By Celia Brown

Director of Marketing, SAP

T: @celiabrown

10 Golden Nuggets from the NY Times Innovation Report

"We need makers, entrepreneurs, reader advocates and zeitgeist watchers.“

-NY Times Innovation Report 2014

The Homepage is Dead

Page One remained the fulcrum of the Times operation, despite only thirty percent of readers actually visiting the Times‘ home page.

The Times Twitter account is run by the newsroom, while its Facebook page is managed by the business. Keeping all its promotional tools in silos has inhibited its ability to help its journalists find and build a base of loyal readers, increasingly who are reading and spreading content on mobile.

Master Mobile to Win in Social

Because we are journalists we tend to look at our competitors through the lens of content rather than strategy. Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and USA Today are

Content Alone is Insufficient

succeeding because of their sophisticated social, search and community building tools and strategies, often in spite of their content.

Unlike printed material which is refined until perfected, a digital experiment should be released quickly and refined through a cycle of continuous improvement- measuring performance, studying results, shuttering losers and building on winners. (p. 32)

Rapid Experimentation is Key

The product and design teams are developing a collections format, and they should further consider tools to make it easier for journalists, and maybe even readers, to create collections and repackage the content. (p. 34)

Andrew Phelps made a Flipboard magazine of the Times’ best obits from 2013 on a whim. It became the best-read collection ever on Flipboard. (p. 33)

Curate and Repackage Content

There are about 14.7 million articles in the Times’ archives dating back to 1851. The Times needs to do a better job of resurfacing archival content. The report cites Gawker repackaging a 161-year-old Times story on Solomon Northup timed with the release of 12 Years A Slave. “We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.” (p. 28)

Be both a Library and a Newsroom

The Times is woefully behind in its tagging and structured data practices. “Without better tagging, we are hamstrung in our ability to allow readers to follow developing stories, discover nearby restaurants that we have reviewed or even have our photos show up on search engines.” (p. 41)

It took seven years for the Times to begin to tag stories “September 11.”

(p. 41)

Implement A Successful Tagging Strategy

… the vast majority of our content is still published late in the evening, but our digital traffic is busiest early in the morning. We aim ambitious stories for Sunday because it is our largest print readership, but weekends are slowest online. (p. 86)

Publish on a Digital Schedule

The Times plans to create a section of the homepage that uses reader patterns to customize a list of content that readers missed but would most likely want to see.

Personalize content to engage readers

“Though all readers would see the same top news stories, the other articles we show them would be customized to reflect what they haven’t seen.” (p. 37)