Twitter, the NYT, and the Remaking of Journalism
Two weeks ago, the NYT published an op-ed that fairly garnered significant controversy: Sen. Tom Cotton openly called for the use of the military against protesters.
But unlike previous unpopular op-eds - like one from the Taliban - this one generated blowback not from readers but within the newsroom. The op-ed concerned employees, many of whom conducted a walk-out, resulting in editor James Bennet’s resignation and his replacement’s declaration that in the future staff would have significant say over whether op-eds were inappropriate.
How did the paper do such a public and sharp about-face? Was this really about editorial policy? Or was there something more at stake?
(Note: This article is not about the op-ed, but rather on business trends in media and how they influenced this incident.)
The Twitterification of News
The history of NYT’s business provides important context. After the Great Recession, the NYT struggled mightily. Revenues plummeted and advertisers left and never came back. Readers could now get much of their news for free over the Internet, and advertisers flocked to eyeballs. Journalism was dying.
Worst of all, the NYT published yesterday’s news. With real time services like Twitter, users could see what was “trending” and find live streams of anything happening globally.
This slump drove newspapers to cut staff and costs like travel, and journalists began to use social media to get real time updates. Camera crews were replaced by neighbors with iPhones.
This drove the rise of the “Twitter story” - an article premised around some controversial Tweet or hashtag - which hit the new journalism trifecta of high clicks, low cost, and real time. This chart below shows Twitter mentions in news websites over the last few years, growing of late even though Twitter has existed since 2006.
And in 2016, the NYT found its perfect partner: Donald Trump.
Between January 2016 and Election Day, the NYT published hundreds of articles on Trump’s tweets, part of the $5B in “free advertising” he was estimated to have received from mainstream outlets. From Election Day to inauguration was also when the NYT saw its greatest subscriber increases explode to the most in years.
Trump also provided a boost to Twitter, which had been stagnant for years. “Donald Trump twitter” remains one of the most Googled phrases of any Twitter-related phrase.
The pivot: Subscribers vs ads
So far, I have described some well known history. But underneath the surface, the news business has continued to transform, and a deep shift in business strategy is driving major changes in what we read in the headlines.
The most significant change is the rapid transition from ad-based journalism to subscriber-based. Originally pursued by high end publications like the Wall Street Journal, news organizations began experimenting with paywalls but found success fleeting, and Trump mocked the “failing” NYT. But the 2016 election helped form a complete turnaround for their business, clear from a breakdown of its revenues:
In 2017, the NYT managed to actually grow its overall revenues for the first time in ten years. This success has led other print media to implement similar strategies, from Atlantic to the Athletic. The strategy seemed to finally be working.
User expectations
At the same time the NYT’s business model shifted, what readers expected from the Internet also changed, creating the basis for the paper’s current predicament.
In product management, we carefully study user behavior and how to condition or create - really, manipulate - users into clicking or viewing certain things.
Social media is illustrative. We learn to see a red badge means something news. We learn to scroll up for new updates. This conditional behavior drives our expectations for other apps and websites to behave similarly.
Another subtle feature of social media like Twitter and Facebook is the feed algorithm. We choose who to follow and what to like, and the algorithm furthers our expectations to only see what we like. We become repulsed - unfollow me, unfriend me! - by what we disagree with. But more interestingly, social media teaches us to blame the messenger: to unmute or unfollow someone even if they only shared a link or a post.
Why does it matter? Because users are now conditioned to unsubscribe to what they do not like. The blame falls with the publisher. And as we have seen, for papers like the NYT, unsubscribing is a matter of life and death.
This forms a stark contrast to the old advertising model. Soap makers and car companies who paid for ad space did not care much about the content of the news. Rather quite the opposite - they preferred the media cast as wide a net as possible, as a broader spectrum of views created a bigger market and more buyers of Fords and Tide. Bland was ideal. The total reversal of the NYT’s business model has created a situation where it must meet its subscribers’ expectations.
We can see the complete opposite effect at play with Facebook. Facebook is completely reliant on advertising revenues, and therefore wants as a big market as possible. This is a major factor in why Zuckerberg and Dorsey have been so resistant to remove any type of speech, no matter how odious. Tech’s recalcitrance is less about capitalist morality play and more about its captivity to a broad base of users.
Top Google queries containing the word Twitter
Nowadays, we do see consumers mount campaigns to stop companies from advertising on certain shows (e.g. Tucker Carlson) - but we should not forget that direct brand accountability and rapid mobilization of campaigns was not possible before social media, either.
Shifting power dynamics and the rise of Influencer news
Even as news media recovered, journalists remained under the gun. The subscriber model tends to reduce the number of outlets - we go from 1000 cable channels to Netflix and Hulu - and that reduced the number of jobs in the field significantly.
But in some sense, the Twitterification of news backfired for these outlets. Journalists worried about losing their jobs saw a chance to build an independent brand around their followers. A big following on Twitter stayed with you even after being laid off. Followers created job security.
Social media began to create a shift in power. Journalists with large followings drove traffic. Many left to create their own media, like Ezra Klein at Vox and Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept. Less famous journalists turned to services such Patreon, where users pay journalists directly for content. The NYT went on a hiring spree, beefing up its opinion section to dozens of regular well known columnists. News media had now joined the influencer economy.
The most lucrative areas of news - sports - saw its biggest star, Bill Simmons, take on the most profitable news channel, ESPN, in a full on war over pay and editorial policy. In the end, Simmons took his 6 million followers elsewhere to found his own website, which he then sold for over $200 million.
The news organization was caught in the middle. Empowered journalists brought traffic, but also created high costs and threatened to replace the power of the brand with their own individual names. ESPN let not only Bill Simmons but dozens of journalists go, believing they could rely on their position. Writers began to unionize to fight commodification. The NYT was an exception here, seeking out big names instead of looking to replace them with lower cost alternatives.
The terms of the battle were now clear. And these dynamics played out exactly as expected in an NYT staff meeting over the Cotton op-ed, as well known journalists on both sides flexed their power on Twitter mid meeting - Bari Weiss tweeting one side and twenty opposing journalists tweeting their disagreement. Eventually, the latter won out.
And at the end of the day, the Times got more clicks and more subscriptions.
When power and money collide
These changes over the op-ed seem sudden and sharp, but were actually the results of a long, inevitable shift. Subscribers and journalists both expect a paper that reflects their values, and the NYT must meet these expectations to stay alive.
And the NYT is not the only paper affected, as dozens of resignations and changes have occurred over the last few weeks. This turnover represents an admission that the subscriber model now influences the content of the paper itself - even down to the opinion pages.
In general, the subscriber trend is negative for readers, because subscriber models are heavily centralized, and as other papers go out of business, the NYT gains even more power than over the news cycle.
The trend is negative for journalists as well. Despite giving some more power, overall the industry has begun to look like Hollywood, where actors and directors with big names can define the fate of a movie and most small time players struggle in high-risk independent work. Many will work on an email or podcast Patreon model that blurs the line between journalism and punditry, but without the fact checkers or editing process of a full fledged news organization.
At the core of the op-ed controversy were two sides: one that believes in a neutral, “voice from nowhere” approach to journalism, and the other that believes in a product based on the producers’ and consumers’ values. The concept of news, once centered around an attempt at neutrality, is now itself the site of debate. And yet beneath all these intellectual arguments, the real struggle is over who truly runs the business. Social justice might be the headline, but it is power and money that continue to matter the most.