The idea for this project began on a blustery spring day on a visit to an office inside the recesses of The New York Times. The day’s agenda was to better understand the process whereby Glenn Kramon, then the assistant managing editor for enterprise, helped decide which of the Times’s many stories from the previous year should be nominated for the Pulitzer Prizes. His desk was littered with books, printouts, envelopes, and handwritten notes. On the wall hung a proudly framed full-page ad that the Ford Motor Company had taken out, promising improvements in response to the paper’s investigation into SUV rollover deaths in the late 1990s.1weren’t entirely unusual in a building where you can easily find yourself in a hallway covered with portraits of award-winning teams and their front pages. But the scene was striking for the simple fact that here, for lack of a better description, unfolded a crucial step in how the impact sausage was made.
The process was this: Whenever a Times investigation was mentioned in a meaningful way, whether it be a citation by a competing publication, a complimentary letter from a senator, or an official response by a corporation or government, a slip of paper would make its way from Kramon’s desk into one of dozens of large manila envelopes that were filled, hand-labeled, and filed in boxes under his desk. Pulling a seemingly random scrap from one of the envelopes on the iEconomy series—an explanatory series that would later win that category’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize2describing pickup from an unusual source. “I knew ‘iEconomy’ was big when Saturday Night Live spoofed it,”3 As the conversation progressed to the question of how one might actually measure impact, Kramon reached under his desk again, pulled out an overloaded envelope, and squeezed it to demonstrate its thickness. “Do you want to know what impact is? It’s this right here.” That was to say: at the end of the year the stories with the thickest envelopes—the ones that resonated the most with the outside world—were the likeliest candidates for submission.
How newsrooms conceive of and measure the impact of their work is a messy, idiosyncratic, and often-rigorous process—based at times on what simply seems worth remembering during the life of a story; at others, on strict guidelines of what passes the “impact bar.”
As a result, we conceived of our related research project in two parts: first as an attempt to understand how and through which processes news organizations both large and small currently approach the “impact problem” and second, to see if we could develop a better way—through building a technology platform called NewsLynx—to help those newsrooms fill the proverbial envelope.