The Gray Lady weaves a new website

April 9, 2006 by

Len Apcar is the editor in chief of NYTimes.com, this year’s Online Journalism Award winner for general excellence (large sites). Last week, the Times website debuted a new site design, its first redesign in over five years. Apcar talked via the phone with OJR about the process of redesigning a news site the size of the New York Times’. An edited transcript of that conversation follows:

OJR: What is the New York Times staff approach to a redesign, starting with the decision on when it is time to have one?

Apcar: I can’t tell you that there was an meticulous timing decision about it. It was becoming more and more clear to us, I would say, going back a couple of years, that we needed to find a way to service more content on the home page and to improve the article page as an experience in several respects. But the most important one was on the article page: that if you came into the site via the article page that you found other options and other places to go, that you just didn’t come to the article you were finding and leave.

We actually began redesigning the article page and launched a new article page design last year. And that helped us in a lot of our thinking about the site as a whole. We wanted to look at the taxonomy, which we weren’t happy with. We wanted to look at the visual design, which we thought was beginning to look quite dated. It looked too text heavy. And we also knew that people were becoming much more comfortable with larger screens, larger monitors and that we would eventually go to a 1024 resolution.

All those things contributed to a consensus that we’ve got to sit down and talk about a redesign.

OJR: Who participates in the process at the New York Times?

Apcar: We started with drawing up a proposal. And I would say our head of product development — who’s done a lot of information architectural work and product development work — he began drafting a proposal. I worked on it. A couple of other people from IT worked on it, and it was kind of a joint document that we used to set down our goals. We laid down for an outside design firm what our goals were, what our problems were, what our concerns were about site behavior.

It had been, as of today, it’d been six years since we’d looked at this. Even though the previous design was launched in 2001, it was largely the product of thinking from 2000. And the [increase in] traffic on the site, the content on the site, plus that multimedia and video were really in their infancy — all of that needed to be addressed in this redesign.

OJR: How much of the work was done outside the company and how much was done internally?

Apcar: Well, all the build work was done internally. The outside firm [Avenue A | Razorfish] was strictly a visually design consultancy. They came in and we asked them to help us with about 10 or 12 templates that were largely section fronts. Home page, sub-navigational issues and taxonomy issues we basically ironed out ourselves. But they were very, very helpful in having an outside-the-company view of our site. They did a lot of work in getting us to think about different approaches to the problems we were facing with the site.

I think the whole Razorfish experience lasted about six months. If I had to put a timeline on it, it was about two or three months of deliberation, six months of intensive work with the consultant, and then the build phase, with our own information technology department, which was four months. Four calendar months, but a lot of long days.

OJR: Let’s talk about project management in the other direction. How much was upper New York Times management involved?

Apcar: Well, even before the redesign, I’ve always been a fan of integrating the two newsrooms. When various firms were bidding for the job, I invited the assistant managing editor in charge of design, Tom Bodkin, to get involved and he came to some of the presentations. So, at the very highest level of design, he was involved. He later asked me to bring a couple of other people in the newsroom he thought would be able to give a lot of time, day to day, for many weeks. So other folks who had a design sensibility and an understanding of the Web were also at the table for the paper.

Once we locked down the designs, we then took it to the top level of the company. It was presented to the publisher, to the executive editor and then to the business management of the newspaper.

OJR: What are your expectations going forward?

Apcar: I am surprised that this last design lasted as long as it did. [Laughs.] I would probably argue that we should have redesigned at least a year or two earlier. I came in in 2002 and wanted to redesign right away. And I think we probably would have tackled it in 2004, but for the fact that we had so much going on that year — both from a news standpoint, with the election, and we were placing a new emphasis on multimedia. There was a lot going on in the product development side, and I think there was a feeling on the business side of the website that it was probably going to be a stretch to get a redesign.

We needed to fix the article page, because people were coming into the article page and leaving the site, so we decided that since we really couldn’t move fast enough on the site redesign, we did the article page as a one-off in 2005.

Technology will drive this. I would think the site is set now for at least three years. But I can’t anticipate the future.

OJR: As a newspaper website editor who has now gone through this process, what advice could you pass along to your colleagues at other newspapers?

Apcar: Well, newspaper design and Web design are very similar in certain respects and very different in others. The similarities, I would say, are that you want a simple clean logical experience — and if you can add an elegance to that, so much the better.

What is different is that you want a magnetism to a webpage. You want to bring a reader close in and hold them there and give them a reason to go deep. Because you are asking a reader not to read headlines and captions and pictures — to get involved in text, you are asking them to read and click and keep clicking and dig deeper in the site, in layers. And when that happens, that’s what I call the essential magnetism of a successful webpage design. And that, to me, is what one of my colleagues called a “lean-in” design as opposed to a “lead-back” design in newspapers.

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GrayLady.com: NY Times explodes wall between print, Web

August 9, 2005 by

“Internet people are frontierspeople. [Behind them] are the barbarians like me — the shopkeeper. We’re their worst nightmare, but we’re coming.” — Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, addressing a Nieman Foundation conference in 1995.

Now the barbarians are at the gate. For the last 10 years, Sulzberger has preached that news is not about distribution platforms, but about content that works on every platform. Now the wheels have been put in motion to make the venerable Times newsroom platform-agnostic, a master plan that will have the online newsfolk working side by side with ink-stained types in the new Times HQ in Spring 2007.

The integration of print and online newsrooms is more than just about physical space. In a staff memo they might as well have CCed Jim Romenesko, executive editor Bill Keller and vice president of digital operations Martin Nisenholtz spelled out a philosophical change that echoed into every newspaper newsroom: “By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists — to reorganize our structures and our minds to make Web journalism …”

For the print newsroom at the august New York Times to put its mind on Web journalism in such a pronounced way is part revolution and part evolution. Editor & Publisher declared it a “Web Victory” in its story on the integration, while the cheeky Inquirer noted wryly that “the print hacks and hackettes will no doubt be a little angry that they’re having to share a building with fake Internet pseudo-journalists.”

