Background
Since 2005, digital infrastructure has made it seamless to produce and distribute content, empowering every individual to become a news informant. Social media websites gave users the tools to create and share content, search engines eased the use of finding content, and blogs reduced the complexity of distributing one’s content. These headwinds disrupted the position of traditional newspapers as the only purveyors of news and information; to combat these forces, traditional newspapers, such as the New York Times, had to move the news & information battle “to a new hill” by improving the depth and variety of news. The challenge with social media, search engines, and niche news blogs was the questionable quality of news, and limited content formats (text, photos). To differentiate and strengthen its value proposition of quality news journalism, the NYTimes improved its depth of news with investigative and service journalism, and the variety of news by creating new content formats such as podcasts, interactive data and VR/AR. For these new storytelling formats to be successful, each journalist was paired with a multimedia team and engineers to create compelling multimedia packages on populist topics. To deliver this new (ongoing) value to consumers, the NYTimes shifted their digital business model to subscription (termed SaaS journalism). This new approach to digital journalism guided its subscription packages by improving the variety and depth of consumption options behind the paywall. This packaging of quality content has netted them 3.6 million digital subscribers, but they aspire to achieve 10 million by 2025.
Challenge
The New York Times created popular new content formats for users to engage, but many users found it challenging to discover content that was most relevant to them. With poor content discovery, users did not frequently visit the website, except for popular news events, which caused their 200 plus published articles per day to go mostly unread. To increase engagement (frequency of visits) and drive discovery, the NYTimes must turn its content into an ecosystem by having each piece of content work in concert where a user’s interaction with one piece of content, influences the outcome of other pieces of content. To orchestrate this ecosystem, the NYTimes must strengthen the capabilities of their content through new services and support to drive discovery. This also presents a clear opportunity for improving its subscription offering, which is primarily oriented on consumption parameters.
To strengthen the capabilities of news, the NYTimes must “cognify” their news to improve a user’s authority of news (personalization & customization), create a sense of belonging (community) around a user’s most passionate subjects, and ease self-fulfillment with news subjects (interaction).
Improving Users’ News Authority
Although printed newspaper may have been cumbersome to use, readers were able to remove sections and reorganize the paper to quickly personalize the editorial experience to reflect the sections and articles that most interested them. Users were immediately gratified because it allowed them to deepen their esteem around their most coveted topics. The advent of digital news websites missed on this desired outcome, as users were forced fed popular categories and topics, and unable to curate the news to their needs. With an inflexible content management system, inability to capture user data and no algorithm expertise in-house, the NYTimes was unable to create a personalized editorial experience. Users resorted to search engines (e.g., Google) and third-party news aggregators (e.g., Flipboard) but the quality of news was questionable at best, especially with the rise of clickbait news. With these forces creating a customer pain point, the NYT has now found their whitespace opportunity in “cognifying” quality news.
To bring these capabilities in house, The Times recently announced a $200 million investment in AI and machine learning capabilities. Meredith Kopit Levien, COO NYTimes, stated, 
With a “north star” of increasing daily visits, the NYTimes wants to optimize its content into newsfeeds that are relevant to users on a daily basis. To execute on this objective, in June 2018, the NYTimes launched “Your Feed” for the iOS app. Here users can take control of their news experience by choosing to follow one or more of the 24 news channels. The news channels feature editorial article feeds of some of the NYTimes traditional columns (Politics, Economy, etc.), variety sections (Gender & Society) and popular editors. Besides, other feeds will be generated based on key events and evolving populist topics. Readers benefit from the personalized feeds because they can deeply explore a subject to improve their authority on a subject. The NYTimes benefits because it drives better discovery of their +200 articles per day. In addition, older articles become “new” again, as feeds become historical accounts of subjects that users want to explore, these feeds lift the long tail on content. The biggest opportunity for the NYTimes (and readers) is turning these personalized feeds into cultural authority destinations. The NYTimes has solicited Google’s AI capabilities to help them identify and tag archived photos and videos, demonstrating that they will eventually add media to “Your News” as well. The newsfeeds can amplify to cultural destinations, imagine an “Amazon HQ2” feed that includes: HQ2 articles, photo galleries of city visits, interactive maps of finalist cities, podcasts with economic developers and interview videos with prominent city officials. Also, by tagging media assets and leveraging machine learning capabilities, the NYT can personalize the reading experience by having articles optimize for a user’s preferred content format (e.g., articles starting with videos or interactive charts pending a user’s behavior) to increase time spent on editorials.
Amplifying news feeds and articles not only improves the user experience, but also increases the distribution and monetization opportunities. With a personalized multimedia experience, the NYTimes can develop a smart TV app, which would expand ad inventory for audio and video ads and improve targeted ad inventory (higher CPMs). By following in the footsteps of other media players, personalization would exist behind the paywall to drive acquisition of new users to their subscription product and improve the frequency of visits (daily) of their current subscribers to drive retention rates. Furthermore, the marginal cost of content decreases as more readers view and discover articles, increasing profit margins per user. With an improved offering to deepen the esteem of users, the challenge for the NYTimes is how do they solicit users to cooperate and collaborate with news to expand the experience and create a sense of belonging around news.
