Making News at The New York Times

Chapter 6

Participation, Branding, and the New New York Times

Andrew Ross Sorkin, editor of Dealbook and columnist, sat hunched over business weekend editor David Joachim's computer.¹ The two were trying to decipher Tweetdeck, the Twitter sharing platform.

“What is it?” Sorkin asked. Joachim explained the advantages of using this site over the main Twitter platform: “You can post the whole URL instead of going to that link shortening thing [Bitly]. And it updates to Facebook automatically.”²

But Joachim, arguably, was using Twitter pretty poorly at the time. His tweets were composed of links to New York Times content, and he only had a few followers, or people who subscribed to his Twitter feed. But he was trying, at least, and doing so without the intervention of the appointed social media editor, Jennifer Preston. And the collaboration between Sorkin and Joachim was informal, rather than the result of something top down. It wasn't going to result in perfect best practices for Twitter use (after all, Twitter itself could update to Facebook, too), but this exchange might have helped Sorkin manage his nearly four hundred thousand followers just a little bit better.

This vignette shows how journalists often taught each other (for better or worse) about social media. And this kind of informal activity had some notable benefits for the newsroom: from the perspectives of branding, revenue, experimentation, and creating relationships with the audience, participation on social media platforms seemed to be a must for the news organization. Like interactivity and immediacy, the value of participation had influenced newswork, albeit in contested ways, on many levels. Significantly, though, participation inside The Times certainly did not embody the idea espoused by many Internet theorists about the nature of journalism in the networked public sphere.

When we think about participation from an academic perspective, we think about the social, writeable Web that breaks down boundaries between producers and consumers of traditional media. Users are empowered to make their own content and share it with people they know and don't know (the mantra of YouTube, for instance, is “Broadcast Yourself”). In a social media world, this content produced by users is shareable and spreadable.³ In fact, that's what we see, for instance, in the generation of memes replicating across the Web: users bring new meaning to these often silly commercials or images, sharing them across Facebook and Twitter.

Participation challenges the traditional norms of journalism by suggesting that anyone, at any time, could become a reporter.⁴ News scholar Mark Deuze suggests that journalistic authority is transformed through the “blurring of real or perceived boundaries between makers and users in an increasingly participatory media.”⁵ By this, he means that traditional journalists and users are now sharing the duties of creating media content, and as such, journalists will have to earn the right to be treated as professionals. Of course, participation has always existed between journalists and their audiences in some form, from letters to the editor to photos bought from ordinary citizens. The public journalism movement of the 1990s and early 2000s sought to bring together journalists and their audiences as part of the story generation and reporting process. However, the participatory Web offers a new dimension to this exchange.

As a result, others imagine a world where journalists and audiences work together via collective intelligence to create collaborative projects. Axel Bruns calls this process produsage—and in this pro-am world, distinctions between consumers and producers no longer exist. Together, journalists and audiences work toward the continuous improvement of content in a nearly egalitarian fashion, exemplified by Wikipedia.⁶ Internet intellectual and journalism scholar Jeff Jarvis and the London School of Economics' Charlie Beckett both suggest the term networked journalism,⁷ which “takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives.”⁸

But when theory is translated in more practical ways, the utopian ideal can get corrupted. Like the other values we have considered, participation becomes one other possible mechanism of economic survival as newsrooms take advantage of the social Web. Similarly, participation is not always about equal exchange. When journalists heard the message about participation, they translated this as a practical imperative to be on social networks, but they did not, for the most part, take part in a genuine conversation with their audiences. As journalists worked to try to understand participation, there were many hiccups in the road, from resistance in the newsroom to ethical concerns.

There was much at stake for the newspaper to adapt to the new value of participation in the newsroom. Just how much authority would this great newspaper be willing to yield to the supposed new power of the audience? What engagement with the audience was necessary and desirable, and how much of it should journalists do? What were the ethical problems that could result? And could this participation through social media be monetized, in some way? This chapter attempts to get to the core of these questions.

A review of the newsroom's digital social media strategy underscores the top managers' sense of how participation could be monetized; their views suggest a limited vision of the user as anything other than a way to make money. The economic emphasis didn't translate to the editorial side of the newsroom, where top editors failed to consider what participation might add to the conversation. The divisions in the newsroom reveal the variability of the importance journalists placed on making participation part of online news. For some, the newsroom was a welcoming environment for experimentation and learning or an opportunity to try branding and reporting. Others were adamant in their refusals to engage; still others were simply unsure what participation meant in an online newsroom. The tension surrounding ethics, from creating an ethics policy that could last, to avoiding controversy caused by social media, demonstrated just how difficult it was for Times journalists to negotiate participation.

In theory, it makes sense to proclaim the dawn of a new age between journalists and audience members. From an aspirational perspective, there is the potential to redistribute the very authority of news production and give new people voices. Yet in practice, this was not so simple—nor necessarily desired or even practical for The Times. Rather, what can be seen in the newsroom was a period of transformation, from trying to create a business model to developing an understanding of how to use social media platforms, suggesting the emergent and, at times, contested nature of participation in online journalism.

Who's In the Money?

Even more valuable than a sticky site—the kind loaded with interactive elements—would be a sticky and spreadable site.⁹ A spreadable site is one that takes advantage of social content that people can share, comment on, spread across their social networks, augment by adding user-generated content, and even remix—though maybe not all of those things nor all of them at once. A sticky, spreadable site would ideally have the potential to bring in the most money, because visitors would not only stay on the site but also share the site's content with the people who listen to them, read or watch the content they pass along, and perhaps even reshare it. An added benefit is that advertisers know that a participatory audience is a responsive and active audience.

Facebook might have been the ultimate sticky and spreadable site at the time of my research. Facebook was sticky in that users could spend hours and hours scrolling through the site, looking at what their friends were doing, playing games, seeing photos, updating statuses, and the like. But it was also a spreadable site: it served as the vehicle for people to share content about themselves, spread news stories, and comment on each other's profiles. People could post user-generated content, which could then be shared rapidly and broadly across networks.

