Can The New York Times become a true destination for cooking videos? The venerable news outlet is betting that it can, leveraging its vast library of recipes, its in-house talent, and outside cooking creators to help it do so.
NYT Cooking has become a serious destination for foodies and home cooks (the Times says its Cooking site and app tallied 456 million visits last year), and Cooking has become one of the company’s core competencies when it comes to generation and retention of subscribers.
But it has also, quietly, become a video destination into itself, both within its owned ecosystem and on YouTube, where NYT Cooking has more than one million subscribers. As food and recipe creators flourish on that platform, the Times wants to take a bigger bite of the cooking video market, more aggressively pushing into an area that was once dominated by Food Network.
“We really do want to be the home of the best food talent on the internet,” says Emily Weinstein, the editorial lead for NYT Cooking. “Video is, of course, the lingua franca of the internet, it’s just a natural way forward for us.”
“There’s a proliferation of video across the internet, and they’ve loved our videos in the app but we’ve also really seen people love our videos on YouTube,” adds Camilla Velasquez, the business lead for NYT Cooking. “So we’ve really figured, why don’t we just do more of this? Why don’t we become the home of the best cooking talent? And we think that video is the best way to bring this to life, it’s what people want now on the internet, and franchises is the best way to do that.”
On Friday, the Times launched season two of what has become a flagship show: Cooking 101. The debut episode features Salt Fat Acid Heat author Samin Nosrat talking salad dressings (you can watch it here). The series features a rotating group of hosts teaching cooking basics.
But the Times is now expanding its roster of programming. Next month it will debut The Veggie, based on Tanya Sichynsky’s newsletter of the same name (Weinstein says the newsletter reaches millions of consumers). Sichynsky will host the show, which is focused on vegan, vegetarian and vegetable-forward dishes.
“We know this from feedback from audience, they want more recipes that are meatless,” Weinstein says. “Tanya herself is not vegetarian, but Tanya’s approach to this is to make it delicious and fun and easy to to make these changes in your cooking, to cook food that is more vegetable forward.”
Then later in the year the Times will debut a baking series hosted by NYT Cooking’s Vaughn Vreeland.
“He has his own following,” says Scott Loitsch, “People love to see him on on camera, and being able to launch the baking franchise, which will have a newsletter component, gets you to know him a little bit deeper and in a different way.”
Weinstein says that when the Times was researching what consumers loved about the process of baking, and what they wanted to watch in a baking series, they stumbled upon what they call the “lick the bowl moment.”
“It’s not the moment where you take the pan of brownies out of the oven, it’s not the moment where you eat the brownie, it’s that moment of promise and joy and fun, where you take the spatula and scrape the dredges out of the bowl and lick the batter,” Weinstein says. “It’s so joyous, we knew that would translate well to video.”
But beyond the Times‘ own staff, it is also turning to creators in the space who can host episodes or launch new franchises. Already the Times works with well-known creators with their own followings on YouTube and other platforms, and it wants to build that out further.
“We’re looking for really talented creators who are currently independent, who want to enter the family. And we’re also looking for people, honestly, who are really talented recipe creators, because for NYT Cooking at the end of the day, it is about the recipe,” Weinstein says. “So when we look at people out there in the world, we’re looking at people who have a really sharp instinct for making amazing content, people who really know how to build community around the recipes, and people who are also creating great recipes to match.”
The Times‘ video push also coincides with a wider push outside of its owned ecosystem. While subscriptions to its core recipe library and content is still the foundational model of NYT Cooking, it is looking to other platforms — and YouTube in particular — to grow its reach.
To that end, the Times is pursuing more brand collaborations and advertising, which could include product integrations into videos, or sponsored access to a recipe that is normally behind the paywall.
“We don’t have to make a one size fits all of everything,” Velasquez says. “We can really lean into the entertainment aspect of it for YouTube, and then we can lean into the actual instructional portion of it for the recipe, so we get lots of different delivery mechanisms for a user.”
In a multiplatform world, where video creators are emerging as a dominant cultural force (and where cooking is a genre with a fanbase in the millions), NYT Cooking wants to ensure that it remains not only relevant, but at the center of that revolution, spinning up a flywheel where creators can expand their audience the Times, while the Times widens its pool of talent.
