The chairman of the New York Times Arthur Sulzberger gave a talk at Polis LSE on the continuing digital transformation of the New York Times on November 1st.
Here is the text.
Arthur Sulzberger at Polis
Good afternoon everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you here at the London School of Economics to talk about The New York Times and the role we are playing in helping to shape the future of digital and social media. There is a transformation currently underway at The Times – and by that I mean the one in New York – which involves the evolution of a great NEWSPAPER to what is now a great MULTI-PLATFORM global news organization.
We’ve transformed the manner in which we deliver the news without ever veering from the high journalistic standards that are firmly in place at both The Times and at our global newspaper, The International Herald Tribune. In a world where information and opinion are ubiquitous, our promise of quality is more important than ever.
But in our new world, quality carries many elements. Reporting honestly and accurately is a critical part, of course. But so too is engaging communities in a variety of new ways. So, how are we doing there?
This past July, a research company called Netprospex issued a comprehensive report on the use of social media by businesses across the United States. The study looked at the numbers of employees in a company who were on various social networks and the numbers of followers those accounts had.
[link to Twitter post about the Netprospex report]
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, which I will talk more about later. 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.
I’d like to give shout-outs to three of our reporters in particular for their extraordinary efforts in social media:
Nick Kristof — has huge, real time communities on Facebook and Twitter and he uses them to great effect in his reporting, often from some of the world’s most troubled places.
Chris Chivers – uses Tumblr and Twitter to draw back the veil on his reporting, often posting story snippits on his Tumblr blog before they appear on nytimes.com. He also asks his audience to help crowd-source a question for him, for example about ammunition he’s found in the field in war torn Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq.
and…
Lydia Polgreen – She has used her Facebook page to build a community of readers interested in India, where she has been a Delhi-based correspondent. Now that she’s moving to South Africa, I can only assume she will do the same there.
There is a reason why we are so committed to social media at The Times and that reason rests with our audience. We have an incredibly enlightened, intelligent and sophisticated group of users who are highly engaged with our products. Our efforts in social media are meant to tap in to the knowledge from that readership. We value what they can share with us and with other users.
For this specific reason, we are currently in the midst of an expansion of our online discussion and community features at NYTimes.com and we are redesigning our comments section later this year.
We’re also in the process of creating a Trusted Commenter program, which will be available to a select group of readers with a history of high-quality comments. Their submissions will be published on our Opinion pages and across NYTimes.com without prior modification.
The business result of all of these efforts is increasing levels of engagement with our site. This includes more time spent, more stories read, more videos viewed…and more ads viewed.
So, back to how we’re altering the culture at The New York Times.
Innovation is not some new-fangled management concept for us, we’ve been at it for about 160 years. We launched the first book review and best-sellers list. We created the modern Op-Ed format by publishing opinions from the public. We undertook a national and international expansion that cemented our standing as a global news brand. And we were early to the Internet with “The Times on the Web” in January 1996.
Our success online was not a foregone conclusion. In 2000, we were #3 in terms of uniques behind The Washington Post and USA Today. Today we’re proudly the #1 newspaper website, with a worldwide audience of over 45 million uniques (that’s comScore, not our own internal numbers). And that’s after we started asking readers to pay for unlimited access to our content.
Our mission is inspirational and it guides us in everything we do. We create, collect, and distribute the highest quality news and opinion, while upholding what we believe is the gold standard of journalism, and we do it across all platforms where our readers want to find us.
A healthy democracy is built on an informed and engaged population. News organizations are a critical part of that.
We want people to be well and reliably informed. We want to lift the global conversation. And we want to transform our industry – the content experience and underlying business model – to make all of that possible for a very long time to come.
Our content distinguishes us. Now, we are also challenged to deliver it in ways that draws in readers who are one click away from a dizzying array of other options.
Not so long ago, at The Times, the Web was an afterthought. But we integrated our print and online news operations and can now leverage the talent of many hundreds across all platforms.
Our approach to stories now almost always includes the notion that we’ll post a story when it’s ready to go. And, we’ve tweaked our story telling to include the use of video, interactive graphics and other multimedia tools.