If it was interactivity—and, to a lesser extent, immediacy—that helped make Times content sticky, the next question before Times strategists might well have been how to make Times content more spreadable. Times content, when shared over social networks, talked about on Facebook, commented on, or the like, became spreadable content. And all that interactive content, like the text, was generally spreadable: all the graphics, videos, and slideshows could easily be shared across social networks—and, contrary to the nytimes.com paywall model in place at the time, shared content could be accessed for free—as a way to spread Times content even further. The caveat about social media strategy I saw at The Times was that it was, in fact, likely to change, and the staff at The Times was entirely uncertain about whether any of it would work. But for the period I was there, the strategy revolved around trying to harness the very special audience The Times had for its spreadable content.

Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations at The Times, noted that one of the questions facing the news organization was whether it, too, could do what Facebook was doing. Speaking to the Wharton School of Business students in 2010, he had this to say:

 

By [Facebook spreading itself across the Web], it raises the question of whether Facebook's incredible engagement metrics can now be applied to sites that, today, have implemented only a thin layer of interactivity into their products. I regard this as true for both traditional and non-traditional publishers, with few exceptions.

When Zuckerberg says that “web experiences want to be social,” he's not just referring to social sites. He's talking about the need for engagement across the web, including on publishing sites.

…So in a very direct sense, greater engagement contributes to our emerging business model. This approach is governed by a simple premise: the more engaged our users are with us, the more value we deliver to them, the more likely they will be to pay.¹⁰

 

In other words, engagement via social and interactive content, spread by the loyal customer who wants to spend time with The New York Times brand and talk about The New York Times on social sites, is a survival tactic for The Times.

So, if we look at participation from an economic perspective, we see a company that was bound up in branding its reporters and making its content maximally shareable. The top executives were preoccupied, it seemed, with these goals. Engagement was money, whether The Times said so directly or not. Consider the following speech from publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., given at the London School of Economics in November 2011, boasting about a consulting company's report on social media:

 

The New York Times was ranked Number One as the most social company in the United States, based on our social presence. The Times scored ahead of powerhouses like Google, Apple, and the Walt Disney Company.

We've put a priority on the utilization of social media…. We've had great success building upon our readership that way. We have far more followers on social networks than most other news organizations. The main Facebook page of The New York Times has more than 1.7 million fans. And, our main Twitter page has more than 3.8 million followers. That's extraordinary and it doesn't even begin to define our reach since so many of our terrific reporters have their own significant followings on social media. In fact, we have more than 15.8 million followers on Twitter for all New York Times accounts. And here is an astounding fact—a New York Times story is tweeted every 4 seconds.¹¹

 

What were the implications of all of this? Traffic. Readership. Spreadability. Money. And the best thing about The Times’ audience, as we will see a bit later, was that it was, as Sulzberger, Jr. noted, “an incredibly enlightened, intelligent and sophisticated group of users who [were] highly engaged with our products”—or more specifically, an audience ideal for marketers.

Was all of this participation implemented with just money in mind? Maybe not. Sulzberger, Jr. did use this speech to talk about The Times as a site of democratic conversation. He addressed the moves the news organization was making to include readers. He highlighted the efforts of some of the strongest social media users at The Times on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr to reach out to audiences in new ways. But when you added up the numbers and potential for expanding The New York Times’ reach, participation had a strong economic incentive for The Times.

The statistics about participation, however, were misleading. First, the @nytimes account on Twitter had 4.5 million followers. A number of key figures (columnists, for the most part) had millions of Twitter followers. David Pogue had 1.4 million Twitter followers; far more people were following his 140-character updates than subscribing to the print paper. Nick Kristof had 1.2 million followers. Other journalists, too, were registering huge numbers of followers. Brian Stelter, media writer, had about 380,000 followers, and David Carr, media columnist, had about 400,000 followers. In contrast, Jill Abramson, executive editor, only had 16,000 followers. In other words, a selection of journalists had most of the followers, while others had a great deal fewer.

Similarly, just bragging about being “the most social” company tells us little about how these journalists were actually using these platforms. A Pew study released in conjunction with The George Washington University looked at the Twitter feeds from thirteen major news organizations and thirteen journalists. The study found that news organizations were much more likely than individual journalists to use the tool to promote their own content. And beyond that, news organizations were far less likely to use Twitter as a reporting tool, or to “curate or recommend information” (2 percent of the time).¹² And a mere 1 percent of those news organization's tweets studied (out of a total of thirty-six hundred) were actually retweets that came from somewhere outside the news organization, such as an individual or another news organization.

Conversely, journalists like Pogue, Carr, Stelter, C. J. Chivers (a war correspondent), and others have developed not only loyal followings but also personal brands. As part of the “most social” company, these reporters were helping deliver Times content and spread the brand to dedicated readers. Reporters with Twitter accounts and Facebook pages have fans. And the content shared with these fans, on these sites, is both “spreadable” and “sticky.” The problem perplexing The Times was how to turn these brands into something they could measure and then sell to advertisers. But these loyal fans were certainly an improvement over the aggregate traffic measures online. So while social media editor Jennifer Preston was proud of these journalists who had developed loyal followings, and proud of their audience engagement, an economic motive was also at work. As Jill Abramson, new executive editor of The Times as of September 2011, put it in a panel at the annual Austin, Texas, cultural festival South by Southwest, individual New York Times journalists on Twitter were “sub-brands” of the news organization.¹³

Preston explained that another aspect of The Times’ social media strategy was to get readers who were participating on social media sites to come to The Times through those social media sites and thereby to develop another type of engaged reader. The newspaper had added a number of Facebook pages where people interested specifically in Times content about, say, Broadway or politics or movies could congregate, form communities, and find links back to Times content. The Times didn't usually ask questions of this audience; instead, someone at The Times pushed out a Times story, and readers discussed the story among themselves and their friends. The goal, it seems, was to get these readers to come back to The Times Web site: this was, in part, a traffic strategy.

