|
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What was the thought process behind doing an “Ask Us Anything” post now?
Lee: We can’t take credit for this, but there’s a department within the Times we work closely with called Times Insider. And this group — it’s a relatively small group — but it’s designed to do exactly what we’ve been talking about in the trust principles, which is: They talk to other journalists within the newsroom about specific stories that they’ve worked on. How did they get the story? What were the mechanics and background to how certain stories were put together? It’s a way to, frankly, highlight people in the newsroom and what we do, and they’ve been doing it for a few years. So, during the election, Times Insider — and we worked with them on this — they came up with, “Hey, let’s ask readers what they want to know about how we’re covering the election.” They put out an “Ask Us Anything” on this and got tons of questions. And we worked with this group to filter out the questions and then reach out to different editors and reporters in the newsroom to answer them. That was sort of the initial inspiration for this.
This time around, with Trump coming into office, we knew there’d be even more questions not just from our own subscribers, but just from readers in general. So we said, “Let’s do that again, but let’s make it even more extensive.” We wanted to really open it up and get as deep as possible into it. The reader response was pretty astounding. We got more than 500 comments and questions in 48 hours. And we had to cut it off at that point because we were not going to be able to follow through.
READ: You Asked, We Answered: How The Times is reporting on the Trump administration (New York Times)
How does your team measure what success looks like for a project based on building trust?
Lee: A big part of what we were originally sort of focusing on was, how do we even measure trust? And we ultimately decided that any kind of measurement will always be a wonky thing. So we set upon two main things in this approach: Whatever we do, we want it to be widely distributed. What does that mean? So we changed the convention around date lines. That was a change to the entire culture of the convention so that every story, when it has a dateline, now looks like this certain thing. We have 2,000 reporters and editors — all their bio pages reflect this new thing. So in other words, these are distributed solutions. They're not going to be cordoned off into one section of the paper or of the site. Our projects are designed to be visible to [our entire audience]. Visibility and changing the structure of the report was an important principle in terms of how we devised our projects and what we thought would be a good project.
The second is just much simpler: Is it good journalism? And almost everything that I've talked about is good journalism. It's about transparency. It's about showing our work. And I think explaining our process used to be considered bad journalism in the sense that you're focusing on yourself. I think that is now wrong. We should be explaining our journalism. That is good journalism to do. And it's good to encourage reader skepticism.
Read on for more details about their process for answering readers' questions and what other newsrooms can learn from a project like this.
| 
