As print news began to lose primacy to its digital avatar, Nikki Usher a researcher and st spent five months at the newsroom of the world’s most celebrated newspaper during early 2010 trying to find a method in the madness of ‘instant news making’. Print volumes failed to pick up after the global recession of 2008 which saw a sharp decline both in circulation and ad revenues. At that time the low cost web versions of newspapers gained popularity as they were free and delivered instantly and globally.
Newspapers searching for new revenue models gave web readers priority treatment and new concepts like fresh news, instant updating and ‘web first’ started doing the rounds.
Instant news making
Usher an assistant professor of media studies at George Washington
University in her recent book Making News at The New York Times recounts her 2010 experience talking to news makers and editors — observing the happenings at the news room and tracking how content flowed from its vast array of reporters and editors worldwide into the print and the web editions of the newspaper. The book races through a breathless period of constant change that coincided with Steve Job’s launch of the iPad tablet and the beginning of the Android challenge to the iPhone, the Nokia Symbian and the Blackberry, bringing dozens of low cost Asian phone makers into play. Usher talks of the cataclysmic changes in the era when the term ‘web first’ was created in the newsrooms and immediacy and instant news making took a precedence to meet rapidly changing timelines.
Till then the conventional procedure of a story going to the home page of the grey lady was extremely rigorous and pretty even paced. It needed endless verification, editing and brainstorming over lead stories and protracted decision- making after long rounds of editorial meetings about what would eventually find place in the home page of the New York Times (NYT). The home page was a coveted spot that usually carried five to six stories drawing attention of
the largest number of readers each day. Not one, not two, but 11 men and 7 women in their collective judgement had the power to decide what was the most important news in the world that could find place in the homepage of the print edition of the NYT. Each copy went up and down the hierarchy in a structured fashion and was vetted by the copy editors, news editors, the homepage editor, executive editors and the managing editors before being selected as the day’s top news story.
Immediacy storms the bastion
The ‘web first’ theory swept away the newsroom hierarchy like a desert storm. Usher writes about how the web edition of the NYT was produced four years ago. “On April 2, 2010, I spent the day with Mick Sussman, one of the morning homepage producers for the US edition. His shift was from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. He explained to me that his goal was to have something new up on the homepage about every 10 minutes (keeping the page looking ‘fresh’).
The big changes that he made were in the ‘A’ column, or the leftmost column going down the homepage; the photo spot, which he tried to change every 30 minutes; and the ‘B’ column, or the column underneath the photo spot, which was a prime spot for a news story other than the top of the ‘A’ column. The nuances of the web page itself often demanded that he do the last-minute editing of these summaries before they went in front of millions of NYTimes.com readers, often going up without any kind of editorial oversight other than his own news judgement and copy editing skills. As I watched Sussman work, I noticed how much hand coding and manipulation of the website he had to do — his job involved not only journalistic judgement but also considerable web skills.”
At all the newsroom meetings the editorial oversight of home page news vanished overnight for the web as immediacy became the new mantra and Sussman and others like him became the all powerful ring master of the circus. A constantly updated home page that played out whole day long at the NYT and other major global newspapers evolved with just one person at its command. Not only did he select and place the stuff but almost always rewrote the headlines and at times much of the stuff on the
home page to get it into a proper rhythm of fresh news flow balanced uniformly for the home page. This is not to say that Sussman was not good or equal to the task given to him but to show that the demands of serving news fresh on the web and keeping the homepage dynamic and in perpetual motion made the structured and multilayered editorial system redundant for the digital edition of the NYT in those early days. Nobody had an answer to why this was needed but Usher who visited NYT recently after her book was published acknowledged that the process of updating stories on the web has considerably slowed down with more editorial oversights and focus today.
Multi format publishing
Four years have passed since the Nikki Usher research and news makers today are grappling not with two but with four to six options of content transmission today. After the web version comes the mobile version which is just a 50 or a 100 word synopsis of the article with links for more reading and all the photos linked separately. Usually the author of the article prepares this content which goes as a blurb for the web and print edition and as the full content for the mobile edition. Mobile users rarely read beyond 100 words and mostly switch format for longer text. Next in line is the social media where the tweets are done either with links to the web version or the mobile version. Video links if any are also included in the web and mobile versions. Last comes the published version on print which is edited rigorously, culled meticulously to meet the word limit constraint of print and has few exclusive high resolution photos that would look great in print edition. This print edition is the well thought out carefully crafted version with multiple layers of editing of the original content that maintains the impeccable quality, the print page word limits, the precise depth and balance — the heritage and pride of most large newspapers worldwide.
