Jumat, 26 Juli 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

Interested in learning about data journalism?

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 02:32 PM PDT

Then you should sign up for the new MOOC from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which is all about the basics of data-driven journalism.

Your instructors are an all-star crew: Amy Schmitz Weiss from San Diego State University, Lise Olsen from the Houston Chronicle, Derek Willis from The New York Times, Jeremy Bowers from NPR, and Sisi Wei from ProPublica.

Best of all, it’s free. Registration’s open now, and the course will run from August 12 to September 16.

“Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate”

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 01:57 PM PDT

Our friends at the Berkman Center — specifically, Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling — are out with a new report that tries to map the spread of conversation around SOPA/PIPA last year:

In this paper, we use a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States that was designed to give prosecutors and copyright holders new tools to pursue suspected online copyright violations. Our study applies a mixed-methods approach by combining text and link analysis with human coding and informal interviews to map the evolution of the controversy over time and to analyze the mobilization, roles, and interactions of various actors.

This novel, data-driven perspective on the dynamics of the networked public sphere supports an optimistic view of the potential for networked democratic participation, and offers a view of a vibrant, diverse, and decentralized networked public sphere that exhibited broad participation, leveraged topical expertise, and focused public sentiment to shape national public policy.

Full paper here. Super nifty visualization here.

Gawker is letting readers rewrite headlines and reframe articles

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 11:27 AM PDT

Relegating online comments to the bottom of an article seems so old-school newspapery in retrospect, doesn’t it?

Long the default for many news organizations online, the message is that reader comments are an afterthought, a footnote, less important than the story itself.

Gawker Media wants to change that perception. Founder Nick Denton has been obsessing over how to reinvent online commenting for going on a decade now, and it seemed as though the publishing-and-discussion Kinja platform his sites unveiled last year was finally approaching his ideal.

“We’re building a truly interactive news platform,” Denton told me over Gchat. “Readers should be able to contribute stories, get them on the front, determine headline and image size that their friends see, rebut stories, etc.”

So Denton’s making another revision to his dream platform: Tonight Gawker is rolling out a new kind of reblogging functionality to Kinja so that readers can top the articles they share with their own headlines and introductions. (It’ll first enable Gawker Media staffers to re-top stories; that power will roll out to all readers soon.) "Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers," Denton told the Lab earlier this year. "And at some point the distinction should become meaningless."

Anybody can create her own Kinja page, which is a personal micro-site meant to enable constructive conversations “without fear of trolls poisoning your comments,” according to the Kinja front page. (Kinja’s front is a place where Gawker editors will feature the most popular stories and discussions from across all Gawker Media sites and Kinja.)

The idea is to give anyone the ability to reframe an existing article for any audience. Think of it like super-aggregating: You can share an entire article rather than just quoting excerpts or linking to the original, but you can also top it with your own headline, lede, and commentary. “For instance, say a story was written for gamers — they can translate it for a more general audience,” Denton said. “And, if that URL is shared, it is shared with the new headline and intro.”

So a reader gets to repurpose and share an article in whatever context she chooses, with the original article appearing in full below her headline and introduction, but the original story gets the traffic. Gawker editors can also snap up original reader contributions to Kinja, reframe them, and share those reader-generated posts with the wider Gawker network. Staffers can aggregate commenters; commenters can aggregate staffers; at some point, the distinctions start to dissolve.

Here’s an example. Gawker’s Cord Jefferson wrote this quick post on a Canadian man caught swimming across the Detroit River to the United States on a dare. But Jefferson’s colleague Jesus Diaz decided to put a new top on it with new art. (Consider this more a proof-of-concept, since the new angle isn’t particularly interesting here.) Here’s what the shared version would look like:

kinja-example

For contributors who are happy for the exposure and a media company that can freely share user-generated content, it’s a win-win. (“It’s particularly useful for stories contributed by readers,” Denton says. “Any user can have the benefit of professional packaging.” That’s not too far off of the pitch for Medium.)

The reframing functionality could also serve as simple A/B testing because it allows several versions of the same story to circulate under different headlines. So where one reader might write the headline “Cat Neckties Are Things That Exist; Are Popular,” another could share that original post but reframe it as “Nutty cat owners forcing pets to wear ‘cat neckties.’” An original post with the headline “The Truth About Being Broke” might be reframed as “How to survive being totally broke.” (Upworthy has a similar strategy and often shares the same content under different headlines.)

