Notes on: NYT’s Nisenholtz’s Speech: The Importance Of Engagement - by @josephtartakoff 

- reaffirms the importance of identity.
- does it demonstrate how 'engagement' is becoming the new money-making buzzword?

Martin Nisenholtz, the SVP for digital operations at The New York Times Company, delivered the keynote address at the Wharton School of Business’ “Future of Publishing” conference on 30th April. Full speech can be found here

When Zuckerberg says that “web experiences want to be social,” he’s not just referring to social sites. He’s talking about the need for engagement across the web, including on publishing sites.

Re. NYT’s incoming paywall (2011) “the more engaged our users are with us, the more value we deliver to them, the more likely they will be to pay.”

But in thinking deeply about engagement—- what it means on the Web (and maybe off the Web) -  we’ve begun to view it as the essential moat around which our defenses are based; it is the emotional connection that our users have with us.

The media arts – including journalism – are fundamentally about storytelling. - But what is “storytelling” in an interactive network? What’s different about it online? It is about creating an essential human connection.

Why, for example do people spend so much more time with the print edition of The Times than they do, on average, with the web site?

Identity is, in my view, a fundamental building block for engagement <-- this Facebook has now proven it to be true.

Facebook works because it is rooted in identity.

The idea of users helping users is fundamental to the DNA of the web. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the worldwide web protocols, in part, so that scientists could link to one another, communicate with one another and help one another.

“I’ve always thought that among our most leverageable assets is our audience.” --> I’m referring to our audience as knowledgeable participants in the life our web site. This creates the essential emotional bond that will lead to real engagement in an interactive setting.

a site like nytimes.com must fully transform from a broadcast news experience, to an interactive network.
It must transition from being on the web, to being of the web.

What does it mean when we’re structuring geo-location (i.e. Foursquare) on millions of people? What does it mean to our readers and what does it mean to the businesses that serve them?  And let’s not lose the notion of more whimsical interfaces. All this meta-data is springing essentially out of something that’s really fun.

Betaworks About page, there’s a quote from a guy named David Reed who captures the essence of this new information ecology nicely. He writes, “The boundaries of your resources (read “site”) become liquid, public, shared.”