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Times insider | the research and development lab talks ‘delta’, times insider, the research and development lab talks ‘delta’, delta at work.

The Research and Development Lab explains ‘Delta,’ a visualization program that presents NYTimes.com traffic data.

Delta is a visualization program built by Nik Hanselmann, a creative technologist in The Times’s Research and Development Lab . But what exactly does a visualization program like Delta do? Michael Dewar, who also works in the lab, explains.

What was the seed for this idea? When did it get underway?

In 2013, Nik and I did some work to see if we could extract interesting behavioral patterns from reader data without imposing any preconceived ideas about how we think people use NYTimes.com. Nik started experimenting with ways of showing all the different behaviors as little rows of pixels stacked on top of each other.

It turned out to be a little abstract and hard to understand, so Nik built a visualization that showed those same events in an easier context: individual page views emanating from a global map of the earth. The globe visualization he made turned out to be quite powerful, especially because he made it work on a live data stream, giving you this amazing live, low-orbit view of the audience.

How did you develop something like this?

Nik figured out a way to package the page-view data stream, which comes in very quickly, into a nice slow stream to send to the web browser where the visualization lives.

He then decided on how to arrange the page views as pixels on the screen. One arrangement is to use the page-view event to draw a pixel on the surface of the globe. Another arrangement is taking the page-view event and drawing it on a site map of The New York Times.

He experimented with lots of arrangements before settling on the ones in Delta — choosing the right one is critical for the visualization to make sense. Then he spent a lot of time balancing clarity and aesthetics to make it look appealing, in order to draw viewers into the data.

Where does the data come from, and how?

Most of the data comes from a little piece of code that lives on every page of NYTimes.com. When a reader loads the page into a browser, a message is sent back to The New York Times, which our Data Science and Engineering (DSE) team collects and then makes available to developers and researchers like us.

These messages arrive at our computers at up to 3,000 page views per second, each event corresponding to a reader loading an NYTimes.com web page. When there’s a lot of news, this number can get even higher as more people use the site.

We also look at the publication stream, using something we built in the lab called Streamtools , which tracks every time a new article is published.

What were you setting out to learn?

The aim was to make a live view of the NYTimes.com audience in a way that let us see the global behavior on the site. You can start to see some amazing patterns emerge from the data. For example: We can see how readers flow from the home page into the rest of the site. We can also see how readers flow from social media into the site, and how they aren’t necessarily coming to the same parts of the site as the readers from the home page. There are also lots of mini-behaviors, like readers bouncing around slide shows or the Real Estate section, going quickly through lots of photos or house listings. And we can see the “long tail” of The New York Times and its audience. There is an incredible amount of material available to read — stretching back many years — and audiences reading it. Not everyone is focused on the brand new material that was published today.

What practical use does this tool have?

It’s great for generating questions to ask. We hope all the people who want to understand our audience behavior better — analysts, strategists, product designers — would be able to use it to start trying to get a more visceral “feel” of how readers flow in and around the site.

What is your favorite aspect of Delta?

I really like the third view, where each pixel leaves a little contrail behind it, revealing this amazing web of behavior all over the site map. Also, having it on all day in the lab, you start to get a sense of the paper’s rhythm and how the audience reacts to it, which is a lovely sense to recover all the way up here on the 28th floor, so far from the action of the third-floor newsroom.

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The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space

Some of the most exciting work taking place in The New York Times building is being done on the 28th floor, in the paper’s Research and Development Lab. The group serves essentially as a skunkworks project for a news institution that stands to benefit, financially and otherwise, from creative thinking; as Michael Zimbalist , the Times’ vice president of R&D, puts it, the team is “investigating the ideas at the edges of today and thinking about how they’re going to impact business decisions tomorrow.” (For more on the group’s doings, check out the series of videos that we shot there a couple of years ago.)

