Q&A: Monica Racic, Director of Production and Multimedia @ The New Yorker

This week, The Idea caught up with Monica Racic about her multimedia efforts at The New Yorker, from bots to augmented reality.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this piece misspelled David Grann’s surname.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at The New Yorker?

I’m the director of production and multimedia. I bridge these two different departments here, which is a product of my background.

My job is to identify editorial and technical solutions to bring some of our more ambitious stories to reality. It’s definitely a very unique position, and it works for me because of my background. I studied English and Journalism, as well as Film and Graphic Design. I dabbled in computer science, just because I was interested in it. I didn’t actually know that that would be applicable in my future life. I’ve worn many different hats, even before TNY. I worked as a writer and a video producer, I never really knew that I would be utilizing all of these skills, but I have the very fortunate position of finding myself being able to use these confluence of skills at The New Yorker today.

I started on the production team on the night shift. I was making photocopies and adding proofreader fixes. I was here during a really interesting time in media; it was right after the iPhone and the iPad came out, and more and more was being done to produce new content for new platforms. It was a real opportunity for me to stick up my hand and say, hey, I’m interested in this, and I can contribute ideas. Truly, I’m forever grateful to the folks on high who were receptive to that. It really allowed me to grow here and thrive here.

Looking back on my experiences, I can say that what I thought was a curse of having too many interests was really a blessing. Having my background in all of these different things gives me the ability to share a lexicon with people across many different disciplines. From editors and writers, to producers and developers. Having that experience makes me much more nimble in my job. Fast forwarding a bit to 2007 and 2008, I cut my teeth on some projects in product management, I was working on some of our web products and apps and figuring out ways to make the physical weekly magazine and all of its digital incarnations in more efficient ways. It was really an opportunity for me to put forward editorial ideas and then find creative ways to make that stuff happen.

That’s kind of the position that I find myself in today. Being able to flex these different muscles: both the creative side of storytelling, but also the technical side of my brain that wants to find the most elegant and efficient manner to get the job done.

Can you give an example of some of those projects you made more efficient?

We revamped our workflows for the magazine and the production teams many different times. We’re constantly iterating on it. Everything from creating new workflow diagrams, documentation, automation scripts, things like that, when we’re rolling out new projects or products that all comes out from my team.

When we relaunched our digital edition app many years ago, we actually built a web application that could automate the production of creating the individual stack that would go into our digital edition. We quickly identified the different templates and permutations that we would want to choose from, and we built a script and some automation on top of those base templates that would allow us to put the edition out very quickly, since as a weekly, we have a very small window of time between when we go to press on Friday night and when we send the digital files to our various distribution streams.

How has the role of multimedia has changed since you started at The New Yorker?

When I started, it was a little more siloed, and it was considered an extra to the piece. Something that I think has really grown over the last several years is that we’ve made a real effort to integrate that into the whole ideation phase of the magazine and the website at large. We’re talking to editors and writers from very early stages of the story, we’re coordinating with art, photo, design and radio and video teams, and we’re collectively thinking about what the final presentation of a story should be. It’s definitely more integrated.

What are The New Yorker’s multimedia goals? Are there any formats that the publication is particularly focused on?

For us, the story is the most important thing. We dabble in many different formats, we’ve worked in AR, we’ve had bots, we’ve had creative audio pull quotes, we’ve even had some data visualization. But, we’re really focused on what a given story needs. In that regard, what we do is very bespoke and story-driven. We don’t want to produce pieces that are merely ornamentation for a story, nor do we want to be redundant or show what was literally just explained in text. Rather, we want to enhance a feature, or make a point real, in a way that words alone cannot do. That’s actually quite a difficult thing to do at a place like The New Yorker, where we’re working with some of the best writers and reporters. The bar is incredibly high for our journalism, so the same is true for our multimedia content. We really focus on quality over quantity and we work hard to make sure that a visual or an interactive idea really brings added value to the story.

A good example is an investigative feature we produced. It was done in collaboration with a nonprofit newsroom, The Trace. It was about gun store theft and the trafficking of stolen guns in America. From the very beginning, this piece was conceived with all of the visual and reported elements in mind. We had security footage of a specific gun being stolen, we had the data to create an interactive map, showing how this batch of stolen guns were then smuggled across state lines, and we actually had the image of the same gun recovered from a later crime scene. All of these elements work together and are carefully placed throughout the story to illustrate a point, which is just how easy it can be to steal a weapon from a gun dealer and the repercussions of that reality. The story was greatly enhanced by each element, and that’s what we’re seeking to do with each of the pieces that we tackle.

Another goal of our team is continual collaboration. Every idea that turns into a story is reported and workshopped for many months. Each piece, whatever the scale, is iterated on and truly made better by invaluable contributions by my colleagues across all the departments here. A continual goal for us is to always maintain that level of collaboration.

Finally, another goal is to find innovations that can be turned into tools for the full newsroom. I see that as a big part of my responsibility, too, to spot opportunities. In our cultural series, Touchstones, in which we have some of our critics cover significant works of art, we built a special audio highlighter feature, so that we could play back music samples in an essay without disrupting the reading experience. We later templatized that feature and used it in this phenomenal story by Burkhard Bilger on the experimental singing group, Roomfull of Teeth. You can actually hear samples of “throat singing,” or “alpine yodeling.” It doesn’t disrupt the story, and it really enhances the piece. That innovation started with our team and is now something that we use in a more modular way.

How do these multimedia goals relate to the business side of the operation?

They go hand in hand, because if you’re making good content, people want to consume that content. Hopefully, then they’ll subscribe. The poetry bot feature that we did is actually a really good example of this where there’s a good marriage between an editorial idea and a concept that feels part of the overall identity of the magazine and some actual strategy goals.