But nothing is as simple as the stereotypes would have it. Sulzberger and Nisenholtz have been planning for this day for 10 years, through the dot-com dreams of a New York Times Digital spin-off IPO and the dog days of digital cutbacks, to a time where the online side has matured, grown in revenues and is ready to take its place in the hallowed main newsroom. Other newsrooms from Tampa, Fla., and Lawrence, Kansas, might have tried integration, but the Times has 1,200 people in its print operation that will now be helping to lead the digital charge.

The evolutionary change has been in motion for some years, as the Times launched its continuous news desk back in 2000, and online editors already take part in Page One and other print meetings. While Nisenholtz told me the integration was his vision from the very start of his tenure in ’95, it just wasn’t practical then. In the old days, online was the ugly step-sister to print, but how times have changed. Now, according to Keller, there are many print people chomping at the bit, wanting to get online but facing too many bureaucratic obstacles.

“I’m constantly hearing from people in the newsroom who have ideas for cool things we could do on the Web,” Keller told me. “But under the divided operation, all we could do was lob ideas over the transom. Not that the people at the Web site were reluctant to do it. They had other priorities. It was becoming a source for frustration, and I felt that if we were really going to embrace this thing and own it and tap into the creative energy of all these smart people who are filled with ideas that we ought to be in the same place — physically, administratively, in every way.”

The memo mentions that print editors will take on more responsibility for the Web and that Jonathan Landman will head a team that will help the newsroom absorb and take advantage of those new duties. That left a lot of questions in the air about how Web responsibilities will be divvied up in the new era between online and print staffers. Would that mean more work for print reporters? Where does it leave online editor Len Apcar?

“The spirit of that [passage in the memo] is less how it works, because it’s more of a work in progress,” Nisenholtz said. “But the spirit of that is that the foreign editor would be responsible not just for what happens in print but what happens online. In other words, it’s not a question of how it works but a question of philosophy. … Now we’re saying the desk heads are going to be looking in the direction of the Web as well. So when something gets conceived, it’s not just conceived as a print project but as a Web project as well.”

Some Times print reporters told me there were worries among some staffers that the Web work would take away from the basic work of newsgathering.

“I know some reporters think they’ll be asked to write for the Web and then asked to write again for the next day’s paper — two stories in the time they used to use for one — and potentially scooping themselves,” one staffer said, who wished to remain anonymous. “And I think there are more old-timers here who aren’t as comfortable with the Web.”

Nisenholtz and Keller downplayed those worries and said that staffers would take to the Web at their own speed. With the continuous news desk, reporters are not forced to file for the Web while working on a story and have options to work in different ways with the desk. Keller noted that foreign correspondents and business reporters already were huge proponents of filing to the Web and that that would get other people interested.

“There’s going to be some portion of people who are essentially non-adapters but are so valuable for the paper for what they do, and we’ll live with that,” Keller said. “We have a lot of people here, and not everybody will have to be thrown into the Web. There will be slow adapters, and we will certainly try to proselytize for this and explain that this is an exciting thing to do.”

While layoffs were not part of the reorganization plan, the print newsroom recently had 25 buyouts and there were more layoffs on the business side. At the same time, the digital side has been hiring people — there’s a slew of job openings right now — and the company recently bought About.com. Neither Nisenholtz nor Keller would connect the dots, but the resulting image is loud and clear: The print business is stagnant and digital is booming.

Meanwhile, other large newspaper newsrooms looked on with interest at the Times’ plans. WashingtonPost.Newsweek.Interactive CEO Caroline Little said the online operation at the Post would remain across the river in Arlington, Va., from the main newsroom. Wall Street Journal Online managing editor Bill Grueskin said that WSJ.com has been located inside and outside and then inside the print newsroom again.

“On the point of proximity, I’ve seen it both ways,” Grueskin said via e-mail. “When I started working here, we were all in the same building. A few months later, the September 11 tragedy across the street forced us to relocate for a year to New Jersey, then two more years to an office in SoHo, about a mile from where the print newsroom is now. We moved back to the main headquarters a year ago and share a floor with many print reporters and editors. While it was useful for us to be separate from the print side for a while, it is much, much better to have us all under the same roof. …While our setup works well, we are looking at ways to expand cooperation and integration.”

At USAToday.com, vice president and editor in chief Kinsey Wilson said consolidation of the print and online newsrooms is inevitable, but they’re taking a slower approach to make sure they preserve the strengths of both sides.

“We’ve learned a great deal about what it takes to publish in real time across multiple platforms,” Wilson said via e-mail. “But [the online] medium is still in the process of being invented. It often requires a different approach to the news. And it is staffed at a fraction of the level of the parent organization. If the goal is to create a stronger, more flexible organization, it only makes sense to move with some care and deliberation in bringing such disparate operations together. Our inclination at this point is to signal our intent to the staff, but experiment on a small scale, in discrete areas, where we can afford to innovate and occasionally make mistakes, before embarking on a full-scale integration.”

At the Times, Nisenholtz has ambitions to super-charge the Web site and take it beyond the realm of newspaper sites and into the top tier of news sites online. He told me he envisioned multimedia reports going from two to three reports per day to 30 or 40 reports daily, while also building out a new aggregation service that would take on Google News.