Connecting Users to Discover News
Before the digital era, the socialization (and curation) of print news occurred when a person circled an article, fold the edge of a particular section, or cut out an article for a person’s reference. In turn, commentary about the article would occur at the dinner table, or office break room. This social construct of news was captured in the digital world by Facebook and Twitter. Social media made it seamless for users to share news, like specific articles and give feedback instantaneously. In turn, this drove discovery as users would get introduced to new topics; however, users were unable to curate their own newsfeeds. In addition, social media provided other challenges, such as (bots) sharing unsubstantiated (fake) news and making illegitimate comments on article threads. This immediately eroded the trust and quality of news shared on social media platforms.
With the NYTimes new slogan, “the truth is now more important than ever.” The NYT has an opportunity to create a community anchored on empowering users to curate and share quality and trustworthy news, essentially decentralizing news curation. The NYT recognizes this opportunity,
To encourage users to learn from each other, The NYT should elicit the cooperation from its readers by giving users the tools to create news feeds and tag articles to share with friends. Editors can then transition to become curators, or intermediaries to news feeds, spending their time optimizing newsfeeds with the best content and providing editorial balance to “round out” newsfeeds. To further encourage socialization, the NYT can give users the ability to follow their friends within the editorial experience to gain insight into the news articles and personalize feeds that they enjoy, creating a news dashboard to drive discovery. Beyond friends and family, the second and third place sources for user recommendations are from influencers and brands. The “Your News” feed can be extended to include a curation of niche news topics from leading brands and influencers. Imagine a feed curated by IBM (Watson) on top articles about artificial intelligence, or Barack Obama curating a feed of the top articles for key issues for the 2020 election. Not only does this drive discovery, but this too extends the long tail of news, as older articles will have more relevance as users would like to get “smarter” on a niche topic. This social connection of news will also improve the personalization engine (Your News), as the NYT will have sociographic data to surface articles based on a user’s personal attributes, social connections, and influences.
The new socialization features will also drive monetization opportunities. Premium curation from influencers would reside behind the paywall to drive conversion rates. In addition, switching costs for current users will increase (driving renewal rates), as users would become wedded to their favorite curators whether friends or influencers. Branded newsfeeds create additional sponsorship opportunities for advertisers (e.g. Productivity newsfeed brought to you by Microsoft). The plethora of user-generated news feeds unlocks targeted and localized ad opportunities, as advertisers can buy against specific social clusters (e.g. parents who are fitness enthusiasts, Australian working professionals, etc.). Furthermore, by understanding social and local user clusters, this can influence the locations of NYTimes Live Events accelerating ticket sales and creating additional sponsorship opportunities (e.g. Future of Education: NYT Live event tour sponsored by Udemy). Lastly, new revenue streams can be introduced, Influencers that are skillful at curating newsfeeds (Barack Obama 2020 election feed) can open the door for curation tipping, giving users the ability to tip their favorite curators (revenue shared with NYT).
Although personalization and socialization of news will drive engagement and discovery, many users must leave “their world” to participate in the content. How can the New York Times bring news into their world, for users to interact with content between online and offline worlds?”
Interacting with Content in Our World
Over the past century, most humans have interacted with news via print, TV, or smartphone, with each experience bringing us momentarily “out of our world.” However, with the growth of cloud platforms, big data and computing power, technology has allowed us to merge our online and offline worlds. The most recent technology that captures the essence of merging online and offline is smart speakers.
Smart speakers have empowered users to take command of their world via voice. Mostly driven by Google Home and Amazon Echo, smart speakers have grown from 37 million installed base units in 2017 to 66 million in 2018, with an expectation of 175 million by 2022. Of the top information topics requested via smart speakers, News was second (38%).
The NYTimes quickly seized this opportunity by recently announcing five new voice skills for Alexa (Amazon) that features: a daily news briefing and quiz, and voice content that complements print articles from travel, music, and books. NYT can further build on these skills to strengthen news “services” by leveraging their machine learning capabilities, the NYT can deliver personalized daily news briefings to users and empower socialization of news by giving users the ability to “favorite,” and share daily briefings via voice. However, the voice skills lend themselves most significantly to “gamifying” content. To expand the crossword experience, the NYTimes has an opportunity to create an HQ trivia for voice, allowing users to participate in voice quiz competitions daily to win prizes. Leveraging machine learning, these voice quizzes can be optimized based on the level of difficulty and specific verticals to democratize participation among users. More than just leveraging voice for content participation, voice can ease the use of search and curation by automating these features. NYT can develop a voice-enabled virtual assistant, essentially creating a digital librarian to navigate the NYT editorial landscape. The virtual assistant can aid users in finding information on topics, and curate news feeds that can be consumed across formats and platforms. The virtual assistant can also “Russian Doll” to NYTimes Cooking apps to ease the creative process for cooking users; the voice assistant would read recipes and aid users throughout the process to achieve their desired dish.
Voice skills will also provide monetization opportunities; a voice assistant can be placed behind the paywall to drive conversions and retention of current subscribers. Voice expands the ad inventory for podcast audio ads and drives sponsorship opportunities, as voice quizzes can be monetized much like HQ trivia (e.g., Tech News quiz brought to you by Samsung).
By personalizing, socializing, and interacting with the news experience, the NYTimes can create a “news & information flywheel” that as more people use these features the capabilities will improve. These features can also strengthen its subscription offering by fulfilling the capabilities gap.
With a strong flywheel and an attractive subscription offering, the NYTimes will be able to accelerate subscription growth to meet their goal of 10m subscribers by 2025.
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