The poetry bot sends its followers one poem a day from our archives. It also features selected audiograms of poets reading their work. Similar to cartoons and fiction, poetry is just part of The New Yorker’s DNA, and the way that this idea came about, I was looking back at this tremendous archive we’ve amassed over the years — Dorothy Parker, Seamus Heaney, Ada Limón, and so many others.

We weren’t really doing much with poetry on our site at the time, so this was in 2016. I had seen playful bots created by artists out in the wild, and there was also a lot of talk about Russian Bots at the time, and then especially in the month following the election, there was just a general sense of fatigue from the constant barrage of politics and breaking news on social media, so I saw an opportunity. That was not only to experiment with a new format — I’m pretty sure we were the first at Conde Nast to release a bot — but sending poems in this way could offer a respite from the tumultuous news cycle for people.

We built this poetry bot, and it launched in early 2017. Readers really appreciated this break that gave them a sense of delight or offered a moment of reflection, in all of the ways that poetry can give you that sense of meaning. It was incredibly well received. We learned that people definitely came to poetry on our site. Each release from the bot included a link back to newyorker.com, so there was definitely an increase there. We also saw that while it was a small audience, it was a highly engaged audience. People who came to our website through the poetry bot actually subscribed at a significantly higher rate than people who came through other avenues. That was really heartening to hear, that all of this hard work we put into it, people really appreciated. When they came to see what else we do, they were so moved they also chose to subscribe. That’s just a win-win all around.

The bot actually did so well. We launched it for our 92nd anniversary, we had 92 poems from the archives, but this past year we rebooted it for national poetry month, so now there are even more poems in the cache from which the bot can pull. So you can receive a new poem every single day of the year and hopefully have that kind of serendipitous feeling you get from flipping through the magazine and coming upon a poem, but online!

Can you talk a bit more about the poetry bot? Specifically, how you came to combine poetry, which is such an old art form, with something so new like a bot?

I think I was interested in experimenting with bot technology as a delivery method, and then, even if one thinks of poetry as a legacy form, it’s incredibly, pertinent today and it moves people. Combining it with a new delivery method just seemed fitting. You want to meet people where they are.

What are some projects you’re working on right now?

We’re working on an incredibly exciting augmented reality idea, and I’m so excited for that to get released later this year. We’re also working on more longform features with some of our writers, and our touchstone series is still ongoing.

Why are you so excited about AR?

That was an area where I saw opportunity, where the medium had a direct application to the narrative. I felt that we had an editorial concept that could really only be told in a particular medium. That’s what I’m always looking for: the right marriage between medium and story, so that we can elevate the narrative to its best incarnation. I think we have that with this particular one.

Is it common for the multimedia to be thought through from the beginning of a project, or are there other ways that projects will come to you? If so, are there ever challenges that come from working across teams and capabilities?

I think it happens both ways. We have pieces that we’re brought into when there is already an idea or there’s already a manuscript and we’re asked to contribute ideas as well. Those can also be incredibly fruitful collaborations. I think the piece that we did with David Grann is a great example. He wrote a piece about an individual who tried to traverse Antarctica on foot, and we worked really closely with him, the editor, the checker, the producer, the photo team, the design team, to create an experience that does not disrupt the story, but gives added value. Whether we included audio dispatches from this gentleman’s journey, video, photography, historical or contemporary. We worked really closely to make that experience very cohesive, and that’s an example of a story that came to us. Certainly, as I mentioned, there are stories that we’re going to and approaching other departments and saying, hey, I think there’s an opportunity here, can we collaborate on this? Sometimes, it fortuitously happens at the same time. A good example is a post that we produced with Amy Davidson Sorkin about Brexit, the maddening circuitous, different scenarios of how it could go down. She was talking about doing a post on it, and we saw an opportunity there to do a graphical chart that could lay out all of the scenarios.

What multimedia trends are you most excited about? Is there a format that you think has a lot of potential?

I see AR as having a lot of potential. Not just because we’re working on a project but I thought a lot about XR in general, and VR innately by being completely immersive feels actually less immersive — you feel more removed from a situation. I don’t think that medium right now has gone beyond putting you in an interesting vantage point and saying, hey look around. Some have made great strides.

AR, I feel like there’s a lot more opportunity. We’re at this interesting inflection moment for people to go beyond the novelty of it, and really start exploring storytelling in this way. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in AR. There was this really cool project produced by Accurat, a data visualization and design firm, and Giorgia Lupi, one of the founders who recently was made partner at Pentagram, produced an experience in which it invited people to answer the question what they’re hopeful for, and in doing so, build these special little sculptures that are coded through color, size, and scale, and tone and tilt to be your own personalized sculpture about what you’re hopeful for in the future. These exist out in the real world, and you can contribute to them as a user or you can also find other people’s contributions. I thought that was quite delightful and an interesting AR experiment.

What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen in media from an organization other than your own?

This isn’t new, but I’m endlessly in love with it, and that’s the song exploder podcast. It’s been around for a while now, it was launched by Hrishikesh Hirway, and now it’s hosted by Thao Nguyen, and it continues to move me. It’s just so artfully produced and the concept is again, that perfect marriage between medium and story. Each episode, they invite a musician to take apart a song and explain how they created a track piece by piece, and it builds to the final track, in this very gratifying way. Even the way it’s produced, where the interviewer is edited out of the podcast, you’re really in this very intimate and personal setting, with the musician and you’re just along with them on their journey in creating this song. I think it’s just a really wonderful podcast. It’s an exemplar in finding that marriage between the medium and the story.