“Google News was the fastest growing news site in the first six months of the year,” Nisenholtz said. “So we have to be as good as anyone else at doing that and meanwhile put in our own Times special sauce — which is our journalism — that will always differentiate us. If you look at those as the two pillars of our future, you can think about how we’re approaching this next phase. Weblogs are great, they’re part of the information universe, and people ought to have access to them, and we should make that access as seamless as possible.”

The following is a combination of edited transcripts from interviews with Nisenholtz and Keller. The interviews took place at different times but included similar questions to both.

Online Journalism Review: What were the origins of the idea for integration?

Martin Nisenholtz: I think you have to go back to the beginning on this one, because it’s very important that everyone understand that from the outset we would have a single newsroom that was creating for both platforms. In 1995 or ’96, the practicality of that vision wasn’t realizable. You had a nascent medium, the user numbers were tiny, there weren’t real revenues in the business.

As we’ve progressed into this decade, a couple things have happened. One is we’ve seen a steady progression of usage and broadband penetration so we’re able to serve at NYTimes.com well over 10 million unique users per month. We also have the ability to create whole new forms of journalism that weren’t possible when we had a narrowband world.

The business and medium had to mature to the point where it made sense to do this and where it made sense culturally for the newsroom to accept it and get excited about it and produce for it. It’s been a dream for us [to integrate] from the very beginning, and when you have 1,200 of the smartest journalists in the world on your side, you really want to leverage that. So Bill Keller and I have an agreement that we’re going to put the full thrust of the New York Times newsroom behind this effort.

Bill Keller: It’s something I’ve been thinking about and I’ve talked to Martin about off and on. And I’ve talked to people in the newsroom here who are smart like Rich Meislin and Andy Rosenthal, who’s actually the deputy on the editorial page but he’s an early adopter, Len Apcar at the Web site. And when Neil Chase came in here, bringing some experience and some more frustrations from places he’s worked. … I don’t know when I decided to write this up as a proposal, maybe two months ago; I wasn’t too sure how it would be received.

But it fits very neatly with what Martin has been saying for some time. From that point on, it became a joint venture, which is great, because we’ve both had enough of these two operations being apart, coming from different cultures and not always understanding each other’s language. I’ve always gotten along really well with Martin. From the early days of the Web, we’ve been on committees together, we’ve been scheming to try and get more money into the digital stuff. I think of him as very much a comrade in this.

OJR: So the source of frustration has been on the print side?

Keller: I’m sure there were frustrations on the digital side, too. Where I live is in the print newsroom, and you have a movie critic who goes off to Cannes and wants to do a blog. There are limits to what a reporter can do, but for critics, it’s a great thing. But we weren’t set up for a critic to do a blog, so it required a lot of work-arounds to make it happen.

Andrew Sorkin does this DealBook in an e-mail and in the paper, and he’s been really bursting with ideas for what he could do in that realm. But to get it done, you have to organize a committee, one for digital, one for the newsroom, one for business and one for strategic planning. It’s all sort of cumbersome. Some of this stuff should be carefully studied, but there are day-to-day things we could do that are hard to do if you’re separate.

I had an experience not long ago with a reporter coming back from a foreign assignment and was planning to do a big project that involved a trip she had taken. And I said wouldn’t it have been cool to take a videocamera with you or a tape recorder on the journey and file 500-word daily reports? It doesn’t mean you don’t do the big print report. But you don’t think about it when the project is being conceived, it tends to be an afterthought. It’s not going to apply to every story, but there will be a lot of cases where somebody will get it in their mind to think of a cool way to do something for the Web that may be entirely different from what they do for the paper.

OJR: Was it hard to convince the upper management of the Times Co. to do this?

Nisenholtz: This has the full support of everyone in senior management at the Times Company and particularly of Arthur Sulzberger. I remember in my interview with him, back in 1995, he said he didn’t care whether people got their Times news from a Star Trek beam. His view is we have to be in the news business and not in the ink and paper business. If you go back and read his stuff for at least 10 years, that’s always been his mantra.

OJR: What steps have already been taken in this integration effort, such as the continuous news desk?

Nisenholtz: The continuous news desk is the principal one. When we started the continuous news desk in 2000; we started it in the newsroom. We thought at the time that in order to have a vibrant news report during the day it has to be embedded into the newsroom itself. That’s been going on for five years, and it’s getting better under the direction of Bill Brink, and it will continue to get better as we pour more resources into it.

One thing I would point to is multimedia. I think that all you need to do is go into the multimedia section of the site to see the breadth of the reporting we’re doing now. It’s still baby steps, but it’s a hell of a lot more robust than even two years ago. Our multimedia now is embedded into the rhythm of the way we produce the Web site, and all of that is done in collaboration with the newsroom. The enabling technology behind this has been broadband, but the cultural change we had to make was getting our reporters into that rhythm.

The second thing I would point to is the efforts where individual reporters or columnists put up their hand and say, “I want to work specifically on the Web.” I would point to two things there — one is Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook, which was a Weblog before Weblogs existed. It’s an annotated version of the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] community that we put out every morning in an e-mail at 8 o’clock. It’s a wonderful compendium of reports that goes out and is read by 175,000 people who are interested in those financial matters.

The third thing I would point to on the OpEd side is Nicholas Kristof’s stuff. His collaboration with Naka Nathaniel has included incredible stuff from Thailand, from North Korea, from Iran, from every interesting place that you can imagine. Hopefully a lot of people from around the newsroom have seen these things and said, ‘This is an interesting way to extend the voice of the New York Times.’

OJR: One of the things you talked about in the memo was having print editors in charge of Web sections, or blurring the lines between print editors and Web editors. How would that work exactly?

