The Leaked New York Times Innovation Report, And What it Means for the Future of Digital Media

The times are moving on, with or without us.

The New York Times recently had a document leaked outlining the future of their digital strategy.

Essentially, The Times is finally understanding what the digital age needs, gaining a grasp of the online landscape, and planning radically their future as a journalistic institution.

It’s incredibly refreshing to see, but even more incredible is the insight they provided within the document itself.

This may genuinely be one of the key documents of this digital media age.

The “age of influence” is well upon us. Anyone can gain a name in journalism off of the merit of their writing alone. The merit, the voice, the passion and the intent is now the weapon. The medium is no longer the weapon. Mediums do give exposure, yes, but the playing field is now more level than ever before. The slow to adapt will dwindle, and the cunning will thrive.

As someone who cares deeply about writing, and journalism, and the digital age of media, this struck a deep chord for me.

As a digital marketing consultant, however, this was a revelation.

The new focus on social media, the statistics from within the beast itself, the outlook on organic search, the focus on evergreen content, the attention to modern UX, and the polarization of their competitive landscape — it is simply a gold-mine of information.

The report mentions The Huffington Post (which I’m gladly a contributor to) has a very unique outlook on content, which focuses largely on syndicating quality journalism and writing with an eye on social media and SEO best practices (not gaming the system, I’m not talking about RapGenius here).

The beauty is that The Times’ report doesn’t look at this behemoth of a content engine and pout its lip saying “That’s not true journalism” — they see it and understand that this is where the competitive landscape has shifted, and if they are to survive in this digital age, they need to adapt, and fast. They quickly note that the practices and the outlook on content from The Huffington Post led to their overtaking in readership of The Times years ago, which has only grown in recent months.

The report notes that their competitor BuzzFeed‘s strategy and growth hinged on “highly sharable content, aggressive social distribution, and experimental story forms” to overtake The Times’ viewer traffic in 2013.

The simple fact is, The New York Times gets it. Now.

It’s incredible to see an institution as old and as powerful as The Times take a step back, look at the landscape objectively, see their competitors for what they are, gain a scope of the future, and plan their place in it.

The Times’ generates nearly 30% of their traffic from Facebook, a good 15% of their traffic from other social spheres, 10-15% from organic search, 15% from other portals and about 15% from other sources. They have 30m monthly web readers, 6.5m email subscribers, 5.7m Facebook followers, and 11.3m Twitter followers.

All of this and they’re just now adopting a digital-first focus.

This is baffling, but from an internet marketers point of view, it’s absolutely brilliant. If you haven’t even been focusing on digital-first, and you have that kind of ground-work to play with, the results could be tremendous.

For those still spouting, “what’s the ROI of social media?” — well, at a valuation of ~1b, with 50% of their readership coming through from social media, I would say somewhere close to $500m. That’s a pretty damn good figure.

The mindset is the key, and they’ve adopted the right mindset.

Now it’s time to take action, and form their outreach, amplification, and content style to this digital age.

Read the report, and learn how The New York Times plans to take on the disruption in the market by innovating on their already incredible institution of world-class journalism.

It’s pure gold, and I have a ton of faith in them for their future, and the future of digital journalism as a whole.

I’m the Co-founder @Simpletiger, a digital marketing agency in Atlanta, GA. I’m also a contributor to The Huffington Post, Copyblogger & Moz.

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