The New York Times now aims to make its mark in television

By Jay Bobbin

Gracenote

Long a mainstay of print journalism, The New York Times now aims to make its mark in television.

Getting its FX premiere Sunday – with each week’s episode also streaming on Hulu starting the following day – “The Weekly” shows reporters from the newspaper covering one story per half-hour.

The concept is to enhance a published article about the given topic in a highly visual and somewhat dramatic style, as the featured journalist works sources and visits related locations in service of digging beneath the headline.

“Journalism is under assault in a way that it never has been before,” reasons “Weekly” executive producer Sam Dolnick.

“On Facebook every day, there’s all kind of fake news being thrown about every which-way, where a nine-month investigation by The New York Times looks just like a random piece of information. The White House is attacking the credibility of journalists every day. We think that now more than ever, we need to stand up for journalism – and that the best way to do that is to be transparent and show how we know what we know, why we do what we do and the lengths we go to confirm the news that we’re reporting.”

Sabrina Tavernise, a New York Times national correspondent, adds that “trying to do something like this, where we get to show people exactly how we do what we do [while] reaching a very new and entirely different audience, is a pretty great thing. We are hoping that this is just a new way we can engage with people that we hadn’t before, and really show them [that] this stuff is kind of hard. Sometimes, you don’t quite understand what you’re looking at.”

At a time when journalists already are multitasking by necessity, New York Times national immigration reporter Caitlin Dickerson allows that doing “The Weekly” work “feels like yet another thing that falls to the reporter to have to do in this era ... but I think at the same time, it’s really opened up a lot for me in terms of storytelling and imparting information.”