“The whole point of Kinja is to turn the conversation into news — on a grander scale than we do already on the Gawker blogs,” Denton said.

Gawker has already made reader interaction a prominent part of how stories are displayed. Image annotation gives commenters high visibility — most often via quippy one-liners — by taking comments outside of the comment section and integrating them with photos. On Kinja, that level of interaction will help personalize content, too.

“If your friend recommends an image, it shows big,” Denton says. “If your friend annotates a particular portion of an image, that’s the bit you see in the thumb. If your friend recommends a story, the headline shows big to you.”

Wresting this kind of editorial control from the professionals may make some journalists uneasy, but it’s already how people are interacting with content (and with one another) on other platforms. Denton calls Kinja “by far the most significant tech investment” that the company has ever made, with 30 tech staffers working full-time on the project for the past year.

For Kinja to work, people will have to want to be part of the Gawker network. They have to choose Kinja as a place where they share and contextualize. Gawker is already known for its robust and dedicated base of commenters, and its comment section is the place where plenty of Gawker staffers got their start. But it’s tough to measure how many people are already using Kinja, Denton says.

“All the existing Gawker Media commenters automatically have Kinja accounts, so the global number is muddy,” Denton told me in an email. “But you can see the unique trend here.” (Denton says growth is actually stronger than it appears in the graph below because some Kinja sites like Groupthink have been moved under Gawker domains.)

kinja

For a media company whose former editor once described its comment section as a “tar pit of hell,” encouraging meaningful discussion is no easy feat. But ignoring the discourse that a story generates doesn’t mean a conversation won’t happen — it just means the conversation will happen without you.

“Interactive news: I’d like to bring some meaning to the phrase,” Denton said. “And by ‘meaning,’ something more than volume of comments.”

Photo by Peter Rukavina used under a Creative Commons license.

Rebranding of the International Herald Tribune was a digital strategy move

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 09:03 AM PDT

Earlier this year, The New York Times Co. announced that the International Herald Tribune would be rebranded as the The International New York Times. (Nikki Usher wrote about it for us at the time.) Today, the Financial Times takes a look at what was behind that decision — largely, and unsurprisingly, digital strategy.

In its latest quarter, revenues in the company's New York Times Media Group, which includes the New York Times and the IHT, declined 0.9 per cent to $380.7m. The group derived more than half of its revenues from circulation dollars, which grew 8.2 per cent in the quarter but failed to offset a 11.4 per cent drop in advertising. While the New York Times doesn't break out the performance of the IHT, Mr [Stephen] Dunbar-Johnson says it is profitable, without giving details.

Mr Dunbar-Johnson says executives' confidence in the international opportunity was bolstered by a lengthy study and analysis of traffic patterns to the New York Times website. About a third of its 41.4m unique global monthly visitors come from outside the US. Yet only 70,000, or 10 per cent of its 708,000 paid digital subscribers are located outside of the US.

While Dunbar-Johnson stressed that The International New York Times would retain content unique from that of The New York Times, he expressed the company’s desire to capitalize on the power of a “global monobrand” — and also hinted that the publication’s headquartering in Paris might not be permanent, either.

Mr Johnson plays down concerns that the IHT will abandon its roots in Paris, where half its staff are based. He cautions, however, that France's costly and inflexible labour market means that "so often, it makes economic sense to do it outside of France".

BBC News hits a majority-mobile mark

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:29 AM PDT

Journalism.co.uk’s Sarah Marshall reports that, for two days this month, BBC News got more traffic from mobile phones than from laptop/desktop computers.

Apparently, smartphone + tablet now routinely surpasses laptop + desktop traffic on the weekends. What made these two (weekend) days unique is that it was smartphones alone that beat their old-school antecedents. The death of actor Cory Monteith fueled one of those mobile-dominant days — another sign that young people in particular prefer news on their phones.

