Making News at The New York Times

Chapter 4

Immediacy

TO WHAT END?

In some ways, business health reporter Barry Meier was pretty lucky. He wasn't working on a big breaking story that was sensitive to immediate time deadlines. Instead, he had been given the time and space to plug away at an evolving story on failing medical devices. So far, he had found that thousands of all-metal artificial hips were faulty. He wasn't writing for a daily deadline; instead, he and his editors were biding their time for a big Page One story.¹ After all, it wasn't like artificial hips had to be linked to a particular day's news agenda, though editors surmised this would eventually be an important story.

So Meier had the time to report, report, and report, gathering more and more data and tweaking his story. He waited, with his editors, until there was the right mix of news stories on Page One for the head honchos to decide that his hip story would be one of the most important of the day. Eventually, Meier's first front-page splash propelled enough interest for a high-profile series of articles on medical device failures. A year later, he could say that the faulty hip replacements could be called the “most widespread medical implant failure in decades.”²

But he wasn't writing for the Web, unless you count the fact that such stories would ultimately be posted on the home page and the business Web page, at least for a few hours. “I don't write much breaking news on my beat,” Meier told me. “I'm the wrong person to talk to if you want to hear about writing for the Web.”³

On the other hand, Steve Lohr, an old hand on the technology beat and the author of a book on the history of computing, had a different perspective about immediacy in the new news environment. Lohr wrote both big stories and incremental, daily stories on his beat. So while he might be working on, say, a story about digital data or supercomputing, he was at the same time charged with covering IBM. This meant that he needed to respond to major company press releases, cover vaguely notable IBM tidbits and gossip of the day for the Bits blog, and write up anything that had to do with IBM earnings. So on any given day, Lohr could be writing for Page One, the front of the business page, the blog, or the instant demands of the nytimes.com Web site. The seemingly endless demands and conflicting priorities frustrated him. He was particularly bothered by the intense focus on speed.

As he told me when I shadowed him, “It didn't used to be like this. People caring about every little detail of the day. It's not horrible [writing Web updates], but it's not what I want to be doing.”⁴

He didn't clarify whether he meant that his audience or his editors cared about these constant updates, but it was certainly clear to me that he preferred stories that weren't just event-driven but instead inspired by his reporting efforts.

Juxtaposing these two experiences is significant: Meier fills a vision of the old world of news, whereas Lohr is subject to the demands of online journalism. Some at The Times may escape its pull, but only the most vaunted have the opportunity to be totally immune. Instead, for the ordinary Times journalist, the environment of online news demands the kind of rapid production Lohr dreaded—an acceleration of the journalistic workflow for an ever-demanding audience—whether editors expecting new content for the Web or the paper's readership. Covering breaking news for the Web was almost a test of endurance, as journalists stared down the unrelenting demand to be first and fast; the presence of pita chips and donuts on big news days were not just for morale, but for energy.

As we will see in this chapter, Lohr was not alone in feeling harried, if not disheartened, by the pace of online news production. While the last chapter looks at the disconnect between print and online in a more global sense—at the organizational level of The Times—this chapter provides a close look at what the conflicting nature of immediacy meant in 2010 for the on-the-ground reporters and editors on the business desk. The people covered in this chapter are traditional journalists charged with the majority of original news gathering in the newsroom. They were caught in a struggle in a newsroom that couldn't quite decide what immediacy meant: Was it today's news for today, now, or today's news for tomorrow?

Inside The Times, immediacy constrained, ordered, and influenced newswork in a variety of conflicting and confusing ways. On one hand, editors and journalists worked together to assemble breaking stories as quickly as possible, often not without error. On the other hand, The Times encouraged journalists to take a step back from the minutiae to give a big, sweeping update (the “second-day story”) and write a story for the print paper that would last. Two different goals—one day, one reporter. The result: general exhaustion.

And to what end were the big second-day stories, the tomorrow stories, in the churn of online journalism? Even those protected from doing tedious online updating were now subjected to the demands of the Web site's churn: journalists saw their hard-won Page One story or even long-term investigation fade from the home page within hours. Sure, a story remained on the Web site somewhere, but often out of easy public view, somewhere even reporters commonly had trouble finding it.

New, discordant rules seemed to apply to the competition. Sometimes, the competition really mattered online—if The Journal had it, so must The Times. On the other hand, sometimes the competition was ignored entirely. The situation with scoops was similarly unclear. Scoops, once the great shining pride of the newsroom, were now caught in a netherworld between print and online; a scoop posted to the Web site could be eviscerated by the competition in a matter of hours, but a scoop put in the print paper could be rendered meaningless by the crush of Web news overshadowing the morning paper. Scoops were central to the journalism ego, but what they meant in the digital age was quite different—and unclear.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring together this variety of experiences of traditional journalists in the immediate online journalism environment: covering breaking stories, writing second-day stories, sizing up the competition, understanding churn, and assessing scoops. Each dimension explored here underscores how immediacy is, indeed, an emergent and contested value of online journalism. Journalists do not know what it means, but they know that it is increasingly ordering how and what they do and that it is essential to the quality and perception of the work they do. Journalists face a Sisyphean struggle with the ever-present content demands of the Web for more, new, now; yet after they produce something, they are only asked to start afresh and produce more. As this struggle goes on, immediacy in turn reorders news routines, practices, and role perceptions of what it means to be a journalist and to do journalism in the digital age.

