New York Times training editor: Take these four steps before you roll out new things

When I tell someone at work that I wrote a book called Saying No to New, I usually get a similar response each time. It’s something like, “But you advocate for new things here.”

It’s true. At The New York Times, I’m a deputy editor on the newsroom development and support team. Our job is to help reporters and editors learn new skills and tools through training and product rollouts. We train colleagues on AI, storytelling formats, engaging in the comments, and much more. And we build new tools that save our coworkers time so they can focus on making journalism.

Throughout my journalism career, I’ve worked on countless newsroom change initiatives at organizations big and small. You might say that I’ve been on the “new thing” beat, always studying emerging technology, and collaborating with colleagues to teach it to reporters and editors.

So, what gives? Well, it may sound counterintuitive, but the lessons in Saying No to New can serve as a secret weapon for newsroom innovation.

The first thing I tell people is that my book is not about saying no to all new things. It’s about resisting the pull of new things that distract us from what matters in life. Science tells us that humans are naturally drawn to novelty, which is why it can be so easy to get carried away by the hype of the next shiny new thing.

In our personal lives, that may be new stuff that costs money, creates clutter, or drains our time and attention. In a newsroom, that may be using technology in a way that conflicts with our journalistic standards. The book’s title, Saying No to New, acts as a sort of counterbalance to our bias for novelty.

But the book is also about leaning into newness — the right kind of newness. One of my central lessons is this: If you can get good at avoiding the wrong type of new, you’ll also get good at identifying the right type of new. At the Times, we are always on the lookout for new tools that help reporters parse complex data sets, or new workflows that save editors time. We help journalists grow their careers by teaching them new skills that will set them up for the future.

This nuance is important and core to the work my teammates and I do. Journalists certainly shouldn’t resist all new things if they want to stay relevant in this age of constant disruption. But we also shouldn’t recklessly embrace every newfangled thing that comes along. Striking that balance is the trick. You can do it with a strategy that investigates, interrogates, and experiments with new things.

Here’s how, drawing upon a decision-making framework I outlined in my book and examples from my career training journalists.

Embrace uncertainty

Humans do not like uncertainty — so much so that researchers have found that the more uncertain something becomes, the more stressed we become.

This matters when we’re training journalists on something new because a new thing is by definition an uncertainty. We don’t know how it will work, what will go wrong, or what will go right. Any new endeavor in a workplace is a journey down an uncertain path.

Here’s the problem: Because humans are allergic to uncertainty, we instinctively try to avoid it. One way is by thinking we can accurately predict the future. This is a phenomenon called the overconfidence effect. The more unknown something is (and thus, the more uncertain something is), the more confident we become in our ability to forecast the outcome.

This can get us into trouble at the start of a new initiative because we may set unrealistic expectations about it. This is known as the planning fallacy. When this happens, we “spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations,” wrote Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo in a 2003 piece in Harvard Business Review.

To overcome these psychological hurdles, we should embrace uncertainty. My team always tries to keep an open mind at the start of a project. We outline our plan but also take note of what we don’t know. We expect messiness at the start of something new.

This is especially the case with AI. When we are preparing to train reporters and editors on a new AI tool, there is a lot we do know. We know that the Times has stated clear principles for responsible experimentation, like how the technology should always be used with human guidance and review. But there’s also a lot we don’t know. For example, we don’t know all the different ways a reporter might want to use a tool for research. We don’t know for certain whether the tool will end up being useful or not.

This mindset allows us to lead with curiosity and not assume we have all the answers. It also makes any new initiative a collaboration with our colleagues so we can work with them to find answers to our burning questions.

Size it up

It’s a myth that caution and skepticism are signs of resistance to a new tool. In my experience, when my colleagues start asking questions, it means they’re curious (they are journalists, after all).

They want to know how something works, but also why we’re doing something new in the first place. Why should they use a new tool? What purpose does it serve?

Don’t avoid these questions. Lean into them. Size up the new workflow task in your content management system or the new AI tool. Spell out why you’re doing something — and specifically, how it serves the journalistic mission. Interrogate the value it will bring to the daily work of a journalist.

With every new thing my team works on, we think about what motivates New York Times journalists. Reporting. Editing. Finding the truth. Telling compelling stories. We push ourselves to understand how the new thing will serve those motivations.

We have a policy on our team that every new project must start with a proposal. The proposal involves six simple prompts:

• Overview: A one-sentence problem statement.
• Proposal: What you’re going to do and why.
• Goal: One sentence that explains what you expect to achieve as a result of the project.
• Who: Who is working on the project, who from leadership is overseeing it and who needs to be kept informed.
• When: When it will start and when it will end.
• How it will work: A short outline of the steps you plan to take.

By drilling into these details, we remove the noise and hype of a new thing and focus on what matters.

When in doubt, try it out

We can never be 100% certain about the outcome of a new project. But that doesn’t mean we can’t remove at least some of the uncertainty about it.

The single best way to improve our predictions about what a new thing can and cannot do is by trying it out. My team starts any new initiative with a pilot phase. The pilot allows us to dip our toes into a new thing before rolling it out to the entire newsroom. For us, that often means training a limited number of journalists and studying the results.

Keeping the project contained has several benefits. It allows us to observe and ask questions. And it lowers the stakes — we expect missteps at this stage because, again, we couldn’t have predicted what would happen. If we’re rolling out new technology, we collaborate closely with our colleagues in product to gather feedback about the tool.

Last year, we wanted to explore how we might teach journalists the ins and outs of easy-to-use AI tools that could be used to help them find information and sift through datasets. As a pilot, we had members of our team spend time with two newsroom departments, teaching the tools and answering questions, while also paying close attention to the potential use cases and challenges. Then we stopped, assessed how it went, and used the pilot to design a program we would later bring to other desks.

Learn to learn

I interviewed Adam Cifu, a general internist at the University of Chicago Medicine. I wanted to understand how he assesses new things in the medical field. I mean, who better to learn from than someone who makes life-or-death decisions?

Dr. Cifu told me about something called evidence-based medicine, a framework for making smart decisions. He said that an essential principle of evidence-based medicine is what doctors do after a new treatment or procedure has been rolled out. Doctors will examine the results of a new drug, for instance, to determine whether or not it worked as intended.

Although the stakes are quite different in our line of work, there is an analogous step when introducing new things to journalists. As a new thing gets implemented within an organization, we must also evaluate the results and learn from what we find out. We want to know how many people are using it, how they’re using it, and whether it is being used in ways that we hoped — and then use that data to make informed choices going forward.

Last year, my team partnered with the Audience team at The Times to train reporters and editors on how to participate more in our story comments to engage directly with readers. As we made our way across the newsroom, training our colleagues on the best practices for facilitating great conversations with readers, we carefully observed the results. In addition to a central question — are people doing it? — we also measured the quality of the comments themselves.

This assessment gave us a multi-dimensional view of the outcome, which we then used to make adjustments in future training efforts.