The New York Times in a Twitter-Based, Multimedia World

FutureTwitter is the most popular microblogging service. With 313 milion active users and aproximately 500 milion tweets per day (check out how many tweets are being sent every day), it was launched in 2006 as a short, text-based communication social network.

As the journalist Mark Briggs points out, “in the past, a user had to wait for a news organization to publish a story on a breaking news event”. However, he says, “with Twitter, users on the scene start spreading the word immediately”. Its simplicity and flexibility -we can send tweets with images, videos, GIFs and links- has turned Twitter into the favorite social network for media companies. Nowadays, if you are a media outlet and you are not on Twitter, you will be deemed old-fashioned.

Making the most of Twitter is not just about attaching the link of the same stories that are available on the website. Using Twitter as a place to pour links prevents media from engaging in the community conversation, which is one of the main purposes of this social media. Tweeting entails asking for feedback, getting to know your audience and paying attention to what your followers say. “If I send out a link it’s because I did it myself”, says Tracy Record, founder of the West Seattle Blog. This is how Twitter works, we have to be a human presence and publish only our own material. In order words, turning off the autopilot.

The coverage of breaking events is thought to be the primary use of the social network represented by the blue bird. Almost every unexpected news, such as terrorist attacks or accidents, are first released on Twitter. Thus, citizens are no longer viewers and have become also publishers. This is one of the keys of current journalism. Not only journalists, but also people take part in the news production. And journalists have to pay attention to that and take advantage of this new concept of citizen journalism.

A ground-breaking newspaper

The New York Times is a great example of a newspaper that has adapted perfectly to the requirements of the new journalism (still evolving). A Twitter-based multimedia world compels outlets to create a wide range of contents. Printed papers are no longer enough. They have to exploit their websites, their social media accounts and complement the reports with blogs that go into details in some specific topics.

The American newspaper is one of the most up-to-date media. If you look up “the new york times” on Google, the first result will be “The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia“. I would bet that the last word -Multimedia- was not there some years ago. Indeed, multimedia content, essentially videos, is one of the strengths of the daily newspaper. There is no doubt that The New York Times reporters strive very hard in order to enhance and stand out the multimedia world. This is how the “Times Video” interface looks like:

Try to find a media with no Twitter account. That seems like a hard challenge to fullfil. Every newspaper and media company has at least one account on Twitter. Being on this social network is a must for those that base their work on producing and publishing news. Some of them even have different accounts for each field of information or each edition.

The New York Times is an enormous newspaper with more than 750 members on a Twitter list called NYT Journalists. Its Twitter feed has a great deal of traffic every day. The vast majority of tweets include the headline of a story, with the link to the website and the pertinent picture. The journalists that work for The NYT also have their personal accounts, which they use to share or retweet stories, quote and comment others tweets and post thoughts. Emma Cott and Samantha Stark, for example, are reporters for the American newspaper. Both of them, as we can see from the embedded tweets, use their personal accounts to publish thoughts and concerns, but essentially to attach and recommend content available on the newspaper they work for.

Did you know that The New York Times makes documentaries? Watch this! http://t.co/fs88g5ojoD @abbygoodnough @johnmwoo @justinesimons

— Emma Cott (@EmmaCottNYT) June 22, 2015

Please take a moment to watch our film! https://t.co/M3n76NhWuM

— Samantha Stark (@starksamantha) October 3, 2016

Long Life to Journalism

A digital revolution and both a model and economic crisis have changed completely the way to produce journalistic content 

In the last decade, journalism has been one of the most shifting industries. Still evolving, the future of mainstream media is not certain yet. The process of adaptation to new devices and tools has been tough for the majority of the journalists that started working before the rising of digital journalism. Typing for web and mobile audiences is not the same as typing for papers. Copying the existing model and pasting it online doesn’t work. In the new journalism, a combination of multimedia, text, data, interactivity and visual content is required in order to keep the audience engaged.

Some outlets have provided their employees with digital training sessions, but the switch from traditional journalism to current journalism is definitely destined to new generations. As Mark Briggs points out in his book Journalism Next: A Practical Guide to Digital Reporting and Publishing, “the future is now”, referring to all journalism students and practitioners.

The evolution of a new journalism model has gone trough several hardships. Selling content to the Internet users is not easy, but there is no doubt that quality journalism needs income. Familiarizing digital newspapers readers to pay for reading stories has been a tough work. Yet is true that every outlet has opted for a different membership plan, every one has struggled to do it natural. That is, offering fragments or a limited number of articles each month, in order to attract users and convince them to subscribe.

Social networks emerged later, but they are now an undeniable space were users content mixes with news content. Twitter is the favorite network for both outlets and journalists. It offers immediacy and is very useful to inform about breaking news. But also Facebook and Snapchat are consolidating as potential networks were media can reach out to audiences. To picture how important can Twitter become for journalists, Bin Laden’s death was first announced on Twitter, before the official announcement of Obama.

So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.

— Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) May 2, 2011

Looking for revenue has been one of the main concerns among news media. The switch to digital journalism was uncertain in that sense, and many were worried about an income drop. Subscriptions and advertising are the two main sources of revenue for digital media. Thus, they focused on enhancing both fields, working to grab the advertising companies’ attention. Although the print-only is still the most common way of reading newspapers in US, advertising revenue from digital is growing every year. As the print revenue has declined, the digital advertising revenue is nowadays a quarter.

Create column charts

According to Briggs, everyone involved with journalism should be hopeful about its future, but also uncertain. “How do you prepare yourself today for a job that doesn’t currently exist?”, he questions. It is actually true that the dizzying pace of technological innovation endorses Briggs’s inquiry. Indeed, the model of journalism is still evolving, and new tools and devices are offering a wide range of formats and possibilities to journalists. Working as a journalist nowadays might be related to social network management, traditional news company or even to start-up new blog or a new enterprise. It is uncertain.

Working as a journalist is not anymore as it used to be. New generations have to understand that. The industry is in constant change, which can be positive if you now how to take advantage of it. Multi-tasking profiles are more and more demanded. Not only do current journalists are required to produce news, but also to edit video and audio, produce multimedia and visual content, and gather data in an interactive way for the audience. Companies are looking for more skilled employees, capable of doing many processes that digital era require. This is a challenge worth accepting.