A New Catch Line at The Times?

Online newsrooms live in the now. Gawker, for instance, notes, “There's a new catchline on the media kit: Whatever we think. Whatever we know. That's what we'll publish.”⁵ And this mentality has similarly caught on at The Times, where journalists write what they know as they find it out. We get some sense from Bowley in Chapter 2 about what immediacy feels like for journalists at The Times, but I was also able to capture one particular story as it unfolded, headline by headline, lead by lead—for what was, at the time, the all-important “jobs” story.

The jobs (or unemployment) numbers for the previous month are released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 a.m. on the first Friday of each month. During the Great Recession, the “jobs” story usually made the front page and was the subject of much attention. In the newsroom, these numbers were viewed as a bellwether for the economy, and outside the newsroom, politicians and pundits made much noise after their release.

This story is a good example of New York Times journalists running about like Web hamsters in action and of the repercussions of creating breaking news content. Along the way, there were missteps and errors in the crush to get the news out fast. As reporter Peter Goodman began to shape the story for the print paper, as he had been instructed, he got word from Page One that his lead wasn't “breaking news” enough—even though, by the time his story would go out in the print newspaper, the story, on the monthly employment report, would be about twenty-four hours old (depending, of course, on when a reader picked up the print paper in the morning), underscoring the old immediacy versus the immediacy of online journalism.

Goodman spent most of his time writing big feature stories about the state of the economy. This is an important side note, because not all journalists face constant immediate pressure at The Times all the time, so when they do, it is perhaps all the more jarring to their daily routine. For instance, Goodman was hard at work on the feature series mentioned earlier, called “The New Poor,” a Page One-or-bust series. Still, Goodman, despite his vaunted status in the newsroom, was also on call to write a big breaking story for the Web.

The goal for the “jobs” story, at least in its breaking stages, was to be able to post it the moment the new numbers were in. This was a far cry from the richly textured stories that Goodman usually wrote. Nonetheless, the newspaper tried at least to somehow make sure that this humdrum story might have a bit of a different flavor from what competitors would write about the jobs numbers. This was the supposed “value-added” element to separate The Times from the “commodity news” that other news outlets would have.

So as we saw with Bowley's Goldman story, the strategy was to create B matter that could be put up as a placeholder to differentiate Times content, with a prepared lead ready to insert the latest numbers. Reporter Javier Hernandez, with guidance from Goodman, actually prereported the jobs story with quotes from people about the possible numbers. In fact, as Hernandez joked to me, he had even gotten quotes from a factory that had people “banging down its doors to get jobs,” as well as a quote from an unemployed person frustrated with the situation. Hernandez added, “We always try to find at least one unemployed person for this before the story gets written.”⁶

In the case of this story, we can see some of the strengths and limits of immediacy. On March 5, 2010, Web editor Mark Getzfred and Hernandez were ready for the unemployment numbers. At 8:30 a.m., these numbers first came up on the Department of Labor Web site, and nearly instantly, CNBC repeated the numbers on the air. Getzfred sent an IM to the home page editor to request that he put up an alert across the top of the home page.

Hernandez put the numbers into his B matter. In February 2010, job losses were down, from 109,000 at the beginning of January to current losses of 36,000. The unemployment rate remained steady. The headlines and leads changed rapidly over the course of the morning, as we can see below.

 

Headline 1, 8:47 a.m. “36,000 Jobs Lost in February; Rate Steady at 9.7 Percent”

Lead 1, 8:47 a.m.: “Friday's losses were less than the estimates by economists, who said that a series of winter storms were likely to affect the employment numbers.”

 

There were a few typographical errors in the rest of the copy of this first story, including a stray comma and an extra space, and a sharp-eyed reader alerted The Times to the errors.

 

Lead 2, 9:26 a.m.: “Just as unemployment in the United States seemed to be abating, the government said Friday that the economy was hit with another round of job losses last month.”

 

Hernandez then added this section to the story, following it with an analyst's comment:

 

The job losses reported Friday were less that [sic] the consensus estimate of a 68,000 decline for February.

At a time when doubts about the recovery are surfacing, the report did not offer a clear snapshot of the economy's underlying health. Analysts generally expect the jobs market to improve this year, but only at a grudging pace.

Headline 2, 9:31 a.m.: “U.S. Job Losses in February Obscure View of Recovery”

 

At this point, Getzfred had encouraged Hernandez to start adding his “value-added” content about the unemployed worker and the company with job hunters. But after Goodman arrived at the office, something important happened: the lead and headline completely changed in tone.

