The Public Editor\'s Sunday Column: Perilous Task of Innovation in a Digital Age

Perilous Task of Innovation in a Digital Age

CRUISES. Conferences. New forms of advertising. Fancy multimedia storytelling.

The Gray Lady, as The New York Times has long been known, isn't as sedate as she used to be. The company is innovating like a house afire. Or let's turn the metaphor around: With the house of print burning down, The Times is quickly building something new, hoping to have a permanent place to live in the digital age.

The innovation is necessary. After all, print advertising - the lifeblood of The Times - has long been in decline. Last year, in a major milestone, consumer revenue (mostly from print and digital subscriptions) surpassed advertising revenue, both digital and print. In the old days, print advertising alone brought in about 80 percent of all Times revenue.

The old business model is fading, and the new one hasn't quite arrived. The Times is journalistically strong and is profitable, but its future is far from certain. As necessary as innovation is, it comes with risks - ethical risks, journalistic risks and, if those should be compromised, business risks.

Here is a look at what is happening, and some of the implications.

CONFERENCES AND CRUISES In 2014, should you have the resources, you can go on a cruise to Patagonia and rub elbows with a top Times editor and a Times columnist who are among the speakers. Earlier this year, if you had $995 to spare, you could have attended “Thomas L. Friedman's The Next New World,” a conference in San Francisco featuring the Times columnist. Last year's DealBook conference, where businesspeople paid $1,500 to listen to the likes of the Goldman Sachs chairman, Lloyd Blankfein, interviewed on a stage at The Times, was another example. These ventures are lucrative, can be informative and help to “build the brands” of The Times and its journalists.

But, some readers have asked me, what makes them all that different from The Washington Post's ill-fated salons, attacked as being ethically unacceptable because they would have given a few people some rare up-close-and-personal access to Post journalists? There are some crucial differences: The Times conferences are on the record, while The Post's salons were not intended to be; and the cruises, unlike the salons, are not pitched to lobbyists and political animals as a way to schmooze Washington journalists. Still, this growing category of event deserves scrutiny and monitoring.

EXPERIMENTS IN ADVERTISING Take traditional advertising and put it in the digital space, and what you often get is either annoying (people can't wait to close the ad) or invisible (people look right past it). What's the answer? “Native advertising” - in which advertising is presented to mimic the appeal of editorial content - is all the rage elsewhere. The Times, so far, has only dipped its toe in that water but continues to explore new advertising ideas, including “micro sites” devoted to specific advertisers.

One small example from The Times, as David Carr noted recently in a column on native advertising, is in the guide to New York City activities, The Scoop. There, Citi Bike (itself sponsored by Citibank) sponsors a way to show readers where the bikes are. Harmless, right? Citi Bike gets its message out; The Times gets some revenue; and the consumer gets good information. It's a far cry from what got The Atlantic magazine into trouble when readers were confused by a Scientology ad that looked like editorial content (and which the magazine quickly said was a mistake that wouldn't be repeated), but the blurring of lines bears watching. Gerard Baker, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, warned last week that native advertising amounts to a “Faustian pact.”

As with so many knotty issues in the new media world, transparency with the reader is the key. Tell the readers clearly what they're looking at.

Philip B. Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, put it this way: “If the point of native advertising is to fool the reader, that's no good. The reader should never be deceived.”

VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION Last year, The Times learned to “snow fall,” a noun that became a verb when its elaborate multimedia story about an avalanche in Washington where three people died set a new standard for digital storytelling. “Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” won a Pulitzer Prize, and since then, several other similar productions have been unveiled - among them “The Jockey,” about the “winningest” rider of thoroughbred racehorses.

Meanwhile, because The Times has more potential advertising for videos than it has videos to put it on, production has ramped up. Staff has doubled since last year, new video series have been added and video has been placed outside The Times's pay wall, so that it's free to all viewers. Even the popular Modern Love feature now has a video offering, done with animated illustrations. Rebecca Howard, general manager of video production, reports both to the executive editor, Jill Abramson, and to the executive vice president for digital products, Denise Warren. That dual reporting straddles the traditional wall between business and editorial concerns, meant to provide independence.

Ms. Howard thinks it's necessary, saying, “There's so much that's woven together about what we're doing.” As The Times decides where to put its finite resources, that blending of business and journalistic priorities is something to keep an eye on. Will the most newsworthy projects be the ones to get the green light, or will it be those that will generate the most traffic and thus appeal most to advertisers?

These issues are not easy ones. I've heard many people at The Times, including its publisher and its chief executive, emphasize that no new venture will tamper with the bedrock values of The Times or harm its journalistic integrity. Because the reader's trust in that integrity is the real currency at The Times, it's imperative that that promise is fulfilled.

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(For more from my interview with Rebecca Howard on the expansion of video at The Times, please see the Public Editor's Journal at nytimes.com/publiceditor.)

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 29, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Perilous Task of Innovation in a Digital Age.