Kyle Massey is an assistant news editor. He has worked at The Times since 1999.
Since time almost immemorial, orientation for every Times newsroom worker has included attending a Page 1 meeting.
At the meeting, a daily Times ritual for at least 60 years, editors from each desk hashed out the day’s top stories, sometimes with a jocularity you might not expect.
Until this week, the gathering always culminated with “the lineup,” a list of articles to appear on the next day’s front page. The 4 p.m. meeting became the stuff of lore, and was even a focus of the 2011 documentary movie “Page One: Inside the New York Times.”
But since most modern readers get The Times on smartphones and computers, the executive editor, Dean Baquet, has refocused the gathering: The big daily free-for-all for editors to pitch their stories is no longer called the Page 1 meeting. It is the 4:30 news meeting, and the printed front page is not on the agenda.
A separate meeting for selecting front-page items will now be held at 3:30 p.m. with far fewer editors in attendance, led by the deputy executive editor Susan Chira; the creative director Tom Bodkin; and the director of photography Michele McNally. Editors from the news desk, senior journalists who coordinate the report, will join in. Still, the conference of seven or eight will be far different from past Page 1 meetings, which included 25 or even 30 editors.
The larger meeting will continue a yearslong evolution away from its front-page focus, responding to the needs of a constant news cycle. In recent years, Mr. Baquet had turned discussion toward story lines and trends, resources for breaking news, and rolling out enterprise and long-form stories in a reasoned way for digital users.
The change has been remarkable to many newsroom veterans, for whom success at the Page 1 meeting was always the holy grail. David Dunlap, a reporter and amateur newsroom historian, traced the formalized meeting back to the postwar years. “It was certainly an established affair by 1954, because — thank goodness — a Page 1 meeting was captured by Alistair Cooke’s ‘Omnibus’ program on CBS,” he wrote in an email.
The program was chronicled in Times Talk, an internal publication, in its April 1954 issue.
Turner Catledge, who later led the newsroom, wrote that he first established a daily news meeting in 1946, when he was assistant managing editor. The first meetings were stand-up affairs, he wrote. “In those days the Times newsroom had no conference table.”
But for the new age, Mr. Baquet has gone a step further, declaring that the big meeting — now held around a vast wooden table — will exclusively be a forum for planning coverage and for ranking items for digital display. One focus will be presentations for mobile devices, where more than half of Times readers now obtain their news. The meeting will serve as a follow-up to the morning news meeting, which sets the day’s goals and lines of reporting. That meeting has been moved from 10 to 9:30 a.m.
Mr. Baquet laid out his thinking in an email to the staff on May 5.
“The idea is for us to mobilize faster in the morning so we can get an earlier start on setting news and enterprise priorities, and to move the discussion of print Page One out of the afternoon meeting in order to focus on coverage regardless of where it appears, as well as to plan our digital report for the following morning,” he wrote.
On May 8, Mr. Baquet presided over the last meeting under the old format, and Ms. Chira celebrated the occasion with cupcakes. Dean Murphy, the Business editor, gave candy cigars to several editors who will continue focusing on the print newspaper. Mr. Baquet congratulated the newsroom, not always the most nimble group in changing its ways. “It is remarkable how fast all the desks have responded to a constant flood of change,” he said, raising his cupcake in a toast. “Thank you, and cheers!”
The new meetings include a category of stories to be ranked high for promotion on The Times’s home page and mobile news feed, and named for the editor himself: Dean’s List. “I didn’t come up with the name, but I like it,” Mr. Baquet said when the list made its debut several months ago. He later asked several editors to brainstorm on ideas for a less-personal name, but none of those names caught on.
Mr. Baquet made it clear in his note that the front page — and the print newspaper over all — remains a high priority for The Times, saying that “stories and photos that appear on Page 1 reflect our collective judgment about the most important journalism we are offering to our readers each day.”
But Mr. Baquet emphasized that the holy grail is now digital prominence. “We want to ensure that our digital report is of equal quality, and make sure we are giving the most readers the best version of all journalism when they want to read it,” he said. “Our large and growing mobile readership is coming to us early in the day and we need to continue to find ways to better serve that audience, as well as the many readers who find us on their desktops during the day.”
That leaves only one complication: The sign outside the large third-floor conference room says “Page One.”
“We’re thinking about changing the name,” Mr. Baquet said. “Any ideas?”