 

Headline 3, 9:41 a.m.: “Jobless Rate Holds Steady, Raising Hopes of Recovery”

Lead 3, 9:41 a.m.: “The economy lost fewer jobs than expected, the government reported Friday, bolstering hopes that a still-sputtering recovery is beginning to gain momentum.”

 

Note that the changes were from “hit with job losses” and “grudging pace” to a “still-sputtering recovery.”

This third lead and the dramatic change in tone are noteworthy. The initial Times online story had added the wrong emphasis—seasoned editors, in the rush to put up the numbers, had missed the big picture. Goodman had come into the newsroom around 9:40 and, with a quick look at the numbers, alerted the team working on the story that they had gotten it wrong: this was good news for the American economy. Getzfred and assigning editor Dan Niemi had seen years' worth of jobs reports, but they hadn't picked up this detail from the numbers. Instead, it took someone who wasn't working minute by minute to pause and think about the report.

The headline and lead had been wrong all morning. The breaking news was misinterpreted for the first two hours of the day. Immediate is not always right. This is an important lesson, as readers may not read the story again; policy makers may begin to issue statements; and, in the case of business news, financial decisions may be affected.

Then, Goodman's day officially began after Hernandez stepped down from the immediate update duties. Around 10 a.m., Goodman took over the story, working to add more substantial analysis, though he would also be providing more online updates—with the goal being a 1 p.m. deadline for the first “print” deadline, for the International Herald Tribune's Europe edition.

The lead changed again around 11 a.m., and Goodman became the sole author on the byline for the article.

 

Lead 5, around 11 a.m.:

The American economy lost fewer jobs than expected last month and the unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday, bolstering hopes that a still-tenuous recovery may be starting to gain momentum.

The government's monthly snapshot of the job market found that another 36,000 jobs disappeared in February—hardly cause for a celebration.

Yet compared to the monthly losses of more than 650,000 jobs a year ago, and against a backdrop of recent news that increased the possibility of a slide back into recession, most economists construed the report as a sign of improvement.

“It's strikingly good,” said Dean Baker, a director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, who has been notably skeptical of signs of recovery in recent months. “It's much better than it had been looking.”

 

The analysis was starting to take shape. Goodman had had a good three hours since getting into the office to analyze the trends in the data and begin taking the story in his own direction. The time gave him the chance to provide more analysis than the prewritten story ever could.

He provided additional analysis as the 1 p.m. International Herald Tribune print deadline edged closer:

 

Even as the report eased worries that the economy might teeter back toward a decline, it did little to dislodge the widespread notion that the recession has given way to a weak and uncertain expansion, one that is unlikely to provide the robust growth in hiring needed to cut significantly into the teeming ranks of the jobless.

Some 15 million Americans remained officially unemployed in February, and more than 4 in 10 of those had been mired there for longer than six months. The so-called underemployment rate—which counts people whose hours have been cut and those working part-time for lack of full-time positions, along with those out of work—reached 16.8 percent of the work force, up from 16.5 percent in January.

 

This version, 950 words, would be printed in the International Herald Tribune. It would also remain the online version for most of the workday.

After the Page One meeting at 4 p.m., editor Winnie O'Kelley came over to talk to Goodman, concerned that his lead was “too featurey.” Goodman had been told by O'Kelley to take the story in a more thoughtful direction throughout the day. O'Kelly had likely figured the news would seem stale by the next morning, having been up on the Web site all day, but Page One still wanted the hard news.⁷ The story would, indeed, be aged news by the time it hit the next day's newspaper stands and driveways. But this was immediacy for the print paper.

The final story was posted to the Web at 9 p.m. Though Goodman made only one Web update on his own (the IHT update), a team of journalists was required to keep this story up to date and ready for the Web with breaking news and added analysis—four people, one story, and five updates before 1 p.m. But when the morning crush subsided, Goodman had a chance to do some “real” reporting; he had time to speak to the secretary of labor and a number of economists, and he also analyzed the economic data. He had left the morning immediacy of the Web behind.⁸ Having access to the secretary of labor (Hilda Solis) and the nation's top economists was a Times luxury that few other papers could replicate. In Goodman's case, this meant a huge advantage for Times coverage, with “value-added” content from top sources.

Online journalism demands the quick story, the instant interpretation. But the print story Goodman began preparing for the next day's paper demanded the attention of a journalist uninterrupted by constant updates. However, the home page and the business online editors wanted new updates with fresh insight about the jobs report. Goodman provided some, essentially rewriting the morning story by early afternoon. The immediate updates had the newsroom in constant motion, but focusing on them also meant the story was actually wrong for a good part of the morning.

Were these journalists hamsters running around simply to publish what they knew now, as opposed to what they would know with some analysis—publishing for publishing's sake? Or was the goal to produce a seasoned story with deeper quotes and more analysis, albeit “aged news” that would be old by the next day—but immediate according to print standards? This jobs story underscores the tensions facing the newspaper and a team of journalists, as they tried to navigate a thicket of competing imperatives over what immediacy meant online, what their obligations were to this goal, and what they ultimately were supposed to be producing for the print newspaper.

