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Credit: Image by Bogden Suditu on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The New York Times launched a daily newsletter and rolling news feed covering US politics and elections yesterday, using multimedia and audience interaction to give politics reportage a fresh look at the outlet.

First Draft "is a pretty aggressive attempt by us to put some urgency into our political coverage", Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent and managing editor of the project, told Journalism.co.uk, while also hoping to make the subject matter more accessible to readers.

People are reading us much more on their mobile phonesCarl Hulse, The New York Times
The news feed is updated throughout the day with breaking political stories, "tidbits", videos, and pictures.

The morning newsletter, available to paying subscribers, also includes aggregated stories, although the focus is not on content curation.

As news story digests and round-ups are not lacking in Washington DC and New York, Hulse said First Draft's own aggregation also includes stories coming from smaller and medium sized communities from around the country, and email newsletters were an area the New York Times "needed to play in a little bit more".

"People are reading us much more on their mobile phones," he said, "and in the morning the mobile phone is something that people pick up and read with their breakfast now like they used to read the paper. So we wanted to have something that we thought was a substitute product that people could take advantage of along with their Cheerios."

ny times first draft screenshot
Screenshot of First Draft from NYTimes.com

Hulse said previous politically-focussed efforts from the New York Times, like the Caucus blog, did not have the same focus on video and photography.

First Draft, however, was set up with a conversational tone in mind and an emphasis on multimedia reporting, publishing a video interview with Vice President Joe Biden on the first day with more planned for the future.

"It's going to be a main part of this whole effort to be very visual," said Hulse, "and some of our items probably will just be a picture. So we think that's a big change and a real improvement from things we've tried in the past."

He said the content published on First Draft was going to be "a step different" not only from other newsletters in the same area, but also from the New York Times newspaper. "We're going to have information here that's not even in our paper, which may then move on to become a story in the paper."

It's just another political product that we have here that gives people greater insight into what's going onCarl Hulse, The New York Times
He said reporters collected a lot of "political news and tidbits" but did not have a space to write about all of them, "even though they were interesting and we would probably want people to know about [them]".

First Draft is a place for them to publish everything, he said, even if it is something "that maybe doesn't rise to the level of a full story".

Hulse said First Draft was also a new way to make the most of the Times' reporting resources, and to disseminate information "better, quicker, in a more engaging way".

The project gives people the opportunity to contact journalists behind the stories, and ask questions through email, Twitter, or a form on the news site.

Hulse said the interactive element was a chance for people to weigh in, and to ask any questions about politics that would be sent to and answered by the relevant reporter. He said the team was "open to all sorts of enquiries", including those about the reporting process.

He said he wanted to see First Draft as a "jumping off point" for people to read developing stories throughout the day that will be covered in a broader way in the newspaper.

"This doesn't supplant anything we're doing for the paper, it's just another political product that we have here that gives people greater insight into what's going on," he said.

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