#NYTIMES NEWS MEDIA EDITORIAL FULL#

Some of that could, understandably, be management’s desire not to air its dirtiest laundry in a newsroom-wide memo.

#NYTIMES NEWS MEDIA EDITORIAL FULL#

(“The masthead embraces the committee’s key recommendations.”) But I have to say, reading that memo and then the full report, it still feels like there’s a big gap between leadership and the digital troops. When last week’s version was sent out to the newsroom, a joint Abramson/Baquet memo (their last together?) expressed support for its findings. It’s journalists turning their own reporting skills on themselves. (Or at least as raw as digital strategy documents can get.) You can sense the frayed nerves and the frustration at a newsroom that is, for all its digital successes, still in many ways oriented toward an old model. This fuller version is quite different - it’s raw. I confess I didn’t feel anything quite so revelatory when I read last week’s leaked version - which read like an indoor-voice summary, expected and designed to be leaked to the broader world. I’ve spoken with multiple digital-savvy Times staffers in recent days who described the report with words like “transformative” and “incredibly important” and “a big big moment for the future of the Times.” One admitted crying while reading it because it surfaced so many issues about Times culture that digital types have been struggling to overcome for years. (A summary version of it was leaked last week, but this is the big kahuna.)Īnd that is something we’re interested in here - one of the world’s leading news organizations, giving itself a rigorous self-examination. It’s the full report of the newsroom innovation team that was given six full months to ask big questions about the Times’ digital strategy. But Abramson’s removal and Dean Baquet’s ascent has apparently inspired someone inside the Times to leak one of the most remarkable documents I’ve seen in my years running the Lab, to Myles Tanzer at BuzzFeed.

We don’t typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan’s very capable cadre of media reporters. Jill Abramson’s ouster yesterday afternoon probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter’s GDP numbers. There are few things that can galvanize the news world’s attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times.

Nytimes news media editorial