Most recently, we have introduced a new storytelling enhancement that allows us to embed a video right within the text of a story, not in some separate video player elsewhere on the page.
We used this recently as part of an outstanding enterprise piece on Autism, where the story’s subject, an aspiring animator, told his story in his own words.
Let’s return to social media for a moment.
As I mentioned, at The Times we see great value in social media. We believe it is critical in keeping us as a part of the open web and of the global conversation, particularly after the launch of our digital subscription model. In fact, we value it so greatly that all social media links to nytimes.com are free… from everywhere in the world on all social networks.
And, as I noted earlier, we’re using social media to engage our audience and we’re using it in our reporting.
Twitter and Facebook are vast, so we have approached them by applying Times journalism as a layer on top of them. We come up with clever hashtags, ask provocative questions, find ways to curate only the best material for our site, provide Times quality live reporting on Twitter and our staff, aggressively and skeptically reports on developments in the social media world.
A few examples…
Prior to Hurricane Irene, a recent storm that threatened the Northeastern part of the United States, our newsroom was looking for a way to get trusted information to our audience in real time as the story developed. So, we launched a new twitter account that we plan to use as our dedicated Twitter feed for breaking news, @NYTlive. @NYTlive will be used to provide a steady stream of developments and links to stories and multimedia, and retweeted updates from our correspondents as well as other interesting sources.
In a world overflowing with information and opinion of too often questionable value, we intend to provide context and reliability. When you come to @NYTlive, you will get both fast and honest journalism.
Every story in our 9/11 10th anniversary package, The Reckoning, included a suggested hashtag for tweeting, #911plus10. We came up with this hashtag months before the 9/11 anniversary and started using it on Twitter on the @nytimes account to seed discussion. By 9/11 it was a popular tag being used throughout Twitter — and in some cases by our competitors — to talk about the anniversary. On the day of the anniversary, we put out another hashtag, #911plus20 and provoked our readers to tell us what they thought the United States should focus on during the next 10 years.
Here’s a sampling of the thoughtful responses:
And here’s the interactive map that was a key social 9/11 project, allowing people to pin themselves, leave a comment and then send a customized tweet or Facebook status update linking directly to their contribution:
Another terrific example of community building happened on the evening of Steve Jobs death.
On that night, we coined a hastag, #stevejobslegacy, that went viral and we curated a selection of amazing tweets for the homepage of nytimes.com. We also gave readers a chance to send in photos. We asked them to use photography to illustrate the impact that Jobs’s life had made on theirs. It was a tribute both fascinating and touching.
The homepage that night ended up being a gathering place for a community of people seeking to learn about Jobs but also looking to share reminiscences about the important part he played in their lives.
Here’s a link to the Steve Jobs tweets on the homepage:
Our live debate dashboard for the U.S. presidential election has many great elements, including its real-time fact-checking feature. On Twitter, readers can tweet requests for Times political reporters and editors to fact check something a candidate just said during the debate using the hashtag #asknyt. Answers appear on the dashboard:
How we report the news is evolving and so is how our readers consume news.
Given the seismic shifts in media consumption, knowing your reader is obviously important. Like most publishers, we have a trove of data on our users. But at The Times we also sit down and talk to our audience, one to one. Our Customer Insight Group is our direct line to our readers and they conduct frequent studies.
Two recent studies looked at iPad behavior among our most loyal Times readers.
In the first round of research, we learned that many are now consuming more news than ever across platforms: Over 80% of iPad users read The Times on at least two platforms and half of them juggle three or more.
It’s no secret that we, along with the entire newspaper and magazine industry, were worried that the iPad – more than any other digital device – might cannibalize print, so we were delighted to see that these users are instead reading us more than ever.
We then commissioned a follow-on study on cross-platform behavior. The first set of recent findings are fascinating.
Let me touch on a few highlights:
Mobile. Very utilitarian. Users are really “filling in,” “snacking” when they have free time…at the football field, the doctor’s office… They also tell us our content made that downtime more meaningful and valuable to them.
With print and the tablet, it’s about the reading experience. Spread the paper out on the kitchen table, bring the iPad to the park, lean back and enjoy.
