Entrevista Jim Roberts, el NYT online

El primer redactor jefe de la página web del New York Times fue Bernard Gwertzman y en 2001 todavía tenía serios problemas para entender lo que estaba sucediendo en la web. El Times insistía en cobrar por algún tipo de información y estaban pasando la barrera de los hipervínculos. Pero ya notaba que los periodistas digitales no eran simples redactores, sino más bien productores. Hoy es Jim Roberts quien está a cargo de una de las páginas más llamativas de los websites de noticias: encabeza la lista de visitas únicas (13 millones al mes), superan los 20 minutos por visitantes y consigue 27 páginas por vista. En la siguiente entrevista, realizada hace unos meses Roberts da señales de los cambios que está haciendo el NYT en la web, mucho más que entregar a sus columnistas gratis a la audiencia.


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Mr. Roberts oversees the news operations of nytimes.com, managing a staff of reporters and editors on the continuous news desk as well as editors and multimedia producers in the Web newsroom. As he sees it, his mission is to bring the immediacy and interactivity of the Web to The New York Times, while spreading The Times's journalistic standards, depth and authority to the Web.

He joined The Times in 1987 as a copy editor and held a variety of editing jobs on the national, sports and metropolitan desks. He served as deputy metropolitan editor for regional news; national political editor, coordinating coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, the election and the 36-day aftermath; and national editor. In 2006, he became director of continuous news and was later promoted to editor of digital news.

Several other editors have answered questions in this column, including Executive Editor Bill Keller, Obituaries Editor Bill McDonald, Assistant Managing Editor Glenn Kramon, Director of Copy Desks Merrill Perlman, Metropolitan Editor Joe Sexton, Living Editor Trish Hall, Investigations Editor Matthew Purdy and National Editor Suzanne Daley. Their responses and those of other Times editors are on the Talk to the Newsroom page.
These discussions will continue in future weeks with other Times editors.

What Is the Task at Hand?
Q. Forgive me but I have the most unimaginative question for you: Your mission "is to bring the immediacy and interactivity of the Web to The New York Times, while spreading The Times's journalistic standards, depth and authority to the Web." How do you do that? What is the task at hand — at the scale of writing, structuring and anything else. Do you have any papers you have written about your work? Any insights or references would be most appreciated.

A. Actually there's nothing unimaginative about the question. It'll be up to me to make the answer imaginative.

It took me awhile to compose the line you quoted because I wanted to precisely convey the sense of balancing the allure of the new with the responsibilities of the old, without sacrificing either. In other words, we want nytimes.com to be timely, lively and reflective of the excitement and dynamism of the Web, yet we also want our loyal print readers to feel at home when they see what we do online.