Has the New York Times expanded its newsroom too much?

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Food portions, the economy, TVs, apartment blocks, wars and people – a week in New York has reminded me that America just keeps getting bigger.

You could add the New York Times to that list. This week AG Sulzberger, its publisher, revealed that its newsroom has now grown to 2,300 journalists, rising by more than 50% in the past decade. That makes it twice the size of the second-biggest traditional newsroom.

This could be seen as a marker of its continuing success. As consultants, when talking to clients about tactics and strategies we have to guard against “mention-itis” when it comes to the NYT. People understandably would just get irritated if all our examples of things that worked were from just one title.

It’s difficult to avoid though because the NYT is undoubtedly performing very well as a newsroom and as a company. The scoops keep rolling in and it is strongly profitable (though it is not alone in this respect – hat tip to my friends at the Wall Street Journal). Its product and diversification strategy is second to none.

I would not, however, view the increasing size of its newsroom as an unalloyed marker of success. Sometimes adding more reporters during times of plenty is not a good idea and can sow the seeds of problems later down the road.

In much of the recent discourse about the woes of the Washington Post, the blame has squarely been laid at the feet of Will Lewis, its recently departed publisher. Actually, the problems began in the good times, during the “Trump bump” years of his first presidency. WaPo’s leadership then went on a hiring spree, increasing the size of the newsroom from around 750 in 2016 to more than 1,000 in 2021, according to internal reporting.

The problem was that this hiring assumed that the good times would last for ever, or at least an extended period, and that they would automatically need more people to reach their goals.

In their case, that wasn’t true. And I worry that the New York Times might also be storing up problems for a later date.

There are a couple of main reasons for my concern. First, in structural terms, the traditional news industry is contracting and while there is a “winner takes most” dynamic at play that is benefiting the Times it is unlikely that it will stay immune from these forces in the long term.

Most analysts think that in an AI-mediated world newsrooms will have to be smaller and will need to produce more distinctive work to survive. Hang on, you might say, aren’t more journalists a good thing in that respect? Yes, if every single piece they produce can cut through the volume of AI-assisted content that will soon wash over us. That feels unlikely.

So newsrooms will need to assess very closely which of their reporters and editors is able to produce that kind of journalism on a regular basis. That’s all the more difficult if you have a couple of thousand of them.

Second, with 2,300 journalists you have 2,300 egos, many of them scrabbling for advancement. That’s not a bad thing, that’s just what people are like. But with that many people you will struggle to keep them even a majority, let alone all of them, happy.

When you are working for the New York Times there are not many other places you would like to work. Almost everywhere else would feel like a step down. People won’t leave of their own volition so the newsroom is going to have a problem with “bed blockers” and stifled ambitions.

I witnessed this during my time at The Sunday Times in London. For the best part of two decades, the top two dozen editing roles were locked in. Nobody left and very few people were promoted (I found the only way up was to apply for jobs that nobody else wanted). This meant that a whole generation of talented journalists became frustrated and eventually moved on, to the paper’s long-term detriment.

I hasten to add that this was in a newsroom that was performing very well at the time, both journalistically and business-wise. This is certainly the case at the New York Times as I write, but things change and having such a huge, and growing, staff might prove an anchor to its future prospects.

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the
transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]