Yesterday, Buzzfeed obtained an NYT internal report (embedded above):
A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture.
Joshua Benton is impressed by the document:
I’ve spoken with multiple digital-savvy Times staffers in recent days who described the report with words like “transformative” and “incredibly important” and “a big big moment for the future of the Times.” One admitted crying while reading it because it surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years.
I confess I didn’t feel anything quite so revelatory when I read last week’s leaked version — which read like an indoor-voice summary, expected and designed to be leaked to the broader world. This fuller version is quite different — it’s raw. (Or at least as raw as digital strategy documents can get.) You can sense the frayed nerves and the frustration at a newsroom that is, for all its digital successes, still in many ways oriented toward an old model. It’s journalists turning their own reporting skills on themselves.
Zachary M. Seward focuses on the NYT’s declining homepage traffic:
Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its digital strategy … That’s not necessarily a reflection of any problems at the Times but the reality of how news is now distributed on the internet. Homepage traffic is declining at most news sites as readers increasingly find links to news articles from social media, email, and other sources.
He adds that overall “traffic to the Times isn’t falling; it’s just coming in through the ‘side door’ more often.” Ezra complicates this analysis:
Someone has to post an article to Twitter or Facebook. That can be the media brand. It can even be the journalists. But when articles work it’s really coming from the readers. Social media is wonderfully, frustratingly organic. Oftentimes the biggest hits are the ones you never even thought to share.
So the next question is where do those readers — the ones seeding your content, and finding your gems — come from? That turns out to be a very, very hard question to answer. It’s tough to track the chains of social shares. But my experience — and that may not be worth much — is that many of them are coming to your home page.
Both Derek Thompson and Tyler Cowen add their two cents.
The Dish 