However, there was another motivating factor behind the Facebook approach. The hope was that these readers would come to care deeply about Times content, enough so that they would become “fans” on Facebook and, as a result, could be mobilized to share content with their non-Times-reading friends, thus bringing those friends to the site. And once these readers were on The Times’ site, the newspaper then made it very easy for them to suggest stories to friends via Facebook (all anyone had to do was click the “Facebook Recommends” link on the bottom of the story). Through this form of social curation—friends suggesting stories to other friends—content would spread naturally. The Facebook strategy brought together the kind of friend chains that represented what advertisers have, for years, called “quality audiences,” or audiences whose demographic profiles made them particularly attractive as consumers. Preston even used the words “quality audience” when talking about The Times’ Facebook strategy for monetizing this loyal readership. Given the nature of Facebook's ability to chart demographics and traffic patterns, The Times knew a lot more about these readers than it ever had before. Facebook fans, and the Facebook Recommends system, were plainly a marketing win.

From the way Sulzberger, Jr., Nisenholtz, and Preston talked, it seemed like The Times had a firm digital strategy for social media. However, I think there is also a way in which improvisation (in its elemental form) can be seen at work in the plans they pursued. If improvisation is the process of building new routines out of old ones, we can see this to be the case with this digital strategy. Newspapers needed to come up with some way to make sense of a diminishing regular and predictable consumer base, and now, The Times’ new strategy, similar to many other newsrooms, was to rely on reader loyalty that flowed through the personal brands of individual reporters.

Past practices dictated that newspapers should try to find audiences marketers would want—wealthy, educated, and otherwise “demographically desirable” people—through traditional methods, like phone surveys or promotions. Now, though, newspapers were still finding these quality audiences, but through such uncharted territories as Facebook groups. And while it was important for The Times to find a way to make money online, we need to be critical about the views espoused from the top management about participation. Readers were used for their demographics and their capacity to contribute to reporting, but it is important to question just how much of the rhetoric of Web 2.0 and participation was actually manifested by Times digital strategy. From the economic perspective, it seemed to be very little—and perhaps that was entirely logical, given the newspaper's goals.

Interestingly, at no point did I hear from any management figures, who were definitely concerned with the economic impacts of these branding, monetization, and participation proselytizing efforts, any kinds of concerns about what these journalists might say. When I talked to Preston, I did not hear anything about objectivity or even any consideration about how to help reporters develop their informed “voice” to parallel the one that The Times so prided itself on in print. She wasn't going to be the “social media police,” as she put it. But as we will see, there were very few cases where the audience was anything more than—at best—a reporting source for Times journalists, suggesting that Benkler's, Bruns's, and others' aspirations for journalism and participation may not yet be realized (or practical) in reality.

Leave It to the Storytellers?

As much as the drive for participation was rooted in economics, the message about money, thankfully, didn't seem to be the one that journalists were getting. Instead, what journalists heard was that they ought to be participating on social media platforms to connect with audiences in new ways: a very practical rendition of the more theoretical messages of “produsage” and “networked journalism.” Just how to participate on these platforms though, was an industry-wide conundrum. Anywhere journalists went to look about how to do reporting in the digital age, from industry blogs to conferences to email newsletters, they would probably be presented with messages about how they should be making the most of their new capacity for interaction with the audience via social networks.

Similarly, news organizations got lots of attention from journoblogs for announcing “social media editors,” whose primary purpose was deemed to integrate social media into the newsroom workflow. News organizations had begun to promote participation via social media as a key to their success, like Al Jazeera had done during the Arab Spring. Internet intellectual Jeff Jarvis, a presence in almost all of The New York Times’ journalists' Twitter feeds that I saw, constantly promoted the idea of participatory engagement.¹⁴ Jay Rosen, another scholar who managed to reach out to journalists, argued that journalists needed to pay much more attention to what audiences were both saying and creating as news producers themselves.¹⁵ The Knight Foundation, the biggest philanthropic funder in journalism, had been pouring millions of dollars into news challenges that rewarded participation, especially projects that enabled citizens to create news. Thus, journalists heard a constant message from industry chatter about the need to participate with the audience—from talk of a Pulitzer for social media to Knight Foundation grants.¹⁶

Ironically though, not all journalists were getting this message from the top of the editorial food chain at The Times. As community editor Vanessa Schneider explained to me, journalists could go all day without engaging in any kind of interaction with readers (even just the basics, from comments to emails or newer tools like Twitter), in part because the institutional buy-in at the top hadn't been made clear:

 

If it were [presented as] just a piece of the puzzle, “Yeah I had to answer comments, use Facebook and Twitter [and] it's part of what I do during the day,”…it won't happen in the company absolutely unless Bill Keller [then executive editor] said “read comments and answer them, go on Twitter and answer [the audience], and promote [their work] on Facebook.”

But it takes people away from A1 and at end of day, editors want text and the head print editors that have the final word in how people spend their time.¹⁷

 

In other words, in Schneider's view, journalists wouldn't participate on these networks unless there was some sort of institutional force behind the much larger culture of participation journalists were hearing about. Old habits would be too easy to keep if no one in authority was really encouraging change. And despite Preston's efforts, Schneider, her deputy, didn't feel that social media had, at that time, become a regular part of the lives of most reporters in the newsroom.

And as Schneider put it, some of the older, print/text-focused editors saw participatory outlets as a distraction. One editor complained to me about a reporter who had developed a very loyal following on Twitter. In fact, this reporter often broke news on Twitter and then wrote about it for the newspaper. But as the editor told me: “[Reporter X] should be writing more and tweeting less. I'd like to see some more Page One stories out of her.” Thus, there were some conflicting messages inside The Times: despite the sense in journalism's general professional milieu that social media was supposed to be important, there was still some resistance from top editors who saw social media as an interruption to the more important print product.

Nonetheless, what emerged as particularly interesting from The Times’ experience with social media was that most journalists didn't need clear messages about social media from the top. The whole idea of participation was simply so new that there were no tried and true ways to think about the process. So there was the capacity for bottom-up trial and error, thanks to the varying institutional support, and plenty of space for experimentation. Some reporters improvised on old routines, using Twitter for news gathering. Other reporters had become brand names, moving beyond bylines to personalities in the social media space. Still others couldn't figure out what all of this meant for them. All of this instability showcased the contested nature of adopting participation as a value of online journalism.

