jodi-rudoren
Allow me to suggest a great read for you. It’s called “the Privacy Project” and it’s sponsored by this wonderful newspaper, the New York Times. I’ve followed it for over 3 months now. Pretty much, it suggests that you and those who attend to you should engage in reading for enlightenment and then self-reflection toward reform. Because if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
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Oh, here we go: You want people to "get addicted" to your journalism? I would ask if you really want to encourage active, informed minds or clicks?
You want "storytelling" as opposed to what - fact based news?
Women don't like "data-heavy analysis"? They do like "personal narrative, visual stories, things with a conversational tone"? Are you trying to build in sexism here?
How about going back to being a truly international newspaper? I am dating myself, but I could do with less self-help and more international news that focuses on other countries as they see themselves. Most NYTimes international reporting seems to focus on how those countries affect the US.
I feel that, although the NYTimes is useful, has done some marvelous national reporting, and I subscribe, I would be a lot happier with a denser, less American centric world view.
At the bottom of this article, I see the following topics, all of which I would ask the NTimes to avoid: "About the Idea That You're Growing Horns From Looking Down at Your Phone", "Honeymoon Hashtag Hell", "How to Organize Your Messy Contacts List"
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Woman here. I find the NYT increasingly light on tech, hard and soft science, history, and maps. My "eyes to content" time per day is moving away from the NYT and doubt AI analytics really captures such migration from current editorial content. Perhaps I am the anomaly as a boomer art historian by training with a passion for science/tech, a nerdy interest in politics, and long interest in eastern Europe. Putin and oligarchs investments in the EU desperately needs more in depth analysis (and yes its ties to Trump). I will absolve the NYT from covering coding per se as a bridge too far.
"... but does mean reconsidering and reimagining how, when and where we tell stories."
"...To get there, we need to help our journalists think more about the audience and read the data signals about what readers want to help inform coverage decisions."
The NYT is always open on my computers, phone, tablet. I subscribe to Crosswords and Cooking, maybe to Parenting. I read pretty much everything on the NYtimes.com. I am alarmed and concerned that the strategy of giving people what they want, as excerpted above, will impact the paper's straight news reportage. I find the news reporting to be factual, bias free and includes all sides, and I fervently hope it stays that way. I understand that NYT is focusing on operating in a digital environment, which does need more audience engagement, and that can be accomplished in opinions, news analysis, etc. The News on the NYT tells me everything, what I like and don't like, what I want to hear, don't want to hear, what I want to believe and don't want to believe - please keep it that way.
As a grass roots level entrepreneur, I found this very interesting and informative. Thank you Jodi. The NYT is the best journalism in the world and I love all the new usage of video. It really helps tell the story. Data is so helpful and clearly it shows you are doing the work.
When I saw this article, I wondered how this NYT analyst could be collecting information about print subscribers' interests? It is not all the digital world.
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The jargon in this is so depressing:
"so we stood up teams to lean into those audiences and make it more clear that The Times is for them"
"which doesn’t mean changing our core values, but does mean reconsidering and reimagining how, when and where we tell stories"
"The journalism itself is our strongest audience tool"
Read it and weep.
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@DH94114 I actually find this refreshing. The Times, like all media and society as a whole, so discounted anyone but white males for so long. I love Race/Related. I love Overlooked. I like to hear all voices, including, but not limited to, white males.
Where can I purchase some NYT podcast swag? How cool it would be to have a mug, shopping tote, and fan-groupie coloring books and posters
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@Caps4Sale Here you go: shirts, totes, pads and pencils... https://store.nytimes.com/search?type=product&q=the+daily
Interesting that this observation has not attracted any comment: "One of the things that group does is look closely at which types of stories perform well with women (personal narrative, visual stories, things with a conversational tone) and which do not (data-heavy analysis). " So women can't read "data-heavy analysis?" That will be news to the women I know.
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@Joe I'm a woman who loves me a good data story (as highlighted in the column), so I was, indeed, distressed to see examples in which our data-heavy work so heavily over-indexed with men. I don't think this is a forever problem though. There's lots of ways to tell data stories, and we're experimenting with all of them.
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I love NYT and I usually look at it every morning and if I get a spare minute because I am waiting for something. The breadth and depth of journalism and quality of the writing is in my view well beyond the daily newspapers here in Australia. NYT has far better international coverage and discussion about current affairs. There is much more room for reader commentary in NYT and a sense of feeling like part of an international community. However, as I have said before I don’t want NYT to become too tailored to me. There would be nothing worse than being stuck in my own echo chamber. I want to see all the headlines even if I don’t want to or have time to read every article. Remember you’re news not just entertainment.
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@Kay Thank you so much for this, Kay, and be assured that our strategy is exactly the thing you're outlining. We want to continue to bring you in-depth and high-quality journalism about the whole world. Damien Cave and his team on the ground there are doing various things, including our weekly Australia Letter email, to help readers there connect with our journalism, but the journalism is the journalism.
The number of clickbait and opinion articles has gotten out of control on both the mobile and web apps. The only good thing about the articles is that the comments section is usually so terrible that it's good.
Personally, I would love to see happy positive articles on the NYT. But ever since we as a culture decided positive news doesn't sell, such news became never to see the light of day. The only positivity I get is from the science/animal section. In the time of Trump and depressing news, these stand out to me.
I realize I am just one, but as a woman, please more facts and data analysis. (the worst offenders are the articles based on questionable studies with no analysis or insight. Namely most Health / Food section articles.)
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Unfortunately, it's apparent that the author's mission has little to do with serving existing readers. The Times falls woefully short in at least these 2 areas:
1. The overhaul of "top stories" in the app has turned it into a tab I never look at. The previous version was a useful compilation. Now it's been passed through the dumb-me-down USA Today filter, with someone's deranged organization and a premium on pretty pictures rather than content.
