of fact, I want small eBooksellers to thrive, and want to purchase eBooks from them, even at a slight loss in price. But it seems they are not interested in helping someone like me.

Amazon recognised the search for the full title and author name of the bestseller, but was not very truthful when it told me that only the hardcover was available. On clicking the result, I could find the Kindle eBook version as well.
So Amazon is not perfect, but still it takes you where you want to go.

I returned to ebookmall.com and performed one more search. This time, just for the eBook title. It turns out the eBook was actually available there:

My message to the promoters of eBookmall is simple. You’ve got work to do to review your search function. Otherwise, you are losing out on potential sales.

Infibeam too has to improve 
What about India? Infibeam (infibeam.com), co-founded by former Amazon employee Vishal Mehta, offers a good selection of eBooks. But here too, I found that they could improve upon their search function a bit more.
Look what I got when I searched for Laura Lael Miller in Infibeam:

Her current bestseller Big Sky Secrets returned as the 30th result. That needs improvement. EBooksellers have to give additional weightage to NYT eBook bestseller lists in their search algorithms and increase public awareness that they do sell these eBooks in their stores. Otherwise visitors to your sites will return disappointed, and you will continue to complain against Amazon.com. Remember, as Bezos said, “Complaining is not a strategy at all.”