Keller: In the first stage it’s going to be more about philosophy. Not quite philosophy, it’s more about attitude. If you’re a foreign editor, it’s about thinking of the foreign report on the Web as your domain along with the paper. There are editors who edit the foreign stuff and producers who do the foreign reports on the Web, but they should be sitting on the foreign desk when the stories are conceived, and the foreign editors should be looking at foreign coverage on the Web. And if there’s something amiss, it won’t just be, ‘Oh, I guess I better send an e-mail to Len Apcar.’ She can actually call the correspondent and say, ‘What about this?’ At first, it’s about taking responsibility and having it in your brain.

Nisenholtz: The interesting thing about it is that Bill and I have discussed not just the journalistic aspects of that, but also the new things that the Web is capable of doing and all of the ways that you leverage software, which we’ve gotten better at doing over the years, and how the newsroom can leverage software to bring journalism to life online.

One of the breakthroughs here is that we’re not just putting word people into the newsroom. We’re putting people in all of these functions into the newsroom who will exercise a very different kind of report for the Web than what would be characterized as a repurposed newspaper. That’s huge. To me, that’s a big signal event for the New York Times and for any newsroom. It’s a matter of growing new muscles in new areas that are Web-oriented and have little or no application in the print world.

OJR: What type of software are you talking about, Martin?

Nisenholtz: If you look at our Web site, you can see them all over now, and we’re just beginning. What is an RSS aggregator? It’s essentially a software application. It’s not just a way of creating content, it’s a way of mapping content to a user’s needs. However we need to use software; we will use software to add substance to this Web report, and that will be melded into the general business of the way we do things in Web journalism, and that’s where I see so much potential.

If you think back historically, there was a time when the Times had no photo desk. Now we have a vibrant photo desk. There was a time when there was no graphics department. Now we have a huge graphics department. I’m talking about competencies and abilities that add to what we offer. You can imagine whole new departments beginning to flower that are particular to the construction of Web journalism.

OJR: Editor & Publisher had a story about the Times integration titled ‘Web Victory.’ Do you see this as a victory for the Web side?

Nisenholtz: Yeah, I think it’s a huge gain for the Web side.

Keller: I’d like to think that there weren’t any losers in this, that we all win. This is really an important step in the recognition of the Web playing a big part in our future. I’m honestly bullish about newspapers. For all of the difficulties in the industry, I think there will be at least a few good newspapers that will be healthy and profitable for a long time, and I’m pretty sure this will be one of them. I tend to be skeptical of this fatalistic hand-wringing you see at conferences of newspaper editors. There was a nice line in the American Journalism Review, ‘Newspapers may be dinosaurs, but dinosaurs walked the Earth for millions of years.’

Okay, maybe not millions of years, but we’ll be around for awhile. But we all realize we must adapt, and we’ve been doing that with the continuous news desk. This should take it to a hugely higher level because we haven’t figured out who at NYTimes.com gets absorbed into the bigger newsroom. It may be 40 or 50 people at the most, and we’ve got 1,200 people, and they’re mostly really smart, creative people, and they’re going to come up with some really dumb ideas; but one out of seven is going to be a really smart idea, and one out of 50 will be a really transformative idea.

OJR: The memo might worry people in the newsroom who think they’ll have to do more work. How do you respond to them?

Keller: That’s not a new worry, that’s been around since we’ve started the continuous news desk. What we’ve tried to do since the inception of the Web is to not have the situation where you’re ordering reporters to do double duty. We built the continuous news desk to be a kind of buffer. It doesn’t just have editors on it but also has rewrite people.

If you’re covering the bombings in London, and the continuous news desk calls, you have a bunch of options. You can say ‘I don’t have enough time right now, I’m going out the door right now.’ You’re entitled to do that. Or you could say, ‘I have time to bang out 500 words for you, I’ll sit down and do that right now.’ Or the third option is you could say, ‘I’m really rushed I’ll just take two minutes to tell you what’s going on and can give you some guidance.’ And between that and the wires and what you see on TV, you can put up an interim story yourself. As a result reporters have been able to come to this at their own pace.

People are already filing for the newspaper, and the Web when it doesn’t interfere with their ability to cover the story. That doesn’t mean that they have to pay a price in quality. This is an opportunity for them to play around with forms, try new things. I’m not going to put a gun to someone’s head and say ‘you’ve got to blog’ on top of everything else. And I’m not going to expect a reporter to cook up a journalistic form that they’re not comfortable with. I understand the anxiety, because we’ve lived with it for seven years, but I don’t think it’s going to be a big problem.

OJR: When people hear about a reorganization, they immediately think of layoffs. Is that part of your plan?

Keller: I know, ‘merger’ is often a cute way of saying downsizing. But that has not been in our plans at all. I suspect that the opposite will be true. I think two things will happen. First of all, if we’re serious about the Web being our future, then we’re going to have to invest in it. So instead of downsizing, we’ll be upsizing, if that’s a word. We will be super-sizing it — now there’s a word that will scare the bejesus out of the publisher.

There’s clearly going to have to be investment and growth, and a lot of the skills that are down there will be more in-demand and not less.

The second thing is that there will be some shifting of resources from the print side to the digital side, almost subsidizing the Web journalism. That might be just in print reporters shifting some of their time. I don’t know how microscopic you want to get, but when we design a new section, for example, we have a whole set of procedures we go through. … In the future, I suspect the Web will enter into that as well. We might do the same procedure for a Web product, or for a product that has Web and print manifestations. We’re going to be swimming in the same pool.

OJR: Apcar told E&P that online people would start moving to the newsroom even before ’07. With the recent print layoffs, is there an image of print people leaving and digital people taking their place?

Keller: You mean did we drop the neutron bomb to open up space to move these people in? No. The actual physical merger, the complete merger, won’t happen until spring of ’07. We’re still tinkering with the floor plans, but we expect the digital producers and editors and software developers — all the people we expect to do this — to be contiguous with people who do the print paper.

