The New York Times

Designing an App for Audio Journalism — From the Ground Up

The Design Journey of The New York Times Audio App

How The New York Times Cooking Team Makes Personalized Recipe Recommendations

A look into how recommendation algorithms are used to help readers find the right recipes for them

A Week in the Life of a Team during The New York Times Annual Hackathon

Every year, The New York Times hosts an annual hackathon event called Maker Week.Teams across Engineering, Product, Design, Data and Insights, and Cyber technology have the opportunity to unleash their creativity and work together to explore new products, ideas, and technologies.

Estimation Isn’t for Everyone

Reduce overhead by removing one of them: estimation. We believe that mature Agile teams can evolve beyond the tedium of debating Fibonacci scores and operate better without them. Once your team turns its focus to breaking problems down to their component parts, all you need is a little math to plan your next project.

Day in the Life of a Senior Software Engineer on the Photo Publishing Team

I start off most mornings by taking my dog, Goose, to Prospect Park’s off-leash hours. It’s dog heaven! When we get back from the park, I make myself coffee and do Spelling Bee and Wordle, my morning…

Bringing Dark Mode to our News Apps

How teams across The New York Times launched the dark mode feature to our news apps

Day in the Life of a Senior Analyst in the Data and Insights Group

Natalia Bell is a senior analyst in the Data and Insights Group (DIG) supporting the Storytelling and Publishing mission, which aims to build a more dynamic, visual and trustworthy digital news report that transforms how our newsroom covers the news and our audience engages with us.

Technical Takeaways from Building an Animated Image Carousel on The New York Times iOS Core News…

An in depth look at how an animated image carousel was built to expose users to the breadth of NYT content.

Making Reporting Effortless, Especially for Security Researchers

Improving visibility of our responsible disclosure program through implementation of the security.txt standard.

Expanding our Front End Testing Frameworks

How to cover more testing ground and discover new front end code issues by using both JSDOM and browser-based end-to-end testing.

Meeting… Hispanic Talent at The New York Times

As Hispanic and Latinx Heritage Month has wrapped up, we are highlighting a few of our Hispanic and Latinx colleagues who have helped shape The New York Times Company with their work, from engineering to product.

How We Recreated the Dixie Wildfire’s Plume from Radar and Satellite Data

New York Times Graphics editors and R&D engineers worked with wildfire experts to visualize how fires create their own weather patterns. An engineer describes the process behind this data driven graphic.

Collective Decision-Making with AHP

How the NYT Identity team tried out the Analytic Hierarchy Process to select a user ID format.

Effortless Alerting for Platforms and Their Tenants

How The New York Times Publishing Pipeline team is harnessing the power of defaults to make the right path the easy path for tenants of our shared platform.

Adopting a New Framework by Composing a Community

How Android engineers at The New York Times came together to learn and adopt a new framework.

How The New York Times Uses Machine Learning To Make Its Paywall Smarter

When The New York Times paywall launched , its meter count was the same for all users. Since then, The Times has transformed into a data-driven digital company, and its paywall is now successfully using a causal machine learning model called the Dynamic Meter to set personalized meter limits, making for a smarter paywall.

Meeting…Black Technology Talent at The New York Times

For Black History Month, we are highlighting a few of our Black colleagues who have helped shape The New York Times Company with their work, from engineering to information technology.

Failover Plans, Outage Playbooks and Resilience Gaps

This is part two of an ongoing series about how The Times’s is working to improve the resilience of its systems. Read part one here. Over the past few years, New York Times Engineering has been…

Who Owns That Application? Check the Catalog

When The New York Times first joined the world wide web in 1996, there were a handful of engineers who maintained the website and publishing software. The number of applications that fueled The…

Meeting… Juliette Melton, User Researcher at The New York Times

What is your job title and does it mean? My title is Managing Director, User Insights & Strategy. I’m in the Audience Insights Group, and our mission is to help The Times grow by understanding our…

Product Design at the Pace of News

Last year, The New York Times formed a cross-functional team of editors, product managers, news designers, product designers, engineers and data analysts to innovate and scale live journalism…

Meeting… Kinshuk Varshney, Engineering Manager at The New York Times

What is your job title and does it mean? I am a senior engineering manager for the Data Ad Products team in the Advertising mission. I am responsible for the growth, development and wellbeing of the…

Assess, Test and Prepare for the (Un)Expected News Event

For the last few years, New York Times Engineering has embarked on 'election readiness efforts' to improve site reliability and systems resilience.