New Participatory Practices Inside the Newsroom

Whenever I asked journalists at The New York Times about the “new audience” online, they would generally respond, “You mean Facebook? Twitter?” Then, they would mention a few names of people in the newsroom who were seen as being prolific on these sites, usually some combination of the following journalists: Brian Stelter, David Carr, David Pogue, Rob Mackey (head of The Lede Blog), Nick Kristof, Louise Story, and C.J. Chivers. From what I heard in the newsroom, the Web value of participation was an ideal that journalists aspired to, even though many felt quite confused about the actual practicalities of engaging with the audience in new ways. Those who were best at social media were widely regarded as future-oriented, shining stars.

In the 1950s, scholar Warren Breed wrote about the quiet but inescapable socialization of journalists that reinforced certain accepted organizational norms and values.¹⁸ Something similar was happening with participation: as participation became a new value of newswork, journalists influenced each other about its importance, even if many were uncertain about how to make participation work for them. I saw this happening in the newsroom myself. There were Sorkin and Joachim, teaching each other. There were other quick “what should I tweet” conversations in the newsroom. But perhaps my favorite example was the day I watched the reporter Willie Neuman get introduced to Twitter.

Neuman, agriculture and food business beat writer, sat at the back of the tech pod. One result of being so close to the tech team was that he was generally a willing subject for the suggestions of the early adopters around him. For example, he regularly got friendly ribbing for his outdated PalmPilot smartphone, with its antenna held together by duct tape, and eventually took a step up to a better, sleeker Blackberry (though he admitted that even this was still just a shell of what his colleagues had).

After listening to tech journalists Nick Bilton and Jenna Wortham talk about Foursquare one day, Neuman was confused. Bilton and Wortham simply explained to Neuman that the check-in app was a new trend—and didn't elaborate. Instead, they went back to basics with Neuman, or at least “basics” as far as these tech reporters understood it: Twitter. Wortham inquired whether Neuman was on Twitter. Neuman equivocated.¹⁹ He had an account, but he hadn't ever used it.

I listened as Neuman asked, “Why do I want this? What's it for?” Wortham gave a quick response: “You can use it to send out articles.” Bilton explained to Neuman that he could “add” people to his Twitter list to see what they were saying. He began instructing Neuman to add Times staff members to the list of people Neuman followed. Bilton began calling out names from his own Twitter list for Neuman to add, including other influential media people, like columnists from Wired and The Atlantic.

Neuman noted, “Carr [media columnist David Carr] is just talking about…” with great surprise. I didn't catch what Neuman said, but he was likely surprised that Carr, who tweets about what he ate for breakfast, was tweeting about nothing related to the news.

Bilton then showed Neuman how to retweet. Neuman was confused and asked what retweeting means: “Why would I want to do this?” Bilton explained the concept: “Say you're following me, or liked something I said, you'd retweet me. Then, the next time I saw something you said that I liked, I'd retweet you.” Retweeting was one way to help others promote their friends, Bilton explained.

When I spoke to Neuman two months later about social media, he had tried using Twitter, but just briefly. He noted:

 

I haven't used it very much. I looked at it for a while, but I have lost interest. I can see what companies were doing with it, and they were mostly just plugging themselves in pretty innocuous ways. Some people use it every time they write a story. And they put it up there. I tried that a couple of times but didn't keep doing it.²⁰

 

This vignette of Neuman's Twitter training, and then his apparent inability to keep up with it, illustrates a number of important themes about participation in The New York Times’ newsroom. First, Neuman was a willing experimenter—confused but willing to learn about what his more tech-savvy colleagues were doing to increase their Web presence. He was socialized into an ethos of participation. Even when he rejected using Twitter, he was well aware that many of his colleagues were constantly using social media, tweeting “every time they write a story.”

Nonetheless, Neuman also posited an important critique of this supposedly participatory forum: the information he was getting was from companies, not from people, and most of it was useless to him. Though he was improvising by trying the new routine of using social media for his work, the old rules were still in place for determining the information sources he would pay attention to—companies, not audiences. So much for his interacting with an audience of ordinary readers.

From another vantage, though, what Bilton and Wortham taught Neuman about social media was illuminating. For these journalists, the primary reason for using Twitter was more about bolstering one's own presence with, say, other Times journalists and influential media elites. Talking to readers never came up once during the lesson. And Bilton and Wortham were branded reporters who spent much of their time (as I observed) engaging in dialogue with tech elites over Twitter, exchanges that were nonetheless seen by a fairly large following (Bilton's was then at about one hundred thousand people). Still, for Neuman, the drumbeat of “participation, participation, participation” had now become part of his understanding of working in the digital age, just as it had for many other journalists.

Making Participation Part of Everyday Workflow

Though Neuman didn't know how to make social media part of his workflow, there were certainly other people, beyond just the tech reporters, who had begun to use social media as an extension of their traditional skills in the newsroom. These journalists saw social media as useful for both reporting and audience building (or, more cynically, brand building) and also as a way to communicate with their fellow beat reporters and even some sources. And most of this took place over Twitter, in a public setting where their followers could watch these conversations unfolding in real time.²¹

Journalist Brian Stelter had been heralded for his social media prowess, and examining his workflow gives some sense of the many considerations that were presented to a journalist thinking about using social media as a tool in the newsroom. Stelter was an early adopter of social media in the newsroom. He had presented at the tech-celebration portion of South by Southwest,²² instructed journalists at Columbia University,²³ and regularly been the subject of articles with headlines like “NYT's Brian Stelter Champions Technology.”²⁴ Influential tech blog Mashable called him an “industry leader” in social media.²⁵ Stelter had some natural advantages: he was one of the youngest reporters in the newsroom, so he had essentially grown up with most of these social media platforms. He had also made his way to The Times from the blog he started, TVNewser, so his conception of the work required of a reporter included the kind of self-promotion and branding that many journalists had never had to do.

Stelter covered media and television as news (rather than as entertainment) for The Times. He was also one of the most prolific reporters at the newspaper, in part because of his Twitter activity. I once heard a Web producer groan when they saw yet another contributing line from him. But his contributing lines were warranted: as he explained to me about an earthquake in California he helped report, he had used Twitter to find out information during the breaking news. “I knew that [the reporter] was far away from the quake,” he said. “But I knew people would be on Twitter talking about it. So I got on Twitter and started following what people were saying.”²⁶ Stelter said he was absolutely convinced of Twitter's ability to provide him with news and information from ordinary people—and we can see this as evidence of the preeminent place that participation has in his idea of what constitutes reporting in a new media age.

