Q&A with NYTimes.com Editor on blogs
In an interview with CyberJournalist.net publisher Jonathan Dube, NYTimes.com Editor in Chief Len Apcar discusses the site's new blog-like political feature, Times on the Trail.
"We thought that there were a lot of blogs out there, political blogs out there, but we didnt necessarily think that the quality was very good. We thought that there was a lot of rumor out there, a lot of wild opinion being bandied about, but we also thought that there was a vehicle here for short-form information, continuous updating, some development observations, insights, that might not rise to a full article but are worthy of reporting....I looked at many blogs and I came away thinking I was not interested in creating a blog, but I was interested in creating something completely different. "
(Disclaimer: Dube and Apcar serve together on the Online News Association board, and Apcar is on The Media Center's board.)
Dube: Why did The Times decide to start this blog?
Apcar: We wanted to create a destination for people, readers who are really interested in the campaign coverage. We thought that there were a lot of blogs out there, political blogs out there, but we didnt necessarily think that the quality was very good. We thought that there was a lot of rumor out there, a lot of wild opinion being bandied about, but we also thought that there was a vehicle here for short-form information, continuous updating, some development observations, insights, that might not rise to a full article but are worthy of reporting.
Was there any debate over whether the Weblog-format was appropriate for The New York Times? I know some sites, such as CNN.com, have said blogging is too unstructured a format for them.
I looked at many blogs and I came away thinking I was not interested in creating a blog, but I was interested in creating something completely different. In other words, I wanted something that was reported from the news staff, not an opinion vehicle; I wanted something that was edited by the newsroom, not something that was just dashed off and published on a Web page; and I wanted something that in time I felt would give people a concise and authoritative read on campaign coverage and on campaign developments. I thought a lot of the e-mails, a lot of the other blog pages, were too hard to follow. They were unwieldy, they were inefficient you had to really stay tuned all the time. And I thought that was not really useful to most readers. And I thought that there were ways to turn this into something that was a couple of notches above what was out there.
What kind of feedback have you gotten so far?
You know I havent looked at a lot of it, but generally the feedback has been positive.... What I have heard, if you weed out the people who criticize your politics or who just want to mouth off, most people are saying this is fun, this is interesting, I enjoy reading it; its very useful on the right side of the page; and I come to it now to find out what Times reporters are reporting and thinking.
Have you gotten any feedback from the people who are writing it?
Yes, I have, and most of them are telling me I like it a lot. That they find it fun to see items go right up to come through the editing process and go right up. That they find it satisfying to do some short-form analysis and short-form reporting, and they think that it is definitely a Times-quality page and thats very heartening.
Was there any debate at all about linking to competitors news sites? And what is your policy in general about linking to other news sites? Some news sites have policies against linking against competitors.
There was no internal debate. We knew from the beginning that it was required in this kind of a page. We knew that there is plenty of other very good reporting out there. And we knew that to have crediblity with the reader we couldnt just say, well, heres what The Times is reporting and ignore everybody else. We thought that there was a way to do this that we would still be comfortable with from a journalistic point of view, in terms of our own standards and credibility with the reader . That being said, were being careful about this. I dont like and avoid linking to stories that are facutally loose, that are speculation, or just not the kind of stories I would publish, period. But I do want to look at local insights, which we might not be reporting or anybody else, particularly in this season of different states different weeks. Local insights, observations, from the campaign trail, from the reporters from the Rose Garden, from the press bus; news, of course, paramount. All of those things I wanted to get, and if it meant that sometimes a story was shaping the day and it was published in another publication, and it was making news and shaping the direction of the campaign that day, then I would link to it.
I became convinced of this last fall during the California recall when the L.A. Times was writing investigative stories, scoops, that no one else had, and were changing the nature of the debate for several hours or days, and I thought, well of course youd have to link to that....
I just think thats almost a minimum these days. But there are a lot of stories these days that I wouldnt link to.
Any other projects similar to Times on the Trail in the works?
Ill tell you Jonathan, to be quite candid about this, Ive looked at this kind of page as a possible template for other areas of common interest. In other words, you could take this page and build a page for Opera buffs. You could do it for theater. You could do it for any number of special interests.
I wanted to learn how to do this first with political reporting. I thought it made a lot of sense. It played to The Times strengths. We have just scores, dozens, of reporters covering the campaigns. I was hoping wed have a good lively debate, which weve got. So I want to learn by doing this first, with politics. And then from there Ill step back and say, what do we think? what kind of tool is this? How do we learn from this?
I didnt want to do an e-mail, for politics. And I dont want to do an e-mail for opera buffs either.
Why not?
I think open rates on e-mail are difficult these days with the spam problem right now, and e-mail is not updatable, and I wanted a continuously updated report... We add transcripts, we add articles, we add reporting from the staff, and I didnt want to have a political report that was just a snapshot each morning. There are plenty of others that are out there and are very good, but I didnt want to just compete with them...
Do you consider Times on the Trail a Weblog?
I did not want to jump on the bandwagon and race to the lowest common denominator. Thats not what I was about here. I really studied the blog space. I talked to a lot of bloggers. I went to a bloggers' conference. And I came away from them and I said, theres a concept here we could use, and we could turn this into what was jokingly refered to for months as an information delivery device. But this whole business of whether a blog should be edited I thought was a red herring. The whole question of whether a newspaper could blog I thought was a red herring. So my view was, if you want to call it a blog, you can call it a blog. Im not calling it a blog because I dont think its a blog. Its an updated news service.
But I wanted to take care of those who would say, Well, if it were a blog it would have this or it would have that. We have all the standard elements you can link to it, you can print it, you can react to it. It has links....
Look, this will evolve. It still hasnt achieved my vision just yet. But its off to a good start.
Hasnt achieved your vision? So whats is your vision?
Oh, Id like to see more and more items, more robustly reported. Id like to see more humor, a little more fun. I think the voice is starting to come through, and I think were raising the standard for doing this. Its not all that noticable yet, but its only been out since the morning after New Hampshire.
But you would like to see more voice in this than in the standard newspaper reports?
Slightly. I mean, its a voice in our newspaper that we would call a notebook. Its that kind of voice. And its short-form.
Its basically a continuously published notebook.
Exactly. What do we call it? We call it a continuously updated report.... We just call it The Trail. You file an item to The Trail.
Feb 12, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(3)
Discussion
3 comments about 'Q&A with NYTimes.com Editor on blogs'cyberjournalist.net doesn't like netscape browsers, which unfortunately i have to use unless i paste an e-mail link into IE. cheers.
Posted by Doug FEaver at February 13, 2004 11:12 AM
Thanks. The site works on Netscape 7 but not on some legacy versions. We're about to do a site overhaul so we'll try to make sure it works on the older versions.
Posted by editor at February 16, 2004 10:14 PM
"Im not calling it a blog because I dont think its a blog. Its an updated news service." Presumably displaying the kind of canting "journalistic ethics" that its print cousin does, accompanied by the kind of self-serving claptrap about duty to the public that hypocritical editorial and "news" staffs have been cranking out for the last decade or so. Dress it however you like, the news profession (and the NYT in particular) do a terrible job of news reporting, and there's no reason to expect that a group that has acted as the GOP's pimp for decades will become less lazy or sleazy over the long run.
Posted by mwl at February 17, 2004 3:14 PM
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