BBC News reports that smartphones typically account for 42 percent of its traffic. Back in November, that equivalent (also including tablets) was 37 percent at The New York Times, and I’ve no doubt their numbers today would be broadly similar. Fiona Spruill back then:

The numbers speak for themselves. In the next 12–18 months, many news organizations will cross the 50 percent threshold where more users are visiting on phones and tablets than on desktop computers and laptops.

In other words, it’s time to stop thinking of your desktop site as “the site” and your mobile site as some ancillary adjunct.

Ethnic media is more than a niche: It’s worth your attention

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 07:00 AM PDT

Karl Rove gets it. So do major advertisers, broadcast networks, and their digital offspring. To be a viable political or commercial force in America’s future, you must be able to understand and connect with an audience that is heavily made up of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.

No surprise there, right?

Then why is there a paucity of research, education and funding aimed at producing excellent journalists and sustainable news outlets to serve that important and expanding audience? Why is ethnic media still relatively invisible to media analysts, foundations and journalism schools, and what are the costs to us if this trend continues?

New York City is, admittedly, an extreme example of media diversity: Three million residents — 37 percent of the population — are foreign-born, and less than a quarter of those residents report speaking only English at home. Not surprisingly, there’s a vibrant ecosystem of ethnic media to serve a population that speaks more than 170 languages. But a version of New York’s mishmash exists in suburbs and small towns across America. Multicultural media are everywhere.

So it’s puzzling that we still hear (including from my esteemed colleague Jeff Jarvis) about the declining fortunes of New York’s “three daily newspapers” when there are 18 dailies serving the city, nine of which are published in languages other than English. Some are simply reprinting news about their home countries and offer little local coverage. But many, like the Chinese-language World Journal or El Diario-La Prensa, offer page after page of local news and have reporting staffs that would be the envy of many metro dailies. The combined circulation of these 18 dailies exceeds 500,000. (By contrast, the New York Daily News delivers about 270,000 papers to the city’s five boroughs.)

To get our arms around this sub-set of the local media sector, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media recently conducted a survey. The resulting directory, Many Voices, One City, includes information about 270 community and ethnic outlets that produce news in 36 languages, whether for print, radio, TV, or the web. We know there are many more such news outlets and we intend to keep adding to our soon-to-be-released online version of the directory.

Buried in our findings were some interesting nuggets: Of the 270 outlets, 31 cater to Latino audiences; the Pakistani community can choose from nine news outlets. And though the most recent U.S. Census identified just 7,000 Nepali residents in the city, the local Nepali community is served by three newspapers, one of which distributes 7,000 copies every fortnight. Overall, the sector remains active: In the last two years, for instance, there were 21 new entrants.

Unfortunately, there is little research about the business models of these ethnic and community publications. Anecdotally, however, they look and feel very different from the ones that are often the subject of media analysis. Sixty percent of those we surveyed have no circulation revenue; they rely almost exclusively on local advertising. Nearly half publish weekly newspapers, earning praise from advertisers who like the fact that the papers lie on kitchen tables for days at a time, available to multiple readers of households that are often multigenerational.

Although most of the city’s daily and weekly ethnic and community newspapers have nascent websites, many publishers tell us they see little point in devoting additional resources to them. They cite the lousy economics: the high cost of investment and editorial commitment in relation to a tiny revenue stream.

Are these publishers ignoring industry trends at their peril, or does one size not fit all? We know from other research that nearly half of the owners of the city’s small businesses — potential local advertisers — are foreign-born. And we also know that a high percentage of those small businesses — over 85 percent, according to one survey — have no presence of their own online. But without more detailed research and analysis, it’s hard to know what this all means for ethnic and community media outlets and their business strategies. Therein lies opportunity.

To begin serving the needs of this market segment, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism decided several years ago to launch an ethnic and community media initiative. We were encouraged to do so by Garry Pierre-Pierre, the founding publisher and editor of the Haitian Times. He understood the sector and its limitations, and believed the J-School could be an important force in strengthening it. Thanks to his foresight — and grants from the Ford Foundation and several other funders — we launched our Center for Community and Ethnic Media last fall. Pierre-Pierre is now its executive director.

