As part of a relaunch of its technology news hub, the New York Times has announced syndication deals with several blogs, including VentureBeat, Read/Write Web and the GigaOm network. Deputy NYT tech editor Vindu Goel has a rundown on some of the changes at his blog, and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat has a post up about the news, as does my friend Om Malik (BeetTV has an interview with the Times’ deputy tech editor). Hansell says that the deals are part of a series of moves, including adding several new sections to the paper’s tech coverage, and two new reporters covering venture capital and business computing.
The syndication moves are an interesting approach for the Times to take, particularly since the website already effectively aggregates technology blog headlines through the Blogrunner widget in the centre of the page (the Times bought BlogRunner a couple of years ago, but only integrated it into the page earlier this year). The Washington Post has a similar syndication deal with TechCrunch, and GigaOm announced a similar deal yesterday that will see its content show up at CNNMoney and Fortune. Om Malik’s blog network also has a content syndication deal with BusinessWeek that it announced in July.
It’s interesting to see mainstream media outlets like the Times, the Washington Post and CNN reaching out to blogs to enhance their coverage. The Washington Post has taken this idea a little further with its newly launched Political Browser website, which the newspaper says is intended to be a one-stop aggregator of sorts for political news and commentary from anywhere on the Web — even competing sites. And Andy Plesser at BeetTV raises an interesting issue: will their additional Google juice lead to sites like the New York Times and Washington Post getting traffic for the posts they aggregate, rather than the originating site?