Do you remember going to the video?

For those of you who weren’t paying attention to the media industry a decade ago: that’s when publishers spent an enormous amount of time and money trying to become video creators, hoping to cash in on the traffic and revenue bonanza fueled by Facebook.

That one didn’t work.

But now publishers are trying again, creating videos that live on their own sites and are designed to travel around the Internet. You can see a very prominent example of this right now at The New York Times, which routinely displays videos of its reporters talking about the news on its home page.

“It’s as big a transformation as the print-to-digital transformation” that began a couple of decades ago, says Joe Kahn, the Times’s top editor.

Unlike the last video push, made largely at the behest of Facebook, which provided all kinds of incentives for publishers to make videos, the Times doesn’t see video as a revenue stream — for now.

Instead, Kahn says his company simply has to make videos, because that’s what news consumers want. And not making a New York Times video means they’ll see something else instead.

“We will always offer good journalism in text form,” he told me in an interview this week. “But the idea that we can continue to refine the form of text as people’s viewing habits change, I think it’s kind of a head in the sand.”

Kahn and I talked about many other topics during our talk, which you can hear in its entirety on my Channels podcast. Among them: how Kahn processes the Times’ continued criticism for exaggerating or understating different stories; how the revelation that Dianna Russini, the former star reporter for the Times-owned Athletic, was making $800,000 a year was affecting her staff; and why Kahn is less interested than other media leaders in integrating Substackers and other types of creator economies at the Times.

The following is an edited excerpt from our conversation:

Peter Kafka: There are a ton of videos on the Times site right now. Is that for existing readers? Is it to attract new readers?

Joe Kahn: It’s the biggest and most important transformation currently taking place in the newsroom: what we believe is our own proprietary formula for integrating great video journalism with the rest of our journalism.

I think it has the potential to allow us to bring very good quality, original reporting to a much wider audience than we currently have.

Does that mean more people will come to the Times because it has a video? Or will the video be distributed on TikTok and Reels?

Both. It is a way to bring journalism to a broad demographic of curious people on the Internet, who prefer to obtain news and information in short videos, with a direct conversational approach from an expert journalist. Or being taken to the scene of a news event and exposed directly to what that person is watching and reporting on at that moment.

It is traveling very well on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. But it’s also working very well on our own site.

Is the profile of someone who watches a video in The New York Times different from that of someone who reads The New York Times?

Not on our own site. We are getting a very good reaction from subscribers who read and watch.

Off-platform, I think we’re reaching an audience that isn’t used to reading long-form journalism, but is very open to having a journalist, who has spent days, weeks and sometimes months reporting on a given topic, give them a two- or three-minute summary of that work. In two or three minutes you can convey a lot of really valuable information.

They are doing enormously well in people’s feeds and introducing them to our journalists and the work they are doing.

It is longbow work. It is not part of the link economy like Google Search was.

Don’t you think people watch a New York Times video on TikTok and then go to the Times site to read more?

We know that people who discover journalism through Google will come and interact directly with that journalism, and some of them will get used to reading.

There is less of a direct path for these videos. But that doesn’t worry us at the moment.

What we are concerned about is making sure we compete with very good quality journalism on these platforms, which would otherwise be inundated with garbage.

You want to be there saying, “We’re The New York Times, we provide good information. It may not be on our site for a long time, but we want you to know we’re here.”

I agree with that.

And you’re not monetizing that.

There’s no immediate way to monetize that and we’re not worried about monetizing it now.

I firmly believe that as people become more exposed to high-quality reporting and information in their feeds, in whatever form they want, they will want more of it.

It will raise your expectations of what good reporting is. It will differentiate us from influencers who don’t do original reporting and help seed the environment for quality news and information.

Journalists have all kinds of different skills. What about reporters who aren’t good in front of the camera, or who don’t feel comfortable in front of the camera, or who don’t want to be in front of the camera? How should they think about their careers?

There will be many reporters who will not have a video presence. We don’t insist that everyone do it.

At the moment, we have somewhat the opposite problem. The demand for videos that accompany the good journalism we are doing exceeds the supply we can make.

People knock on your door and say, “I want to be on camera.”

We are adding dozens of video journalists to all news desks to have more capacity to do video journalism.

An individual journalist and a couple of editors can produce a text journalistic article. You have to multiply that by two or three to get a two-minute long video, integrating graphics, integrating clips.

You’ve been in this job for the last four years and you will have it for another four years. What’s first on your to-do list for that stretch?

The transformation of the New York Times newsroom into what I hope will be the premier multimedia news organization, where we offer journalism in multiple forms, including video forms that serve a much larger audience, is enormous.

It’s as big a transformation as the print-to-digital transformation that I and many others have been involved in over the last 15 or 20 years. This is such a big structural adjustment for us and a priority in terms of our journalistic storytelling.

I’m surprised to hear you put so much emphasis on it. I was like, “Okay, you have a dedicated team that makes videos and some of your reporters will be on camera.”

It will affect every part of the newsroom and the way we write a large subset of our stories.

I think we should be prepared. We will always provide good journalism in text form. But the idea that we can continue to refine the form of text as people’s viewing habits change, I think is kind of a head in the sand.

We are in a race against time to make sure good quality journalism competes with the AI-generated non-original journalism and influencer-generated non-original journalism that exists on the internet. It’s imperative that we can translate the good work we’re doing into the ways people want to consume our journalism.

And if in the next four years – it’s going to take a lot longer to get it to scale – but if in the next four years we can make a really big down payment to integrate into the core of The New York Times, I’ll consider that a pretty significant transformation of the place.