The “Second-Day Story”

In the world of immediacy, instant news updates are privileged by those manning Web operations until other, print-focused editors determine that it is time to focus on the print story. These more print-focused editors also want a big take-away piece the same day for the print paper. In the newsroom, this is called the “second-day story,’ a name adopted from the old model of a follow-up piece released the next day that was used to explain the news story as it had evolved over the course of the day.

Wire news organizations have been updating stories throughout the day over most of the past few decades. And at the end of the day, these wire services will often do a “write-thru” to finalize the lasting edition of a story, or the big “take-out,” as many journalists refer to this story. But now, print newsrooms are doing the same thing. However, the second-day story in the digital age is different for newspapers, and perhaps also for broadcast and cable news channels planning their evening coverage, as the story needs to offer more than just a summary of what has been on the Web all day. Unlike the wire story, which every outlet can use, the second-day story now aims to be unique and specific to a particular news organization.

The second-day story routines reflect how people have adapted to using technology to advance the news. First, because the story is intended for the print edition, the second-day story has to be built to last. In the past, there hadn't been competing Internet coverage that was up all day for readers to consume on multiple outlets. But the built-to-last idea suggests that, even with content that is constantly updated on the Web, the print version of the story should not “feel” old, because it will bring readers a more complete version of the story. Thus, in the Web age, though the second-day story form uses old technology (print) for its distribution, it is a new type of story because it requires journalists to take a step back and find something new that represents what The Times’ final word will be on the matter after a long series of updates. It is now a “magazine” story for the daily news cycle, as one editor explained to me.

The result was crushing to some of the journalists I met, who hadn't expected their life goal or their tenure at The Times to fulfill these competing imperatives. The pressure to do both the immediate story and the second-day story was difficult for many reporters, as they felt compelled to serve two masters. For some reporters, including those who had come from wire services, being at The Times was supposed to mean more time for considered reporting. They weren't supposed to have to keep up with constant rewrites, and while they didn't mind writing for the Web in principle, they didn't want to have to chronicle every small development of a story. These reporters felt breathless at times, as they tried to figure out how to feed both online demands and print demands.

Reporter Ed Wyatt explained how the process of updating a story online made him feel like the wire reporter he was when he began his career. Wyatt had recently moved from working as a business reporter in the Los Angeles bureau to covering regulatory affairs out of Washington, D.C., for the business desk. Unlike other reporters I spoke to, Wyatt seemed to have an explanation for the obsession with immediacy: keeping up with the competition:

 

When I got out of business school, I was working for a wire service, Dow Jones, and the emphasis there is speed and getting a story up as fast as possible, reporting a story with enough info to write a headline and two or three paragraphs and send that out…. Now without a doubt, I will write something for the Web immediately, [and] it's almost exactly like reporting for a wire service…. I didn't think that I would be at The Times as a wire service reporter, and it is a trend back toward that, and it is discomforting. You have to react to what's out there from AP and other newspapers but also react to what every blog has posted out there.⁹

 

Wyatt also felt that he had to match everything other organizations were covering on any breaking story, including blogs The Times now found reputable. He saw this as a consistent complaint:

 

It's a common complaint about the arena that we are in that as reporters you have to respond to everything…everything. Every blog report. Editors see it and they want to know why don't we have [it]. And sometimes we don't have it because it's not true. Sometimes other people have different sources. Sometimes we can learn something and we can confirm it, but it leaves less time for original thought when you are chasing everyone else's reporting.

 

Notably, few reporters mentioned to me that they felt they were chasing other people's reporting. But this fear is worth noting and perhaps subconsciously drives some of the frenzy.

So, with this note about competition and added value in mind, how well do second-day stories work? I asked Wyatt how he felt about second-day stories more generally. He noted:

 

It's good in theory…. Yeah, it make senses that we want to do that…and we want to have added value and we should in the story for the newspaper, but if you have to spend time writing the updates and story for the Web, it cuts into time [you need] to ruminate for bigger thoughts. It's good theory, but in practice doesn't always work.

 

To Wyatt, overlaying the second-day-story approach with a need to write Web inserts was something that cut into his ability to craft the larger narrative for the paper, even though there was considerable pressure to come up with something new. Wyatt, at least, had been unable to see how to make a new routine work where he could cover a breaking news story online and still write a differentiated second-day story. The promise of a new routine was there, combining both online and print, but he couldn't do it yet.

Other reporters also found the pace of reporting and writing the second-day story difficult to maintain. As one reporter said to me:

 

The pace is simply unsustainable. Maybe you can ask someone to come in here early in the morning and start doing that, but they are going to burn out. You can't have someone doing that regularly. Maybe the young people can handle it, but it is not a way to do this. And then you turn around and write a longer story for the paper. That's like two entirely different stories in one day.

 

This reporter had adjusted to the idea of writing for the Web, but not the demands of the new routine—and she or he wondered whether doing so was even possible.

