'So many possibilities' so much Times

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Neil Chase is settling in to his new role as Deputy Editor for News at nytimes.com, and he's very excited. He talks about the newly announced offering, New York Times Select, bringing his experience from CBS MarketWatch to the Times, and on using the site to avoid incidents like the Jayson Blair fiasco.

TRANSCRIPT: Neil Chase, interviewed by Chad Capellman

NC: I’m Neil Chase. I’m the Deputy Editor for News at the New York Times on the Web. A couple of months ago I moved there from CBS MarketWatch where I was the Managing Editor. And at MarketWatch and at the Times, I’ve done a lot of work with the Media Center, followed the Media Center from its start-up and hosted a lot of Media Center sessions at MarketWatch. So it’s always fun to be here.

CC: The transition you made from MarketWatch, which had grown kind of on its own to some degree and not had a lot of the baggage, for lack of a better term, of some other entities, like the one you’re at now – how do you think that helps you get them where they want to be?

NC: MarketWatch was a pure start-up. A bunch of experienced journalists but starting up with very little editorial content from anywhere else, doing our own reporting, creating our own content. You come to the New York Times and there’s a lot of great reporting to work with. So it’s a very different challenge, but it’s a lot of fun to be at a place where there are 1,200 journalists in the newsroom doing this incredible work. The biggest frustration is that we can’t do more with so many more of the good stories because there are only so many hours in the day.

CC: You’ve got a lot of people here who are making a business of just taking everything that’s out there and making it sort of their own.

NC: The aggregators?

CC: The aggregators. And you’re in an organization that is as definitive as you can get from one organization in terms of the content that’s generated from that. What’s your perspective on how this all plays out and where we’re going to go from here.

NC: Well, one of the fascinating things here is being able to see the different players in this – not just the journalists who are collecting the content but the portals, the aggregators, the people who are getting the content and distributing it. There are a lot more ways to get our content out there these days. A lot more people can see it in a lot more different formats. We think we – professional journalists – will maybe always be the best ones to deliver that content, to create that content, to report that content, but the more ways to get it out there, the better. It’s just a question of learning those ways, understanding them, and making the most out of them, and maybe to a certain extent changing the way we do some of the reporting and production to match those ways it’s distributed.

CC: How do you see the evolution of the New York Times’ Web site in the next few years playing out?

NC: Ooh, good question. Being new at the Times, I see so much possibility, so many things we could do, so many things we are doing well, so many more things we could do. And it’s going to be a process of figuring out what’s next. The Times just announced their paid product, Time Select, starts in September, so one of the big focuses right now is gearing up for that, getting everything ready, making sure that when that launches it’s something that lives up to the title, Times Select, that it’s the best content. And people are going to be excited about getting it for the wonderfully low price of $49.95 a year. There’s a lot of work to be put in for that. We’re looking at design changes on the site. We’re constantly looking at ways to increase the reporters’ ability to work directly with us, to increase our producers’ ability to gather news in different ways.

CC: In light of the Jayson Blair upheaval and everything that came about with that, has there been any talk about using the site as a better tool to kind of help exchange with the readers and prevent those stories from getting out of hand the way they did?

NC: The couple of panels that have studied credibility issues at the Times in the past couple of years have both included in their recommendations ways the Web site can participate. And the most recent one announced a few weeks ago included suggestions that there be more interaction with reporters, more, if you will, transparency to the news gathering process, more ways to get reporters involved in either discussions with or answering feedback from or in some way relating more closely to the readers. And the Web site is the place that can happen. It’s an exciting place to be during all this, because the desire, not just at the Web site but throughout the news organization, to be a little more transparent, to be more accessible, to get the reporters, the editors, the journalists involved more with the readers – that all focuses around the Web site, so it’s going to be a lot of fun.