Under the Center’s umbrella, we’ve begun to raise the visibility of this media sector with our website, Voices of NY, which curates (translating from 12 languages) the best stories published daily by 90-plus publications that we regularly review. The city’s commissioner of immigrant affairs, Fatima Shama, has called Voices an invaluable resource. To showcase the best work being produced by this sector, the J-School hosts an annual journalism awards competition called the Ippies. We were fortunate to inherit both Voices and the Ippies from the New York Community Media Alliance, a nonprofit that offered to transfer them to the J-School when it began running out of steam in early 2011.

We’ve also begun an aggressive training program. So far, we’ve held more than 100 sessions for community and ethnic journalists in everything from reporting and writing, to making videos and audio podcasts, to shooting better photographs and using databases. We’ve partnered with the New York Press Association to hold seminars on strategies for increasing advertising and circulation revenue. We’ve hosted a weekend boot camp on mobile news in tandem with the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California.

Most recently, we’ve begun an effort to improve political coverage of the city’s upcoming mayoral election. Thanks to a grant from the Charles H. Revson Foundation, we’ve trained 15 political fellows and hosted Q&As with eight leading mayoral candidates. Given the importance that race and ethnicity are likely to play in this pivotal election, in which African-American, Asian, and Hispanic candidates are among those running, this kind of exchange proved to be mutually beneficial. We hope that it will also foster greater civic engagement.

It would be a mistake, however, to think of the J-School’s work with community and ethnic media as altruistic. Our students and faculty benefit daily from the stronger ties we now enjoy with this diverse group of journalists and their audiences. As the only public graduate school of journalism in the northeast, with about 40 percent of our students hailing from minority or immigrant families, our interest in this sector matches our mission. Voices of NY is a platform for our students’ work. Some students work as summer interns at these local publications, with a few even getting full-time jobs after graduation. Reporters and editors from the ethnic press have been guests in our classes and sources for student projects. Alums have even won Ippies awards.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this relationship, but where we go from here is uncertain. As the recent Pew Research Center report on nonprofit news outlets demonstrated, publications like Voices of NY are highly dependent on grants from foundations, whose interests can ebb and flow. Many of the major foundations that support journalism frequently focus on innovations in technology and hyperlocal experiments. Web-only case studies like Baristanet, the New Haven Independent, The Batavian, and Voice of San Diego have garnered most of the attention of the profession’s thought-leaders. The subtitle of Dan Kennedy’s new book, The Wired City, says it all: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age.

There is no denying that a successful transition to a digital world is critical to the industry’s future. But with many news websites struggling to survive on digital dimes — and the prospect of a future filled with even less lucrative mobile pennies — perhaps the pendulum has swung too far. One of New York’s most promising web-only community news sites, The Lo-Down, last year made the counter-intuitive decision to publish a print magazine and credits that decision with its current economic viability.

There are some signs that the print vs. digital dichotomy is being reconsidered. Pew’s 2013 State of the News Media report, for instance, noted that “the very slow progress in digital advertising makes print editions, where the ads run alongside news and the physical product brings a package of inserts into the homes, seem worth taking another look at. For now, the consensus on the future of print seems to be shifting and even elongating somewhat, with more of an industry acknowledgement that it will be around for years, maybe decades, contributing a smaller but still significant share of revenues and profits.”

Based on our experience at the Center, what’s needed? A focus on innovation by grant-making institutions that encompasses both web-based and print/web hybrid models. Research into new topics: What are the characteristics of successful ethnic media outlets, many of which are hybrids? Are they different — and if so, how — from successful community news outlets? Given the embrace by Latino and Asian youth of mobile platforms, is there a business argument for print weeklies to leapfrog the web-based and page-based media world? When there is a critical mass of community and ethnic publications, what opportunities exist for joint ad sales, digital marketing services, or technological support?

Journalism schools can and should play a vital role in developing these new areas of research and experimentation. We have the facilities, the faculty and staff expertise, and an army of students already in place to undertake these new initiatives. And the cross-fertilization that results can help root journalism schools more deeply into local, often under-served, communities.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism has been in contact with several other journalism programs that are doing work with ethnic media and we would welcome hearing from others who are going down this path. We are planning a conference in early 2014 to critique our work, share best practices and identify ways we can partner with other journalism educators to amplify our efforts.