Other reporters had a mixed view. I spoke with Jad Mouawad, who was responsible for less breaking news. When he was responsible for a breaking story, he said, he also saw it as similar to the wire service where he had started. Mouawad also had not expected to be doing constant updates at The Times. Instead, he wanted to spend his time thinking about the big story, rather than putting out inserts as they came. He told me:

 

I came from a newswire [Bloomberg], so the whole immediate reaction, immediacy reactivity, bang a story and get it out, bang six stories [and] get them out each day, that's something I am used to, but it's not something I thought I would be coming over here and finding. That's a big surprise to me and one of the biggest changes I've seen in the six years I've been at The Times.

The immediate needs of all the news all the time on the Web has taken over. We are now asked to do a lot of things, get news out very fast, feed the Web site, the International Herald Tribune, and do eight or nine versions, do something for the Paris deadline, and flip the story around and write a second-day analytical piece that seems fresh. This is not what you would have done ten years ago.

There are more demands on time. Some reporters in the newsroom [as they work to promote themselves] send out tweets, some will proactively use their own social networks to reach more people, but I'm just working on that.¹⁰

 

Journalists were not unprepared to work at this intense pace, but they were still trying to figure out how to perform the balancing act The Times had asked for, between producing online content and producing the second-day story. A very senior reporter told me that online writing meant thinking about things she hadn't expected to:

 

I spend more time than I ever thought I would thinking about online. Of course I would always have to think about photos, but now I am thinking about online as well…. At this stage in my career, I should be spending my time having long lunches and cultivating sources. But that's not the reality. Things are moving much quicker.¹¹

 

The reporters acknowledged that they were more than capable of producing a second-day story for the print paper, but the breakneck pace of doing so made it hard to sustain this effort on a daily basis. In fact, to them, it was antithetical to the very idea of being at The Times. Many saw what they were being asked to do as cutting off potential venues for more in-depth reporting opportunities. The need for speed was harming the ability of journalists to dig deeper and to spend more time looking for stories; after all, it's hard to cultivate stories if you can't get out of the newsroom for lunch. This complaint, voiced by a few journalists, did not seem to have changed the overall quality of what the Page One editors believed The Times could provide, but some journalists certainly felt they didn't always have a chance to do their best work.

Ironically, despite the seemingly endless demand for online content ASAP, The Times print newsroom wanted that second-day story. So this really meant journalists had to be writing—and reporting—two entirely different types of stories at the same time: a breaking news story for the Web and a longer, more thoughtful, “value-added” story. It was this “second-day” story that seemed to matter at the end of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, while the in-the-moment updates mattered during the news day.

Here, we see the way in which immediacy emerges as a contested value for journalists as they go about trying to do their work in the online newsroom. On one hand, in breaking news situations, they are given the imperative to work swiftly and produce regular updates to feed the demands of the Web. Immediacy is ASAP; immediacy is valued as the essence of nytimes.com online journalism. But on the other hand, immediacy creates a strain on the lived experiences of what reporters are actually able to do: it is exhausting and hard to sustain and certainly not what they thought the illustrious New York Times was supposed to care about. On the other hand, they're told to scale back their pace on the very same day and write something lasting—something for tomorrow but written today, a story that will make the aged news seem, well, less aged and more a symbol of The Times setting the agenda. So reporters are caught in the middle of a newspaper that has not figured out what it wants to be—and the strain is telling.

Churn

To many other journalists, the result of immediacy was not just physical exhaustion. There was also, at times, a defeatist attitude when journalists realized that their work—even their best work—would not be on the home page for very long. They understood that the Web site was focused on getting out new and fresh content, but to the journalists with whom I spoke, this also meant that readers didn't have the chance to absorb the stories that these journalists had spent so much time on. What was the point of writing a second-day story if it would only be on the Web site for a short time? It would reach the print readers, but not the Web readers who, having seen the story developing over the course of the day, might never see the final story unless they checked back in the evening or early in the morning. Even big projects could fade into the netherworld of the Web site; though there might be subpages showing a big series' content, chances are that the home page would stop linking to this content after a day or two.

During my stay at The Times, business editor Liz Alderman was rotated up to the home page to get a better sense of The Times’ digital experience (she was on a year-long visit from the International Herald Tribune's Paris bureau). She had the perspective of both the home page and of editing on the business desk and commented on the churn:

 

We here at the home page think we should be changing it every five minutes—but there's a real question of how often to update—is it for the news junkies or every few hours?…I don't know why they update the Web when they do. It's different…if you are cranking something out versus [putting out] a polished narrative.¹²

 

Alderman questioned the discrepancy between what she understood to be her goal on the business desk—pushing her reporters to create “value-added content”—and how long this content would actually last online.

Other journalists were similarly frustrated by the constant motion that seemed to make their stories disappear. As reporter Diana B. Henriques complained one day:

 

I'll have a Page One story one day, and then my sources will call me and tell me they can't find it online. It's because it's disappeared by morning into the headlines. That's life, I guess. It's good for the paper, but I don't know what to tell my sources. Sometimes it's as if my story didn't exist.¹³

 

By morning, Page One stories were gone from the home page—and largely gone from view, as well, unless a journalist, source, or reader happened to be Googling a particular story. So that important story Henriques wanted to send to her sources wasn't featured anywhere prominent anymore (though late at night, it would have been).

