Following Our Audience to Telegram

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Late on the first Friday night in March, Vindu Goel, an audience editor for The New York Times, sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line: “If NYTimes.com gets blocked in Russia … ”

It had been over a week since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, and several Western news organizations had already suspended their operations in Russia in the wake of a crackdown on media and free speech by the country’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. Russia had already taken steps to ban or restrict Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Mr. Goel began pondering the question: If our website is blocked in Russia, how can we get our news and information to people who need it?

From his home in California, Mr. Goel typed the email. To continue delivering the news to readers overseas, he wrote, The Times should start a channel on the fast-growing messaging service Telegram. He copied his boss; his boss’s boss; Michael Slackman, the assistant managing editor for International; and Snigdha Koirala, an international deputy editor. Within minutes, emails were flying back and forth. Everyone wanted to figure out how to get it done.

“We want to be where the audience is,” Mr. Goel said in an interview. “We realized that a large chunk of the audience who would be most interested in accurate information about the war is on Telegram, and we weren’t there.”

Telegram is a combined content distribution platform and messaging app. The platform is free to use, and offers end-to-end encryption for messages for enhanced security and privacy. Telegram reports that it has more than 500 million monthly active users, a number which has likely grown since the invasion began. It was founded in 2013 by Nikolai and Pavel Durov, brothers who fled Russia years ago, and has since become Russia’s most popular messaging tool.

With Russians receiving censored news and Ukrainians under attack or fleeing the country, Mr. Goel said it was imperative that The Times participate in one of the only platforms still widely accessible.

After Mr. Goel got the idea, it took just one week for The Times to post for the first time on @NYTimes, a Telegram channel that delivers reporting, eyewitness accounts, interviews and breaking news about the war in Ukraine to users around the world. Often, the content is pulled from The Times’s live blog on the war. “It was one of the fastest-moving ideas I’ve seen in 10 years at The Times,” Ms. Koirala said.

In the channel’s first two days, before it was even officially announced, 1,500 users subscribed. Just over three weeks after its first post, the channel had attracted an audience of more than 53,000.

For this war, it has undeniably become “the social media platform of choice,” said Michael Schwirtz, an investigative reporter for The Times who spent months reporting from Ukraine. “Everybody I know shares Telegram links when news breaks,” he added. “Now, The New York Times is part of that constellation of sources.”

Mr. Schwirtz, a frequent contributor to The Times’s live blog, said that when the Telegram channel was formally announced, several Ukrainian officials and soldiers messaged him to say they were subscribing.

Making the account operational took quick work on the part of many. The Times’s audience team spun into gear to plan the kickoff. Two software engineers, Hugh Mandeville and Justin Heideman, built an interface to make it easier for those in The Times’s newsroom to post content to the channel. “It’s kind of similar to Slack,” Mr. Mandeville said. “You can talk to your friends, you can group chat and you can have channels.”

As soon as The Times created an account, “we started publishing — it was almost that simple,” Mr. Goel said, adding: “Nobody said pause. It was more like, How fast can you do it?”

Anna Dubenko, The Times’s director of audience, said that 56 percent of the Telegram channel’s subscribers were English speakers, and those in the second-largest group (28 percent) listed Russian as their native language. For now, The Times’s posts on Telegram are in English, but it may expand to other languages in the future.

“Russian people are the ones who are being shielded from what’s being done in their name,” Ms. Dubenko said. “I can’t think of a more important mission for The Times than delivering the truth to the people who need it.”