Jun 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Anyone who read the profile in the New York Times in November probably remembers the incredible story of Brian Stelter, a 21-year-old college student at tiny Townson University near Baltimore, who started a blog about the TV news business called — fittingly — TVNewser. In much the same way that Harry Knowles created Ain’t It Cool News and turned it into the go-to spot for movie industry news and rumours, Brian’s blog quickly became the destination for TV news junkies, including many senior executives (Rex has another example here). As the NYT story put it:
“I’ve heard people joke that when TVNewser is dormant, the kid had a final or a big family dinner that he couldn’t get out of,” said Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor and a TVNewser devotee. “People from entry level to high and mighty check in on it.”
Well, TVNewser gained such a following that Brian got hired by Mediabistro, and now he has been hired by the New York Times itself, and will be part of building a new media “vertical” for the newspaper online, along with media editor (and Canadian ex-pat) Bruce Headlam. Jeff Jarvis — who initially advised Brian not to move to Mediabistro, but later changed his mind — has some thoughts on the latest move here. And Poynter has an interview with the man himself done by (what else) instant messaging.
Apr 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The New York Times is adding third-party content to one of its websites, according to a piece in MediaPost. The story says that the NYT’s new Auto site will have aggregated newsfeeds and information on car makes and models from outside sources such as New Car Test Drive.
“We wanted to surround our own auto content with supporting information for any new make or model [data, pricing, rebates, photos], as well as third-party content,” said Ira Silberstein, vice president of product development, NYTimes.com.
“We want to be a resource for consumers so that they can get a wealth of information…reviews from us, from other parties, ratings, pricing and specs all in one place.”
As Scott Karp points out at Publishing 2.0, this is a sign that the New York Times might be willing to move beyond the idea that “one entity can create all the content that anyone needs.”
Feb 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of the New York Times and son of the man who preceded him in that job, gave a relatively revealing interview (for a Sulzberger at least) to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently, which I found through a link at Journalistopia. Like Danny Sanchez, I was struck by this comment:
Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years? “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.
Sulzberger also says that the Times has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day — which is larger than its print subscriber base of 1.1 million. And he admitted that “Once upon a time, people had to read the paper to find out what was going on in theater. Today there are hundreds of forums and sites with that information,” but says
“The paper can integrate material from bloggers and external writers. We need to be part of that community and to have dialogue with the online world … we are curators, curators of news. People don’t click onto the New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust.”
Oh, and if you were thinking that maybe the Times might reconsider its pay wall, and/or offer its new Times Reader software to readers for free? Doesn’t sound like Art Jr. feels that way.
Feb 5th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Jon Friedman at Marketwatch has posted some thoughts about a discussion he had with Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, in which the newspaper executive talked about the NYT’s increasing use of video — including an upcoming move into “user-generated” video — as well as the paper’s ongoing attempts to unify its digital and paper newsrooms.
Keller tells Friedman that he’s a newspaper guy at heart but lately he has become “platform-agnostic.” The piece talks about the Art Buchwald obituary — which came complete with a video clip of Buchwald saying “Hi, my name is Art Buchwald, and I just died” — as well as new blogs from David Carr and others.
And Keller says that as far as the newsroom goes, “we’re figuring out the lines of authority” and trying to avoid “competing fiefdoms.” The Times is trying to create an “integrated desk” responsible for both digital and paper news generation and production.
Jan 23rd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
Christine Herron, a venture capitalist with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s fund, has an interesting post about the New York Times, and Martin Nisenholtz’s challenge as vice-president of digital operations for the Grey Lady. As she puts it: “How does a established news institution transform itself into a sleek Web 2.0 business?”
The answer, according to Nisenholtz, is to focus on circulation rather than traffic. In other words, try to convert the 2.5 million visitors that the newspaper’s site gets on an average day into long-term readers — and possibly even into subscribers to TimesSelect, the for-pay service that about 500,000 people have signed up for. So his goals are to a) “Keep users coming back, and staying longer,” and b) “Increase not only the average number of visits per reader, but also the average number of page views per visit.” But how to do that?
As usual, some of the most interesting stuff shows up in the comments: in a response to a commenter who works at CNN, where they get lots of hits but not a lot of longer visits, Christine says that one formula that seems to work is “snippets/facts drive traffic [while] essays/analysis build readership. So in theory, you need both if you’re building an actual community or reader base.” Good advice.
