Wrestling With The Gray Lady

The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

My wife was incensed. She felt personally betrayed by the Times, sensing that the publication had intentionally ignored the ACC news (she also fumed that the Biden administration must suck at comms, which is another highly relevant story). I was a bit more sanguine – I figured we probably just missed the coverage. You can’t read everything the paper publishes, after all. A quick search would tell the tale. I pulled up the Times app on my phone and…

“Where’s the damn search function?”

Now *I* was incensed. But indeed, there is no search function on the “front page” of the Times app. Instead you’re presented with a river of news stories, and four options as permanent chrome at the bottom: “Today”, “Play”, “Sections”, and “You”. As I stared at an interface I’d never really thought about until that very moment, I realized I didn’t use the app’s navigation much. “Today” – the river of news I’ve already been presented – was where I lived. I sometimes hit “Sections” to dive into Business from time to time, but “Play”? Nope, I have a separate app for that. And “You”? I don’t want a news organization to tailor its work to me. I want to know what’s important in the world regardless of my personal preferences – news is a public good, after all, which means the public should share the same information ecosystem.

But this lack of a Search feature struck me as potentially insidious. Coupled with an endless stream of news, the NYT app felt functionally identical to Instagram – an algorithmically tailored feed of content designed to keep me scrolling. Was it possible that the Times had made a conscious decision to keep me – and by extension, all of us – from using the Search feature so as to keep me mindlessly engaged in the app? This would be exactly the same kind of behavior evinced by Meta, Google, and the rest of the surveillance capitalism crew.

In other words, if we all missed the news about the American Climate Corps, it was because the Times had decided it was not worthy of its main feed. Could that be true?

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The answer to these questions turns out to be as gray as the Gray Lady herself. First, let’s get our facts down: The Times did cover the ACC, though sparsely. I eventually found the Search function (it appears at the Section level, and at the top on the Web). Since its launch, the ACC has appeared in a handful of stories, though half of them were roundups:

OK, so the Times didn’t completely ignore the ACC, but clearly, it didn’t feel it merited much coverage (search for “Donald Trump,” on the other hand, and you’d be left with the impression that he’s the most important figure ever to walk the earth.) It’s impossible to know whether the Times‘ original story on the ACC made “the river” on the day it published. Online, Times stories sometimes mention where they were placed in the physical paper, but the launch story has no such designation. So I guess I’ll never know whether we simply missed it, or whether Times editors determined it wasn’t worth promoting.

As for my concerns that the Times was using insidious design principles to lull me insensate, I think there’s a pretty simple reason the company’s product designers haven’t put Search front and center in the app: The search feature is terrible. I can’t tell you why I know this for sure, but suffice to say, I’ve heard from enough well-connected folks to feel confident about the statement. If you’ve ever spent any time with the Times‘ search function, you’d probably agree. No publisher wants to put a bad feature in front of the majority of its audience. I forgot that in the heat of my initial frustration. Mea culpa. 

Regardless of whether it’s slowly morphing into Instagram, the Times wasn’t alone in ignoring the Biden administration’s plans for the ACC. A Google News search for “American Climate Corps” finds close to 4,000 results, but most of those are in niche publications, or retreads of government press releases. The ACC never made it into my “left of home” news feed on my phone, never came up while I doom scrolled Threads or Instagram, failed to materialize in my daily perusal of the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, and was absent from water cooler chats with my students, colleagues, and friends over the past six months.

In short, the ACC isn’t news. While my wife and I think the ACC should be a big story, almost no one else does. Which led me to another set of questions: Do we all see the same thing when we scroll the feeds of trusted news organizations like the Times or the Post? How are the decisions impacting my understanding of the world being made? Can these even be called “decisions” when there’s no way of understanding relative importance – no physical containers into which news must be poured?

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There is one “container” in the Times’ digital product lineup where one might identify how editorial decisions are being made. Like about 15-17 million other humans, my front door to the Times comes via “The Morning,” a daily email newsletter that graces my inbox early each morning. Based on industry standard metrics, The Morning is likely opened by 5-6 million people each day – making it one of the largest and most influential media vehicles in the world. If I were working at the Times, I’d care – a lot – about what The Morning was pushing each day. More than any other product, it’s become the “front page” of the paper – its voice, point of view, and personality.

Over the past year or so, The Morning has started to annoy me.

Consistent with the company’s push to become a lifestyle company, The Morning often leads with “soft” features about cultural trends, pop-psychology, and, lord help us, self-help. In the past two weeks, for example, millions have endured lead stories like Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups (how audio books can soothe us to sleep), Saving Time (time management skills) and The Gen Z Crossword Era (“a spirited conversation with modern culture.”) These stories are tuned to what I’d call the NPR crowd – an audience that’s on average older, more educated and affluent, and more liberal than most news readers. Put another way, The Morning is built to engage its core audience – and for whatever reason, I find it offensive.

I can’t say that The New York Times is wrong to put a sweater and a pair of slippers on its largest email newsletter. I’m sure there’s a bevy of market research telling its managers that we’d all prefer to hear about how the eclipse might bring us together, or nod along while an editor notes that we all seem to love a good story about marathons. I just happen to disagree. Tough luck, buddy, the Times seems to be saying back to me. Try your luck over on X.

But…I’d certainly like to be able to ask the Times‘ to only send me “real news,” a term I’m pretty sure the editors there understand. I’d like to tell it to include all of its coverage of the climate crisis. But were those features to be available, I’d only be creating my own filter bubble. I’d end up divorced from the shared reality that products like The Morning create. And shared reality is what constitutes “the public,” no?

It’s a dilemma, one I think our entire society is experiencing. I’ve always understood the job of the news business to be singular: To tell hard truths to people who need to hear them. What happens to journalism when no one wants to hear them anymore?

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