Given the demographic trends, there is little more important than helping to ensure high journalistic standards and sound business practices in this often overlooked but important media sector. Journalism schools should help lead the way.

Sarah Bartlett is the Director of the Urban Reporting Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and a board member of the Center for Community and Ethnic Media.

Photo of ethnic newspapers in Australia by PJ R used under a Creative Commons license.

How much will liberals pay to hear a blue voice in a red state?

Posted: 25 Jul 2013 05:00 AM PDT

Alan Leveritt was born in Little Rock a little over 60 years ago. He was living there in 1957, when the national debate over desegregating public schools came to a head at Central High.

“The only thing that redeemed the soul of the city,” Leveritt says, “was the Arkansas Gazette. It stood up to the segregationists, and to the [rival Arkansas] Democrat, and to the business community and said that we ought to go ahead and follow the law. They endured an advertiser boycott, lost a million dollars, and won a Pulitzer Prize.”

Leveritt considered those newspapermen his heroes. At 22, he was working as an obituary writer when he decided to drop out of college and start a magazine of his own. He hitchhiked up the east coast, over to Wisconsin, and then south again, stopping at journalism schools along the way, where he tried to recruit like-minded media entrepreneurs. Then he hitchhiked back to Arkansas.

“Two came,” he says. “One stayed.”

And so, in 1977, the Arkansas Times was born, a small magazine that current editor Lindsey Millar guesses cost no more than a nickel. “We had $200 in capital,” says Leveritt, “and that was the only capital that was put into the company for 17 years.”

Eventually, the Times grew into a statewide glossy with a healthy circulation, but the media landscape was tough. “There was a protracted newspaper war in the ’90s between the Arkansas Gazette, which was the oldest paper west of the Mississippi with this great progressive reputation, and the Arkansas Democrat,” says Millar. “There was a long war, the Gazette ended up selling to Gannett, the Democrat ended up winning, and now it’s the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.”

Leveritt says that, as a result of the absorption, the liberal voice Arkansans had depended on the Gazette to provide disappeared. For Leveritt, who remembered those mid-century glory days, that was unacceptable. So he set out to remold the magazine into a weekly newspaper, first on a subscription basis, and then as a free alternative weekly. He even hired some of the Gazette’s staffers. “We inherited their mantle,” says Millar. “We’re the blue voice in a very, very red state.”

arkansas-times

Now, 27 years later, it’s time for the shape-shifting Arkansas Times to change yet again. In the intervening years, through the efforts of a handful of dedicated writers, the paper has built a series of blogs that drive the majority of their web traffic. Up till now, that content has been as free as the print edition, but no longer. On August 1, the Times’ four blogs — arts, entertainment, dining, and politics — will be going behind what Millar calls a “leaky meter” paywall. Yep: It’s a free weekly that’s putting up a paywall online.

The full subscription will cost $9.99 per month, and casual readers will have up to 10 blog posts a month available to them for free. Only the blog posts will be metered — the content in the print weekly will remain free in print and online for a month after publication. Digital subscribers will also receive a weekly email newsletter with deals and coupons for local businesses. Here’s the paper’s video announcement:

Even though the Times has been through major transitions before, Leveritt acknowledges that this is a different animal than turning a paid glossy into a free weekly. “For an alt weekly to go to a digital membership is problematic,” he says. “But we have something other weeklies don’t have, which is the Arkansas Blog.”

According to Leveritt, the Arkansas Blog, which focuses on news and politics and is the brainchild of former editor Max Brantley, got 201,000 unique visitors in June. There are only 180,000 people in Little Rock.

“A local business owner says, ‘You know, I’m addicted to the Arkansas Blog.’ The guy who runs the Clinton library used the same word — he says, ‘I’m addicted.’ And so am I! We’ll look at that thing six or seven times a day,” says Leveritt. “That’s the group we’re targeting with the digital membership. They’re our most engaged readers, and we think they’ll pay to keep this going.”

Leveritt says the success of the Arkansas Times has always heavily rested on the talent of the writers he was able to attract. He makes a solid investment in editorial — 18 percent of spending when the industry average for daily newspapers is closer to 12.5. But there’s also an element of luck: “We’ve always had much better writers than we could afford.”