2. For us print subscribers it's clear we are pond scum, since the Times has proven it cares nothing about its abject incompetence at color reproduction. Good luck finding enough unfussy new readers to counterbalance existing ones who will flee in frustration to the Guardian or the BBC.
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Does the gender analysis on what articles women prefer, mean that The NY Times is now printing more stories
That are not backed by facts and data?
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@Sipa111 Nope. Here's one published today: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/democratic-polls.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
It's telling that Ms. Rudoren says straight out that her "mission" is to "get [people] addicted to our journalism." I've watched the online version of the Times follow the lead of more disturbing practitioners of attention manipulation by using clickbait headlines; by presenting readers with autoplay videos when they expected to read a text article; and by deprecating the presence of news on the main ("above the fold") screen and filling it increasingly with hyperbolic editorials and cringeworthy lifestyle articles. Increasingly, the Times is working less on maintaining our trust as a serious source of information and more on getting us addicted—by making us mindlessly compelled to click instead of by making us want to learn. It's why I've taken the NYT off my bookmarks bar and into a subfolder called "Big Media." I've never been less happy with the Times than I am now.
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@John C Sorry to hear about the bookmark change, John, we'll try and win you back. Maybe the word addicted was not the best choice, but I meant addicted to our kind of high-quality journalism. To rely on it and make it a habit and feel like they can't live without it. Nobody's going to feel that way clickbait, but they will about memorable stories. That's what we're going for.
Sounds like we can expect more feelings, fewer facts - less reading, more time-sucking multimedia. Want to know the facts behind the story? Reading the Times on, say the Central Park Five, won’t answer your questions as to their crimes, but will tell you every trendy sign of mob rule in and out of the media.
The old NY Times would have set an investigative team to pin down and explicate the facts, but now we get endless paeans to a Netflix series whose producer has proudly proclaimed her privilege to invent facts. The Times recently quickly mentioned the boys “badly hurting a man at the reservoir.” Has any NY Times reporter interviewed this victim and explained how many years in prison this crime deserved? Has anyone investigated the difference and doubts, inherent in the evidence of rape and the evidence of assault? The assault damaged the woman jogger far more than the rape.
Have I gotten off the subject here - not entirely.
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I intensely dislike the attitude that we should be addicted to the media we consume. How is that in any way a good thing? Please stop with the behavioral psychology tricks designed to encourage addiction and mislead people. It’s not ethical for a mainstream news organization to behave this way and devalue what we need most in these times: responsible journalism.
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I'd start with a functioning Search option.
Was there coverage today of the installation
(No) Kids In Cages with audio of the children
crying for their parents? and police removal
of the cages?
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@Patricia Libby Is this what you were looking for?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/us/immigrant-children-detention-center-audio.html?module=inline
Love my Logitech keyboard. Have used it in airports and am always approached by curious passengers. When I extol the keyboard's virtues, I'm often told that I should be a Logitech spokesperson or influencer. I wonder how that pays ...
Don't just tell us what we want to hear, please also include what we need to hear. I don't want a newsroom dedicated to increasing clicks, or a newspaper that is addictive.
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@Josh We're addicted to quality. Turns out you all are, too, so quality grows audience.
I had suspected that this was the Times business plan: click bait targeted at a specific audience. It is gratifying to see that I am right.
I am very old school but I expected more from the “newspaper of note.”
Knowing that I am not the target audience makes it much easier to disengage.
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There IS an app to find where movies and TV shows are streaming, Jodi. It's called Just Watch. I use it all the time.
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@SMR +1. Also, I use the Watch Now feature on Apple TV and on the TV app on iOS to figure out what services you can use to watch a movie, TV series, or sporting event.
@JM I will check both of them out, thank you so much!
First, my demographic (necessary in this day and age for giving/removing weight to my comments)
White, male, 68 years old. 18+ years of education. A NYT reader since I was 10 years old.
Recently, I discovered the acronym FOMO. I had to google it. Much to my consternation I could not fully believe that this was a clinical diagnosis. A therapist friend confirmed that he has had quite a few younger patients who he has applied this diagnosis to.
My point being that many of the changes at the NYT seem to be aimed at satisfying or appealing to this fear.
A brief list of what I do not like with the evolving NYT:
what I see as transparent demographic appeal to some articles and their framing.
sensational headlines that do not accurately reflect the underlying article
any article or headline that includes the following: "must watch, must see, must read.
any story or headline that uses "We, Everyone, Us, All" when there is absolutely no proof that this level of ubiquity is applicable.
"Best of Late Night"
And the conversational tone of newer journalism, the self-referential examination by and of the reporter outside of the opinion section.
All said, I'm still reading.
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@T Smull Good list, especially that last one. Younger NPR reporters are particularly guilty of this, in my estimation.
On the plus side, I like the Overlooked No Longer obits, and today’s, about Ma Rainey, was one of the best. It included far more links than I clicked on, but it was exactly that balance I like of pure journalism, along with including those hyperlinks for anyone who wants to read and listen to more.
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@T Smull Generally agree, but also believe that the Times needs to meet readers where they are -- and that getting the Times into more hands and brains matters a lot more now than before
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@T Smull
I forgot another phrase I find offensive in the new NYT, "Everything You Need to Know about . . ."
This assumes the media source actually knows what I, as an individual, need or think. I find this arrogant and insulting.
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Re Rudoren’s comment about finding which streaming service has a particular show she wants to watch: type “watch ” into Google. You’ll get back a list of services that offer the show. Works for movies, too.
Something was edited out of my original post. It should be “watch “ followed by the name of the show or movie.