When Does the New York Times Decide to Use Hyperlinks in Stories?

Here’s an email I sent yesterday to the Public Editor of the New York Times:

Good evening Liz,

A few questions for you on the overlooked subject of hyperlinks:

1. How does the Times decide when to link to a person or subject’s internal “topics” page? Is it done automatically by the CMS?

For example, in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/business/media/breitbart-news-presidential-race.html, see “Andrew Breitbart” in the eighth paragraph and “Tea Party movement” in the 10th paragraph.

Also, the same article mentions “the ‘Saturday Night Live’ actor Leslie Jones.” Why the link to SNL but not to Jones?

2. Do reporters insert links when they file, or do editors usually add them?

3. What’s the official criteria for a link? Is there an informal policy?

For example, if you mention a YouTube video, surely it behooves you to link to it — if not embed it. But too often in straight news articles, links you’d expect are MIA.

For example: The same Brietbart article says, “The site refers to “migrant rape gangs” in Europe, and was among the first news outlets to disseminate unsubstantiated rumors that Mrs. Clinton was in ill health.”

If this were a blog post, I’d expect to see links on “migrant rape gangs” and “disseminate unsubstantiated rumors.”

Thanks, Liz.

In Writing Headlines, As in Testing Them, Two Heads Are Better Than One

I love that the New York Times is now doing this!

For a short while on March 15, one reader might have seen this:

$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Trump

While another saw this:

Measuring Trump’s Media Dominance

Any guesses which won the test, and by how much?

The top one got nearly three times as many readers.

A story might be 1,000 words long, but tweaking the tiny handful of words that promoted this one on our homepage gave almost 300% more readers.

In other cases, headline tests have increased readership by an order of magnitude.

When this:

Soul-Searching in Baltimore, a Year After Freddie Gray’s Death

was paired against this:

Baltimore After Freddie Gray: The ‘Mind-Set Has Changed’

The test showed a 1,677% increase in readership for the second one.

Raise Your Hand if This Describes How Your Company Approaches Social Media

“There was a social team that ran Twitter for the newsroom, but Facebook and YouTube were handled by marketing. SEO was handled by the product team, while analytics fell under the consumer insights team.”

Inside the New York Times’s Audience Development Strategy

How Apple and the New York Times Compile Their Media Lists

Apple

The New York Times

When It Comes to Going Viral, Quality Trumps Timeliness

Upworthy and Viral Nova, two of the web’s hottest, most viral sites, don’t care about timeliness—that is, whether they’re the first to break a story. They focus instead on the quality of their content. This is a lesson the New York Times would do well to learn.

Indeed, there are 15 million articles in the Times’s archives. The Gray Lady needs to do a better job of resurfacing this archival content.

For example, earlier this year, Gawker repackaged a 161-year-old Times article on Solomon Northup timed to the release of 12 Years a Slave. The Gawker post generated 200,000 page views.

Such arts and culture stories—about movies, museums, books, and theater—remain relevant long after they’re published. As the Times’s own innovation report puts it, “We can be both a daily newsletter and a library—offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.”

Another example: On a whim, Times staffer Andrew Phelps made a Flipboard magazine of the paper’s best obits from 2013. It became the best-read collection ever on Flipboard. Why isn’t the Times doing stuff like this on its own platforms?

Lessons: Resurface old content (with a caveat). And tag everything.

Addendum: Felix Salmon: “Too many news organizations make their publication decisions based on what other news organizations have already published … when journalists start caring about scoops and exclusives, that’s a clear sign that they’re publishing mainly for the benefit of other journalists, rather than for their readers.”

Addendum (8/12/2014): Matt Buchanan: “There's already a certain apathy toward the origin of things—that's how we wound up with Distractify pulling in 21 million uniques in its second month, Ashton Kutcher funding the ‘fastest-growing site in the history of the Internet,’ and ViralNova.”

Talk to Your Competitors. They’ll Make You Smarter

Another business lesson from the New York Times innovation report (my emphasis):

Staying on top of these trends, particularly in today’s faster-moving media world, requires finding sources, often in leadership roles at other companies, and cultivating ongoing conversations. Alexis Madrigal, the tech writer and digital strategist at the Atlantic, told us how the company was succeeding on mobile through a focus on Facebook and direct emails. Kevin Delaney, the head of Quartz, provided his insights on how to integrate and use developers in the newsroom, and Laura Evans, the former head of analytics at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, helped us understand how those publications are changing—which shifts we should mirror and which we should ignore. These relationships also helped us identify promising digital talent.

