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“If we aren’t read, we aren’t going to change the world.”

^{Dean Baquet, Managing Editor, NYT}

Keeping Up with the Times

On the evening of January 21, 1996, a group of a dozen men perched over a newsroom computer and marked a milestone: “The New York Times Introduces a Website.” In 1995, the newspaper had formed a digital media company “to develop products for the rapidly growing field of digital publishing.” However, the rather anticlimactic launch of the site that evening was met by many of the traditional print journalists at the paper with disdain. That would soon change.

The launch of www.nytimes.com began a new era for journalism, beginning with a change in how reporters worked and later becoming an entire discipline unto itself. This evolution would not have been possible without Richard Meislin, The New York Times’ (NYT) first Head of Digital. His internal memo, "What is the Internet," briefed the “masthead” executive leadership team on the potential of digital. "The New York Times is about to establish an online personality, both visual and verbal... How we combine elements, make information available, and interact with readers will make huge differences in how we're regarded online." Starting in a separate office in the Hippodrome, the groundwork was laid for the digital teams to form, protected from the machinations of the newsroom until the Times moved into a new office in 2007.

Graphics at War

NYTimes.com forced the newspaper to change how it viewed itself. The paywall went up in 2011 as the Masthead ceded to changing reader behaviors. In 2014, new Managing Editor Dean Baquet restructured the teams to encourage collaboration between the newsroom and the “business side.” Creative Director Tom Bodkin took a page from his days at web-friendly magazines, assigning graphics editors to traditional desk teams (National, Business, Politics, etc.). Baquet eliminated the Copy Desk in 2017, and he elevated designers from the Cooking feature of the website to lead the new digital product oriented teams. He heeded the warnings of The Innovation Report in 2015, written by the heir of the Times’ ownership family: “Graphics, Interactive, Design and Social are spending a disproportionate amount of time on [labor-intensive] one-offs. Meanwhile, we have repeatedly put off making the necessary improvements to allow our graphics to appear on mobile.” They scrambled to keep up with the times.

The graphics editors at NYT had already become data journalists. They could develop stories on their own or in collaboration with the “desk heads.” One early example was the team’s response to 9/11. Archie Tse, the paper’s current graphics editor, drew the visuals of the twin towers’ architecture for NYT’s’ coverage of the attack. Later, Tse spent years traveling to Baghdad to report on the Iraq war. “When you stay out in the field, you develop a sense of geography and chronology,” Tse said.“Graphics are a team effort. One person might sketch, another will report and possibly a third person would work on doing the chronology.” The work was not easy, though. According to Tse, it was not unusual for a graphics team to work from 4 p.m. to midnight, putting together information to send to an editor in New York City . . . ” Tse said. “One person just can’t produce the graphics needed by deadline.” Tse is also credited by Steve Duenes, assistant masthead editor as having created the red-and-blue color schemes common to current political map visuals. By 2010, NYT hired more digital native reporters, like Nate Silver, the creator of 538 to track political, polling, and survey statistics. In 2013, the team developed the first interactive graphic “Snow Fall” to document the 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche, winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Charting New Territory

Like how the early digital group grew isolated from the newsroom, a new San Francisco office opened to explore interactive graphics. Mike Bostock joined in 2013 to lead this effort. Along with another designer Shan Carter, Bostock would often take as long as three or four weeks to design a visual, ages compared to the daily schedule in Manhattan. Their proximity to Silicon Valley helped make their work more technical. In fact, Bostock developed D3.js, an open source javascript library for developing interactive visualizations (“Data-Driven Documents” or D3) online. Rather than strictly following typical journalistic rules, Bostock and his colleagues would explore data relevant to current events with D3, employing peer code reviews and automated validation to ensure quality. The Times won the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for Business and Financial journalism for their “Economy Interactives” each of the next three years. Today, D3 remains one of the most widely used interactive visualization libraries for developers.

Some of the prompts for Bostock’s visuals came from Amanda Cox. The Data Editor for the Times in the late 2010s, Cox earned a reputation for rationalism. She started as an intern out of grad school a decade earlier, redesigning all of the visuals in her interview exam with the programming language R. Within a few years, she earned the role of editor for the Upshot feature. When the New York Times editors Slack with each other, they often wryly use emojis to comment on data insights. Typing the emoji alias “:noone-knows-anything:”, they see a picture of Cox. After she helped develop landmark visuals like the infamous needle that turned red late on the night of the 2016 election, Steve Duenes created the new team leadership role for her. The last person to hold a similar title as Data Editor? Richard Meislin, Editor of Statistical News.

Thanks to Cox, the graphics team created new standards for data journalism. For example Cox relaxed the “New York Times Manual of Style & Usage’s" rule of displaying the margin of error on a chart noting–”it is actively harmful in how wrong it is”. She incorporated annotations into every interactive visual and favored distributions to straight averages. Most importantly though, Cox challenged her team to consider what they miss because of the tools they use. As current graphics editor Marco Hernandez admits he holds himself to a high standard because of “the weight of the brand . . . That’s a huge pressure on your work. The management and teammates do well in helping you to get over it, but the feeling never goes away . . . the most important thing is how passionate you are about your work, and if your team is also passionate, you would do great things.”

Despite their central position at the newspaper of record today, the graphics team at NYT had to contend with onerous office politics along the way. For years, the digital teams were cut off from normal newsroom operations, an afterthought at best. Micromanagement, hierarchy, and approvals made agile development impossible. Managing editors before Baquet viewed the business side with disdain. Statistics about web views and subscriptions were not made available until Cox’s time. The old guard who cut their teeth in the print edition viewed graphics and subscriber statistics as anathema to the concept of good journalism, as chronicled in the 2003 book The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney.

Nevertheless, the New York Times graphics team came to epitomize data journalism. In fact, they pushed boundaries thanks to their separation from the traditional elements of the Times. By helping to centralize the role of digital in the newsroom and advancing reader expectations, they changed the industry forever.

Epilogue: The Changing of the Guard

Every day for 60 years, “The Gray Lady’s” leadership would gather to decide on the lineup of articles which would make it to the front page of the print publication. In 2015, Baquet declared the daily meeting would become a forum for planning digital coverage. “The idea is for us to mobilize faster . . . in order to focus on coverage regardless of where it appears,” he wrote. On May 8 that year, Baquet led the last meeting under the old format. “It is remarkable how fast all the desks have responded to a constant flood of change,” he said, raising a cupcake in a toast. “Thank you, and cheers!” Journalism was never the same. Neither was data visualization.