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The Public Editor

Facebook Live: Too Much, Too Soon

Recent New York Times Facebook Live events.

IT’S been just over four months since The New York Times started producing live video for Facebook, but already the scoreboard is flashing. A few earned gold medals. Several others finished strong. And a lot should never have made the team.

One of the medalists was Times journalist Deborah Acosta, who produced a pair of quirky, engaging videos after she happened upon some old Kodachrome slides trashed on a Midtown sidewalk. After consulting with her editor, Acosta turned on her camera and began a real-time hunt for the photographer who shot the images and for the person who threw them away.

Like Helen Mirren with an iPhone, Acosta tracked down leads, chased dead ends and live-streamed a suspenseful tale that ranks among The Times’s more successful videos in the emerging genre of “Live.” Reporters are always solving mysteries, but what made this unique is that Acosta did so both with her audience watching and with some offering up real-time clues.

These videos represent a potentially transformational form of journalism because they let stories unfold organically, live, and with the audience able to change the experience. What is also new is that this experiment is the first where The Times is producing exclusive work for someone else’s platform, in this case Facebook’s. Which means that virtually none of the hundreds of videos that The Times has produced can be found on its own website.

Why would the editors make such a deal? For the same reason other media companies have. Not because they revere Facebook, but because they yearn to reach its 1.7 billion users. Think of it like the annoying kid in high school who somehow gets invited to all the good parties; you hang out with him because he opens doors, not because he’s your best friend. This is the same, only with higher stakes.

While the terms of the deal are secret, the transaction requires Facebook to give The Times a guaranteed sum (reported to be $3 million a year) in return for a prescribed amount of video (so far it’s averaging upward of four a day). Neither Times officials nor Facebook would discuss the deal, citing confidentiality. Several other media companies, including BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Mashable, have also signed on. Their job: to stock Facebook’s pond with high-quality video so it can compete in the rapidly growing market for live-stream video.

For The Times the goal is twofold, says Louise Story, an investigative reporter who oversees the Live team. “One is to develop video that appeals to a Facebook audience, about two-thirds of which is under 34,” she says. “Second is to help people around the newsroom think more about audience.”

Ultimately, there is surely a hope that this could turn the valve on a new advertising stream.

That all sounds good. But here’s the problem. After watching countless hours of live video in the past few weeks, I have hit upon many that are either plagued by technical malfunctions, feel contrived, drone on too long, ignore audience questions or are simply boring, by I imagine most anyone’s standards.

Too many don’t live up to the journalistic quality one typically associates with The New York Times. Take one produced at the Republican convention, where we’re on the floor chatting up delegates. The idea is right, but the sound cuts in and out for three long minutes and becomes so grating that one Facebook viewer messaged: “WOW. THE AUDIO IS HORRIBLE!” Another added: “Unwatchable,” and one humorously said, “RIP headphone users...” Another video on raging fires in Canada shows the narrator staring off-screen while the sound keeps breaking up. Not a single flame ever appears. One viewer, April Simpson, sent in this comment: “It would be a much more effective interview if you could roll in some of the amazing video of the fire. Seriously, nyt contact me — I could help you with all of this.”

And in a category all its own, there is a video of an editor with two reporters who are pitching their stories in hopes of getting good play on the home page. It’s an odd meeting — of a type I’ve never seen nor heard of in my 30 years in newsrooms. And it turns out it was more of a simulation to show the kinds of conversations that take place in a newsroom. In other words, it was posed.

When Times live videos are good — and many are — they capture an immediate experience, feel spontaneous and put the viewer in a front-row seat with a hand on the controls.

It’s great when The Times hits the mark, as it did with a young man who was shot in the back while trying to elude the Orlando gunman last June. The video is raw and unpolished as Norman Casiano calmly gives a blow-by-blow of being squeezed into a bathroom stall with other panicked clubgoers desperate to escape. It drew 1.6 million views. Another popular video took us to Taksim Square in Istanbul for a protest one day after the attempted coup.

This is a puzzling predicament for The Times. On the one hand, it has before it a compelling new form of journalism, a young and eager audience, and the crown prince of social media opening up its checkbook. On the other hand, if you’re producing about 120 videos a month, implementing good quality control can take a back seat. Changing that might mean instituting clear rules of the road, like: no tedious interviews between two talking heads; no greenlighting weak ideas; and absolutely no videos that essentially fabricate scenes for the camera.

The Times’s top editor, Dean Baquet, believes mistakes are the price of innovation. “Have we done some stuff that’s not so pretty? Yes,” he says. “But the newsroom needs to get comfortable using their imaginative brains to tell stories in different ways.”

I need no convincing that live, interactive video is a medium worth embracing. If you’re not experimenting in the digital age, you won’t survive. But this particular experiment veers significantly from The Times’s past approach to new journalism forms. The newsroom has shown that innovation doesn’t have to equate with poor quality. Whether it was with interactive graphics, virtual reality or podcasts, The Times is a model for innovating at a thoughtful, measured pace, but with quality worthy of its name.

This time, that’s not the case. It’s as if we passed over beta and went straight to bulk. What I hope is that The Times pauses to regroup, returning with a rigor that more sharply defines the exceptional and rejects the second-rate. After all, the world has a glut of bad video and not enough of the kind The Times is capable of producing.

Evan Gershkovich contributed research for this column.

Follow the public editor on Twitter @spaydl and reach her by email at public@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Facebook Live: Too Much, Too Soon. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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