Posts tagged New York Times

Pushy Notifications

AdAge reports that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are using more push notifications on their mobile and tablet apps than they did in the past.

The move reflects a strategy to increase user engagement with the apps that while downloaded, sometimes sit dormant on people’s devices. Specifically, each newsroom is using notifications for breaking news.

Via AdAge:

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal — No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in terms of U.S. digital circulation, according to the Alliance for Audited Media — are putting more emphasis on using mobile alerts to distribute breaking news stories and promote their mobile apps.

News publishers have long considered push notifications, which pop up on phone and tablet screens, too intrusive to use more than sparingly. In recent months, however, The Journal and Times have reconsidered that stance and started using them more often.

“We felt comfortable that our breaking news alerts have been well-received by readers and that we may have been a little too stringent about what alerts we should have been sending,” said Jonathan Ellis, deputy editor of digital platforms at The Times, which has revised its guidelines on the subject. “More frequently, we’re asking ourselves the question ‘Should this be a mobile push alert?’”

FJP: The strategy is similar to one used by app developers and their frequent updates, no matter how small. It’s a reminder to the User that the app exists and hopefully prods him or her to use it again.

AdAge reports that those that opt in to push notifications are five times more likely to use an app but does take this warning from Brent Hieggelke, CMO at Urban Airship, “Push is not a channel to nag your customer. That’s a terrible experience.”

I also would like to say: You really should have kids review the children’s books (especially reviewers who are the same age as the kids whom the book is intended for).

Second grader Rosa Cohn in a letter to the New York Times (via schoollibraryjournal)

FJP: Brilliant advice.

schoollibraryjournal

The Complete Glossary of Hipster Hallmarks, cribbed from the pages of The New York Times and presented without comment.

Starting with A, “all-night roof parties” (May 19, 2002), and ending with W, women with Feist haircuts” (“young”) (June 11, 2009).

Unfortunately, there’s no X, Y or Z.

Do Social Media Sites Like Tumblr Need Their Own News Publications? We learned last week that Tumblr is shutting down Storyboard — the news blog responsible for reporting on creative and noteworthy posts by Tumblr users. Tumblr’s cofounder, David Karp, posted his explanation for Storyboard’s closing on the site’s staff blog, saying: “What we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.” Karp mentions that Storyboard partnered with the likes of WNYC, Mashable, Time, etc. and was even nominated for a James Beard Award (to name a few accomplishments). So, why is it best to “move on” when the project has been so successful?  The consensus (here, here, and here) seems to be that Tumblr needs to downsize to turn a profit this year. However, in an interview with The New York Times, Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed, suggested Storyboard is closing because there’s no point in writing about what you can just go and see for yourself. He said: It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically. And he’s not the only one who shares the sentiment.  The New York Times calls attention to Dan Fletcher (a journalism school graduate) who quit his “amorphous” job as managing editor of Facebook in 2012. His position required him to write about FaceBook trends. He said that reporters aren’t needed on FaceBook and that articles detract from user activity that is “inherently more interesting” than the articles themselves. FJP:  Why is it “peculiar” that an excellent editorial staff would be reporting on the “organic” events of social media communities? Isn’t that what journalists do? Just because social media communities exist in the cyber-verse doesn’t make them less newsworthy. Admittedly, Storyboard and other social media news blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) aren’t exactly watchdog reporters (they want to talk about the posts that make themselves look good, after all), and that should make us question whether these publications can really be “journalistic.” But social media news is in its larval stage. Maybe, in the future, social communities will be publishing articles about juveniles who break copyright laws, and sites will be locking people’s profiles in cyber-jail-blocks for weeks due to hazing. Surely, social sites are gonna need some objective, guardian watchdogs for that, right? Eh? — Krissy Image: Screenshot from Storyboard.

Do Social Media Sites Like Tumblr Need Their Own News Publications?

We learned last week that Tumblr is shutting down Storyboard — the news blog responsible for reporting on creative and noteworthy posts by Tumblr users. Tumblr’s cofounder, David Karp, posted his explanation for Storyboard’s closing on the site’s staff blog, saying: “What we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on.”

