A day in the life of the NYT online business editor

Nikki Usher, a journalism professor at George Washington University, writes for Nieman Journalism Lab about work at the New York Times when she was immersed with the staff.

Here is an excerpt:

Most days when I was doing my research, I would get into the newsroom in the morning and prop myself up comfortably in a chair next to Mark Getzfred, the online editor for the business section, before heading off to do any other research. Some highlights from his work days, which began when he took the train at 6 a.m. from his home in Connecticut and read on his BlackBerry and Kindle until he arrived in New York by 7:30 a.m. or so, then ran to at least 5:30 or 6 p.m., show how the business desk attempted to fill the need for online content. Like Sussman, Getzfred took to his job with intensity, underscoring the obsession with the new and what was now online.

Getzfred began his day trying to find fresh stories for the business web page and the business global page (the main business pages) that had not been in the business section the night before. He started by searching through International Herald Tribune content that had come in from the night before; the business desk relied on the content from the partnership with this paper owned by The New York Times Co. to help fill the morning edition.

So, for instance, on January 12, 2010, he spent his morning (as he did most mornings) reframing a story from the Asia bureau of the International Herald Tribune on Japan Airlines’ struggles with bankruptcy, just to get something new on the page. He followed this up with a story on Airbus, the European airline manufacturer, another story that had come from the IHT. Both stories went up (though in different places) on each of the business pages.

He would constantly scan the wires, and he would begin rewriting a markets story even before the U.S. markets opened. An Asia-based writer would have left off this story in the very early hours of the U.S. morning, it would have been picked up by the European markets writer in the Paris bureau of the IHT by early morning U.S. time, and then Getzfred would begin filling in the details about premarket trading in the United States, gleaning content from the wires. He noted that this was one of the most popular stories on the site — “people like reading about markets and we give it a little context” (again emphasizing how the Times hoped it was providing value-added content). Around 9:45 a.m., he stopped for a brief 15-minute meeting to discuss what was going to be available on the website with the other web editors. This was the meeting that Sussman said he couldn’t hear — despite the fact that this was one of the few moments when web editors got together to talk about stories. Notably, this meeting only described what was available and the importance of these stories at a particular moment.

Read more here.