Roman was a Times contributor whose chocolate shortbread cookie recipe went viral earlier this year.Īnd then there’s video. He also snagged cook and author Alison Roman as a columnist in the summer. He just hired two new editors to assign and edit recipes, work on special projects and focus on social media. Sifton says he’s still expanding his team. And until recently, the section offered a meal kit service through Chef’d, a company that is now defunct.
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That newsletter now has 86,000 subscribers.Ĭooking has also partnered with Wirecutter, a product recommendations website owned by The New York Times Company, to provide tips on how to find the best pressure cooker.
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It launched another newsletter in September focused on providing readers with a series of weeknight dishes to cook. The team has been tinkering with other ways to promote the brand. It has also grown its recipe library to about 19,000. In addition to the 120,000 paid subscriptions, the Times says about three million people now subscribe to its main Cooking newsletter, which doesn’t require a subscription. There were plenty of other flourishes to encourage reuse, such as the ability to save recipes or search for meals by keyword.Īll of those features, along with a regular newsletter, helped Cooking develop a user base for when the company began charging for the service three years later. When the Cooking app launched in September 2014, it featured 16,000 recipes available at no charge. NYT Cooking app Photo-Illustration: CNN/Shutterstock/New York Times Sifton said recipes like those were chosen because they had become indelible in the minds of Times readers. The torte was re-baked and photographed for inclusion on the app. “Each one of these things we are interrogating and retesting and trying to figure out, so that we’re not beholden to whatever the food trend was then,” Sifton said.įor example, the Cooking staff dusted off a recipe for an original plum torte creation from Times food columnist Marian Burros that the newspaper published every September from 1983 until 1989. There were a few duds they passed over - the ’70s microwave recipes aren’t at the top of Sifton’s list - but many others were classics that deserved another look. So Sifton and his team got to work and curated decades of Times recipes they deemed suitable for a modern cooking app. “We had this notion that we could build a digital version of what was ‘The New York Times Cook Book,’” Sifton added, referencing the title of Claiborne’s book. The book belonged to him, and the newspaper didn’t profit. The book was a bestseller - for Claiborne, at least. He traced it back to the 1960s, when food editor Craig Claiborne amassed a bunch of Times recipes and assembled them into his own cookbook. “The idea was based in history, really,” Sifton told CNN Business. According to editor Sam Sifton, the strategy for the section’s current iteration was years in the making. That meant the Cooking staff had to come up with a product that was worth the cost of entry. Cooking enthusiasts either have to pay the extra $5 for access, or subscribe to a pricier Times bundle.
Notably, the Cooking section is not included in a basic, $15-a-month digital subscription to the Times. That’s a relatively big ask in an age when just about every form of entertainment has a monthly fee attached to it, and when amateur cooks already have access to countless recipes on the internet for free.
NYT Cooking charges $5 a month for access to its coverage. But persuading a sizable chunk of those people to sign up for a separate food website was no small feat. The Times isn’t shy about touting its success: The newspaper recently announced that it surpassed four million total subscriptions. The New York Times bet more than a year ago that it could convince an audience of foodies to pay for a standalone section devoted to all things cooking.Ībout 120,000 subscriptions later, the newspaper thinks it has proven that NYT Cooking is not just another flash in the pan.
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