Interview with Lexi Mainland

NY Times Special Project Editor, Interactive Desk (formerly Social Media Editor)

This interview is the fourth in a series in which I talk to people who are currently working on user engagement.

Lexi Mainland is currently the special projects editor on the Interactive Desk at the NY Times, but was the social media editor from 2011–2014. She led a team of 5 editors focusing on social media within the Interactive News desk. This fall, she became special projects editor on interactive news, leading interactive projects, some of which still involve UGC and crowdsourcing but many of which do not.

I interviewed Lexi and my takeaways are below.

The Job

As a social media editor, Lexi’s job was “finding ways to tell stories in social ways.” This was about more than sharing or contributing, but about finding stories that couldn’t be told without social media outreach and sourcing.

Philosophy

“The audience expects the Times to be doing a lot of work on the reporting side, so we approach the ask with transparency about what we’ve done to get to this point.” And then we explain, “Here’s how we need your help.”

How did you reach this philosophy/realization?

There were lots of individuals thinking like this but the big ah-ha was when Sarah Palin’s public letters were published. We digitized them and opened a database. There were lots of comments about how it’s the NYT’s job to do this reporting, not theirs (the readers).

They want us to be the expert, review the files, and then ask more targeted questions.

Ask targeted questions.

For the Boston Marathon coverage, they waited to launch their interactive until they had done as much reporting as possible. They had a still from a video that showed the whole scene and they worked to identify as many people as possible before they asked their audience to identify the remaining few.

Put in as much work as possible first.

Focus is key: A focused call-out leads to a focused piece.

We also try to ask really incisive questions in the same way that you’d report.

Guiding Questions

The majority of the stuff we produce are articles ==> so how do we add participation to articles? We do this by asking fairly personal questions within the article; it makes it more like a conversation.

For the Paying Until It Hurts series, all of the participants came from responses to previous articles.

What do you do with these comments?

We save sources to reach out to them later, somewhat like the Public Insight Network created by American Public Media. We always try to close the loop (sometimes it’s just a thank you email, but it often leads to a story).

How do you prioritize what pieces to add engagement to (given how much NYT publish)?

• Stories that allow us to try something new
• Stories that clearly have a personal impact

We also try to make sure that what we’re asking makes sense with who might be participating.

We don’t do anything just for participation’s sake.

Do you report further based on the answers you get?

Sometimes we do follow-up reporting.

For the 50th anniversary piece on the March on Washington, we got a lot of answers from Jewish white men, which makes sense given the audience of the NYT. So we put a promotional ad on Facebook reaching out to new audiences, and we got more answers that led to a balanced piece.

Also, for most of the people who send us essays, we end up publishing their story as an “as-told-to” by reporting out further.

How do you fight audience bias?

We are always fighting it and trying to expand our audience. We try to get into areas where we aren’t always present. To do this, we use tranlsations a lot. We’ve accessed monks in Bhutan and people on Chinese Weibo that way.

I think there are probably a lot of tools out there that we aren’t using.

Do these efforts help to expand the NYT audience?

It’s good to surprise people with things they don’t expect from the Times. We hope that by giving people real interaction with the site, they will feel more interested. We find that giving feedback within engagement pieces about how the user fits into society (or compares to the average) helps people to feel more engaged.

To truly grow your audience, you have to really step out of bounds and that’s hard to do.

For the Coming Out series that we did, we did outreach on Twitter. We researched before publishing what hashtags were popular among gay teenagers, because those were the people we thought would benefit most from the story. We realized that #comingout was super popular and so we named the series Coming Out, and it automatically had more spread on Twitter.

Do you use paid advertising on Facebook to expand your network?

It’s mostly organic on Facebook, but we do budget for certain call-outs on big pieces.

Quality is really important to us. We try to make anything we do feel like a seamless part of NYT.

How do you respond to criticism about the Times being behind and old?

More than anything, it’s slow-going. We’re trying to more methodically approach new methods. And as for approaching people within the organization, I try to always approach everyone with the same enthusiasm.