Alex Hardiman: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we could of go back to when I started at the New York Times, because I started in late 2019, it was just right before the pandemic. It was pretty wild to come back to the company and to get shifted into this moment of needing to build products that really were trying to help people through the moment. At a time when our journalists were covering the story and all of New York Times' employees were trying to live through it. It was COVID 24/7 in terms of work and life. For me, I remember in the earliest days when we were first really reporting on COVID and learning about it, we had reporters on the ground in Wuhan even before we knew how COVID was transmitted. Then, when the world shut down, for the Times, we went fully remote in March, 2020, and I remember the day so well because it was the beginning of spring break, of course, all plans were canceled. My kids, I had no idea what to do with them. My husband and I panic packed, put them in a car, drove to go see some friends in Vermont, and we decided we were going to do a kid daycare pool share just to figure out how to keep working with someone overseeing the kids. We got there late at night and I literally just went into a laundry closet and I didn't emerge for two weeks because my Slack was blowing up about all of the work that we needed to do to make our products as useful as possible. The kids were being crazy and we just had to get to work. What was really stunning about this moment in time was that as people were getting sick and we were reporting about all of the trends that we were seeing, we saw that other institutions, especially the government, were not actually stepping up to help people understand the basic facts about what was happening. This is a product leader, it's a real wartime moment where you just need to blow up roadmaps, share context with everyone and say, "Okay, everyone, we have a totally different mandate than what we did a couple weeks ago." Given the needs in the world and the mission of the New York Times and our purpose, which is to help people access information to make informed decision about their lives, we're going to do a whole bunch of these things. We're going to build a comprehensive public data set of COVID cases. Nobody else is doing it. We really just started scraping and pulling this together, and what was a single spreadsheet at the time. We pulled a bunch of engineers from other teams to go help build out that database. We launched entirely new formats and data tools to make our journalism a lot more easier to follow. Things like tools to be able to look up infection rates and eventually vaccination rates down at your local zip code level. We made our most important COVID coverage free to everybody. It was really important that if it was something related to public safety, we didn't put it behind a paywall. Our mission is to do better than that. We really made sure that we had that information available to everyone. ant that if it was something related to public safety, we didn't put it behind a paywall. Our mission is to do better than that. We really made sure that we had that information available to everyone. We also just found that for journalists who hadn't actually been in Wuhan, they just needed tips to an internal safety guidance for reporting, and so we made that publicly available. It was just one of those really interesting moments where everything felt so crazy in this moment of crisis. But building purposeful products that made a really difficult moment feel not only possible but promising, was one of the most unifying moments, I would say, for our teams. Because even though people were working so hard and balancing work life and personal life, no one doubted for a second that the work they were doing was of greater good for the world. There's real privilege in being able to spend your time doing those things. But it's one of the biggest news stories of our lifetime and to be at the forefront of that, I think for all of us, was a pretty incredible and humbling experience. Wow. People talk about having impact and driving impact and it's usually like, move this metric some percentage, but that is some incredible impact. Helping people avoid COVID, avoid dying, keeping their families safe. It's got to be some of the most fulfilling work that you and your team has done and ideally it wouldn't have happened, but it was also probably incredibly fulfilling.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.