To those closest to the Web, this churn of stories was just fine. As editor Kevin McKenna explained to the business staff one day:

 

You're not going to find stories up there all day, you're just not. These stories have to move and change as we have new content. This is not the [print] newspaper. It has to be more dynamic. You're not going to find your story from this morning's paper still featured on the [business] Web page by 4 p.m. That's the nature of the Web.¹⁴

 

But to many journalists writing these stories, immediacy was not a particularly fulfilling newsroom value. From the perspective of workflow, it meant pushing out content as fast as possible, only to then rewrite the same content for the next day's print paper. To what end, though? All that work went into stories that would quickly be replaced and then forgotten in the six-hour turnover Sussman had mentioned. For Times journalists, ASAP online rhythms meant that a day's—or a month's—hard work could be displaced with a few clicks and a few hours on the home page.

Competition in the Digital Age

The Times’ attitude toward competition online further underscored the ambiguity surrounding immediacy in the newsroom. Depending on my vantage point, one day I would see journalists vexed by the appearance of a story (or the speed of news) on a competing news site, while on other days, journalists paid no attention to the competition online. Watching journalists discuss what appeared online suggested that The Times hadn't quite made up its mind about whether to try to keep up with the competition or to be aloof and follow its own path.

A snapshot back to Mick Sussman, the day home page editor, illustrates the unpredictability of whether online competition matters. He was monitoring the competition—The Washington Post, the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN—but I only saw him actually check them three times. Here he was, the home page editor, only just barely paying attention to the competition. From my observation, these quick checks did not impact what stories he placed where or which stories he thought were most important. In fact, only once did he point out that The Post had a story The Times did not. Sussman learned that it was a Washington Post story about governors quitting and how that could be dangerous. But Pat Lyons, his editor, pointed out that the “could cause danger” perspective really didn't make it news, so that story was nothing for The Times to be concerned about.

Nonetheless, on the same day, those concerned with the home page were stressing about not having the same photo that other news outlets were using on their home page. Sussman and the global home page editor were debating whether to use a picture of a Muslim teenage widow who had set off a suicide bomb in Moscow. Other news outlets had splashed the arresting photo on their morning sites, but The Times did not want to use the photograph unless it could independently verify the picture. Eventually, the home page photo editor was able to identify the photo's origins, and the group decided to give the picture “a good run.”

So did these top online editors care about having what other news sites had, or did they not? Sussman illustrated that he didn't want The Times to miss major stories, but he didn't let the home pages of other sites dictate his own news judgment. At the same time, not having a key photo that others did have absorbed newsroom conversation for at least thirty minutes, a seeming eternity in Web time. Standards for competition were hard to understand in this constantly updating Web world.

In other instances, the simple presence of a story could prompt business editors to react and encourage a response story. In chapter 2, we saw how, when The Journal posted a story about the iPad's name being potentially offensive to women, an account that the tech desk had initially dismissed suddenly got written about in a blog post. Other cases elucidate how a minor story popping up on The Journal home page could set off a chase to get something for The Times.

On April 13, 2010, assigning editor Dan Niemi noticed that The Journal had splashed a story about Lexus being downgraded in Consumer Reports, just the latest after a long series of struggles from Toyota: “Sometimes people will see this stuff and think it's a big deal, but I argue against it. There's not much credence to Consumer Reports” He added, “Sometimes people will see something on The Journal but their Web page just splashes stuff, it's not always important.” Nonetheless, the auto team had a blog post on the subject, and the home page was pushing it for the front. As more details became available, the story emerged as a significant detail in the Toyota saga of 2010, in part because Toyota was pulling this Lexus model off the market. But was the early story—the Consumer Reports story—worth chasing simply because The Journal had it?

Some journalists argue that it isn't important to keep up with the latest developments. As one editor explained to me, the goal was not to beat Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch, Reuters, or the Financial Times every time they published something. As one editor explained, “You don't go head to head, you're zigging when they zag, you're competitive on the big story.” In other words, the big story matters, not the small wins.

Is immediacy about chasing down the small story? Is it about being the first to get out the story—or is it not about beating Bloomberg? The Times hadn't quite figured out whether it wanted to be the comprehensive site that captured everything or to be more selective in its offering. Despite the ambiguity, one thing was clear: Competition meant something new for online journalism, where an immediate response could counter another newsroom's offering. Instead of waiting for the next day to respond to something The Times had missed, the newsroom could respond ASAP. The question before these journalists, though, was just how to balance these instant demands, these quick stories, with the more significant stories that would end the day.

A Scoop in a Web-First World

Building on the idea of competition, scoops in a Web-first world further illustrate how immediacy remained a contested value. The fact that The Journal had the Lexus post up before The Times was not really a scoop. Scoops had to focus on more than just small developments—the scoop valued in the newsroom is the one that shows the clever reporting of a dogged Times reporter. But then a question arose: publish the story online first or wait for the print paper? Saving the story for print meant that it would be blatantly clear the next morning that The Times had something The Journal did not. But online, the win would not be so clear: The Journal could pull together a “matching” story to make up for what it had missed the night before.

