The New York Times joined Pinterest Friday, posting an array of photos from the food, home and style sections.
A team of editors tinkered with the image-board-based social network for months, strategizing the best way to translate the Gray Lady's staid editorial voice onto the website, the Times' social media editor told TheWrap.
"We wanted to present, still, the most compelling and visually arresting and, in most cases, beautiful imagery as we could," Alexis Mainland said. "But we wanted to do that in entertaining ways."
While the Times has lagged behind early adopters like The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and The Huffington Post, the Times broke from the norm among Pinterest-privy publishers of having one editorial voice, Mainland said.
The Times' profile features pins from the editors' individual accounts.
"In most cases with these pins, you're able to tap directly into the editor or curator or journalist," Mainland said. "We're trying to be a little more open about whose particular interest these pins are."
Unlike the newspaper's policy with Twitter, which encourages staffers to regularly churn out 140-character news nuggets, reporters will choose whether they want to experiment with the site, which has 13.5 million monthly users, according to AppData.
Most of the photos on the Times profile were previously published in print or online, though some unused images from photo shoots have made there way onto a pinboard, Mainland said.
"It's sort of a fun window into how our stories are being visually built," she said. "It's a new avenue into our content. In our bio, I put that we're remixing stuff and I think that's a very good description of what we're doing."