How We Reconstructed the Neighborhood Destroyed by the Tulsa Race Massacre

To commemorate the centennial of the Tulsa race massacre, graphics editors at The New York Times analyzed archival maps, city directories, census data, newspaper clippings and survivor accounts to…

Meeting… Romello Goodman, Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and does it mean? Senior Software Engineer on the UX Foundations Team. We work to ensure that The Times delivers a cohesive cross-platform user experience worthy of our…

A New Way to Share New York Times Stories

We hear frequently from New York Times subscribers that they would like the ability to share Times journalism with non-subscribers. We know how enriching it can be to share articles with friends and…

Tracking Covid-19 From Hundreds of Sources, One Extracted Record at a Time

As of this morning, The New York Times has made more than 9.98 million programmatic requests for Covid-19 data from websites around the world. The data we’re collecting are daily snapshots of the…

Meeting… Kathleen Kincaid, Executive Director for Development & Engagement at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? Executive Director for Development & Engagement. Our team creates and fosters programs that support the professional growth of New York Times employees…

Meeting… Andrei Kallaur, Principal Product Designer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I’m currently a Principal Product Designer with a main focus on the Audience Product team. This means that I work on both internal tools as well as…

The 3 Questions I Ask When Interviewing Job Candidates

Whenever I hire a data analyst for my team at The New York Times, I find myself inundated by a stack of resumes, LinkedIn messages and personal notes from colleagues recommending people they know. It…

The Training Is Coming From Inside the CMS

In an era where storytelling is constantly evolving, how do you seamlessly train a newsroom with 1,700 journalists spread around the world? That’s a question near and dear to the Newsroom Development…

Meeting… Aiyana Brooks, Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and does it mean? Software engineer. This means I write code to provide the solutions needed to drive business value. I currently work on an application called Event Tracker…

Threading at the Speed of Light

This is part two of a two-part series on how The New York Times Android team implemented several major library migrations. To read the high-level overview of how they made it happen, see part one…

4 Steps to Win Advocates and Implement a Technical Change

This is part one of a two-part series on how The New York Times Android team implemented several major library migrations. To read the technical details of the change, see part two here. Last year…

How We Manage New York Times Readers’ Data Privacy

When I first started working on the Data Governance team at The New York Times in 2017, I would often be met by blank stares when I tried to explain my job. Over time, I perfected my elevator pitch…

Meeting… Tony Giaccone, Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and does it mean? Senior Software Engineer. It means I have significant experience and I can not only solve complicated technical problems, but I can also mentor and provide…

How We Redesigned the New York Times Opinion Essay

Picture a dinner party. The table is set with a festive meal, glasses full of your favorite drink. A group of your friends gather around to talk and share stories. The conversation swings from topic…

Over 150 Million Photos, Some Perl Scripts and a Creaky User Interface

On an assignment, a New York Times photographer might take hundreds of photos but only file a handful of their best shots. These best photos, often referred to as “selects,” are typically uploaded…

Meeting… Ahmed Bebars, Lead Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and does it mean? Lead Software Engineer. I work with Customer Care, specifically on the Insights and Analytics team. We build platforms that gather and analyze data that help…

We Don’t Get Bitter, We Get Better

We created an assessment to bring operational maturity and site reliability engineering practices to our software engineering teams at The New York Times.

Meeting… Vanessa Jiménez, Associate Software Engineer at The New York Times

Most Times employees are working remotely right now. What does working from home these days look like for you? I wake up, make myself a latte and figure out what I’ll have for breakfast. Then, I’ll…

Meeting… Alexandra Shaheen, Program Manager at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I am a program manager who works primarily on engineering projects. I love bringing structure and order to messy and hard problems or situations. I will…

Meeting… Véronique Brossier, Lead Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I am a Lead Software Engineer. I principally work on the iOS newsreader app. My team and I are at the end of a production line of engineers: some build…

Meeting… Vicki Crosson, Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? My job title is software engineer on the Search team. That means I write and maintain various software systems that my team operates. It’s not a terribly…

An Update to Our SQL Interviews

Over the last few years, the Data & Insights Group at The New York Times has more than doubled as we have integrated data into all our business and newsroom processes. Our data analysts’…

Meeting… Tracy Z. Maleeff, Information Security Analyst at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? Information Security Analyst. I am a member of the cybersecurity defense team. Most Times employees are working remotely right now. What does working…

Meeting… Charity Garcia, Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I’m a Software Engineer on NYT Cooking’s engineering team. That means, I get to torture myself every day by looking at amazing recipes and enticing…

Meeting… Sarah Duncan, Lead Data Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? Lead Data Engineer. A data engineer is a software engineer who specializes in data-intensive applications. Most Times employees are working remotely…

Meeting… Drue Thomas, Senior Product Designer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I’m a Senior Product Designer on a team called Workflow, which supports the editors who publish the Times homepage multiple times a day. Technically, my…

Meeting… Christina Malis, Director of Customer Care at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? Director, Customer Care. I serve as product owner for one of Care’s cross-functional scrum teams: the Care Insights and Analytics team. Our work focuses…