Watching Brian Stelter work is a bit like watching someone in hyperdrive. He moved from the two stories he was writing to Facebook, to Twitter, to Tumblr, to Google's Gchat IM client, to talking to people around him, to playing with his brand-new iPad. He explained to me as he was working, “Whenever I have a thought, I tweet it.” These thoughts were pushed out to his now one hundred thousand–plus followers on Twitter. However, just as I had observed with other reporters, Stelter was most likely to respond on Twitter to people he already knew—such as well-known figures in the news industry or people he covered. The ordinary follower tweeting at him was unlikely to receive a response.

And the “social media police” were unlikely to monitor Stelter, who had his own sense of what he could and could not say. Stelter told me that if he was really concerned with a tweet, he would run it by a friend in The Times’ corporate communications department. Still, he saw boundaries between his tweets from @BrianStelter as a New York Times reporter and @BrianStelter, the individual, and he thought people should be able to distinguish between the two, as well. He explained:

 

My tweets get more personal and less about work as the day goes on. The lines between personal and professional bleed in social media. Obviously if I tweet something at 2 a.m., it is not about work. If I say something about a movie, I am not The Times’ movie critic. I think people know that.

 

This statement suggests the growth of reporters as a personal brand. They are reporters who cover serious topics, but they are also people who become personalities to their followers—people who do more than just cover news, who joke and share photos and the like. The ordinary print reporter in the past would live in the shadow of a byline, but now, reporters have a life beyond the newsroom that they can share with the world.

But The New York Times’ social media ethics clearly noted that journalists needed to be careful not to editorialize. So while Stelter trusted the public to understand that the movie opinions he offered were just his own views, and that the funny articles he posted on Facebook were just that, The New York Times as a whole was still figuring out how to keep people excited about Brian Stelter's tweets while refraining from having them seem like endorsements from The Times. So, as we will later see, the lack of “social media police” and the freewheeling nature of Twitter at The Times made for some dicey ethical situations.

While I was with Stelter, I also saw how Twitter could play an important role in reporting.²⁷ Stelter was watching his Twitter feed and noticed some important news: WikiLeaks had posted a video of an American helicopter airstrike on Baghdad that had resulted in the death of two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters.

Stelter, who had been fairly quiet, noticed this development and shouted on the newsroom floor, “WikiLeaks got the video of them being shot and killed. It shows the journalists being killed.”

Reuters had been pushing for the release of the video from the US military, but to no avail. This was big news—another leak from the amorphous group known as WikiLeaks. Stelter then asked his editor, Bruce Headlam, in a rushed voice, if this had made the story list for that evening. It had not.²⁸

Stelter was the first person at The Times to notice this WikiLeaks video—all from monitoring Twitter. His next steps were to call Reuters and to email Elisabeth Bumiller, who covered defense for The Times. He then sent her the link to the video and some sample reaction tweets. Bruce Headlam, Stelter's editor and head of the media desk, began alerting other editors to the story.

Stelter rushed me away as I watched him beginning to comb through the #wikileaks hashtag, searching for hidden gems, sources, and anything else he could get to help Bumiller with the story.²⁹ In the end, he was credited with a contributing line for his efforts.

Bumiller probably would have found out about the story in another way, perhaps after the Pentagon acknowledged the video, but Stelter found out first online. As he told me, “You can't ignore these things just because they are online. You need to do something about it.” Here was a direct case of traditional news-reporting skills being applied in a new context—searching for information on Twitter. These practices were then applied to other existing news norms: the WikiLeaks video was verified by Bumiller, as were other tidbits that Stelter found.

However, participation, even for Stelter, was not about conversation or encouraging user-generated content. Stelter was sharing things with his audience in new ways, and many now had a more personal relationship with this particular reporter, but he rarely talked back to individuals he didn't already know in some capacity, nor did he invite them to respond to him unless he really had a reporting question. In the case of the WikiLeaks story, he was monitoring information on Twitter, using the tool as another reporting source. He was not engaging with individual audience members, but instead, he used their energy to further traditional efforts. So for Stelter, participation had been normalized into his work context, rather than opening up new venues for communication with his audience.

In perhaps a far less dramatic situation than finding out about a WikiLeak, another journalist shared with me how social media has simply made it easier for him to do his work—in part because he could crowd-source his journalism questions. I conducted an interview with another prolific Twitter user, David Pogue, The New York Times’ tech columnist and author of The World According to Twitter. Pogue told me that Twitter was a “wonderful tool” for him as a columnist, noting, “I have [a] big presence on Twitter where there's a lot of give and take.” He told me that one of his favorite Twitter memories was when he was having trouble with a column, and his Twitter following helped him:

 

CNBC was coming next morning to shoot a video [for his column] and I hadn't prepared and it was 10 pm at night. I finally had an idea and I needed 4 extras for it. It was too late for my neighbors [to help me], so I went on Twitter and asked for 4 extras to come to my house in Connecticut. 30 people wrote back and volunteered, showed up on time and it was fantastic.³⁰

 

Certainly, this was a new relationship with his audience beyond what print could provide: Pogue was taking advantage of an active fan base (especially as a columnist) to help him do his work. He tried to see if he could crowd-source a reporting problem, and it worked—more evidence of how social media could, in fact, be a site of improvisation in reporting: new routines based on old practices.

If you looked at Pogue's Twitter feed, as often as he was pushing out links to his own columns and drumming up new ideas for blog posts, he was interacting with the audience.³¹ What is interesting about Pogue, as compared to so many other journalists, is that he did keep a conversation going with his Twitter followers. These conversations were often in response to posts about his own personal experiences, like streaming movies with his kids. Sharing this with an audience of 1.4 million Twitter followers was a powerful conversation to be having, especially on a non-Times-branded platform. The products he was offering—his tweets—were not, as yet, part of traditional news products, and it was still quite messy to figure out how to make sure these fans would get back to The Times, rather than just staying on Twitter. Had Pogue become too much of a sub-brand?