Much of the R&D Lab’s work, up to now, has been focused on platforms: tablets, TVs, screens, clouds. But the group is also thinking beyond gadgetry to two big ideas that are also a preoccupation of the news industry as a whole: the social sharing of news on the one hand, and the real-time processing of data on the other.

For the past several months, the R&D Lab has been working, quietly, on a time-based representation of how the Times’ news content is being shared in Twitter’s social space. Its name: Project Cascade. Superficially, it’s a data visualization, but it’s actually a tool that could, ever so slightly, change the way we think about online engagement.

It’s the product of a collaboration among Mark Hansen , the UCLA stats professor who spent a spring 2010 sabbatical working at the Times as what Zimbalist calls the paper’s “futurist-in-residence” — that casual title alone offers evidence of the scope of the R&D Lab’s ambition — along with Jer Thorp (data artist in residence) and Jake Porway (data scientist). And it has, despite its pragmatic uses, a firmly artistic attitude: Hansen, along with the artist Ben Rubin , designed the “Moveable Type” screen installation in the Times’ lobby, and Thorp, whose work we’ve written about previously , has converted data from the Times’ API into visualizations that are both revealing and stunning.

The team had access to a trove of usage data for Times stories, and wanted to figure out a way to see and understand the life those stories adopt once they leave the newsroom’s confines and go out into the world. The tool, which focuses on Twitter and uses information from the Bit.ly URL shortener , is their solution. “What it attempts to do,” Zimbalist says, “is dimensionalize and make really physical and tangible the way that news is shared.”

Yesterday afternoon, the team gave me a demo of the tool, which, in ultra-widescreen form, lives on a series of screens embedded in a wall outside the R&D Lab. And though, at this point, we’re all familiar with the wonders of social analytics, the tool distinguishes itself for the fact that it treats people not (well, not just ) as data points, but rather as information agents — active participants in news consumption. One of the problems journalism, as an institution, has had in fully engaging its audience (and, relatedly, in engendering that audience’s trust ) has been logistical: News outlets simply haven’t had the tools that would allow them to understand their readers — and to understand, at levels both broad and detailed, how those readers engage with their content.

The tool is framed around the social science-based concept of the “ cascade ” — in this case, the chain of events that propels a story through and around social networks. (I might come across and an article in the Times and tweet it out; Justin might see my tweet, and simply retweet it; Andrew might see Justin’s tweet, read the article, and then tweet it out with an entirely new framing. And on and on.)

Project Cascade — it’s a working title — lets you visualize a cascade as a comprehensive unit; it also allows viewers to zoom in on particular events to see key points in how a story’s sharing activity has unfolded. Its side view demonstrates a (relatively) simple timeline of a story’s activity; its radar view demonstrates the separation between conversations; and its 3D view essentially marries the two, representing individual threads of conversation in a sharper way. Complex cascades can also be pruned to show only the most influential tweets (what Thorp calls the “backbone” of the conversation), and the users who posted them.

(To see some beautiful screenshots, bigger than what we can fit here, try here , here , here , here , and here .)

In all, the tool illustrates the connections between readers and publishers; identifies the most influential contributors to a conversation; and displays the overall life cycle of a news sharing event. It can see how the content of a tweet — or of the story it links to — affects that impact. It can determine which variables — time-of-day, day-of-week, and the like — change clickthrough and retweet trends.

And it can assess the link-level impact of individual users. Who are the people, exactly, who drive other people to tweet about a link? That impact isn’t just a function of follower counts; in fact, often, the most-followed people don’t generate many retweets — possibly because their followers assume others have already seen the link. Project Cascade’s findings so far suggest, though, that it’s the people who are followed by the famous people who can drive a lot of retweet activity and drive discussions — “the deep, hidden influencers,” Zimbalist calls them, who can help news content have impact.

