Q&A: Nancy Gauss & Francesca Barber of NYT Video

The New York Times recently hit 2 million subscribers on YouTube, one of their priority video platforms where they’re reaching audiences that are about 70% under 35 and 50% from outside the U.S. The Idea caught up with NYT’s executive director of video, Nancy Gauss, and director of audience for video, Francesca Barber, to learn about how they reached this milestone, as well as to speak more broadly about their larger video strategy.

Can you give us a brief overview of your roles in NYT’s video operations?

Nancy Gauss: I’m in charge of the video team in the newsroom — so overseeing all the journalists creating video content as well as our production team (the people doing audience data, strategy, operations, and post-production work). It’s a multidisciplinary team with a lot of different skills: everything from original investigations like the killing of Khashoggi to a big interactive interviewing all of the Democratic candidates and asking them questions ranging from topic to policy. We’ll also do features — we recently had a piece about looking for Bob Ross’s paintings.

Over the last couple of years we’ve focused heavily on news, investigations, and features work — what our executive editor calls our signature journalism — and trying to bolster the presence of video across our platforms and YouTube.

Francesca Barber: I’m in charge of our audience and operations team in the video department, so I collaborate with all of the different teams in the video department. We are thinking about audience analytics, our collaboration with product and our platform, and operations.

How did you decide on a content focus around news, investigations, and features?

NG: There are a couple of reasons. First, we wanted to focus on aligning with our broader coverage in the rest of the newsroom so that video is part of our reporting process and not a separate group. The other is thinking about how, in video, we can cover the breadth of stories and types of coverage that the Times puts out, and about what that video extension — especially off-platform in a place like YouTube — should be.

With digital video, it’s really important to think about repeatable frameworks and regular programming, so we spent the last two or three years analyzing our data, audience engagement, and the editorial value of what we’re creating, building around what we think is working, and trying to minimize the variety of work so that people have a clear understanding of the identity for video and know what to expect from us.

What platforms are you optimizing for?

FB: We have two primary focuses: our platform and YouTube.

There are three reasons why we’re on YouTube: we want to reach a new audience that is valuable to the Times, we want to use all the analytics and insights and data that we are receiving from YouTube and bring those back to site, and we’re also gaining incremental revenue so we want to continue working on that.

What types of data are you bringing back to site from YouTube and how are you using it, if the YouTube audience is different from the Times’s site audience?

FB: First thing, what is working on YouTube is what is working on-site and what’s working on-site is working on YouTube. We’re not creating two different platforms here: we’re really focused on honing in on the things that are working both on-site and on YouTube.

I can give you an example as to how we’re using the analytics: We might put a video out on YouTube and test different thumbnails and optimize our click-through rate to understand what kinds of thumbnails we should be using on-site. We’ll often take away those learnings and think about how we can use them for our mobile app, where we’re seeing very similar interaction and engagement to YouTube.

NG: One of the key uses of the data — especially from YouTube because they give such rich data — is look[ing] at how we’re telling our stories and the time spent, where people are dropping off, because ultimately we want to create really high-quality journalism that’s in line with the brand and reaches and keeps a large audience. We spend a lot of time looking at the content and retention rate and experiment to try to improve those numbers, which moves the needle both with engagement on YouTube but also on platform.

What are the goals of the video team and how do these fit in with the Times’s broader subscription-first strategy?

NG: At a high level, we’re focused day-to-day on [creating] signature journalism that is differentiated and will bring people to us rather than our competitors. That’s a huge component, and the other is engagement, both reaching a big audience and keeping them engaged. We think video not only is a powerful tool for engagement, but also, on the right story, can share information and tell stories in ways which no other medium can. So we’re really looking for those opportunities for video to play a role in creating differentiated journalism.

Congratulations on reaching 2 million subscribers on YouTube! Can you walk us through how you’ve grown your audience there?

NG: Two or three years ago, we were putting some video content on YouTube, but it was downstream of the content that we were making for our platform — it wasn’t necessarily with a strategic vision for how we wanted to grow our YouTube audience or engage that community.

The department was in the midst of pretty significant transition. We [Francesca, Zainab Khan — one of the editors focused on YouTube — and I] put together a plan for how we were going to change things on YouTube.

Everything that we’re creating is rooted in the mission of the Times and quality journalism, but on top of that, we’ve been looking a lot at the data and thinking about what lands — what our audience seems to value in terms of overall numbers, time spent, completion rate, comments — to start building around doing fewer things with more consistency and building around our successes, where we are getting a lot of traction, and then either iterating on things that weren’t getting as much traction or stepping away from certain things.