Print users read throughout the day, with a morning bias. Tablet users express an evening bias.
How many of you take your iPad to bed at night? Uh-huh. This is one of the key reasons that our engagement levels are up. This device has added an entirely new day part for us. You can literally get into bed with the audience.
Desktop and laptop. A week-day/work-day habit, and personal. Print and tablets on the other hand are more often shared, left on the coffee table.
Interesting? Yes. But also useful in our marketing and product development efforts.
Finally, I want to talk about our recent move to a digital subscription model.
We did much research to help shape our digital subscription offerings.
We needed to design a model that allowed us to maintain our influence on the Web, protect and grow our advertising business, all the while building a new subscription business.
So we took a “metered” or “freemium” approach, providing 20 articles a month free and “first-click free” on referrals, but charging for unlimited access beyond that. Not a lot of added bells and whistles because our readers were very clear about what they value: the content. The content they have come to know and love…period.
Our highly valued home delivery subscribers get All Digital Access as part of their subscription.
And for another loyal group: our most engaged online users, we did what might have appeared crazy to some. We gave 100,000 of them free access for a year, sponsored by Lincoln, an advertiser who jumped at the opportunity.
Overall, we’re pleased with the success of our digital subscription business. The traffic to our site has exceeded expectations and we continue to meet all of our advertising commitments. And, we’re very pleased with the number of paid and sponsored digital relationships we have – approximately 1.2 million.
At The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, we are committed to creating, collecting and distributing the highest quality news and opinion and we remind ourselves every day to put the consumer at the center of all we do. This allows us to create products that people want and deliver them to the places where people want them.