“These aren’t the kinds of things you would have seen in spreadsheets,” Porway notes. Static representations like spreadsheets don’t demonstrate well the human connections behind content-sharing the way that a visualized, animated universe can. With a 3D representation of interaction, you can see how interest groups — both ad hoc and ongoing, weak-tied and strong — form around particular pieces, and varieties, of content. “What we’re already beginning to see here,” Zimbalist says, “is these different clusters of people in these different vertical areas who are always out there talking about our content.”

And — here’s where things get really interesting — the Times could then bring in those influential news-spreaders to become news…producers. With the tool, “we’ve seen this little community discussion that we would have never been able to filter out of the noise before,” Thorp notes. And, with that insight, “you could imagine a world where people in the newsroom would be like, ‘That’s interesting. There are these three rabbis who are discussing this — maybe we can bring them in to have a debate about it.'”

“So we can identify these people, and maybe we can access their expertise or access their experience — as well as think about, ‘How can we drive more traffic?'”

For now, for its experimental period, Project Cascade uses a data set of Times articles from a two-week period from August 2010 — a period without a single, dominating news event. So it includes intriguing info about, say, the social life of the Times’ coverage of Steve “EvacuSlide” Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant — whose life on Twitter was extended by, among other things, the Times story’s constant updates (and by Brian Stelter ‘s tweets informing his followers about those updates). But the hope, and the point, is to move beyond the proof-of-concept period and begin feeding the data for all Times stories, in real time, into the system.

Real-time analysis is of obvious use beyond the Times, so the newspaper is thinking about — way down the road — sharing the tool. “It’s been a theory of ours for the last year or so that the organizations that are able to make business decisions based upon large amounts of data coming in real time are going to be the winners of the 21st century,” Zimbalist notes. Project Cascade is the double-down on that theory.

The Project Cascade tool can also, intriguingly, help its users learn much more about the social elements of online news distribution. “In effect, what we’re trying to do is think about notions of influence that are based not just on the social graph, but instead how that graph gets exercised,” Hansen says. Or, in much more basic terms: to understand the audience — not as a passive monolith, but as a series of active individuals who happen also to be nodes in a network. The ability to comprehend communities will be crucial for organizations of all kinds going forward, news orgs first among those. Of the communities that form online, “do they represent different opinion groups?” Thorp says. “Do they represent different geographic groups? Do they represent groups that we’ve never identified before? Those are some questions that we can ask.”

Cite this article Hide citations

Garber, Megan. "The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space." Nieman Journalism Lab . Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 22 Apr. 2011. Web. 24 Apr. 2024.

Garber, M. (2011, Apr. 22). The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space. Nieman Journalism Lab . Retrieved April 24, 2024, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-new-york-times-rd-lab-has-built-a-tool-that-explores-the-life-stories-take-in-the-social-space/

Garber, Megan. "The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space." Nieman Journalism Lab . Last modified April 22, 2011. Accessed April 24, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-new-york-times-rd-lab-has-built-a-tool-that-explores-the-life-stories-take-in-the-social-space/.

{{cite web     | url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-new-york-times-rd-lab-has-built-a-tool-that-explores-the-life-stories-take-in-the-social-space/     | title = The New York Times’ R&D Lab has built a tool that explores the life stories take in the social space     | last = Garber     | first = Megan     | work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]     | date = 22 April 2011     | accessdate = 24 April 2024     | ref = {{harvid|Garber|2011}} }}

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Alexis Lloyd explains The New York Times’ Research and Development Lab

Imagine a table that records conversations in meetings, or a mirror that collects data while you get ready in the morning. These are just some of the many projects under the helm of Alexis Lloyd, the creative director of The New York Times Research & Development Lab. Lloyd investigates and develops emerging technologies in media and journalism by exploring interactive interfaces, immersive experiences, and data visualizations.

CJR’s Alexandra Hoey spoke with Lloyd about some exciting projects in the R&D Lab, as well as her vision of the future of reporter and user experiences.

What exactly is the R&D Lab?  We’re looking at emerging changes that are happening in the technology landscape, and also what’s happening in terms of reader behavior and changes in response to new technologies or new kinds of ecosystems. We scan the landscape to look at these signals and then we design and build prototypes that explore the impact of what those changes might be for news and media. About three to five years out is generally the time frame that we’re looking at.

