When The New York Times drastically changes the way it does stuff, it says a lot about what is going on in the industry of journalism and publishing. And almost everyone takes notice, because the Gray Lady is still considered by many to be America's paper of record.
That's why its pact to provide exclusive content to Facebook, which both companies announced on Wednesday, effective immediately, is a really big deal.
According to New York Magazine, "the Times will begin publishing select articles directly into Facebook's news feed."
The partnership is through Facebook's new endeavor called Instant Articles. Articles with Facebook's clients will "load instantly, as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web," according to the newly launched Instant Articles website.
Mobile user interaction is also key.
"(The) powerful new creative tools bring your stories to life," according to Instant Articles. "Instantly zoom into high-resolution photos and tilt to explore in detail. Watch autoplay video come alive as you scroll through the article. See where it all happened with interactive maps. Hear the author's voice with embedded audio captions."
Other media outlets involved in the launch of Instant Articles include BuzzFeed, BBC News, The Guardian and The Atlantic. The New York Times is notably the only print newspaper involved. The deal comes at a pivotal time for the Times, as it is about to surpass the 1 million digital subscriber mark, New York Magazine points out. Apparently the Times ensuring that its premium digital readers aren't left out of the deal is why the agreement took so long to be finalized.
"The New York Times' obsession with this product is their subscribers," a source told New York Magazine. "They shouldn't kill their subscriber business and the data around that."
Not everyone on the Times' newsroom floor is in favor of the partnership. Some staffers even told New York Magazine it feels like "an end-of-the-Times-as-we-know-it inflection point." What also didn't help opinion among the Times staff is how secretive the deal was.
"It's referred to as the 'confidential project.' No one will talk about it," one senior Times executive told New York Magazine.
If David Carr - whose column titled The Media Equation always focused on "the intersection of media and technology" - was still alive, he would likely oppose the deal. He explained as much in a column from last October, when grumblings of a potential agreement between the Times and Facebook began swirling:
"The company (Facebook) has been on something of a listening tour with publishers, discussing better ways to collaborate. The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network's mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.
"That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook's mobile app hosted publishers' pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns."