There was much skepticism prior to the launch of our digital subscription model with many commentators and others saying that it couldn’t possibly succeed. But, our readers have proven that they can distinguish news worth paying for.
Before I close, I’d like to give my colleague David Carr a moment here- this clip, from an Intelligence Squared US debate was recently featured in the documentary Page One.
There’s a concern that the pace of change and financial pressures will inexorably lead to lower quality. I stand before you tonight to promise that our standards for quality at The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune will not decline; and that applies to all of our platforms, those current and those yet to be dreamed of.
Thank you again for having me here.
*****
纽约时报》的数字化持续转型之路
作者 亚瑟•萨尔兹伯格 翻译：圣地亚哥
《纽约时报》公司董事长亚瑟•苏兹伯格（Arthur Sulzberger）11月1日在伦敦经济学院发表了一篇题为《 <纽约时报>的数字化持续转型之路》的演讲，以下是演讲全文：
很高兴有机会和大家相聚在这里，一起探讨《纽约时报》以及我们在打造数字化、社会化媒体的未来中所扮演的角色。
《纽约时报》目前处于转型期，我这么说的意思是一份伟大的报纸正处于进化中，她将进化成一个伟大的多平台国际新闻媒体。
《纽约时报》和我们集团旗下的《国际先驱论坛报》一直秉承高质量发布新闻的原则，现在我们已经在坚持这一原则的前提下成功转变了新闻发布方式。在现今信息爆炸的花花世界， 确保新闻报道的质量也显得空前重要。
但是在我们新闻界，报道质量包涵了许多要素。首先，保障报道的真实与准确是一个毋庸置疑的前提。 但是同时，使用各种新媒体方式提高报道质量也越来越重要。 下面我就谈谈我们在这方面的进展。
今年七月，市场研究机构NetProspex发布了一份关于全美商业公司雇员使用社交媒体的调查报告，这份报告对美国最大的一些公司拥有社交网站个人账号的员工数量以及各个账号的粉丝数量对进行了分析。点击查看报告》》》
基于目前的社交网络使用现状，《纽约时报》领先于一些巨头公司，比如谷歌、苹果和迪斯尼公司等，成为全美社交网络利用最成功的公司。
我们公司一直以来都很重视社交媒体的利用，这一点之后还会说到。
我们以这种方式建立读者群已取得很大成效。我们社交网的粉丝已远远超过其他大多数的新闻团体。
《纽约时报》脸谱网（Facebook）的官方主页拥有170多万名粉丝，与此同时推特网（Twitter）主页的粉丝也超过了380万。
此外，我们公司很多优秀员工的社交网站个人账号都有大量粉丝，这些都没有算在上述数据中。
实际上，推特网上《纽约时报》官方账号和员工个人账号的所有粉丝加起来超过了1580万。另外再告诉大家一个可喜的成绩：推特网上每4秒就会有一条《纽约时报》的新闻更新。
在此，我想特别提一下我们公司的三位优秀记者，以表扬他们在使用社交网络方面做出的突出成绩：
尼克 克里斯托夫（Nick Kristof ）——在脸谱网和推特网上拥有大量粉丝，很多粉丝居住在现在世界上最动乱的地区，这些粉丝为他提供了大量报道线索。
克里斯 奇弗斯（Chris Chivers）——在Tumblr和推特网上推介他的报道，常常在新闻登载在《纽约时报》网站之前，他就会在Tumblr的博客空间发布新闻片段。他还时常邀请粉丝集众人智慧帮忙调查一些问题，比如他最近就在和粉丝一起调查阿富汗、巴基斯坦和伊拉克战争的军火。
还有，莉迪亚 博格林——作为《纽约时报》驻德里的记者，她在自己的脸谱网主页上建了一个对印度感兴趣的读者群。现在她就要调去南非了，我想她还会建一个南非读者群。
