Nov 1st, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
An interesting move by the New York Times: it has effectively added a blog-aggregation news feature to its technology pages, as described by Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web. In the middle of the site there’s a column of the top tech headlines from around the blogosphere — in other words, a very Techmeme-like feature — and you can click below each one to see other posts about the same story.
When you click, you go to BlogRunner.com, which is a blog aggregator/headline engine that the New York Times acquired last year. I wasn’t initially that impressed with it when I first saw it (before the Times bought it), but I’ve been back several times since and I think it does a pretty good job. As Erick Schonfeld notes at TechCrunch, the Times is also building content aggregated by BlogRunner into other parts of its site, including at the bottom of news stories (the same way I use Sphere on my posts).
One small design point that I like about BlogRunner, and wish that Gabe would duplicate at Techmeme: there’s an expand/collapse button for the discussion links on each topic heading (Techmeme lets you expand or collapse them all, but then your preference is set until the next time). The Times has also done some syndication deals with PaidContent and IDG, among others.
I think this is a very smart move by the Times, and by tech editor Saul Hansell (who also writes for the Bits blog). Newspapers by definition have always been aggregators and curators of information — both their own and that culled from news wires and other sources. Aggregating Web content from many different sources seems to me like a natural extension of that.
Oct 20th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Never one to miss an opportunity to be contrarian — although Andrew “I Hate The Internet” Keen has stolen much of his Prophet of Doom act — Nick Carr has a post about the New York Times’ subscription service, TimesSelect, in which he dismisses criticism of the venture as the misguided rantings of “free content” ideologues like Jeff Jarvis.
Carr refers to a Financial Times piece about a study by Matthew Gentzkow, in which the economist looked at the competition between the Washington Post print edition and Web edition. As the FT column describes it, Gentzkow analyzed the readership data from both the print edition and the website and came to some conclusions about how much one cannibalized the other. Says the FT:
“[Gentzkow] found that people who had access to fast internet connections were, other things being equal, less likely to read the print edition. He found reasons to believe this was specifically because of access to washingtonpost.com, not to the Internet in general.”
What are the reasons he found to believe this? I read (or tried to read) the entire paper online, and I still don’t know, in part because of sentences like this one:
“Both reduced-form OLS regressions and a structural model without heterogeneity suggest that the print and online editions of the Post are strong complements.”
And that was in the early part of the paper, where Gentzkow was summarizing his findings — before he got to the part with the long calculus-type formulas and algorithms. At one point, the economist says that according to his research on the levels of substitution between the two products:
“Removing the [news website] from the market entirely would increase readership of [the newsaper] by 27,000 readers per day, or 1.5 per cent.”
He therefore concludes that the Post has lost $5.5-million in newspaper revenue as a result of providing its news online for free. Does that make any sense? It might to an economist, but I would argue his thesis fails the reasonability test. If the washingtonpost.com website were to disappear or be locked behind a pay wall tomorrow, does anyone really think that 27,000 people would suddenly go out and start reading the paper edition?
Gentzkow clearly does. I think they would be more likely to just go elsewhere for their news, such as Google News or Yahoo News or MSNBC or CNN. It might be tempting — and make for a much simpler business case — to argue that a product like the Post competes primarily with its own website, and vice versa, but I don’t think that is the way things work.
A pay wall for the Post or the Times or any other paper simply blocks people out who then go elsewhere. That’s not a religious view, as Nick would like to portray it — in fact, I would argue that it’s a lot more “rational” than Gentzkow’s analysis.
Oct 19th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Anyone who has read my blog probably knows that I have been hard on Dave Winer occasionally (and I think with good reason, but I don’t want to get into that right now).
The fact remains, however, that Dave is a pretty smart guy when it comes to things like RSS — let’s not get into whether he “invented” it or not — and he also thinks outside the box when it comes to things like how newspapers and other media present their content, and that is something I’m interested in as well. So I think it’s only fair that I point out when I think he’s doing something interesting.
The thing in this case is his New York Times keyword index. It’s a simple thing, in a lot of ways, since it just scans the newspaper’s index and comes up with the number of times a certain word is used, then ranks them from top to bottom — but it also has a couple of additional features, including the fact that it displays the headline of a story when you hover over the number.
That’s a nice touch. And it’s an interesting companion to Dave’s “river of news” NYT feed (something I tried to recreate with my Twitter feed of Globe and Mail headlines).
I don’t understand why the Times — or other newspapers, for that matter — don’t provide that kind of alternative search or browsing tool themselves. It’s not rocket science (no offence, Dave) and it might even attract users who don’t want to use the linear approach that most papers default to. Why not have a keyword tag cloud too? The Washington Post had a demo of such a feature awhile back as part of its Post Remix lab project, but it never became part of the actual site, which I think is a shame.
I think plenty of readers would be interested in alternative ways of finding stories, just as they now use features such as the “most read” and “most emailed” lists the Times and other papers have. Why not add even more ways of slicing and dicing the news?
Oct 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.
As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.
Oct 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 3 Comments
Along with several other bloggers, I saw a post at Silicon Alley Insider the other day about the New York Times highlighting reader comments on its front page — in this case, underneath a photo of Al Gore after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Henry Blodget says the Times should be congratulated for this experiment in social media, while David Spector says that it’s a terrible idea and that the newspaper is “devaluing” itself by doing so.
I thought at first that Henry might have stumbled across either an experiment that went live by mistake, or a glitch in the Times’ comment-posting process, but in a comment on the Silicon Alley post, Heather Green from BusinessWeek says that she noticed the Times featured reader comments on the front page back in August as well, when the bridge collapsed in Minnesota.
What’s interesting to me is how opinion is divided on whether this is a good idea or not. David Spector and some of the commenters on his post and others argue that comments belong on story pages but not on the front page, and that the New York Times should just be providing the facts. Others seem to think the facts are probably well known by the time the NYT gets to a story, and so reader comments are a valid part of the news.
I’m inclined to go with that latter view. If it’s a big story that has already been reported, like Al Gore or the bridge collapse, I think a few carefully selected reader comments would be a useful addition to the story. Why else do reporters interview people for their thoughts and then quote them in news stories? Comments are just a way of letting people who don’t happen to get interviewed have their say.