What external trends have you noticed in your research?  I think we, societally, have the tendency to think that whatever the emerging thing is, is going to be something that replaces whatever came before it. And yet we see that’s not really what happens. What happens is that each new thing adds to this increasingly complex system of media platforms and ways of accessing information. So, the Web didn’t replace print, mobiles didn’t replace the Web, and wearables aren’t going to replace mobile. All these things are going to have to exist in this increasingly complex ecosystem of ways of accessing news and information.

What are some specific projects the R&D Lab is working on?  We’ve been thinking a lot about the explosion of sensors over the past several years and the ways that we’ve started to expect as consumers, as people, that we can track all different types of data that we didn’t really have access to before. That’s everything from personal things, like how many steps I’ve walked today, to things that are for more journalistic purposes like data streams that we couldn’t get at before. So part of what we’ve been thinking about is what the sensor network of the near future will look like. How does that change and evolve?

We’ve built a few projects around this. One of them is building semantic listening for Web browsing to capture signals about the topics that I’m reading about or that a group is reading about. We’ve built a listening table that is about how you capture those important moments from a conversation. And we’ve built a semantic listening project for the writing project, which I think is particularly at the heart of what we do journalistically—thinking about how you capture important semantic information about what you are writing about, what a reporter is writing.

Do you think newsrooms are adapting to these technological changes?  I do. The technology and the landscape is changing rapidly enough that for all organizations the continual challenge to keep our processes and our ways of thinking in step of what’s happening in the world. I think that one of the biggest changes that we already see—and that I think will continue to be a big challenge for news organizations in the next few years—is that we’ve adapted really well to digital publishing and the Web and to mobile and to thinking about how we publish articles on this platform. But I think we’re still, in many ways, thinking about publishing articles, and the future of news is really beyond the structure of the article.

How do you think readers will be acquiring their news in the future? I think we’ll continue to see change along the lines of what we’ve already seen. As we have different kinds of devices we’ll have a greater range of form for our content, for our news. And we’ll have a greater diversity of ways we interact with it.

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How NYT’s research lab maps the future role of technology in news

Matt Boggie, executive director of The New York Times research and development lab, outlines some of the trends the team is monitoring to ensure the sustainability of journalism in the digital age

• data privacy;
• connected objects – "devices that you carry around and that monitor your activity, even though they might not necessarily look like computers";
• relationship between reader and reporter – "how this membrane is beginning to break down and how data passes back and forth between the two";
• personal and contextual interfaces, which monitor not only a person's activity but the context around it, providing suggestions based on this data;
• collaborations between reporters and robots – using artificial intelligence to "help us find stories or tell them in different ways";
• the rise and evolution of the platform.

Editor, an experiment in publishing from NYT R&D on Vimeo .

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About the Metro ARchive

The Project

What is the Metro ARchive?

The Metro ARchive is a project developed by Sammy Levin and McCoy Zhu under the mentorship of the New York Times Research and Development Team for the NYC Media Lab Spatial Computing Challenge . It is an immersive AR experience that enables users to view historic New York City streets as they were a century ago. The app is currently a functional prototype, but we are on the lookout for opportunities to expand it into a more accessible experience.

Read about it in the press

Working with Universities to Experiment with Spatial Computing 

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See Old New York Appear Before Your Eyes with this New AR App

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New Application Brings New York City to Life

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New Augmented Reality App Recreates Historic NYC Buildings

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AR虛擬影像讓你重回紐約歷史街景

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AR App Shows What New York Used to Look Like

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If You're Interested in Urban History, Try the Metro ARchive

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The new york times company (nyt) thrives on subscriber growth.