Karp mentions that Storyboard partnered with the likes of WNYC, Mashable, Time, etc. and was even nominated for a James Beard Award (to name a few accomplishments). So, why is it best to “move on” when the project has been so successful? 

The consensus (here, here, and here) seems to be that Tumblr needs to downsize to turn a profit this year. However, in an interview with The New York Times, Charlie Warzel, deputy technology editor at Buzzfeed, suggested Storyboard is closing because there’s no point in writing about what you can just go and see for yourself. He said:

It is always peculiar when a social network branches out into publishing, it just seems odd to bring on even excellent editorial talent to cover what is already going on organically.

And he’s not the only one who shares the sentiment. 

The New York Times calls attention to Dan Fletcher (a journalism school graduate) who quit his “amorphous” job as managing editor of Facebook in 2012. His position required him to write about FaceBook trends. He said that reporters aren’t needed on FaceBook and that articles detract from user activity that is “inherently more interesting” than the articles themselves.

FJP:  Why is it “peculiar” that an excellent editorial staff would be reporting on the “organic” events of social media communities? Isn’t that what journalists do? Just because social media communities exist in the cyber-verse doesn’t make them less newsworthy.

Admittedly, Storyboard and other social media news blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) aren’t exactly watchdog reporters (they want to talk about the posts that make themselves look good, after all), and that should make us question whether these publications can really be “journalistic.” But social media news is in its larval stage. Maybe, in the future, social communities will be publishing articles about juveniles who break copyright laws, and sites will be locking people’s profiles in cyber-jail-blocks for weeks due to hazing. Surely, social sites are gonna need some objective, guardian watchdogs for that, right? Eh? — Krissy

Image: Screenshot from Storyboard.

Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg Survival Facts: If you were a third class passenger, your chance of survival was 25 percent First class passengers had a 62 percent survival rate. Second class passengers had a 41 percent survival rate. The crew had a 24 percent survival rate. Fun Fact: What happened to the iceberg? Bonus: Images of the Titanic wreck made by stitching together hundreds of optical and sonar images collected by robots via Scientific American Woods Whole Oceanographic Institute, and National Geographic. Image: April 16, 1912 edition of the New York Times.

Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg

Survival Facts: If you were a third class passenger, your chance of survival was 25 percent

First class passengers had a 62 percent survival rate. Second class passengers had a 41 percent survival rate. The crew had a 24 percent survival rate.

Fun Fact: What happened to the iceberg?

Bonus: Images of the Titanic wreck made by stitching together hundreds of optical and sonar images collected by robots via Scientific American Woods Whole Oceanographic Institute, and National Geographic.

Image: April 16, 1912 edition of the New York Times.

kateoplis:

Your Tumblr du Jour: Times Haiku

FJP: We’ll never read the New York Times the same again.

Quality, serious journalism that is thoroughly reported, elegantly told and that truly honors the intelligence of its readers is the business model of the New York Times.

Jill Abramson, Executive Editor, New York Times, via the Michigan Daily.

FJP: Idealized, but a great nutshell.

The New York Times is redesigning its Web site — starting with the article experience

Gray Lady’s getting a facelift.

Read through and you can see some of the front-end changes they’re making. The majority of it is cleaning up the clutter and bringing more contemporary UI and navigational schemes to the site.

They’re also relocating comments to the side of article articles “so you can read them in context” and bringing the swipe to tablets as a way to go from article to article.

I don’t get to complain anymore. It’s just true. Some of the most delicious time that you spend as a journalist is like, complaining. At no times have I had fewer actual friends to gossip with, and kind of complain with, or at least commiserate with. That is a hard part of being the boss. Newsrooms are just full of cantankerous complaining people. It’s so enjoyable to be part of that.
Jill Abramson, Executive Editor, The New York Times, about life as the boss. Capital New York, Editor Jill Abramson opens up about layoffs, the time she almost quit, and loneliness at the top.
By an Employee of the New York Times in Damascus Syria and Anne Barnard

By an Employee of the New York Times in Damascus Syria and Anne Barnard

Hackers in China Infiltrate the New York Times Via The New York Times: For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees… The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing… …The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China… …Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family. Image: The Times’ Patrick LaForge keeping things positive in a post on Twitter.

