From:Baquet, Dean Date: Tue, May 5, 2015 at 4:54 PMSubject: News
Meeting ChangesTo: !NYHQ-newsroom
All:
Over the past several months, we have made enormous strides in
placing digital publication first and foremost as we seek to give
our readers the most ambitious news and enterprise in real time.
Weve revamped the morning news meetings to focus on ongoing
coverage and we established the Deans List to publish more
enterprise at the times when our readership is highest. These
efforts have already paid off with a rich menu of news and
enterprise on the web regardless of print publishing deadlines.
Now were ready to take another transformative step: shifting the
time and focus of our news meetings to move more decisively away
from the grip of print deadlines.
Beginningnext Monday, we are going to hold the morning news
meeting at9:30and the afternoon news meeting at4:30. In both
meetings, we will talk about our journalism: the story lines we are
following and the enterprise we want to publish and when. The idea
is for us to mobilize faster in the morning so we can get an
earlier start on setting news and enterprise priorities, and to
move the discussion of print Page One out of the afternoon meeting
in order to focus on coverage regardless of where it appears, as
well as to plan our digital report for the following morning.
The Page One lineup will be decided at a separate meeting
at3:30by a group of editors led by Susan Chira and including Tom
Bodkin, Michele McNally, Steve Kenny, Karron Skog, a News Desk
editor and Alan Robertazzi or another representative from his
department. Their decisions will be based on discussions throughout
the day with individual desk heads. A process note: This means that
summaries will be due no later than3 p.m.
This group will choose a lineup and distribute it to the desks
so editors can make decisions about what theyll run on their
display pages, page designers can start moving forward with their
layouts and copy editors can prioritize their work. If significant
news drives up or a story comes in stronger or weaker than
expected, we will adjust the A1 layout accordingly, as we do
now.
I want to be clear that Page One, and the print newspaper,
remain a crucial part of what we do. The choices of what stories
and photos appear on Page One reflect our collective judgment about
the most important journalism we are offering to our readers each
day. And our increased emphasis on digital publishing does not in
any way detract from our commitment to giving our print subscribers
the richest, most inviting experience every day.
But we want to ensure that our digital report is of equal
quality, and make sure we are giving the most readers the best
version of all journalism when they want to read it. Our large and
growing mobile readership is coming to us early in the day and we
need to continue to find ways to better serve that audience, as
well as the many readers who find us on their desktops during the
day.
Our discussions at the morning and afternoon news meetings have
evolved along these lines in many ways already, and these changes
will allow us to move further. We want to allow our newsroom
leaders to think at these meetings about how to move our coverage
forward during the day and night, when to publish our most
ambitious enterprise, and how to prepare for the day ahead.
One of our goals with these changes is to plan more rigorously
how to publish our best enterprise work and to establish a clearer
schedule for publishing Deans List stories so we can deliver them
to the broadest readership, both through our own publishing systems
and social media.
In making these changes, we recognize that we are likely to run
into some bumps along the way. We will adjust as needed and
encourage your feedback. This is another crucial step forward in
delivering our ambitious journalism to our readers when they are
looking for it.
Dean