But there are also serious critiques that emerge when we think about how journalists are using Twitter, social media, and other forms of user-generated content. My concern was that journalists were simply using social media to further their own ends, rather than taking advantage of an excellent opportunity to get to know their audience better. Their goal simply seemed to be to have help with reporting, to get news out, or to build a public profile. Very little of this actually involved bringing the audience into the newsroom as participants, learning what they might have to say about the news, or taking advantage of this new forum to improve coverage.

On the other hand, are we really to expect that journalists at the most prestigious newspaper in the country should spend most of their time, time that we have seen increasingly eaten up by multimedia demands and more immediate news needs, interacting with the audience? Should journalists be responding to every audience tweet? Is this even possible? How could they harness the potential of the user for their work without the relationship being entirely instrumental (e.g., for explicit reporting purposes)? From what we see here, there was no equalizing of journalist and consumer of news. The Times was still the giant hub of mainstream media, pushing content out. And as some journalists asked when thinking about their own role in these social networks, how did you balance the authority of being a Times reporter with this much more informal network? There were many reasons journalists could find to rethink just how they should understand participation as a value of online journalism.

No Time, No Voice?

Journalists seemed to have a shared definition of participation—being prolific on a social media site. This wasn't, of course, what Web/journalism theorists would hope for journalists to understand about their supposed new relationship with the audience. But theoretical aspirations were left behind in the practice of the newsroom. In the application of participation, what remained contested was not the definition of participation, but what role it would have in their lives—whether journalists were willing to take part and how.

So far, we've only heard about the journalists who seized on Twitter or Facebook or at least encouraged others to do so. But many journalists, all of whom acknowledged that they should somehow engage with this now much more visible audience, didn't wish to invite participation. There were some who couldn't imagine fitting it into their workflow, others who were still sorting out all these new tools, and still others who felt that social media presented some serious ethical quandaries. It's important to hear their voices to remember that social media, even in the “most social” newsroom, was not a given and that participation was very much a contested value.

Journalists who didn't want to engage in social media were quite defensive about their reasons for not engaging online. They couldn't imagine adjusting their workflow to accommodate a new routine. As financial reporter Jennifer Anderson explained to me:

 

I have no time for social media. Literally no time. I'm writing a book, I have a job, a baby. I have a Facebook account to share pictures of my kids with my friends. But it's not for a lack for interest—it's for a lack of hours. The time I could be spending on Twitter or Facebook, I could be reporting or sleeping.³²

 

Labor reporter Steven Greenhouse agreed. His response to the question of social media use was, “I just spent six months moving from the suburbs to Manhattan.”³³ Notably, these journalists felt they should be doing something with social media, but they just couldn't imagine how to do it. Nonetheless, as Breed suggests, these journalists had naturalized a workplace norm: the idea that social media—and participation as The New York Times has imagined it—was important.³⁴

Other reporters didn't see social media as a drain on their time, but they were less convinced that social media was something that could help them. Reporter David Streitfeld put it this way:

 

I look at a lot of stuff, but I don't do too much myself. I do not use Twitter professionally. I do not tweet myself, but I do read what other people say. I don't find Twitter helps me covering real estate.

…Social media does not yet play a dramatic role in my journalism for better or worse. I don't know whether this is just my feeling or social media just isn't adaptable to the reporting needs of writing about real estate or maybe a little of both.³⁵

 

Streitfeld was reluctant to make a final declaration about the fate of social media in his own work, suggesting that he was willing to try new practices. But from his words, it is clear that he hadn't quite figured out how to make social media “adaptable” to what he did on a daily basis.

Other journalists had different questions, like what it would mean to suddenly have a relationship with an audience that was more than just as a byline. These journalists were concerned about the new opportunity to broadcast a nonofficial (yet somehow still official) message on social media platforms. They didn't know how, exactly, to communicate in a context that wasn't the traditional, edited story form. Unlike Pogue and Stelter, these journalists held back because they hadn't quite figured out what to do with the precedent that other journalists had set: having an online personality. Journalist Natasha Singer represented how a few journalists felt:

 

I am a follower, not a tweeter. I'm using it to see what [is] said. I haven't started tweeting yet, because [I am] trying to figure out what unique thing I add. I see reporters linking to stories or to stories other colleagues have posted and to other things that interest them, but I want to add something, and I want to be more than a listener. I am getting a lot out of following other people, but I haven't figured out my unique contribution.³⁶

 

Her comments reflect the fact that participation did mean, to many reporters, creating a form of personal branding in the newsroom. Singer and other journalists saw their professional roles as authoritative voices, and thus, they reasoned that what they said on these platforms could be just as influential as their stories. So, then, what would they say? And how would they develop the kind of relationship that could make Natasha Singer into a real person with, perhaps, opinions, guidance, and new ideas about the latest information, rather than just someone who pushed out content once a day? This transition, away from the detached journalist, a figure held up as a professional ideal for decades, was hard for many journalists to imagine.³⁷

There was no set precedent in the newsroom to form these new relationships with the audience that social media made possible. How Singer will ultimately decide to take her voice online showcases the emergence of participation in the newsroom: journalists are still creating new routines to shape their social media practices. And journalists at The Times had few examples to look to; there were just unique personalities like David Pogue and Brian Stelter. So while journalists had long been invited to appear as experts on TV and radio for their commentary, social media presented an unmoderated venue for conversation. And contributions on social media were different: journalists weren't conversing with talk show hosts in a controlled environment anymore. Instead, this new form of contribution came from journalists' own initiatives—and they were still determining what those might be.

Ethical Concerns

The biggest pushback from journalists about participation on social networks related to ethical concerns. After decades of journalists trying to make the case for their role as objective storytellers, many felt that social media outlets left them more exposed to attack for having a bias. Their “friends,” sources, the organizations they follow, and more would all be visible to the public. And what they said outside of the story, their unedited tweets or Facebook posts, might provide additional fodder for those looking to demonize their reporting.

One aspect that may have further hindered these journalists' desire to participate was that The Times itself was still uncertain about its social media policy. When I asked whether I could offer a link to this policy, or perhaps an appendix, standards editor Phil Corbett responded very nicely:

 

While these do reflect our current guidance to the staff, they were intended more as informal, internal memos—they are not publicly available as our Ethical Journalism handbook is [a printed handbook often given to visitors or available as a PDF].