Until then, we’ll do a few things. In each major news desk, they have an empty seat where we can pretty much right away move in a producer or editor from the Web sitting at each desk. The other thing is the copy desks, which have a lot of space contiguous to the main news desk. They usually start work at around 3 in the afternoon. So in the mornings we could bring in as many people as we want for the first half of the day, which is the time when stories are being hatched.

OJR: There are some people within the newsroom who are Luddites, who don’t like using the Web. Is there going to be an educational aspect to this?

Nisenholtz: In any large group of people, there will be people who go faster and people who go slower. I think if you look on balance at the number of people in the examples I gave before, we’ve made tremendous progress. I’m sure there will be a few people five years from now who won’t be fully capable of doing this. But ultimately most people should understand that the Internet offers an enormous new group of interested, like-minded readers who appreciate Times journalism and do so not just in the U.S. but around the world. The folks who have stepped up and worked with us have seen how much further their voices have been extended when they get behind the Web.

Most people in the newsroom understand that and want to work toward that. I have no doubt there are people who don’t, but by and large the people I’ve spoken to have been excited about it.

Keller: There’s going to be some portion of people who are essentially non-adapters but are so valuable for the paper for what they do, and we’ll live with that. We have a lot of people here, and not everybody will have to be thrown into the Web. There will be slow adapters, and we will certainly try to proselytize for this and explain that this is an exciting thing to do. And people will see what other reporters are doing and think, ‘That looks intriguing; I’d like to try that.’ I’m not going to frog-march reporters into Web journalism; I don’t think we have to. We have plenty of people who will be lining up to do it. The enthusiasts will be giving you the most exciting ideas anyhow.

OJR: If there were terrorist strikes on New York, walk me through how you would currently deal with that story and how you might deal with it in the future with an integrated newsroom?

Nisenholtz: Something like that, we’re pretty set up to deal with that. That’s not a good example for what this would achieve. It’s a rare example, and we’re already set up with the continuous news desk to make that happen. A much better example has to do with the day-to-day rhythm for the news department. The Web becomes a part of the DNA of the newsroom. It’s not the extraordinary example, because we already have the extraordinary example story covered. It’s the everyday example; that’s where the integration is really going to work.

OJR: Some people say that their Web operation is more a ‘skunkworks’ where they can try experiments without the pressure of the full newsroom. Do you think you might lose some of that with integration?

Nisenholtz: I don’t consider our digital newsroom to be a skunkworks or a lab. I consider it to be reasonably innovative, and I consider the Times newsroom to be reasonably innovative, too. I think we’re at the point where they’ve earned the right to be taken seriously. The Times Web business grew 37 percent on the advertising line in July. We’re doing quite well.

I certainly believe that we have to be innovative, and that’s like motherhood and apple pie. But even more important than innovation is scalability, and that’s really what we’re after here. We’re after the ability to move the Web process much more deeply into the lifeblood of the New York Times newsroom so that the Web site becomes much much better. And that’s not just about having more words on the Web site; it’s about having more multimedia, more software, more graphical design, more aggregation of content. It’s a whole range of new competencies and capabilities that we’ll start to see flower. And as they flower, we’ll see them flower at scale.

Traditionally these skunkworks are about one-offs, the Web special. So people work incredibly hard to put up a Web special that is viewed by a few thousand people, then it disappears until you do another one in six months. That’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about scalability.

OJR: Where do you see the Times going with blogs, podcasts, video and wikis? Do any of these stand out as more important to you?

Nisenholtz: What the Times needs to do is be as good as anyone in the world at the commodity stuff. In other words, how you manipulate content and make it accessible. What newspaper Web sites have ignored sometimes is the emphasis on usability and application value. And that’s why some of the portals have stepped in and developed news sites without having any content — because they’ve been really good with the commodity stuff. It’s not very hard to write a news aggregator. There are half a dozen of them, and they all basically do the same thing. But very few newspaper sites do that.

Meanwhile Google News was the fastest growing news site in the first six months of the year. So we have to be as good as anyone else at doing that and meanwhile put our own Times special sauce — which is our journalism — that will always differentiate us. If you look at those as the two pillars of our future, you can think about how we’re approaching this next phase. Weblogs are great, they’re part of the information universe, and people ought to have access to them and we should make that access as seamless as possible.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , , ,

About.com CEO explains $410 million NYT deal

March 7, 2005 by

This didn’t happen when Dow Jones bought MarketWatch. It didn’t happen when the Washington Post bought Slate. But when The New York Times Co. bought About.com from Primedia for $410 million, some pundits were quick to criticize the Times for overpaying for a property they deemed easy to duplicate. About.com has a hoard of 500 freelance “Guides” who write a series of blog posts and articles on everything from Children’s Books to Day Trading.

When the Times announced the purchase, Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote in to PressThink’s Jay Rosen: “The real secret of About.com is that they have figured out a way to get 500 domain experts to work for peanuts, in return for the exalted status as ‘Guides.’ But the NY Times could probably have done that on its own by throwing a little prestige and a few thousand dollars at the top bloggers in each of the targeted areas they wanted to cover. Somebody who already has a prestigious brand could duplicate About.com in a year for less than $50 million. And anybody could do it in two years for $150 million.”

And Poynter’s Online News mailing list lit up with new media types aghast at the purchase. Adam Gaffin, executive editor of Network World Fusion, told me off the list that he did see some merit to the move as adding traffic and ad inventory for the Times. But still, Gaffin couldn’t help himself in an e-mail to me: “Are they out of their frickin’ minds? They’re paying $410 million dollars for a bunch of Weblogs! And in 2005, no less! Yes, it takes time to build up a brand and the resulting page views. But Nick Denton shows how it’s possible to do it in a fraction of the time it took About.com at a fraction of the cost. Imagine Denton set loose with, oh, only $100 million.”