Meeting… Carrie Price, Lead Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I am a Lead Software Engineer. Generally, that means I write a lot of JavaScript for our website. Currently, my team builds and promotes features that…

Meeting… Alice Liang, Sr. Manager of Data & Insights at The New York Times

I manage a team responsible for data on our newsletters, push notifications and some of our personalized surfaces. We identify opportunities for our products to grow, build pipelines to power…

Meeting… Cindy Taibi, Chief Information Officer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? Chief Information Officer. To me, it means that I lead the teams that a) empower our company and our workforce to work productively, efficiently and…

Meeting… Natasha Dykes, Senior Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job title and what does it mean? I’m a Senior Software Engineer on the Messaging Pipeline team. I work on a microservice application that is mainly written in Go, but has a little…

How We Rearchitected Mobile A/B Testing at The New York Times

In early 2020, the mobile engineering teams at The New York Times noticed an issue: our A/B tests were separating users at the wrong ratio. Tests that were supposed to allocate users into control and…

Meeting… Gerardo Núñez, Senior Data Analyst at The New York Times

What does that mean? I look at ways that insights from data can provide answers to questions like, ‘Which social media platform works best to promote certain pieces?’ and ‘How does reader interest in…

A More Accessible Web

Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act being signed into law, which banned discrimination against people with disabilities in all areas of public life. The…

Announcing the New York Times App for Slack

Over the last few years, The New York Times Audience team began paying attention to how Times journalism was shared in private messaging spaces like text, email and other chat platforms. The team…

Meeting… Angelica Hill, Associate Product Manager at The New York Times

What does that mean? My team is responsible for building and maintaining the back-end infrastructure for newsletters, emails and push notifications. These platforms are part of our shift to…

Meeting… Corina Aoi, Technical Product Manager at The New York Times

An interview with Corina Aoi, a technical product manager at The New York Times, on decommissioning legacy software, making career changes and how she starts her days.

We Recommend Articles With a Little Help From Our Friends (Machine Learning and Reader Input)

To create a more comprehensive personalization algorithm, The New York Times built a machine-learning model that relates article text to reader-selected interests.

Meeting… Jessie Wu, Software Engineer at The New York Times

What is your job? I’m a full-stack engineer with a focus in UX engineering for the Care Platforms team. What does that mean? The Care Platforms team works on the customer relationship management, or…

A Year in Illustration

As the art director for NYT Open, I have the privilege of working with artists and designers from all over the world to illustrate for The New York Times. Every piece that is published on Open is led…

To Serve Better Ads, We Built Our Own Data Program

When you browse the internet, the majority of the ads that you see are served by one or more ad technology providers that traffic in behavioral and demographic data collected from users. These…

Meeting… Steven Nedlin, Data Engineering Director at The New York Times

What is your job? I’m an engineering director in Data Engineering, and the engineering lead of the Transformation and Records group in the Data Platforms mission. What does that mean? I manage the…

Meeting… Shay Culpepper, Software Engineer at The New York Times

What does that mean? I work on tracking and analytics for our home screen, both on our website and our mobile apps. Right now, I’m building a dashboard so the newsroom can monitor click-through rates…

Traffic, Turkey and No-Knead Bread

Most years, the writers and editors of the New York Times Food section begin preparing Thanksgiving stories in the summer, sometimes cooking entire turkeys in their sweltering homes to test recipes…

Finding the Right Words

Words have meaning. This statement shouldn’t be a surprise coming from The New York Times, but for the technology industry at large, it’s something that has been increasingly discussed in recent…

Meeting… Sara Pena, Designer at The New York Times

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Sara Pena, a designer. What does that mean…

How the New York Times Technology Teams Prepared for the 2020 Election

What does it take to prepare The New York Times for a presidential election during a pandemic? For the teams that manage the website, apps, CMS and other technology systems, it took over a year of…

Meeting… Kendell Timmers, VP Ad and Growth Data at The New York Times

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. What does that mean? I manage the data teams responsible for advertising…

Announcing The New York Times Widget for iOS 14

The New York Times released its first widget for iOS 14 to help readers stay up-to-date on the latest news. The product was inspired by a Maker Week project.

Meeting… Ashka Gami, Marketing Director for New York Times Games

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. What does that mean? I focus on elevating the value of game play to drive…

To Find Photos in Our Archive, We Taught the CMS How to Read

How The New York Times CMS development team used natural language processing to help editors find news photography.

Meeting… Gaëlle Sharma, Technical Product Manager at The New York Times

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. What does that mean? I help make sure that New York Times readers can…

How We Made a Design System for NYT Cooking on Android

How the New York Times Cooking team made a design system for their Android app.

