The New York Times Effect

It's the gold standard for newspapers. It has a daily circulation of more than 1.1 million and its staff columnists collect Pulitzer prizes like carnival trophies. The stories that it runs on its front page set the agenda for every other news organization. The New York Times is a news behemoth. And this is something of a problem.

We've all heard about the New York Times Effect on restaurants and movies. Journalist Seth Godin writes that when the Times wrote a positive review of his neighborhood cafe business spiked and the line of customers pushed past forty. The spike in business lasted more than a week. A good review can make a business soar, a bad one can push it into the gutters. But the Times has a different effect on journalism. The newspaper has something of a monopoly on stories and it sets the rules about what stories can and cannot be told.

In order to convince a magazine or newspaper to devote precious page space to a story, the idea first needs to jump through several difficult hurdles. First the piece needs to be relevant to the readership and to be genuinely interesting. Second the story has to feel fresh--this means that other major news outlets shouldn't have covered the subject recently.

The first barriers is hard enough to get across. Editors have very definite ideas about what sorts of topics are relevant to their readers. Many stories get killed in their infancy before they even start. But the second barrier can be even more troublesome. Since many news stories are interrelated, how does an editor decide the bar for what counts as fresh?

Last week I pitched a story that aimed at exploring kidney scandal in Delhi where a notorious organ broker kidnapped unsuspecting workers and stole their kidneys. Other publications had already covered the scandal, but I had new information from the WHO that two American insurance companies were paying for organ transplant surgeries abroad—an issue that raises important ethical questions about the future of transplant surgery.

I got two responses from editors. An editor at a major business publication said:

“And I could swear I read a story like this recently in the NYTimes, although I could be hallucinating. It’s a great idea for someone, though, and a very well-considered pitch.”

And another from a top technology magazine said that the editors loved the idea, but the story seemed too familiar:

"BTW this is becoming a common problem. People in this office are
longstanding voracious readers. Everything is too familiar."

I had seen Amelia Gentleman's coverage in the New York Times of the kidney trade, but so many publications had been writing about the subject that I had to double check to see if indeed, she had covered the width and breadth of the issue in the article's 1000 or so words. The article is quite good, but is little more than day one coverage. There is no investigation into the very sinister international side of the crime. Certainly there was no reference to insurance companies that might have footed the bill for the expenses.

The problem isn't actually the fault of the Time's reporting staff, rather it's the weight that people put on Times articles. In my years as a reporter I have had more stories rejected because of previous NY Times coverage than because of prior coverage in any other publication. It doesn't seem to matter as much if TIME magazine or or Newsweek run cover stories on a subject, just so long as the NYT hasn't sent reporters to the field.

For reporters on the Times staff, the situation is precisely the reverse. They can cover any story they want, not matter how tired the subject is. Right now the Times is running a series of stories on sports scholarships which is basically the same exact article written over and over again by different reporters. Last week, Amelia Gentleman covered the sharp increase in Indian surrogate mothers selling pregnancy. The issue had already been a cover of TIME magazine in Asia, Marie Claire, The Christian Science Monitor, the BBC, a major special on the Oprah Winfrey show and dozens of other publications. I'd known about this story for more than two years before the NYtimes reported on it. It is such a familiar story that it should have never gotten past an editor's scrutiny.

The heart of the problem is that every editor I know reads the NYtimes religiously. No matter what their beat is, they see the paper as a direct competitor of their own publication. The times, on the other hand, thinks that it is peerless and can run any story it wants to. In the end, all this does is reinforce the NYT's position as a canonical newspaper. It gets to recycle the best original content from other publications, and then, once it has done so, stops the news coverage of that particular subject.

As an independent journalist, it is hard to always be in the shadow of the New York Times Effect.