In August 2014, Alexandra MacCallum took a new role on the New York Times masthead, charged with overseeing audience growth and engagement.
Just three months earlier, the Times had endured one of the most tumultuous periods in its more than 160-year history. Executive editor Jill Abramson had been suddenly fired, followed by the leak of an internal report that had detailed the paper's struggles to keep up with digital trends.
[seealso slug=http://sale-online.click/2014/05/15/new-york-times-digital/%5D%3C/p%3E%3Cp%3ESince then, the dust has settled enough for MacCallum to start kicking it up again.
"The Innovation Report has made the newsroom unbelievably open to trying new things," MacCallum told Mashable.
On Monday morning, the Times is launching its most publicly facing effort yet under MacCallum: A primary Instagram account.
The account will launch with photographs from around the world centered on a theme of "Beginnings." Photos from Bryan Denton's work around the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone will focus on people beginning to feel comfortable touching each other again. The campaign will run from March 9 through March 15 and also feature Newsha Tavakolian in Iran, Daniel Berehulak from Punjab, India and Adam Ferguson from Thailand.
Bryan Denton had been covering the #Ebola crisis in Freetown, #SierraLeone for about a day when he captured this moment. "It was the first time since I'd been there that I'd seen anybody be demonstratively physical or intimate," said Bryan, @bdentonphoto. To mark our first week on @Instagram, we'll share projects by seven photographers around the world, all inspired by the word "beginnings." #nytbeginnings A photo posted by The New York Times (@nytimes) on Mar 9, 2015 at 4:55am PDT
This might seem like low-hanging fruit, and in some ways it is. The Times already has numerous accounts for its particular sections including sports, travel and fashion.
More important than the actual account is the philosophy about why to do it. MacCallum said that there is a realization that there are potential Times customers on other platforms that they can reach.
"It's raising our profile with a different set of people than we're used to reaching, and I think that's a really important thing for the Times going forward," she said.
The Instagram account is just the most consumer-facing of many changes that Alexandra MacCallum has made since taking the audience development job. Her appointment raised some eyebrows, as MacCallum had spent years on the business side of the paper before moving into the editorial side.
MacCallum has made numerous changes to the Times' audience development process, including bringing managers of the social accounts into the newsroom. As a result, she said that traffic has increased from Pinterest and Facebook, with referrals from the later increasing 150% in the past five months. She worked to bolster the site's search-engine optimization, and older strategy that still drives important readers. The Times has also begun to use Google Analytics to get a better idea of its traffic patterns and increased its efforts on social media.
MacCallum said that those early efforts, although relatively simple, have already had an immediate impact.
"I'd say the first three months were really focused on building the team and a bunch of foundational capabilities in what we're doing and getting us set up with the right tools to do this type of work," she said. "We're very much kind of had a quick impact just by getting ahold of the tools."
The Times is also exploring other ways to reach out to readers including email newsletters and mobile alerts.
"I hope long term...that we're more sophisticated in thinking about engagement and what users we're bringing on which places," she said.