Hackers in China Infiltrate the New York Times

Via The New York Times:

For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees…

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing…

…The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China…

…Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

Image: The Times’ Patrick LaForge keeping things positive in a post on Twitter.

Why the New York Times Killed Martin Luther King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail'

The New Republic’s Timothy Noah writes how the New York Times Magazine assigned, then killed, Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

Via Noah:

According to Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, [New York Times Magazine Editor Walter] Shapiro phoned the offices of King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in July 1962. King was doing jail time in Albany, Georgia, on charges of disturbing the peace while protesting the segregation of public facilities. Shapiro suggested that King write a “letter from prison” modeled on those of early Christian saints; Shapiro may also have been thinking about another 20th century political martyr and Christian minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer…

…The following May, King was once again in jail for staging a nonviolent protest, this time in Birmingham, Alabama. King remembered Shapiro’s offer… King scribbled a response in the margins of the newspaper, on toilet paper, and and on other scraps that his lawyers sneaked out to the SCLC’s executive director, Wyatt Walker, who got it transcribed. Walker passed drafts back and forth through the lawyers until King was satisfied.

Up north at the Times Magazine, Shapiro was eager to publish, but (according to McWhorter) he “could not get the letter past his bosses at the Times.” Way to go, Gray Lady!

The Times, S. Jonathan Bass reports in Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Eight White Religious Leaders, and the ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail,’ initially scheduled the letter for publication in late May. But first it wanted (in the recollection of King adviser Stanley Levison) a “little introduction setting forth the circumstances of the piece.” Then it decided, no, what it really wanted was for King to “write a feature article based on the letter.” Or, possibly, it wanted both. Before King had a chance to jump through these hoops, the New York Post (in those distant days a plausible rival to the Times) got a copy of the letter and published unauthorized excerpts, killing the Times’s interest.

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was eventually published in its entirety by The Atlantic and then Liberation, Christian Century and The New Leader, and, of course, entered the American literary canon.

Timothy Noah, The New Republic. How the New York Times Screwed Martin Luther King Jr.

The [New York] Times does not release traffic figures, but a spokesperson said yesterday that [Nate] Silver’s blog provided a significant—and significantly growing, over the past year—percentage of Times pageviews. This fall, visits to the Times’ political coverage (including FiveThirtyEight) have increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of site visits. But FiveThirtyEight’s growth is staggering: where earlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of politics visits included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent.

But Silver’s blog has buoyed more than just the politics coverage, becoming a signifiant traffic-driver for the site as a whole. Earlier this year, approximately 1 percent of visits to the New York Times included FiveThirtyEight. Last week, that number was 13 percent. Yesterday, it was 20 percent. That is, one in five visitors to the sixth-most-trafficked U.S. news site took a look at Silver’s blog.

Marc Tracy, The New Republic. Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times.

Takeaway: Stat nerds have clout.

New York Times Staffers Stage Walkout Over Contract Negotiations Huffington Post with the story. For background, see Jim Romenesko here and here. One of the oddities is that the Times, after working to combine its print and digital operations, is proposing separate contracts for print and digital reporters. In a memo to colleagues, the Newspaper Guild at the New York Times writes, “Any proposal to dismantle the decade of work that has been done to unify the newsroom, securing its place as the world’s premier news organization, could be laughed off as far-fetched legal gimmickry. After all, that would be an act of self-immolation. But even if it’s not worth serious consideration, it has landed just we are heading at full speed toward a crisis over genuine issues like our pay and benefits.”

New York Times Staffers Stage Walkout Over Contract Negotiations

Huffington Post with the story.

For background, see Jim Romenesko here and here.

One of the oddities is that the Times, after working to combine its print and digital operations, is proposing separate contracts for print and digital reporters.

In a memo to colleagues, the Newspaper Guild at the New York Times writes, “Any proposal to dismantle the decade of work that has been done to unify the newsroom, securing its place as the world’s premier news organization, could be laughed off as far-fetched legal gimmickry. After all, that would be an act of self-immolation. But even if it’s not worth serious consideration, it has landed just we are heading at full speed toward a crisis over genuine issues like our pay and benefits.”