Innovation Report 2014—Introduction

The New York Times is winning at journalism. Of all the challenges facing a media company in the digital age, producing great journalism is the hardest. Our daily report is deep, broad, smart and engaging and we've got a huge lead over the competition.

At the same time, we are falling behind in a second critical area: the art and science of getting our journalism to readers. We have always cared about the reach and impact of our work, but we haven't done enough to crack that code in the digital era.

This is where our competitors are pushing ahead of us. The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have announced aggressive moves in recent months to remake themselves for this age. First Look Media and Vox Media are creating newsrooms custom-built for digital. The Guardian and USA Today have embraced emerging best practices that have helped grow readership. And Huffington Post and Flipboard often get more traffic from Times journalism than we do.

In contrast, over the last year The Times has watched readership fall significantly. Not only is the audience on our website shrinking but our audience on our smartphone apps has dipped, an extremely worrying sign on a growing platform.

Our core mission remains producing the world's best journalism. But with the endless upheaval in technology, reader habits and the entire business model, The Times needs to pursue smart new strategies for growing our audience. The urgency is only growing because digital media is getting more crowded, better funded and far more innovative.

The first section of this report explores in detail the need for the newsroom to take the lead in getting more readers to spend more time reading more of our journalism. It offers specific strategies and tactics to accomplish this goal, often called audience development.

Simply offering recommendations for improving our efforts to get our journalism to readers is not enough, however. The difficulties we face in audience development are of our need to become a more nimble, digitally focused newsroom that can thrive in a landscape of constant change.

The second part of this report examines specific recommendations that we believe will help strengthen our newsroom for the digital era. That means taking more time to assess the landscape and chart the road ahead, rethink print-centric traditions, use experiments and data to inform decisions, hire and empower the right digital talent and work hand in hand with reader-focused departments on the business side. These needs are all deeply intertwined—getting better at one will help all the others.

This is a moment we are well positioned to seize.

The anxiety that filled the newsroom only a few years ago has mostly dissipated. The success of the paywall has provided financial stability as we become more digitally focused. The sale of other properties like The Boston Globe has allowed the leadership to focus squarely on The New York Times. Both Mark Thompson and Jill Abramson have established themselves as willing and eager to push the company in new, sometimes uncomfortable directions.

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Some of these recommendations will seem obvious; others may seem more controversial at first glance. All were developed with full commitment to the values of The Times and with the understanding that we have few extra resources lying around.

The few new roles we have proposed are not focused on creating new journalism; their goal is to get more out of the journalism we are already creating. We want to help tune the newsroom engine to get all the cylinders firing more efficiently.

It should be stated explicitly that there is no single transformational idea in this report. Transformation can be a dangerous word in our current environment because it suggests a shift from one solid state to another; it implies there is an end point. Instead, we have watched the dizzying growth of smart phones and tablets, even as we are still figuring out the web. We have watched the massive migration of readers to social media even as we were redesigning our home page.

Difficult new questions will arrive with each new shift. In all likelihood, we will spend the rest of our careers wrestling with them. The leader of another organization called this era, “A period of muddling through."

Not a single person among the hundreds we interviewed ever suggested tinkering with the journalistic values and integrity that make the Times the greatest journalistic institution in the world. But we must evolve, and quickly, to maintain that status over the coming decades.