Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor at the New York Times, recently spoke to TPM about his years at the Grey Lady, his social media strategy and the impact of the paper’s paywall. What’s the most dramatic change you’ve seen in your 25 years at the Times? I definitely think the transition to digital — it’s enormous, it’s ongoing. Change is hard. Dealing with disruptive technologies left and right requires a lot of energy, a lot of imagination. And every institution like ours deals with it. Just as we’ve mastered the Web, we then are faced with a completely new environment in which people are getting information on their phones. Tablets are now creating their own different types of use cases and consumption. Social media came out of nowhere. If you and I had this conversation four years ago, we wouldn’t be talking about Twitter. Maybe we’d be talking about smart phones, but we wouldn’t talking about tablets. The pace of change gets faster and faster. The disruptions come more quickly. So it’s tough, but it’s been also really gratifying to watch an institution that’s big and based in tradition. It’s been gratifying to be part of the adaptation process.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=95614