这是我们如此重视利用社交网络的原因之一，当然，这也有赖于我们的读者。
我们拥有一个相当博学、智慧又成熟的用户群，他们一直很关注我们的产品。
我们在利用社交网络方面所做的工作旨在充分开发读者知识的潜力。我们希望与读者多多互动，同时也重视读者之间的互动。
基于这个原因，我们最近正在《纽约时报》网站上大力推介在线讨论和网络社区特色产品。同时，今年稍晚些我们还将对评论栏目进行升级改版。
为给读者提供更高质量的服务，我们正针对本网的资深评论员打造一个“可信评论员”栏目。 他们的评论将会直接发表在《纽约时报》的评论栏，事先不会进行任何修改编辑。
这些服务的推出带来的直接成效就是读者与我们的互动频度正在不断增加。 包括读者在本网停留更长时间，点击查看更多网页，观看更多视频.....当然，广告点击率也增加了。
现在，我们来说说《纽约时报》的企业文化正在发生的变化吧。
对我们来说，创新并不是什么新奇的管理理念，它已经陪伴了我们160年。我们发行了第一本书评和畅销书清单。
我们通过发布公众评论创设了第一个现代专栏版。我们的读者遍及全美，甚至全球，这使我们成为了一个具有国际影响力的传媒品牌。 还有，早在1996年1月，我们就创办了《纽约时报》网站NYTimes.com。
我们数字化转型成功并不是一个预料中的结果。2000年，我们的网站在独立访客方面落后于《华盛顿邮报》和《今日美国》，仅排名第三。而今，我们已取得了傲人的成绩----我们的独立访客数量名列报纸网站第一位，在全球范围内拥有4500多万独立访客（这是comScore提供的数据，并非本网内部统计的数据），而且这还是在我们推出付费订阅服务以后的数据。
我们的使命使我们斗志昂扬，它指导着我们做每一件事。我们采写和发布最高质量的新闻和评论，在坚守新闻职业道德的同时，利用一切可用平台为读者提供最优质的服务。
一个健全的民主社会必须建立在一群有见识、尊重契约的公民之上，而新闻业健康发展是健全的民主社会必不可少的一部分。
我们希望帮助公民增长见识，促进全球对话。 我们也想实现产业转型，改变内容体验和商业运作模式，不过圆满完成这项使命还需一段较长的时间。
内容质量一直都是我们的第一竞争力。现在我们也想在发布方式上做些突破，读者只需点击一下便可进入页面浏览内容。
不久前，《纽约时报》网站的电子版还只是一个补充。但是现在在整合了印刷和线上新闻运作模式后，我们的全媒体平台吸引了大量注册用户。
现在我们的电子版几乎包含了纸质版的所有内容。与此同时，我们的电子版报道还利用了视频、交互式图形和其他多媒体媒介。
最近我们引进了一个新的内容强化软件，今后可以直接在内容页插入视频，成功将视频和文字整合到一个页面中，不需要单独在另一个的页面中发布视频了。
我们最近制作的一个视频节目Autism就使用了这种技术，故事的主人公是一个动画师，他就在视频中用自己语言讲述自己的故事。
我们再回来聊聊社交媒体吧：
之前我提到过，《纽约时报》很看好社交媒体的潜力。 我们相信社交媒体的合理利用对于保持我们在开放网络和全球对话中的地位至关重要，尤其在我们推出付费订阅服务后，社交媒体的利用对我们越来越重要。事实上，我们非常重视利用社交媒体，所以我们在nytimes.com上免费添加所有社交网站的链接……这个世界任何一个角落的所有社交网站我们都免费添加链接。
而且，正如我之前提到的，我们正利用社交媒体聚集读者，我们的报道中也充分利用了社交媒体的资源。
推特和脸谱的发展空间都很大，所以《纽约时报》的新闻采写和发布中都充分利用了这两个网站的资源，这也是我们利用社交媒体最频繁最成功的一块。 我们在社交网站上发布一些有深度、有话题的语句，提一些尖锐敏感的问题，在主页上发布一些高质量的话题，同时在推特网上和员工的个人社交空间中发布我们的一些高质量的报道。
下面我举几个例子……
在七年来最强飓风“艾琳"袭击美国东海岸之前，我们的新闻编辑部就一直在关注这次飓风，寻找可信消息来源，给读者报告最新进展。
所以我们在推特上注册了一个账号@NYTlive，专门发布即时新闻。 我们将持续在@NYTlive主页更新各种突发或重大新闻的最近进展，与此同时，如果我们的好友更新了相关信息，我们也会即时转发。
在这个信息爆炸的世界，时有信息遭受质疑，因此我们也打算在社交网站账号主页发布一些事件背景信息和一些辟谣信息。 如果您访问@NYTlive，您就可以浏览最新也是最真实的报道。
在9.11十周年纪念日专栏里每一篇报道中我们都添加了一个标签（hashtag ）#911plus10。我们在十周年到来前几个月就就制作了这个热门标签，并在推特空间使用这个标签，号召网友参与讨论。 直到9.11纪念日到来，这个标签在推特网上都是一个热门标签，甚至我们的一些竞争对手也参与了我们组织的9.11周年纪念的讨论。 同期我们还推出另一个热门标签#911plus20， 组织引导网友讨论在9.11二十周年纪念日来临之前的这十年中美国应该聚焦在哪儿。
下面是一个网友的回复：