One certain advantage for The Times in the digital age was that The Journal had fairly early print deadlines for three editions, between 6 and 7 p.m., between 7 and 8 p.m., and between 8–10 p.m., which generally meant that anything The Times put on its Web page at 9 p.m. was unlikely to make it into the print edition of The Journal. At least on paper, The Times would win the morning, and to people for whom print mattered most, that would mean The Times had won. As we have seen, some of those people are at the head of the news organization.

When weighing what to do with a scoop, The Times had to decide what mattered more: putting the story up first online or putting the story in the paper. But there was a great fear that these scoops would be ephemeral—that these hard-fought stories that ideally demonstrated distinct Times reporting would be eviscerated by an ASAP culture of immediate 24/7 reporting. The value of a scoop inside the newsroom had little to do with what journalists believed the story offered to readers, and much more to do with reporting prestige and beating the competition. Scoops were different from covering breaking, event-driven stories. These were humdingers, special stories, exclusives that no one else, theoretically, had the gumption to find. And it was all the more important that a scoop would be a win.

When journalists talked about scoops during my time in the newsroom, they considered the competition, but they were also considering their own self-worth. The better the journalist, the better the news organization, the more frequent and enduring the scoops. Inside the newsroom, scoops were rewarded. In fact, some newsrooms offered not just internal emails from top editors brimming with praise, but even small financial rewards for big reporting successes. Some of the scoops close to my time in the newsroom came as the product of intense investigations, like the Times’ scoop that New York governor Eliot Spitzer was taking part in a prostitution ring.¹⁵

Financial editor David Gillen explained his view of what scoops meant in terms of a story that he thought counted as a scoop, even though it wasn't the first story on the topic up on the Web. He explained that his reporter had written an exclusive story about how a Galleon trader's wife was about to file a “crazy lawsuit for $500 million,” which, rather significantly, included allegations of insider trading. The Times couldn't run the story until the suit was filed, but a Bloomberg reporter was in the courtroom when it finally was and “snapped the headline.” Nonetheless, Gillen counted the story as a win:

 

The snap…didn't take the suit for what it was, which was outrageous allegations and a crazy tale…. The Times story hit the Web site in eight minutes, and it was this utterly complete yarn about the story. I said we beat Bloomberg. Every day we lose to them, but nobody had that story, we beat them, and CNBC credited us with the story because we had the most complete version.

 

He went on to note, “You can win in the morning and lose the story. I'd rather win the story.” This idea of “winning the story” seemed to fit into the overarching idea, echoed by many editors at The Times, that the longer, more fleshed-out story, the “value-added” story, was the one that would ultimately matter more. And similarly, winning the story also seemed to me a way to enshrine the time journalists needed to do in-depth reporting that might ultimately carve out more important facets of the story. But winning in the morning was what the Web demanded, and the question before The Times was whether any readers would still be around to see who had won the story by the end of the evening.

A hard-fought scoop about Goldman Sachs illustrates the conflict editors faced about how to time an exclusive story. In late May, reporters covering Goldman Sachs discovered that Goldman's clients were worried that the firm had “dueling roles”—both gaining profit for itself and making sure its clients were making a profit. These two goals would seem to benefit both parties. However, Goldman was “shorting” the very toxic assets clients wanted them to sell—or betting against their clients. As such, Goldman was putting its own interest ahead of its clients’. The reporters had documents proving that particular clients, such as Washington Mutual, were concerned.¹⁶

On May 18, 2010, O'Kelley told the editors at the morning business meeting that Page One editors wanted to see the story right away, so it could go up on the Web as soon as possible. “They want CLIENT on the desk now,” she said, referring to the story slug. But the story wasn't actually posted on the Web until the evening for a number of reasons.

O'Kelley explained to me that a strategy affected when “CLIENT” would be placed on the Web site. She noted, “If you put the story up at 6 p.m., you give the competition more time.” The business desk, at least, didn't want to release the story in a way that could put The Journal in a position to match it both online and in the morning's print paper, though other editors at the newspaper were eager to break the story. This indicated to me that the norms about when to push out a scoop were still being informally contested and negotiated inside the newsroom.

But the story was also complicated, and putting it on the Web before it was ready might even have been dangerous for the newspaper. “It's a story you don't want to rush. It was carefully lawyered,” O'Kelley told me the next day. The story went up on the Web site at 9 p.m., past the early print deadline of The Journal. In this case, this strategy gave The Journal a chance to match the story online, but not in print, signaling how, on the business desk, at least, The Times still thought the print-edition scoop was what mattered. And even after the story was posted to the Web, the reporter who had gathered up the long paper trail of documents supporting the scoop wanted to make them public—but wanted to be sure they would not go up at the same time as the story.¹⁷ If the documents went up too soon, they could give other journalists at rival news organizations a chance to write their own credible, document-based stories. As a result, these documents were posted at midnight. The Times alone had the scoop. O'Kelley tried to explain how the strategy worked:

 

It depends on a story. When it's a matchable story and there's direct competition, we still hold things back, but it doesn't happen that often. This was one of these cases where we had to weigh the competitive point for how easy it was for The Journal to match it.