I think there’s a lot of room to create great video across the board and it really came down to sharpening our identity and creating fewer things with more consistency. Regular programming is really important on YouTube and we’re thinking about what are the things that we can do that will come out with some regularity.

What are some of the learnings that you’ve had about what works and what doesn’t work on YouTube?

NG: There’s a couple of examples. Our visual investigations are often built off of visual assets that we source from social media, so we don’t always have access to everything that we would ideally have to tell a story. They’re also often fairly dense. It’s a different type of storytelling that we’ve built over the last couple of years. I think one of the biggest takeaways that we’ve learned from YouTube is that if we set up our stories with a clear premise and tell people head-on what they’re going to get throughout the course of a video, we saw our engagement go up significantly. We had tried a number of different things, but that was the iteration that really took. It is something that we now try through a broader set of videos, because we think that it helps set people’s expectations so that they’re comfortable sitting through it.

Separately, if you look at the Bob Ross piece, we’re tapping into a community that exists on YouTube, [through] the nostalgia of what he represents.

FB: One more thing I’d add, there’s a lot of news on YouTube that is repackaged clips that exist across many different news outlets. And one of the things that we really want to focus on both on-site and on YouTube is, as we said earlier, signature journalism. We are really thoughtful and intentional with what news packages and news videos we put out. We of course put out a video of the highlights of the debate, but we might not necessarily put in repackaged clips that are more commodity, because we want to make sure that when people come to the Times, on-site and on YouTube, they’re really getting a unique representation of kind of what our videos are about and what kind of reporting and journalism we’re doing.

You mentioned that your editorial focus is on news, investigations, and features. How do you think about the timeliness of videos on YouTube, especially when it comes to news content?

NG: We carefully curate the content that goes on YouTube. Not everything that we create for our platform goes on YouTube and there’s definitely a consideration about what works and the timeliness, in terms of what we post.

If you look at our YouTube channel, you’ll see in terms of politics, we’ve gotten a series called “Who Is” that looks at — at the moment all of the Democratic candidates, but it has a broader reach outside of that [as an explanatory approach to some of the key figure in the news]— it’s stuff that’s relevant over many weeks, not just a couple of hours. If there’s stuff that we do put up that’s more relevant in the moment, that may not have an evergreen shelf life, we move quickly to put it up on YouTube.

I think when you look at the content we’re creating for our site that is part of a broader portfolio of written articles, graphics, photography — the work that we do in video on-platform has broader and more varied context. On YouTube, we’re thinking about these things that do sit in these more repeatable frameworks that people know to expect from us and not just sort of throwing everything up there that we put on our platform.

Are there any other platforms that the Times is prioritizing or curious about experimenting with?

NG: We put a lot of our content on Twitter and on Instagram. There’s stuff on Apple News as well. We’re definitely playing in a lot of different spaces, but in terms of the strategic priority, it’s really on-site and on YouTube.

What is an interesting project that you’ve worked on recently?

NG: I think one good example that we’re focusing on recently is creating more impact with our reporting. We did a piece about a U.S.-led airstrike in Afghanistan that killed many members of a family, and through the course of our reporting, the U.S. admitted to bombing this civilian home. So I think seeing that kind of impact is really rewarding and gratifying for the work that we’re doing.

The other I think that we’ve mentioned a lot is that Democratic candidates project, both because I think it’s an interesting innovative approach to visual storytelling and because it’s a great service for our audience. There are a ton of people in the field right now and I think it is a really good way to offer insight into the candidates and who people might vote for.

What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen recently — video or otherwise — from a media outlet outside of the Times?

FB: I think from a product and visual design perspective, the Google News app is really interesting. We’ve seen how they’ve integrated photo, video, visual images, and news all together in one newsfeed. We’re always looking for different publishers and platforms who are thinking about the best way to watch a video for audiences, and I think that is a really good example.

NG: I think Vox continues to be an interesting company to follow, both in terms of the explanatory reporting they’re doing and the graphics that they used to build their stories, but also the experiments that they’re doing with licensing and engaging their audience across their digital properties. So they’re definitely somebody that are consistently doing interesting things.

Ed. note: a previous version of this Q&A misidentified an audience strategy editor on Gauss’s team, Zainab Khan, and mislabeled NYT Video’s visual investigations videos as legal investigations. The story has been updated. We regret the errors.

This Q&A was originally published in the July 29th 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.