While Rosen and others talked to Martin Nisenholtz at the Times, few reporters bothered to directly ask About.com what they thought — even as they were in the eye of the storm. (Forbes.com senior editor Penelope Patsuris says About.com was not willing to talk after the sale, referring her to the New York Times.) I talked to both the current CEO of About.com, Peter Horan, as well as a former editor, Gian Trotta, who both filled me in on the history of the site and its current incarnation.

Trotta, who now is managing the Web presence for Infinity Radio’s WCBS 880 AM in New York, told me that About.com wasn’t originally run by content people and that the Guides did work for very little compensation in the early days — except for stock options.

“I went nuts trying to teach the Guides grammar and journalism,” Trotta said. “The real key is not that the Guides weren’t necessarily great journalists, but they had in-depth knowledge of the off- and online facets of their subject areas and were able to present it in a way that engaged, informed, empowered and entertained their audiences over a consistent level, much as bloggers aspire to do now. It also didn’t hurt that About’s first marketing director Victoria Bianchini was especially skilled at teaching viral marketing.”

While the Guides now use a Weblog format for some of their entries, they land somewhere in between unsupervised bloggers and polished journalists, having some editorial oversight and the backing of About.com’s brand name. But the site has a history of using intrusive advertising from pop-ups to poorly demarcated sponsored sections. And don’t get me started on the quicksand of navigation …

Primedia brought in Horan as CEO of About.com in December 2003, after he had headed DevX.com and had worked in the business side at tech trade publisher IDG. Horan, 50, helped optimize the site for search engines, just as the online advertising market started to explode. About.com was in the sweet spot of covering niche, targeted subjects right as targeted advertising and paid search ads swept the Net.

“If the Times and other folks that were in the [buyout] process really thought that they could recreate [About.com] that easily, they would not be stepping up to pay a premium,” Horan said.

The following is an edited transcript of my interview with Horan over the phone and e-mail, as he explained the editorial process — and compensation — of Guides, while giving ample reasons why the Times got its money’s worth.

Online Journalism Review: How does your work at About differ from previous work you’ve done at DevX and traditional publishers?

Peter Horan: About works off a series of Guides, and the Guides are subject-matter experts who create the sites. It’s a little bit different than a traditional blog. Blogs are real personal. At its worst, it’s ‘here’s what I had for breakfast today,’ or ‘here’s how my date went last night.’ People are looking for a platform to talk about their lives.

With the About.com Guides, it’s about the subject. It’s about Japanese cooking, it’s about vacations in Europe. The Guides create the sites themselves, it’s a publish-first model. They work under the guidance of editors. The editors say here’s the subject you’re covering, here’s the type of content we want you to create. It’s a little bit different than the traditional blog network.

OJR: So they post items first, and then you edit them?

Horan: It’s a collaborative process. We send a lot of guidance out. First of all, we say we want to have a site on hybrid cars, for example. We post the job, people apply, they post their credentials, their writing samples. The editors often have two or three folks go into training for that. During training the prospective Guides will start to create the site. At the end of that process, one is given the keys to become a Guide. On an ongoing basis, the Guides are creating content, putting photos up on the site, and periodically they get site reviews — whether that’s ‘attaboys’ or kicks in the butt — they actually work with editors on an ongoing basis.

If you were the Go Europe Guide, you can’t suddenly do movie reviews. You have a specific ground that you’re accountable for. You get some latitude with how you cover that. But it’s not the bully pulpit to talk about you and your life and what interests you at any given moment. So when people describe us as a network of blogs, that’s not exactly it — there’s some nuance to this.

When I got here, About was not coming off its strongest year. In 2002, 2003, a lot of effort was put into doing an AdSense competitor called Sprinks, which was a pay-per-click link business. And there was also a Web hosting business. They had just sold Sprinks, and I was brought in to refocus the business as a content site. In 2004, we put up 3,000 pieces of original Guide content per week. Now we have a total of more than 1 million pieces of Guide content on our servers.

A lot of folks optimized some of their content for search; we were the first network to optimize the entire site for search. We set it up, so that every page off of the front door, whenever you come in, on an article page, you get a strong sense of branding, a strong sense of context — the ‘you are here’ button — an invitation to read other related articles, and navigation. It’s real different than your experience on other sites where you get to an article and it’s a dead end, or a disorienting experience.

We grew our uniques by 20 percent last year. Our page views growth was 25 percent for last year over the previous year. For the fourth quarter, it was more than 30 percent higher. We’re growing a site that was pretty big to start with. Depending whether you believe comScore or Nielsen, we’re hovering right on the edge of the Top 10 [sites with overall traffic]. We’re No. 8 on comScore and No. 12 on Nielsen.

[Note: Nielsen//Netratings sent me numbers showing that About.com grew from having 20,170,000 unique users in January 2004 for U.S. home and work, to 21,776,000 unique users in January 2005 — a gain of about 8 percent.]

OJR: How do you explain your traffic growth? Did a lot of it come from search engines due to your optimization efforts?

Horan: Certainly, a lot of the traffic came in from search. But search is a factor for everybody, and everybody wants to do well in search. And we clearly did significantly better than a lot of other sites in search. It wasn’t just that search got popular, because our boat got lifted higher than everybody else’s boats with the rising tide.