 

A number of conflicting online priorities are revealed through this Goldman example. First, there was pressure for the story to be put online immediately—this time from top editors. But the business desk pushed back, concerned about competition. So here emerged a question that flowed through many of these scoops: Was The Times going to put its stories out before the print deadline for its paper, or was it going to wait and publish these scoops after someone else could get them? This uncertainty surrounding how to deal with a scoop illustrates the tension surrounding immediacy: some in the newsroom wanted the ASAP win; others wanted a compromise; still others seemed to think that the Web stood in the way of The Times’ authority, originality, and competitive edge, because print was more important. Whether readers would actually notice a scoop (and where) was entirely absent from the conversation.

Immediacy, Online, and Print in a Digital-First World

Immediacy emerges as a contested value as it is negotiated through a wide variety of work routines and experiences of journalists at The Times. The tension between print and online underscores how traditional values clash with online journalism values; the two production cycles and their aspirations are distinct from each other. Print privileges long debate, communal conversation, and lasting stories, while the Web emphasizes quick turnover and rapid decision making in the hands of just one or two gatekeepers. The print world values story development and the belief that The Times ought to provide a distinct, authoritative, and lasting voice about a story or issue. Online, the churn of stories makes it nearly impossible to achieve this permanence (though, of course, the stories never vanish entirely from The Times’ sight, just from the readers' likely ability to find the story).

Journalists don't talk about immediacy as a “value.” In fact, to some degree, immediacy seems imposed by technological forces of digital production seemingly outside journalists' control, such as the speed of the networked information environment, for instance. But ultimately journalists are the ones deciding that immediacy matters—and this value is articulated by the emphasis on a variety of actions and strategies to create content. Journalists manning the Web site have decided it is important to keep the site looking new, “fresh,” and continually updated. Why? Because immediacy has become a way that The Times has begun to define what counts as good journalism in the digital age. Journalists charged with providing rapid updates to the Web on breaking news stories do so to feed the demands of editors pushing for this content and to meet the expectations of the hungry Web site. But the Web site itself isn't even capable of being hungry; it's the journalists and editors at The Times who have decided that immediacy is going to be critical to establishing The Times’ authority in the case of breaking news. Immediacy has become a defining principle that guides routines and motivates actions in The Times newsroom.

But clearly, immediacy is far more complicated: the realities of producing online journalism to meet this new standard run afoul not only of established understandings of worth in the newsroom but also of the actual capacities of journalists to do their jobs. Immediacy is a contested and emergent value that has not been fully accepted by the newsroom, as print still retains its era of mystique and importance. Journalists don't want to have their stories be part of the churn of online; they want something lasting, and their editors think about and plan for the elusive Page One spot. From the perspective of developing the value-added content that Times journalists talk about, there seems to be no probable way of supplementing the process of developing news stories through critique and conversation without regular daily meetings that follow the print news rhythm. Just how to value a scoop in the online world—whether it is online first or print first that matters—underscores the ambiguity of immediacy in the digital age.

Traditional journalists find themselves at the crossroads, trying to understand what immediacy means while still trying to work in the service of “aged news.” At times, they are the hamsters described by Dean Starkman, updating content for the sake of updating content. They are asked to write multiple versions of the same story, only to write an entirely new story up to Times standards for the print paper—leaving them exhausted and disheartened. They see their top stories vanish from the home page in six hours and then further reduced to headlines in subpages within a day on a site that, according to editors, receives 50 to 60 percent of its traffic from the home page.

And yet often, as we will see in the next chapter, journalists are asked to do more than just write stories—they are also asked to make their stories go beyond just text and include interactive elements. Interactivity does offer a pause to the churn, at least temporarily, as journalists work to think about new ways to tell stories to keep people on the page longer. Interactivity offers journalists the chance, at least most of the time, to think off-deadline about the potential for their work. But as the next chapter makes clear, interactivity, too, is a contested value in online journalism. The impetus for interactive work comes from both the top and the bottom of the newsroom hierarchy, but that does not mean that journalists have figured out how to incorporate it into existing routines or that they even welcome it as a new addition to their work. The next chapter, then, goes beyond immediacy to tackle interactivity and its influence on the practices, norms, and expectations at The Times.

Indeed, there were new values orienting journalism practice in an online journalism world: immediacy, interactivity and participation. News routines were being restructured and renegotiated in this uncertain environment. What these values meant, and what consequences they might have for journalism, was emerging through both practice and normative assumptions about what journalism ought to look like in the online journalism world. Interactivity—often called multimedia by journalists in the newsroom—brought a new lens to storytelling and presented the audience as more active agents of news consumption. Interactivity challenged how traditional journalists understood their work and, in fact, reoriented the very structure of the newsroom.