Building the Future
of Journalism with
Verizon 5G

In January 2019, The New York Times and Verizon announced a collaboration focused on defining and delivering journalism in the 5G era.

At The Times, the relationship is anchored within the Research & Development team, a group structured to execute on both near-term and long-term opportunities presented by emerging technologies.

With support from Verizon, The Times is exploring how to best incorporate 5G — the next generation in wireless technology — into its operations, while also exploring new formats Times readers will experience in 5G.

In 2019, Times R&D has focused on creating a “5G ready” newsroom alongside journalists, with support from Verizon, through experiments and field tests that include:

• The Kentucky Derby — In May, R&D team members and Times photojournalists used custom-built hardware to publish high-quality photos from the field to the newsroom. This sped up their live coverage, and allowed The Times to publish a photo of the winning horse 20 minutes ahead of photo wire services.
• Political Coverage — R&D team members and Times newsroom staff members conducted additional field tests in live coverage on the 2020 campaign trail, including the Democratic primary debates and the Iowa State Fair.
• High-Resolution Imagery — The R&D team and journalists from the Graphics desk advanced the use of photogrammetry, a high-resolution image capture capability that allows the newsroom to visually reconstruct scenes as large as a city block. The Times used this technique last September to document the devastation from Hurricane Dorian on Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas.

This work fosters new storytelling capabilities and sets the stage for The Times to leverage 5G in more transformative ways in 2020 and beyond.

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. 

For 168 years, The Times has continually adapted to meet the evolving needs of its readers. Today, The Times is a multimedia news organization, one that operates around the globe and around the clock.

A key component of The Times’s innovation journey is the timely and responsible adoption of new and emerging technologies, everything from artificial intelligence to augmented reality.

Verizon 5G serves as a force multiplier for many capabilities, creating opportunities for new forms of journalism.

Given the potential for an organization like The New York Times and the exciting applications made viable at scale by 5G — from telemedicine to autonomous mobility — the time to start building is now.

For the 1,700 Times journalists around the world, it starts with access to 5G in the field as soon as it becomes available.

In reporting, seconds matter. 5G’s ultra-fast speed and massive capacity should allow HD content to be delivered in near-real time, empowering journalists to file rich, high resolution media from the field. It should also facilitate more constant communication between field reporters and their colleagues in The Times’s newsrooms and bureaus.

As more consumers and businesses adopt 5G-enabled devices, delivery constraints imposed by prior-generation networks recede. This allows an organization like The Times to produce more visual and truly immersive storytelling experiences. 

Verizon 5G also has the potential to transform people’s understanding of journalism by putting more source material in their hands.     

5G should enable more efficient connections between reporters and readers, and it can help create pipelines for producing journalism, including those that were once out-of-reach.

The Times can create new products and offerings in areas like live coverage and more detailed real-time coverage and analysis.

The New York Times is committed to building the next chapter of journalism on 5G by working with Verizon to put new forms of storytelling directly into the hands of readers.