The New York Times Company NYT has deftly overcome operational hurdles, achieving notable success fueled by its expanding subscriber base and strategic transformations. With an unwavering commitment to diversifying revenue streams, optimizing costs and refining operations, the company has emerged as a formidable player in the media landscape. To amplify its revenues further, NYT is actively promoting a more strategically bundled subscription offering, reflecting its proactive approach to business evolution. The company has embraced technological advancements to cultivate robust connections with its audience. Strategic acquisitions such as Wirecutter and The Athletic have significantly broadened its reach and uncovered fresh opportunities in the market. As NYT continues to adapt and innovate, its prospects remain promising in an ever-evolving media landscape, solidifying its position as an industry leader. Critical to NYT's continued growth is the sustained expansion of its subscriber base. As this base grows, so does the company's influence and market position, making it an attractive platform for advertisers seeking to engage with a wider and more engaged audience. This reciprocal relationship between subscribers and advertisers not only drives NYT's revenue streams but also cements its role as a vital player in modern media, poised for enduring success and impact.

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Let’s Dig Deeper

The New York Times Company concluded the fourth quarter of 2023 with roughly 10.36 million subscribers across its print and digital products, including roughly 9.7 million digital-only subscribers. Of the 9.7 million subscribers, about 4.22 million were bundle and multiproduct subscribers. There was a net increase of 880,000 in digital-only subscribers compared with the fourth quarter of 2022. Subscription revenues of $430.4 million grew 3.9% year over year. Subscription revenues from digital-only products jumped 7.2% to $288.7 million. This reflects an increase in bundle and multiproduct revenues and a rise in other single-product subscription revenues. Furthermore, The New York Times Company achieved consistent growth in its digital-only average revenue per user (ARPU). The ARPU increased to an impressive $9.24 in the final quarter from $8.93 in the year-ago period. This increase in the ARPU can be attributed to subscribers transitioning from promotional pricing to higher rate plans and the introduction of price hikes for tenured non-bundle subscribers. Management envisions first-quarter 2024 total subscription revenues to increase about 7-9%, with digital-only subscription revenues anticipated to rise approximately 11-14%.

Wrapping Up

With rapid digitization in the core areas of advertising and readers increasingly gravitating toward online sources, newspaper companies have been reallocating resources to focus on online publications. The New York Times Company has demonstrated unwavering attempts to rapidly acclimatize to the changing face of the multiplatform media industry. For the first quarter of 2024, The New York Times Company foresees a low-to-high-single-digit jump in digital advertising revenues. Shares of this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company have advanced 7.1% in the past year compared with the industry’s growth of 8.1%.

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Study opens new avenue for immunotherapy drug development

Method utilizes engineered peptides to build up the body's natural response.

In a new study published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering , researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have designed a new method for developing immunotherapy drugs using engineered peptides to elicit a natural immune response inside the body.

In preclinical models of locally advanced and metastatic breast cancer, this method improved tumor control and prolonged survival, both as a monotherapy and in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors.

"Amino acids are the building blocks of life and, when a few of them are linked together, they create a peptide. All the biological functions performed by our body are done by proteins and peptides, so our goal was to find a way to redesign these small molecules to possess the unique ability to activate our immune system," said senior author Betty Kim, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Neurosurgery.

The body's immune system is built to patrol and identify infected or diseased cells to eliminate, but cancer cells often exploit weaknesses in the immune system to avoid detection. The goal of immunotherapy is to bolster the body's natural ability to identify and destroy cancer cells. Current immune checkpoint inhibitors are antibodies designed to block specific immune signaling pathways.

The engineered peptide improves the immune system's ability to detect and destroy cancer cells in a unique way. Rather than using an external compound to initiate a response, or harvesting and modifying immune cells for cell therapies, the peptide serves as a messenger to activate specific signaling pathways in immune cells to boost their performance.

"These findings open a whole new avenue for developing immunotherapy drugs. By using designed polypeptides, we can potently activate immune signaling pathways to enhance anti-tumor responses. Additionally, since these are naturally derived agents, we anticipate the toxicity profile would be significantly better than with synthetic compounds," said co-corresponding author Wen Jiang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Radiation Oncology.