The younger staffers are now also involved in the Arkansas Blog, but, despite his ostensible retirement, Brantley still works up to 60 hours a week on the blog, according to Millar. “Every city has reporters like Max,” says Leveritt — “people who are plugged in, who have an institutional memory of business and politics in the city, that know people.”

Brantley was a daily newspaper reporter before he came to the Times, and, especially after the introduction of the digital edition, he became increasingly eager to push out more content. “He was getting itchy having to hold news for the weekly edition, and he worried about that,” says Millar. “He singlehandedly made the Arkansas Blog a daily visit for people who care about politics.”

So it might not be an exaggeration to say the Times is capitalizing on the respect and loyalty that a single reporter built for them over many years, which, as we know, is not an untested strategy. Think of Andrew Sullivan’s decision to see how much he could earn by putting up a paywall around articles and posts he was already writing.

The Times is using the same technology as The Dish, through paywall provider Tinypass. With the trend toward erecting paywalls around independent websites growing, Tinypass has recently announced updates to its software that make it even more accessible to individuals. They work with local papers like The East Hampton Star, new media sites like BKLYNR, and global aggregators like Worldcrunch.

But even as the Times’ leaders look to the future and see a need for direct revenue, they haven’t shied away from other opportunities, making its current approach a potential pattern for the hybrid funding model of the future. Recently, the paper announced a partnership with recent Pulitzer Prize winners InsideClimate News to provide ongoing coverage of an oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas. That reportage will be funded in part by an $8,000 grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, but the paper has also raised $27,000 via crowdfunding efforts. That’s a loyal readership.

But the unique news landscape in Arkansas means the digital membership will be key for the Times’ overall strategy. The Arkansas Times won’t be introducing the idea of paywalls to the market: Walter Hussman is the publisher of the Democrat-Gazette, and as Millar puts it, “a long champion of paying for online content.” (We’ve written before about Hussman as the prime example of a publisher reacting to the rise of the Internet with an airtight paywall.)

“Theirs has always been a protectionist strategy. They’ve released their numbers before, and only a few thousand people subscribe only online.” Millar argues. (The paper’s most recent publisher’s statement, from March, claims about 4,000 paying digital subscribers.) “I think that’s helped us, because there was never a time you could get breaking content from them. They didn’t have a daily digital news staff. Everything they did went in the paper, and then it came out online the next day. But it was always behind the paywall, so you were either a subscriber or you missed it.”

As our Ken Doctor has written, “that simple-minded thought for which [Hussman] was ridiculed is now the root of the reader-revenue revolution.” Warren Buffett recently praised Hussman on sticking to his guns, and said he plans to emulate Hussman’s strategy with his own newspapers.

Leveritt can rattle off statistics about Arkansas’s general population off the top of his head — 17 percent have attended college and 10 percent have graduated, but 85 percent of the Times’ readership has attended college, and 25 percent have advanced degrees. “Certain advertisers, if they’re in Connecticut, maybe they could use mass media, but in Arkansas, they need niche media,” he says. He helps those advertisers reach a very specific audience — people with passports, people who own homes, people of a higher income.

And the Times, being left of center, does stand out ideologically in the market. Millar says part of their strategy moving forward will be to make sure that the readers who are core — not necessarily in that they read the site everyday, but in that they are most ideologically aligned with the goals of the Times — understand the importance of maintaining a robust progressive voice in Little Rock.

“Down the line, this could be an existential thing for us,” says Millar. “We kind of see the writing on the wall, so we’re gonna make that hard sell — sort of the NPR style. ‘If you care about this, you need to pony up some money.’ So we’re hoping we can get a number of folks on an emotional appeal, and not just a transactional one. We’re hoping to get our core readers, of course, but also some people who just support us and what we stand for.”

Millar says he intends to open up as many channels for customer feedback as possible once the paywall goes up, but with such a generous threshold, he doesn’t expect a lot of complaints. The Times has very different audiences, he says, and even when the weekly edition is mostly a digest of that week’s blog posts, the readership rarely complains.

“I’ve been doing this 39 years, and it never ceases to amaze me. Everything changes,” says Leveritt. “And we’re good at change.”

Flag photo by Jimmy Smith used through a Creative Commons license.

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