The Internal Politics of How Stories Get Placed on the NYTimes.com Homepage

From Nikki Usher’s new book:

[Mick Sussman, one of the morning homepage producers for the U.S. edition] admitted, for instance, that he didn’t have much knowledge about style or sports, so he often relied upon other people to alert him when something was important ...

When a new story popped up in his queue, usually over IM, Sussman would send a headline to [the continuous news editor, Pat] Lyons, also over IM. If Lyons didn’t respond, Sussman would just put up a headline. When I was observing Sussman, he asked Lyons about putting up a story on a conspiracy movie. When Lyons didn’t respond, Sussman put the story up. His justification was, “I think this is pretty interesting,” and he noted that he always liked conspiracy stories. For about half an hour, this story was in the section right underneath the main photo on the homepage — a prominent spot. This is an indication of the latitude that Sussman had over the page, shaping it to his own interests. A few minutes later, the foreign desk alerted him to a story on Saudi Arabia, and Sussman decided to put this story on the homepage. While these stories often went through layers of debate and discussion at each individual desk, their quality depended on this editorial judgment. A breaking story, for example, might be headed to Sussman without quality checks. To some degree, Sussman depended on the quality of work provided to him. However, Sussman was ultimately in control of who saw what story, and for how long, on the web ...

The news [that Google was pulling out of China because of security breaches] was broken on the tech blog Bits. [Mark] Getzfred [the online editor for the business section] then alerted the homepage to the news. The homepage didn’t like the wording and, after briefly posting the Bits blog, took it down and put up an AP story. Getzfred quickly wrote a roughly three-paragraph story on the statement ... Bits then reposted a new version, which Getzfred passed to the homepage, which the homepage liked. The full article then followed, updating Getzfred’s headline version, which stayed on the homepage until something more substantial was ready.