It was putting up 3,000 pieces of original content per week. We make sure that each of those pieces of content is really well optimized. The Guide system is very different than the traditional editorial model. If you cut open a journalist in a typical newsroom, they think, ‘OK, my job is to be a journalist, I’m gonna write a good article, be the expert on a subject.’ But there’s only a certain amount of energy in optimization. Guides work on a system where they’re actually compensated based on page growth. One of things we’ve institutionalized is that folks understand that time they put in to optimize the content is really an investment in their page growth.

There’s been enough success stories with the Guides, that basically they sell each other on the idea that this is a good thing to do.

OJR: Can you talk about how you optimize your pages for search engines?

Horan: We spend a lot of time with the key words. The Guides have a publish-first environment, but they can’t publish if they don’t have the key words in there, the meta tags for the search engines to see. It’s kind of like not putting in your ZIP codes on certain forms, and it’s bounced right back to you. The same thing is true, we’ll bounce it right back if you don’t put your meta tags in so the search engines can optimize it — you can’t publish.

We’ve also invested a lot of time with reporting, what were your search engine refers, how did they track against the rest of the network and vs. what you did last year. We do a lot of stuff just on traffic reporting. We treat optimization like a blood sport. Other people dabble in it; this is how we make our living.

OJR: What about the quality of the content? You’re really focusing on optimization, but do you still have editors looking over the quality of various sites?

Horan: We have an ongoing series of what we call channel reviews. We divide all our content into channels, like travel or health or autos. Recently, we went over our business channel, for instance. There were 10 of us in the room, and the editor responsible for the channel walked us through, and said here’s where we’re doing well, here’s where our competitors are doing well, here’s how our traffic has changed year over year. Here are the Guides who are doing a good job, here are ones who aren’t, here’s some sites I’d like to add, here’s some functionality I’d like to add.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve bought into the idea that we’re only as good as our weakest site or our weakest piece of content. We’re just trying to raise the class average as best as we can.

OJR: How do you decide which new sites to launch?

Horan: That is as much art as it is a science. We look at external factors — we look at things like what are the top searches, what is on Yahoo Buzz Index, what’s showing up on Google. We look at the coverage patterns. About covers 57,000 topics. We were looking at the business channel, and were saying how are we doing on commercial real estate? We have a business insurance site in development, but we don’t have a real estate site. What was the thinking there?

So we ask, gee, is there enough interest there? What are the characteristics of a successful site? We do well with recommendation sites. We’re looking at the house & garden channel, and we realized we don’t really offer advice on how to buy home appliances. It’s something that we do well, it’s something that’s consistent with our audience. Could we do something with how to buy dishwashers, and washing machines, and ovens and things. And what kind of content would we need? We’re always looking at it to see where there’s an opportunity to regroup the content.

Hybrid cars was a good example where we had some articles spread out over some sites. But we thought hybrid cars is a long-term idea, and we really want to focus some energy on it. Since we’re not a news site, our content is evergreen, so we wonder, ‘Is this content that will accrue in value over three or four years?’ And we say, yes, hybrid cars seems like it’s at the beginning of its life cycle. It’ll be nice in ’05, it’ll be better in ’06 — in ’07, I bet it’ll be a big site. I wish I could say we have an equation that tells us the day to launch the site.

OJR: I’m surprised you didn’t mention potential advertising as a factor.

Horan: It’s one of them. For example, this past year, we put a lot of effort in our auto site. And as a result, our traffic within autos went up by nine times between July and the end of ’04. Our business traffic has doubled over the past few months because we thought there was a strong advertiser interest in business. That’s definitely a factor as well.

OJR: Who do you see as your competition? Wikipedia?

Horan: Well, Wikipedia is a non-commercial endeavor. Someone might use Wikipedia as well as our site, but it’s a pretty different beast. In some ways, the portals are our competitors, just like they’re everybody’s competitors. Yahoo’s 90 million uniques is certainly a factor both for readers’ attention and the advertisers. We compete with a lot of very niche sites. So if you’re looking for Japanese cooking, if you’re not on About, you might go to a very focused Japanese cooking site to get a recipe. In autos, we compete with Edmunds and Cars Direct. In travel, we compete with Expedia and Frommers.

OJR: I’ve heard a lot of people say derisively that the Guides work for peanuts. Can you talk more specifically about how they’re compensated?

Horan: It all depends on your definition of ‘peanuts.’ First of all, this is intended to be a second job, or one piece of somebody’s mix. The average Guide, the middle Guide, makes $1,500 or $1,600 a month. A Top 10 Guide might make $10,000 or $15,000 a month. The political humor Guide, during October and November [2004], made $20,000 a month because it was an election year. So we’re well out of the peanuts range.

We have 500 Guides, and if you’re Guide No. 450, you might only make $500 a month. But on a per-hour basis, you might be doing OK because you’re probably not putting in a lot of time. But for folks who are working on their content or working on their SEO [search engine optimization] — doing the stuff they’re supposed to be doing — they can make several grand per month.

OJR: When did you know that the site was up for sale? Did Primedia tell you at some point in that process? Did they hire you originally to revamp the site in order to sell it?

Horan: I am not sure that the Primedia counsel wants me to comment on the process. I was actively involved through the process. It’s one of those questions where lawyers’ sphincters start to tighten.

Primedia is a company that’s been built by buying and selling media properties. You can’t kid yourself that nothing is for sale. Everybody’s for sale at the right price. I moved here from California to do the job, to work for Kelly Conlin, the CEO of Primedia, who I worked for at IDG for 10 years. I did not come cross-country because I thought we were going to sell it.

But it just so happens that we had a great year. Our income in ’04 more than doubled. We’re growing pages, we’re growing uniques, we’re growing profits. If you look at the MarketWatch transaction and some other things, the market for Web properties heated up quite a bit. It was this happy coincidence of the fundamental ad market picking up, our site starting to run well, and the stock market starting to reward people for doing well with online advertising. Primedia started getting phone calls from people saying, gee, are you interested in doing something with About? They get a couple of those phone calls, and they say, sure let’s talk.

