Behind the NY Times’ one-word tech story

Daniel Victor of the New York Times writes about how his one-word tech tips story published Friday in the paper came about.

Victor writes, “At this point, Katie Rogers, another reporter on our team, suggested we give The New York Times a contributing line, which is something we normally do when a reporter has worked on a story but not quite enough to warrant a byline. I tweaked that to ‘The New York Times’s internal email system,’ and we were ready to publish.

“But first we had to decide if we really, actually wanted to publish this. Would anyone get the joke? Was it even funny? Were we ruining our reputations, individually and institutionally? Would we be fired?

“We would have to experiment now and (maybe) apologize later, we decided, and Ms. Joseph hit the publish button. We nervously awaited the response, which initially was dominated by confusion — one colleague privately messaged me to make sure we hadn’t published it accidentally. But soon it became apparent that our audience was overwhelmingly appreciative (evidenced by bursts of delighted laughter and comments in the newsroom, plus a flood of positive Twitter commentary), and I was able to breathe easier.”

Read more here.