“I talk to [Nick] Denton all the time. We both talk to Jacob [Weisberg]. We’re constantly telling each other what’s working, what we’ve experimented with,” said Adam Moss, the editor of New York magazine, referring to the heads of Gawker and Slate. “About half the choices I make come about because someone from another site tells me something worked, and so we adopt it.”

It’s important to capture these conversations as well, so insights can be widely shared. The business-side strategy group shared with us an 80-page transcript of interviews about social strategy that they conducted with the leaders at various competitors. They provided us with detailed assessments of the mobile functions offered by our competitors, which quickly clarified where we need to catch up.

A newsroom strategy group should capture, distill and explain the most important developments and insights to emerge from articles and interviews, perhaps in weekly emails to the masthead.

How to Become a Homepage Editor at the New York Times

These people are chosen because they

• have great news judgment
• are great copy editors
• can work quickly
• rarely make mistakes

Making News at the New York Times

“Sulzberger Needs a PR Advisor More Than He Needs a New Editor”

Hamilton Nolan:

Even if, to play devil’s advocate, this decision turns out to have been a good one, Sulzberger has already blown it. Had he allowed Abramson a graceful exit, been open and honest about the reasons for the move, and taken the blame for the mistakes that created the situation in the first place, the publisher might have emerged from this looking like a competent manager. Instead, he emerges from it looking like a befuddled, craven sexist.

5 Ways the New York Times Completely Missed the Digital Boat

From the paper’s admirably honest and thoroughly reported innovation report:

1. A year and a half ago, Andrew Phelps presented his bosses with a tool he developed: an automated, visual homepage of the day’s report. Editors were enthusiastic, but there was no structure to support the initiative and after several months he gave up. More than a year later, an identical featured appeared on the Washington Post website. Immediately, the Times business side put out a request for a designer or developer interested in building a visual homepage.

2. On a whim Phelps made a Flipboard magazine of the Times’s best obits from 2013. It became the best-read collection ever on Flipboard.

3. Recipes were never tagged by ingredients or cooking time. Consequently, the Times floundered about for 15 years trying to figure out how to create a useful recipe database.

4. It took seven years for the Times to begin to tag stories “September 11.” “We never made a tag for Benghazi, and I wish we had because the story just won’t die,” says a member of the archive, metadata, and search team.

5. After the Times spent more than a year producing a signature piece of journalism—the “Invisible Child” series—the newsroom alerted its marketing and PR colleagues too late for them to do any promotion ahead of time.

Why Your Website Needs Metadata. Now

1. The New York Times

Just adding structured data immediately increased traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52%.

2. The Financial Times

Everyone forgets about metadata. They think they can just make stuff and then forget about how it is organized in terms of how you describe your content. But all your assets are useless to you unless you have metadata—your archive is full of stuff that is of no value because you can’t find it and don’t know what it’s about.

3. Circa

In a typical content management system (CMS) you’ll find a headline field, a main text field, information about the article’s creator, a date of its creation and maybe a field for some metatags—usually basic nouns—included as an afterthought, often for SEO ...

But those basic fields in the CMS fail to capture a lot of the value of information invested in the reporting process. If you asked a reporter about the information in an article you’d get specifics: it contains a quote from the mayor, some statistics about government spending, the announcement of a new zoning permit, a description of a local event, and so on. But that information is adrift inside the main unit of the article—without structure it’s lost, except for the ability to search for a string of words in Google.

At Circa we do things differently. The process of creating a story requires the writer to tag information in a structured way. If we insert a quote, we have two extra fields for the name of the person quoted and an alias—their working title. As a result, I can ask our chief technology officer to search our database for all the quotes we have from, say, Eric Holder. I can also ask to have that search refined by date(s) or topics: “Give me all the Eric Holder quotes from the last six months that are associated with the IRS. Also, I’d like all the aliases we’ve used for him.”

Addendum (10/5/2015): If ever a medium needed metadata, it’s streaming video. Asks the New York Times: “Why can’t you search for, say, movies from the 1970s that involve at least three car chases and six explosions? Or click on Carrie Bradshaw’s dress in any given Sex and the City scene and learn who designed it?”

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.

No, the New York Times Does Not Use Twitter to Break News

Michael Roston:

The Times takes a thoroughgoing and cautious approach to using Twitter when major news occurs. The social media desk operates in concert with, not independent of, our main news desk, which is comprised of homepage, front-page, and masthead editors. The updates we tweet are pegged to news reports that editors have approved and never seek to get out ahead of our news report. We focus on retweeting reporters and editors who are directly involved in covering the news, steering clear of external sources of information whose accuracy we cannot count on.