Q&A: Emily Fleischaker, Enterprise Strategy Editor @ NYT Cooking
This week, we chatted with Emily, who came to NYT Cooking a little over a year ago to “spin up a team that will create new recipes, food photography and video primarily for off-platform use, as part of a social media initiative designed to increase traffic to [the] site and apps.” Prior to coming on full-time, she consulted for NYT Cooking on social media practices in the competitive landscape, which helped inform Cooking’s off-platform work. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.
On her role and team:
I’m an editor and I oversee a number of things related to NYT Cooking and NYT Cooking’s growth and off-platform strategy. I oversee the NYT Cooking accounts on social media platforms, and I built a small team to launch an off-platform video initiative earlier this year. I’m also helping set our monthly recipe line-ups and optimizing what comes out of our recipe photo shoots. And then some analytics reporting back to the editorial team, leading brainstorms … It’s kind of broad, but all essentially relates back to growth and building the brand of NYT Cooking and editorial strategy.
On the conception of the off-platform strategy:
NYT Cooking is a relatively new product for the Times, and a lot of the recipes and visual assets were conceived for other platforms, like print. The way that people engage with recipes now — both on websites and on social media — is really different than it used to be. A lot of my [initial consulting] research was around looking at how that’s changed.
For example, at BuzzFeed where I worked before I came to the Times, one of the things that became really popular were the overhead, step-by-step videos of recipes. That was interesting to watch happen because it essentially felt like “this is what a recipe that’s native to Facebook looks like” — or what a little nugget of that recipe looks like (I think people, if they want to cook the food, still need the actual recipe). So I spent — and still spend — a lot of time thinking about what you put out on Instagram, on Facebook, that is engaging enough to feel like it’s not an ad for content, but delivers some substance to the audience and helps the audience see that there’s so much more that the brand is doing, [in terms of] tone and style of food.
We look at where our readers are encountering that content and what that experience is like for them, and plan for elements of the stories, recipes, photography, and videos to make sense on those places. It’s really hard to retrofit something that was conceived of as a story for print or a website in an engaging piece of content off-platform, if you don’t think about it from the beginning. I think you need a balance of both [thinking about it from an owned-and-operated and an off-platform perspective], but my experience is that when you have people dedicated to the platforms and posting on those platforms from the perspective of a content creator, it can be really engaging and fun and liberating versus trying to just promote content.
I think we did this pretty well with our pies story last Thanksgiving. We had this fantastic print section that was kind of a standalone packet, but it also took the form of a mobile-friendly page on the website and lent itself to videos that felt at home on Instagram and Facebook, and photos and conversations. We have all these different ways that we can allow it to live in different places. It was kind of everywhere. Not everything should or has to be that way, but that was fun to see.
On how NYT Cooking’s off-platform strategy has evolved in the past year:
I’ve been here for about a year. Before I started, there were not people on the staff whose entire jobs were to work on off-platform or social media. The Twitter account, Instagram account, and Facebook account were being run by editors who also had an enormous workload in terms of editing stories, web production, recipe editing, so it was very hard for them to give a lot of attention to the posts. When I came in initially and talked to Sam Sifton [NYT food editor] and Amanda Rottier (who runs the product) and they asked “where should we invest to grow NYT Cooking?” the obvious answer was more recipes, photography, and more generally content that would work harder for you off-platform in terms of building your brand. It was one of those situations where you go to NYT Cooking and start looking through and you realize there’s so much there, but because so many people use Instagram, especially in food, as their front page to the internet, or Facebook or Twitter — I don’t know that people were getting the memo.
A lot of [fixing] that was about investing in certain kinds of content that would help spread that word. I also think not saying that “we’re going to do this” and investing a ton of money in it without experimenting first to see what YouTube series are going to be successful for us — what recipes and photography styles and video formats and post formats are going to be successful for us — is not something every media company does, is give its new employees the space to experiment with a lot of things without making some big statement of “this is our new strategy.” Our new strategy is really to experiment and do more of what’s working when we figure out what that is.
On experimentation:
I thought that it would be such a good idea to post more photo collections to Facebook. Like if we loaded a bunch of chicken photos to an album called “Easy Chicken Recipes,” people would value that and would engage with it. And it just didn’t work. We did it a couple of times and tried a couple different frames and styles and it didn’t matter to people. I feel like there’s a lot of times that we’ll try something and we won’t spend a ton of time but give it a shot and we’ll learn, alright people didn’t care. But on the other hand, we did a cooking quiz on Instagram last week and people loved it. They shared it a lot, they finished it. We’ll do more and keep an eye on it. We at one point did “Five Things You Have to Read this Week” on Instagram Stories, and people didn’t really care. So it’s little things like that — not being married to your ideas.
On the platforms she’s investing most in:
We see more opportunity for growth on YouTube and Instagram. It feels like there’s less you can do to reach a broader audience and connect with people [on Facebook], other than Groups.
On other initiatives at NYT Cooking that she’s excited about:
One of the things that we’re aiming for is to diversify our database of recipes in a number of ways — adding more recipes that appeal to a younger audience, which often means thinking about budgets and accessibility to ingredients; also thinking about the background of the people writing the recipes. We’ve also been able to bring in new photographers and food stylists. I think it’s really exciting that I’ve been able to work at NYT Cooking at a time when the company is making an investment in it.
On an interesting project she’s worked on recently:
Something that immediately we started to tackle when I came on board was the photography, and bringing new photographers and food stylists into the mix. What has been so fun is watching these food stylists work and working with them to make sure our photos work not just on-platform but also off-platform, because they have to go out there and fight for attention in a really busy feed.
Food stylists have so many brilliant tricks and tools that they use. I really enjoy gathering tips from them and sharing it in a really casual way. When you come to the New York Times, the first thing that you post — even if it’s just an Instagram caption — is so nerve-wracking … or at least it was to me. And this Instagram Story with behind-the-scenes tips from food stylists was even more so because I shot it on my iPhone. It was really casual and not high-quality. Zero production value. But people really responded strongly. That’s something fun that we’ve been experimenting with: drawing back the curtains and showing people how we do the work that we’re doing. When we fail what we do, and [showing] some of the personalities behind the brand too. That’s been fun, and I’ve been really encouraged by the response to it.
This Q&A was originally published in the July 1st edition of The Idea, and has been edited for length and clarity. For more Q&As with media movers and shakers, subscribe to The Idea, Atlantic Media’s weekly newsletter covering the latest trends and innovations in media.