OJR: How was it working with Primedia? Were they pretty hands off?

Horan: There was some contact, but it was a somewhat arm’s length relationship if only because a lot of what About was doing on the Web was fairly different than what Primedia’s print publications were doing. It was a very cordial relationship, but it wasn’t an intimate relationship, in how we worked with the print books.

OJR: Tell me how you would characterize your audience and its demographic makeup.

Horan: The audience is typically about two-thirds women, average age 37, a little more than half are married, a little more than half have kids. One of our bumper stickers is, ‘We’ve Got More Women Than iVillage, More Men Than Sportsline, More Teens Than MTV.’ All of which is true. That’s why for us, the link-up with the New York Times is real potent. There’s very little duplication between us and the Times, about 15 percent duplication. So together, we’ll reach about 34 million unique visitors a month. We’re not Yahoo, but certainly it puts us at the top of the heap after the big three.

OJR: Why do you have so many women in your audience?

Horan: I think it’s really reflective of the content. We’ve got a tremendously strong health channel. All of us guys should probably spend more time worrying about our health. It still tends to be women who are more sensitive to health issues, and they drag us by the ear to look at the screen and read the article. That attracts a largely female audience. We are the No. 3 food site. We have more unique users in food than Epicurious, which will bring a female audience. We’re top two or three in education and homework. That will tend to skew a little more female.

OJR: When did you reach profitability as a unit? What do you credit with hitting profitability?

Horan: I don’t think anyone was profitable during the nuclear winter, but we were significantly profitable in ’04. I don’t think in 2001, 2002, no matter how brilliant you were, it was going to be real tough to make a profit in that market. With the recovery market it was certainly easier to be rewarded for running the business well. It was a positive double-whammy.

OJR: Does the Times plan any layoffs due to the acquisition?

Horan: You’d have to ask the Times, but I’ve seen the financials that they presented to their board, and they actually reflect incremental investment in the business — keeping the staff intact and investing in the business. This is about growing, this isn’t about cost savings.

We’re running a lean, almost skeletal organization. Because the Times is committed to growing online generally, and growing About, they have demonstrated a willingness to invest in the business. Right now, there’s 68 employees — 7 or 8 editorial — and 500 Guides, who are independent contractors.

OJR: How do you see the Times and About fitting together, both as sites and organizations?

Horan: I was in the funny position of advocating for them to be a part of the process, initially. Not that I thought they would be the one at the end. They’re up the block from us, we’ve known them a long time, and thought they’d prospectively be a good fit. So I was actually very pleasantly surprised when it turned out that they were the acquirer, because I believe the two organizations are very compatible and the two sites are very complementary.

If you had asked me awhile ago, so what does About do well, I’d say consumer sites and information. We don’t do news, we don’t do sports, we don’t do stocks — and they do that really well. In a sense, they do the front pages really well, and we do the drill-down feature content. They tend to skew more male, more urban. We tend to skew more female, more suburban.

When you put the story together, if somebody reads a news article on the Times, we’ve got the evergreen content that’s the drill-down. When you read an article about the tsunami in Southeast Asia, we’ve got a geology guide who already had great articles about tsunamis, the biggest tsunamis ever, what are the things that cause tsunamis, those were already on our servers. All that stuff is nice and compatible.

OJR: Why do you think the synergy strategy with Primedia didn’t work? When they bought About, it seemed like a perfect fit with all their niche pubs.

Horan: I was not at Primedia or About when the deal happened. I think there were several major factors. About’s audience is very different than Primedia’s. About reaches an audience that is two-thirds women. Primedia’s audience is overwhelmingly male. Topically, we cover health, education, food, travel, technology, and new autos. Primedia’s strengths are in outdoors, enthusiast autos, and performance cars and trucks. Finally, I don’t think we worked out a business model that enabled both About and the publications to succeed.

The good news is that we have learned a lot over time and will bring that knowledge to the Times. We should not experience the same challenges.

OJR: Some people have said that The New York Times Co. overpaid for About.com and that they could have built a similar site for a lot less than that.

Horan: This will all go back to ‘what the hell do they know?’ Let’s go through the process here. We have a million pieces of original content on our servers. What would it cost you to write a million articles? What would it cost you to hire the people to write the million articles, to drive traffic? Worldwide we get almost 40 million unique visitors a month. So how much marketing would you spend to get 40 million unique visitors per month?

Mencken said, ‘For every question, there’s an answer that’s simple, neat, and wrong.’ People say, ‘Sure, you can recreate that.’ But in fact there’s eight years of knowledge in how to run a distributed network. If somebody wanted to do it, we have patents on the Guide system and a lot of the underlying technology. So we’ve spent eight years providing Guides with all the tools so they can publish. We have probably the industry’s most sophisticated ad-serving system.

For the past 18 months, we’ve been serving all the users cookies, and we build the page dynamically based on the cookie we see coming in. You may think it’s no problem to recreate this. But if the Times and other folks that were in the [buyout] process really thought that they could recreate this that easily, they would not be stepping up to pay a premium. Oh, and by the way, there’s the execution risk. Over the next three years, what are the odds that you’re going to do this well and wind up in the same spot?

OJR: Why couldn’t your model be replicated by aggregating some of the blogs that are experts in subjects or niches?

Horan: With few exceptions, none of the blogs have critical mass. For the most part, with few exceptions, advertisers don’t want to advertise on someone’s personal home page, they don’t like advertising in forums, they don’t like advertising in blogs. It’s a media business. Media is about getting to critical mass and about getting advertiser support.

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