Since these are fast-changing areas, our guidelines are likely to prove fluid and require revision as we go along, so I would rather these memos not be made public as representing “official” Times standards.³⁸

 

In short, The Times itself used words like “fluid” and acknowledged that, in this uncertain area, the newsroom's views about participation in online journalism were emerging. Unlike the “Ethical Journalism” handbook, a document often used in undergraduate journalism ethics classes, social media guidelines were just too fuzzy to be shared with the public at that moment.

Consider the difference between these social media guidelines and the traditional handbook, which includes a section called “Keeping Our Detachment.” The code states flatly that “it is essential that we preserve professional detachment, free of any hint of bias.” The code goes so far as to say, “Staff members may see sources informally over a meal or drinks, but they must keep in mind the difference between legitimate business and personal friendship.” It warns, “Romantic involvement with a news source would create the appearance and probably the reality of partiality.” As my colleague and former CNN White House bureau chief Frank Sesno points out, these in-person exchanges create cozier relationships than would be developed through social media. But this tells us something, both about what the culture of detachment has been at The Times and about the potential for a slippery slope. Consider the tradition: “No newsroom or editorial employee may do anything that damages our reputation for strict neutrality in reporting on politics and government.” That certainly would seem to leave out a lot of the fun of the chatter on social media platforms.

At first glance, some of the existing social media guidelines seemed that they would answer journalists' questions. But the reality of social media seemed to demand personality, or a “unique contribution,” as Natasha Singer put it; as such, the code might not have been realistic. These social media standards were not that different from existing standards in The Times’ editorial guidelines handbook: “Generally a staff member should not say anything on radio, television or the Internet that could not appear under his or her byline in The Times.” Staffers were instructed to leave blank their political affiliation on Facebook pages to avoid “casting doubt” on The Times’ or the reporter's political impartiality (unless they happened to be columnists).

Journalists were also told to be wary of joining groups, despite the fact that these groups could be good sources of information. Joining these groups could suggest that the reporter (and through the reporter The Times) was actually affiliated with them. Newsroom reporters were warned to be careful not to recommend or retweet anything that illustrated opinion. As a result, in shaping these guidelines, journalists were relying on improvisation, hoping that there would be clear links to the original sense of ethics. But The Times journalists' actual activity across social media platforms bore little resemblance to the original structure of this ethical code.

No one who used these social media platforms prolifically really seemed to follow these guidelines. In the case of Nick Bilton (see Chapter 2), he was clearly tweeting and retweeting his own thoughts and opinions about the new iPad. And joining groups on Facebook could be a great source of information, so it seemed silly to have a reporter avoid joining, say, fans of the GOP. Stelter clearly tweeted his own opinions about movies, restaurants, and the like. So what was a reporter who was uncertain about staying on the safe side supposed to do? The answer, for some, was to simply stay out of the way.

Ed Wyatt, who covers government regulatory efforts from Washington, D.C., put his concerns this way:

 

I had a Facebook page that I eliminated because I didn't want it to be used against me. Everything we write [means] someone attacks our motives, and anything that someone can interpret as giving a basis for questioning my objectivity is something that can cause problems. I don't need it and I don't need the grief.

I have a Twitter account, but I generally don't use it. I rarely use it to promote my own stories, and it seems ridiculous because The Times has a million or however many readers and I do not have a million readers following me on Twitter. It's just not efficient use of my time.

Maybe it's a naïve 20th-century view, but I don't believe I should be in the business of promoting my own stories. I believe The New York Times will promote the stories based on how it displays [them] on the Web page and in the paper.³⁹

 

A number of interesting themes come from Wyatt's response. Journalists have always been accused of bias, but Wyatt saw engaging with the public via social media as just one more way to have his work attacked. Anything taken out of context could remove the distance he tried to have as a reporter. Notably, Wyatt wasn't thinking about how he could include the public in his reporting—he didn't seem to want to; instead, he thought of Twitter and Facebook simply as output. Twitter was a link engine, not conversation.

Other reporters I spoke with shared Wyatt's concern about objectivity. Another reporter similarly noted:

 

I don't participate in it. I am happy to go in and look at stuff, but I don't use it this way. At this point it's a conscious decision not to. It's so easy sometimes for [the] kinds of stories I do to be accused of being somehow aligned with certain interests, so rather than Facebook, or even quite frankly LinkedIn, I just don't want to be accused by someone saying you've associated with that person and that's why you like [this] PR firm or advocacy group. That's too hard for me to manage.⁴⁰

 

These journalists were less concerned about having a conversation with their audience than they were about being subject to attack for their perceived impartiality.

I have, until this point, suggested that theories of the recalibrated journalist/audience relationship were not meshing with the reality of journalistic practice, in part because journalists did not engage with their audience in a more direct way. These journalists were failing to respond to the audience, to engage them in conversation, and to see how they might be able to take part in the news-making process. But the ethical concerns that Wyatt and others brought up are ones that did present some counterpoints to the idea of “networked journalism” or giving up journalistic authority. Soliciting opinions, for instance, might be viewed as asking for endorsements. Replying in the affirmative to a particular link might accidentally put a journalist in the position of defending his or her political neutrality. Thanking someone for a news lead could be similarly dangerous. Conversation with the audience presented an ethical minefield; while most Times journalists were not thinking about social media as a site of engagement with the public, if and when they did, these matters of professional ethics could pose many problems.

These reporters' concerns about ethics were not just excuses for staying off social media platforms. In fact, when I was in the newsroom, one business journalist's daily use of Twitter got her into serious trouble—and showed the dangers of having Twitter as an extension of “every thought,” as Stelter put it. Times journalist Hiroko Tabuchi was busy for months covering the fallout of Toyota's terrible PR disaster over sudden acceleration in its cars.⁴¹ She was working overtime—covering the story for New York deadlines but working in her local time zone (Tokyo) as the dispatch reporter at all the press conferences and Toyota events in Japan. As per her usual routine, Tabuchi was keeping her Twitter followers up to date on her reporting activities.