Meeting… Jeremy Gayed, Lead Software Engineer

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Jeremy Gayed, a lead software engineer. What…

Meeting… Natalya Shelburne, Senior Software Engineer

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Natalya Shelburne, a senior software engineer…

Meeting… Katerina Iliakopoulou, Lead Software Engineer

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Katerina Iliakopoulou, a lead software…

Innovating from Home: Maker Week at The New York Times

Maker Week is an annual tradition: New York Times employees in Data, Design, Marketing, Product and Technology are given the freedom to step away from their normal responsibilities and work on…

Design, Prototype, Zoom: How New York Times Interns Built a Game Remotely

How do you design a digital game with people you have never met in person? This was a question we faced this summer as interns with The New York Times Games team, which is working remotely due to the…

Meeting… Megan Araula, Lead Software Engineer

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Megan Araula, a lead software engineer with…

Published Assets? We Had a Few.

The New York Times has been publishing since 1851, which means we have a lot of publishing assets: 59 million. We used Kafka and Golang to sort them.

Meeting… Nimpee Kaul, Lead Program Manager

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Nimpee Kaul, a lead program manager for the…

How The New York Times Thinks About Your Privacy

The New York Times has made substantial changes to how we handle reader data, with an eye towards increased reader privacy. This includes better privacy practices around marketing, advertising and a more readable privacy policy.

Meeting… Tiffany Peón, Senior Software Engineer

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Tiffany Peón, a senior software engineer on…

Meeting… Storm Hurwitz, Senior Analyst at The New York Times

“Meeting…” is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Storm Hurwitz, a senior analyst on the News…

Meeting… Jasmine Chan

Meeting… is an ongoing series from NYT Open that features New York Times employees from different corners of the company. In this installment, we meet Jasmine Chan, an engineering manager on the…

Could Blockchain Be a Solution to the Issue of Misinformation Online?

When a news photo makes its journey from a camera to publication, it passes through many devices, technologies and people. Each step in this journey is designed to ensure the truthfulness and…

From Print to Digital: Making Over a Million Archived Photos Searchable

A block away from the hustle and bustle of Times Square in New York City, buried three floors below street level, lies The New York Times archive. The archive is housed in a sprawling room that is…

A New Look for ‘The Morning’ Newsletter

When readers of the Morning Briefing opened their inboxes on Monday morning, they were greeted with a redesigned and renamed newsletter. The Morning, as the newsletter is now called, has been…

To Apply Machine Learning Responsibly, We Use It in Moderation

Concerns over implicit bias in machine-learning software raised important questions about how New York Times comment moderators can leverage this powerful tool, while also mitigating the risks.

We Built a Plugin, but It’s Not a Secret

The New York Times has a lot of apps. No, we’re not talking about the apps that you can download from app stores, although we do have a couple of those. We’re talking about the applications and…

How The New York Times Works From Home

From reading poetry at team check-ins to virtual lunches, Times employees are experimenting with new ways of connecting with and motivating their colleagues.

How The New York Times Games Team Designed and Built Vertex

The game idea that would eventually become Vertex was born the weekend Sam Von Ehren moved to New York City. In the middle of unpacking, Von Ehren took a break to attend a friend’s party, where he…

How to Dox Yourself on the Internet

No one wants their home address on the internet. That is personal information we typically only give out to friends, family and maybe our favorite online stores. Yet, for many of us, that…

What The New York Times Metropolitan Diary Taught Its Illustrator about New York

Three years ago, I uprooted myself from California and moved to New York City. Like many New York transplants, I moved with the idea that the city would bring exciting opportunities and I’d…

How to Prepare for an Engineering Interview at The New York Times

Over the last couple of years, we’ve written about how we’ve changed our application and hiring processes for software engineering candidates at The New York Times Company. To ensure all candidates…

How Do People Decide Whether to Trust a Photo on Social Media?

This is part one of a behind-the-scenes look into the research, design and prototyping behind The News Provenance Project’s proof of concept that shows how publishers can use blockchain to surface…

What If Every News Photo on Social Media Showed Contextual Information?

This is part two of a behind-the-scenes look into the research, design and prototyping behind The News Provenance Project’s proof of concept that shows how publishers could use blockchain to surface…

Can Publishers Use Metadata to Regain the Public’s Trust in Visual Journalism?

“The thing about photos is that they carry with them a lot of credibility. Someone took a picture of something! The fact that you can have a genuine photograph, but the way it’s being used is bogus…

Looking Forward to 2020, Here are 10 Themes for News

The New York Times Product and Design Discovery team took a human-centered design research process to understand how people use technology and what that might mean for news.

‘Take Notes’—Lessons from a Project Management Internship

Madison Flanders, a summer, 2019 project management intern with the Technology Department at The New York Times shares five lessons she learned from her introductory role.

5 Questions with Bailey Richardson

An interview with People & Company’s Bailey Richardson about her time as one of Instagram’s first 10 employees, her research around building communities and how to build long-lasting connections.