Credit: Gina Argentina

Considering how the New York Times is coping with the the plight of the publishing industry and news media better than most, it’s not surprising to see that they might be pursuing a more symbiotic editorial model. Granted, when it comes to weathering the storm, the NYT is a lot larger in both scope and scale (size, authority, and audience) than many of its contemporaries, so it has a definite edge. But its continual efforts to reinvent its content model are plain.

In addition to everything it’s done with blogs and Times Wire (a real time news feed), it seems to be pursuing all three facets of a symbiotic editorial model. Most recently, not only has it started thinking of its readers as users, but it’s implemented a diversified ad-revenue model to go with it. As Adage reports:

[...] Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The New York Times, said the company has quit calling online readers “readers,” instead referring to them as users. [...]

“When we think traditionally about creation [at The New York Times] it was limited to people within the Times,” [said Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at NYT]. “We created for readers … [for whom] it was a passive experience. But as we moved online, we wanted to move people from readers to users.”

This shift to users-instead-of-readers is an important part of the transition toward becoming a social news organization. As Alan Rusbridger, the Editor-in-Chief of an equally auhtoritative newspaper, The Guardian, noted in a recent interview, there is a blurring between the reader and the journalist, so it’s become necessary to involve the reader more and create a community around your journalist core.

But more importantly, the NYT’s shift toward users-instead-of-readers is also seen in its integration of apps and what those apps might mean for its revenues. Overall, it looks to be evolving into a veritable social news organization. As the AdAge article elaborates, to coax people from being readers to being users:

[...] the company has opened up its [APIs]. The Times has taken content and data — both internally created material, such as movie reviews and best-seller lists, and external data, such as campaign-finance and legislative information — and opened up the APIs so that outside developers can create tools for its consumers.

Among the results: Instantwatcher mashes up the “Watch Instantly” program from online movie-rental service Netflix with Times movie critics’ top choices. Another app, called NYTExplorer, provides an alternative article-search function to the one that exists on NYTimes.com.

These apps demonstrate how the NYT is diversifying their ad-revenue model. The “Watch Instantly” app, for instance, seems a lot like an affiliate marketing tactic — i.e. a performance-based referral marketing model.

Purusing this kind of ad-revenue diversification and the technology to implement it is 2/3 of the symbiotic editorial equation. The reaming third is integrating a full-sevice marketing agency into your organization (as Vice Magazine has), and as the Nieman Journalism Lab recently documented, the NYT has an advertising R&D lab that seems poised to evolve into just such a full-sevice marketing agency.

Credit: OliverAlex

First, a publication provides two products: content and a medium. The content is for your readers/consumers/users, and the medium is for advertisers looking to reach them.

Your editorial becomes symbiotic when you cross-sell those two products, and you do that by strategically develop content items that complement the offers of advertisers that you proactively scouted. But it’s not about churning out biased content that will help advertisers sell their products. Rather, it’s about having an editorial format, knowing your readers demographics, and understanding what kind of consumers they also happen to be. So a big part of it is making sure that your advertisers actually have product offers that appeal to your readers’ consumer interests.

This, of course, raises the question of how you figure that out. It’s one thing to replace your ad-sales department with a fully integrated marketing agency, like Vice Magazine does, but it’s quite another to analyze your readers in a non-intrusive, non-obstructive way. And that’s where understanding them as users comes in.

Credit: Alex Glickman

But then there’s the technology side to treating your readers as users. Basically, if you’re going to provider your readers with the content that they each find most relevant, you’re going to have to collect data on them. And you do that by becoming a social news organization (or just plain-ol’ social content organization).

By leveraging popular APIs so that your readers can seamlessly aggregate, syndicate, and share your content, you achieve so much more than just increasing page views. You also gain insight into their behavior as users and consumers. Integrated with personal profiles/logins within your portal, this allows you target them with the most relevant content.

More importantly, it allows you to target them with offers that actually appeal to them. And when you do that, you not only increase conversions and value of your ad-space; you also build trust with your readers by demonstrating that you understand and appreciate their interests (as consumers and users). In a word, you use your users to target advertisers.

Of course, doing so effectively require that you (1) have a fully integrated marketing agency in-house (like Vice Magazine) that can (2) help you understand your users, (3) collaborate with your editorial to develop symbiotic content, (4) scout appropriate advertisers, and (5) diversify your ad-revenue stream so that you’re not relying on a single, limited model that might coax you into compromising user-experience. In other words, your in-house marketing agency has to market your editorial product first, and your advertisers second.

Disclosure: this post is the bastard child of a comment on the Nieman Journalism Lab and Nicholas Carr’s Realtime Chronicles.

Image: "Super Target" by jeco

But now content is now dynamic. It exists in “realtime,” in the stream, and that’s killing the real space that was so cumbersome and beyond our control.

Now, if publishers are smart, if they’re really strategic, can actually amass more practical information about their audience than most government agencies. And that means that they can proactively connect their audience with offers that their audience actually care about, is actually interested in. That, after all, is what symbiotic editorial is all about.

I mean, smart publishers, the strategic ones, have so much information that they have to hire database-miners! A job that didn’t even exists all too long ago. So maybe publishers need to stop thinking about how advertisers can target their readers and start thinking about how they can use their readers to target advertisers. Maybe they need to start thinking about a kind of third dimensional advertising.

This guy (Jacek Utko) thinks that design can help save newspapers, which is weird because he also says that “There’s no practical reason for newspaper to survive.” How you save something that has no practical reason to exist is beyond me. But I’m not so sure about design saving newspapers or that newspapers have no practical reason to exist.

Hat tip to Patrick Tanguay for the video.

First, Utko’s talking about reinventing the actual physical print editions of newspapers, and as much as that might increase their circulation, it will only buy them time. Newsworthy information just moves much faster than can the production of a physical product, such as a print edition.

And I’m not so sure about newspapers having no practical reason to exist for two reasons: (1) they are very, very valuable in a democracy, because (2) they’re in the business of providing authoritative information so that they can sell subscriptions and ads. As long as there is a demand/need for that kind of information, there are very practical reasons (both economic and political) for newspapers to exist.

So it’s not that newspapers have to change their product, it’s that they have to change their business model, their revenue model, becoming less of a newspaper and more of news organizations. As Clay Shirky puts it:

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

They probably won’t be able to sell subscriptions the way they used to, but they can definitely sell ads better than they ever have. That’s where their revenue model has to change, in the delivery of advertising. They have to start phasing out (or at least stop relying on) print editions, and start thinking of better ways to deliver both their authoritative information and the ads that appear alongside it.

And it’s not rocket science, either. It’s something that plenty of A-list bloggers and affiliate marketers have already figured out on a much smaller level. All newspapers have to do is increase the scale and scope.

As for this Utko fella, it seems to me that he’s just running is mouth off about how highly he regards himself. I think it’s awesome that he was able to turn around so many Eastern European newspapers — really, I do.

But as online technologies achieve the same penetration rates in Eastern Europe as they have in the West, those publications are to face all of the same challenges as the the Chicago Sun Times and the Rocky Mountain News. And the only design that’s going to help them get past that will be the schools of information architecture and business modeling.