This study was supported by the National Cancer Institute (CA241070) and the U.S. Department of Defense.

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Journalism professors call on New York Times to review Oct. 7 report

More than 50 tenured journalism professors from top universities have signed a letter calling on the New York Times to address questions about a major investigative report that described a “pattern of gender-based violence” in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

The letter follows months of criticism and concerns raised by outside critics as well as some Times staffers about the credibility of its sourcing and the editorial process for the story.

The letter, signed by professors at colleges including New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory and the University of Texas, asks the Times to “immediately commission a group of journalism experts to conduct a thorough and full independent review of the reporting, editing and publishing processes for this story and release a report of the findings.”

It was sent Monday morning to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, executive editor Joe Kahn and international editor Philip Pan.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Times said that the paper has “reviewed the work that was done on this piece of journalism and [we] are satisfied that it met our editorial standards.”

The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, acknowledged the impossibility of “writing perfectly accurate drafts of history in real time” but emphasized that news organizations must be willing to interrogate their own work.

It notes that the Times and many other publications have reassessed stories in the manner the professors suggest. In 2004, the Times reviewed its coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq; in a note to readers , editors later acknowledged they identified “problematic” stories that had been based on the accounts of Iraqi sources “whose credibility has come under increasing public debate.”

Signers include Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Victor Pickard of the University of Pennsylvania, Maggy Zanger of the University of Arizona and Diane Winston of the University of Southern California.

Questions began to emerge shortly after the Times published its December investigation headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”

Relatives of a woman slain in the attack, whose story became a central focus of the Times report, cast doubts on reporting suggesting that she was raped, while other critics pointed to discrepancies in various accounts offered by an eyewitness cited in the story.

The Intercept reported that the Times’ flagship podcast, “The Daily,” had shelved a planned episode about the report due to these questions. In response, the Times launched an intensive internal investigation to determine who had leaked newsroom information, a campaign the paper’s Guild called a “ racially targeted witch hunt .” The Times firmly denied the Guild’s claim.

The Intercept also reported that the Times relied heavily on two relatively inexperienced freelancers in Israel — Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella — to report the story, while Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman was responsible for weaving it together.

The professors’ letters raised concerns about “such reporting arrangements,” noting that Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Bragg resigned from the Times in 2003 after it was revealed that he had relied heavily on a less-experienced freelancer for reporting.

The letter also makes reference to comments made by Gettleman in an interview after the story was published, in which he said he did not want to use the word “evidence” to describe certain details in the story because it “suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court.”

“This language is in stark contrast to the story itself which uses the word ‘evidence’ in the sub headline referring to the same information Gettleman was apparently discussing on stage,” the letter said.

In March, the Times reported that new video evidence “undercut” some of the details in its initial investigation. But the paper did not issue a correction or a retraction of the December report, which the journalism professors called an “unusual decision.”

Shahan Mufti, a professor at the University of Richmond, said in an interview that the unusual circumstances called for response from journalism educators.

“We in journalism education are not typically in the business of telling people in the profession how to do their job,” he said. “This required serious consideration and deliberation, and we came to the conclusion that this is necessary.”

Sandy Tolan, a professor at the University of Southern California, said that the timing of the story — as public opinion in the United States was shifting toward a more critical understanding of the devastation of Israel’s bombing of civilian areas in Gaza — is also relevant.

“As the death toll mounted in Gaza, and criticism was beginning to focus more on Israel, the New York Times released this story, which seems to have been published prematurely,” he said. “Being cognizant of the potential damages of and consequences of the timing, given that it didn’t appear to be as well-reported as it should have been, there’s all the more reason why an external review is appropriate.”

An independent review could find the Times did nothing wrong, the letter says, or find errors in the way the newsroom operated. Either way, the letter concludes, an immediate review “is the only responsible and credible thing to do.”