“If the newsroom hadn’t been a strategic partner, we either wouldn’t have made it, or we would have made it on terms we don’t like.”īut not everyone at the Times is happy with the way Baquet has navigated the divide. Pulling that off, he says, required cooperation with the business side. “I came into this place fighting for the survival of The New York Times ,” Baquet says in an interview. ICYMI: Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda Today, the paper is actively ignoring some of those recommendations, amid increasing signs that one of the last remaining firewalls in journalism is crumbling.ĭean Baquet, who has been executive editor of the paper since May 2014, says flatly that the traditional news-advertising divide has become a luxury the Times can no longer afford. Around the same time, senior editors introduced a cooling-off period before employees from the advertising studio could work in the newsroom. But the 2014 report also drew a line: The advertising arm of the company should remain “walled off” from the newsroom, it stated. And its recommendations were implemented, opening new avenues for the paper to successfully engage with its audience. It is a divide that was memorialized three years ago, in a widely cited innovation report that promoted greater cooperation between business units and journalists, arguing that enforcing their separation was archaic in a digital age. Maybe I was too hard-line, but I believed in the wall. Continuing job cuts in the newsroom, even as the business side of the paper continues to grow, have made those tensions even more acute. But the Times is a unique beast, in journalism and within its own midtown Manhattan tower, and a bevy of new initiatives being rolled out to buoy the company’s bottom line worry journalists at a paper that has long maintained a firm separation between its news and business operations. In one sense, such initiatives might be seen as the new normal, as newspapers like the Times scramble for creative approaches in an industry whose finances are growing creakier by the day. The editor of these sections meets once a week with the advertising department to discuss possible projects, while the advertising studio of the Times acts as a matchmaker between reporters and sponsors. These sections, often paired with Times -backed live events, are a growing part of the business model of what has been the newspaper of record, and just one example of the extent to which the newsroom and the company’s marketing department now work together in an effort to generate new sources of revenue. ICYMI: For The New York Times, Trump is a sparring partner with benefits Although the paper’s own standards call for transparency in this area, the section didn’t disclose the paper’s financial interest. What wasn’t in any of the stories was the fact that the Times itself owned a minority stake in the conference. In addition, eight women participating in the conference offered brief first-person accounts, and other articles appeared on topics that ranged from campus feminism to abortion. The featured piece, on the state of the women’s movement, was by Tina Brown, the well-known journalist who founded the summit. The April 2 edition of the Sunday New York Times, where the paper features its best journalism, included a six-page special section, “Women Today,” pegged to a summit in Manhattan a few days later.
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