On this occasion, her tweets were about what it was like to be at a Toyota press conference:

 

• With less than 3 hours sleep, managed to haul myself onto 6 am shinkansen for #Toyota event in Nagoya. We love you Mr. Toyoda!

• ToyotaMan: We're gonna confiscate your mobile phones once we get off the bus. And you must wear our (butt-ugly) yellow Toyota hats. Whaa…?

• Me: Since we're just sitting here waiting to depart, can I go get a coffee?

• ToyotaMan: No.

• Me: I'll be back in just a minute.

• ToyotaMan: No.

• Back! Toyota coffee machine just recalled my coffee, said it failed a taste check so it wd make another cup. I'm dead serious, place is nuts

• Akio Toyoda took very few questions, ignored reporters incl me who tried to ask a follow-up. I'm sorry, but Toyota sucks.⁴²

 

This series of tweets got Tabuchi in more than a bit of trouble at The Times. While people inside The Times said they spotted her tweets first, they were also picked up on the troublesome Times watchdog blog, NYTPICKER. Simply put, a reporter should not, according to New York Times social media guidelines I received, “write anything on a blog or a personal Web page that you could not write in The Times—don't editorialize.”⁴³ Tabuchi was adding color to her experience and giving readers a real sense of the scene. But she was also adding opinion. And perhaps this opinion was too unprofessional for a Times reporter.

The result of Tabuchi sharing her tweets as part of her up-to-the minute reporting was a very public scolding. The public editor, Clark Hoyt, wanted to pull Tabuchi off the story because he thought her reporting was compromised. Inside the newsroom, I heard a defense from editors that Tabuchi was just tired and this had nothing to do with her ability to report the story. Tabuchi, apologetic, said to Hoyt in his weekly column, “The banter on Twitter is often very casual and forces us to economize on words. That can be perilous. But the last thing I'd want is collegial banter and humor to affect perceptions of our coverage.” Still, though, according to Hoyt, Tabuchi said she “regards Twitter as an invaluable way to connect with readers and to get sources for stories.”⁴⁴

For Tabuchi, participation via social media was a way to extend her reporting beyond the activities of working inside a newsroom. She viewed Twitter as a way to share the experiences of reporting with her followers. And she had incorporated this new approach into her work norms. But the result was unpredictable—the banter itself was a stark contrast to impartiality. Even though Tabuchi wanted to be more than just someone pushing out links, her meltdown with Toyota shows the difficult terrain of navigating between personality and traditional journalism. This ethical minefield was a clear site of negotiating the value of participation in the newsroom.

Rounding Up Participation

Henry Jenkins' work on convergence culture argues that the relationship between producers and consumers is in uncharted territory, because audiences can now so easily create, share, and remix content.⁴⁵ The traditional top-down creation of media has been upended as ordinary people can take what they have made and distribute it across the Web. The essence of participatory culture, to theorists like Jenkins and the others I discussed earlier in the chapter, is one in which the industry that formerly had the power to control content can no longer control how, where, when, and by whom the content is used.

Indeed, participation was a new news production value at The Times. Journalists felt that participation was both influencing their daily work and increasingly becoming part of what it meant to be a journalist in the digital age. But at The Times, participation was not the Web 2.0 vision suggested by Jenkins or any of the other theorists discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Instead, participation equaled being present on a social media platform. This was “participating” in the digital age at The Times.

This chapter gives an overview of some of the challenges, conflicts, and opportunities that emerged in 2010 at The New York Times as participation increasingly became a value of newswork. Journalists understood that interacting with the audience on new platforms was important, so there were opportunities for journalists to teach each other about how to incorporate participation into their daily workflows. Other journalists used social media and citizen participation (albeit in a unidirectional way) to aid their reporting. Showcasing the contested nature of participation, some journalists worried about establishing a unique voice, while others noted the ethical pitfalls that could (and did) emerge.

Journalists, for the most part, seemed fairly ignorant that audiences could quite possibly be citizen contributors to the news-making process. Rather than a shared “mutualisation” of journalism between news organization and audience, as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger spoke about, something different happened at The Times.⁴⁶ Journalists controlled the conversation, and often, this control meant that they would decide to not even engage in any kind of conversation. Perhaps this was for the better, as it might be impossible for a newspaper on the scale of The Times to actually have its reporters busy trying to keep up their reporting duties and also engaging in active daily conversations with readers. In this case, theorists who think about participation may be overly idealistic to suggest that these kinds of relationships can unfold, given the demands of daily news reporting.

Participation was an emergent and, at times, contested value. Journalists did not quite know what to say or how to speak to their new audience or how to make sense of this personal branding mission. The ethics were fuzzy, and they didn't quite make sense to some journalists who tried to have a personality online. Journalists were still figuring out just how much they should pay attention to what their audiences had to say on these new forums. One lesson from this is that, if we do want to consider how we might rethink the journalist-reader relationship, we need to consider the specific goals of the newsroom and journalists in relation to the more theoretical aspirations of user engagement.

What emerges from looking at how journalists engage with social media is that participation is not what journalism theorists say it is or ought to be. For theorists and journalism prognosticators, there is already a stable value called “participation” that should reorder journalism: the audience and the journalist should be in conversation; the authority of the journalist should be meshed with citizen contributions; the one-to-many flow of information should be replaced with a more many-to-many conversation. But for these journalists, the very act of even engaging on participatory platforms was contested. Just joining Twitter was up for debate. Forget having a conversation about the deep advantages of changing journalism and benefiting from user experience; few understood the potential. Even starting to have this conversation was contested.

Yet ultimately, citizen engagement online may help the newspaper survive. Creating shareable content matters economically, and making that content maximally shareable, via Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, or whatever it might be, requires journalist participation. Being on social media platforms may become nonnegotiable, and it may be that participation in practice has a different meaning than it does in theory. In practice, participation may just mean talking to the audience in non-traditional ways, telling stories differently, and creating an online identity that users can recognize. Participation may have little to do with actual conversation, much to the potential dismay of Internet theorists. But nonetheless, some version of participation reordering newswork was emerging in the newsroom of The Times, signaling change and underscoring the emergence of new values ordering online journalism in the digital age, just as interactivity and immediacy were.