这里有一份互动地图，是一项很重要的9.11工程纪念工程。网友可以在地图上签名，发表评论，然后自定义更新到推特或脸谱网上，而网友在推特和脸谱网上的更新又直接链接回到这份地图上他们的评论内容。
另一个例子是在史蒂夫.乔布斯过世的当天夜里我们就创立了一个社交群组。
那晚我们推出了一个热门标签#steve jobs legacy，这个标签很快就火起来，我们还选了一些很不错的评论发布到《纽约时报》网站的主页nytimes.com。 我们也号召读者发布图片，请他们用图片阐述乔布斯的一生给他们的生活带来了些什么影响。 我们把这次活动当作献给乔布斯的一份感人的祭品。
当天夜里我们的网站点击激增，网友纷纷聚到这里了解乔布斯的生平，分享乔布斯给他们的生活带来的变化。
点击查看《纽约时报》网站收录的有关乔布斯的推特评论 。
我们网站的讨论区，比如美国总统选举专区dashboard也做得很不错， 这个专区甚至有一个实时信息核实功能系统。 读者可以通过一个推特热门标签#asknyt跟《纽约时报》时政记者和编辑联系，要求他们去核实某个候选人在一场辩论中所说的某件事是否属实。点击查看dashboard编辑和记者回复。
社交媒体已经成功介入了我们报道新闻和读者消化报道的过程。
考虑到媒体消费需求与时俱进的变化，了解读者需求是一件很重要的事。像大多数出版商一样，《纽约时报》有一个用户数据库。但是我们也会一对一跟读者对话。 我们专门设立了一个“顾客需求调查组”（ Customer Insight Group）直接与读者联系，随时研究读者需求变化。
最近我们就在《纽约时报》最忠实的读者群中做了一个实验，研究他们的iPad应用程序运营情况。
在第一轮调查中，我们了解到现在许多人通过各种平台接触到比以前更多的资讯：80%以上的iPad用户至少通过两个平台浏览《纽约时报》，其中一半通过三个平台或更多。
iPad给整个报刊杂志业带来了忧虑，我们也心怀担忧，这并不是秘密。iPad对印刷出版业的杀伤力超过了以往任何其他电子产品，所以现在看到这些用户浏览我们的网页让我们比以往任何时候都高兴。
随后我们又做了一个跨平台的后续研究。最新的研究发现显示前景很乐观
Let me touch on a few highlights:
我简单说说几个亮点吧：
便携实用
用户在使用iPad的时候通常也同时在做别的事：比如等待或正在吃零食，也可能是在球场上或在门诊排队…….用户告诉我们说浏览《纽约时报》让他们的空闲时间过得更加有意义，也更有价值。
iPad大大提升了阅读体验。 带着您的iPad找个公园坐下，背靠一个舒适的地方，然后就尽情享受阅读吧。
我们从早到晚都可以阅读，不过大部分印刷版报纸读者只是早上读报，电子报读者却偏爱在夜晚阅读。
你们中有几个会在晚上把iPad拿上床玩的？哈哈。我们之所以推出iPad应用程序，其中一个原因就是这个了。 这个产品给我们的一天增加了一项内容，毫不夸张的说，它让您可以和社交好友一起入眠。
台式电脑和笔记本电脑
有了iPad，人们更乐于分享纸质版的报纸了，也不再吝啬咖啡桌上的报纸了。
有趣吧？当然。不过这款软件对我们的市场营销和产品推介也很有用。
最后，我想谈谈最近推出的网上订阅模式
在推出这项服务之前，我们做了大量调查研究
我们需要在保持《纽约时报》的线上影响力，同时不影响广告业务发展的前提下，推出这项全新的订阅服务。
所以，我们采取“计量”或“增值”模式，每月提供20篇文章供读者免费阅读，首次点击推荐给别的读者也是免费的，但是如果想要浏览更多就需要付费了。 在这里我不需要给这项服务打广告，因为我们的读者知道付费浏览我们的网站绝对是值得的：他们喜欢阅读我们的内容……
订阅纸质版报纸的用户可以免费浏览我们的所有电子版内容
而对于另一个忠实用户群---我们网站最活跃的一群用户，我们给他们提供了一项超棒的福利： 有 10万活跃网友可以在一年内免费浏览我们的网站。 这个活动由我们的广告商Lincoln赞助，对方很支持这个活动。
总的来说，我们对“付费墙”在线订阅服务取得的成就感到很满意。这项服务推出后网站浏览量超出了我们的预期，网络广告业务也呈现增长趋势。 我们尤其满意付费用户的数量---接近120万了。
我们的《纽约时报》和《国际先驱论坛报》一直提倡采写和发布最高质量的报道和评论，我们也每天提醒自己满足消费者的需求才是我们工作的中心。 正是因为这样我们才能生产读者想看的内容，同时将这些内容传播到读者希望的任何地方。
在我们推出“付费墙”在线订阅服务之前，很多人都对这项服务的前景表示怀疑。 很多评论员说我们不会成功的，但是读者已经帮我们证明我们的内容值得花钱看。
最后，在演讲结束前我介绍一下我的同事戴维.卡尔，这个视频最近在documentary Page One上很火。
一直有人担忧经济压力和日新月异的变化将无可避免地影响到内容质量。 今晚我在此保证， 《纽约时报》和《国际先驱论坛报》的品质永远都不会降低；包括我们所有的平台，目前正在使用的和将来会使用的，应用品质都永远不会降低。
谢谢大家！
