Having folded the website of the international Herald Tribune into that of the New York Times, IHT story links now redirect to a generic landing page – denying the Times extra Google juice and frustrating users.
Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder of Apartment Therapy, confirms that the New York Times has withdrawn a take down notice for articles and images used by the blog network.
The Times’ new community sites aren’t going to make any money, Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at the paper, concedes.
But Schachter does see potential in syndicating the platform out to community groups.
He’s not getting ahead of himself with the project though: “We don’t know if the placeblogosphere wants us or needs us.”
News reaches us from blogger Brownstoner about the New York Times’ plans to launch a series of neighbourhood blogs – starting with two test sites for the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill areas.
Each site will be headed by a New York Times staffer as editor, but contributions from the public, in particular from CUNY’s journalism programme, will be solicited.
The Times has already teamed up with Everyblock to provide localised data for its political content – will any of Everyblock’s information be deployed on the new local blogs?
Journalism.co.uk is looking into the launch to find out more.
In an interview with Cindy Royal, associate professor at Texas State University, New York Times’ newsroom interactive technologies editor Aron Pilhofer discusses the Times’ graphics and data teams and being part of, what he describes as, one of the most collaborative newsrooms he’s worked in.
The New York Times next API release will be TimesNewswire, which will give developers access to live news headlines, CN reports. The announcement was made at the Times’ first ‘hack day’ last Friday.
In her weekly column, the Guardian readers’ editor, Siobhain Butterworth, takes a look at newspapers’ handling of reader complaints and responses in the age of digital publishing.
She picks out a New York Times case: following the settlement of a libel action brought against it by a Washington lobbyist, the paper published a joint statement, an article from the lobbyist’s lawyers, a note to readers and a report about the settlement.
“What’s interesting and unusual about the Iseman case is that the negotiated resolution of her complaint included space on the paper’s website for her lawyers’ views about the lawsuit,” Butterworth comments.
Another look at paid content. From the Knight Media Center OJR blog: “The New York Times should indeed use its website to generate more revenue – but not by charging for any part of its presently all-free daily report. Executive Editor Bill Keller’s recent ruminations on the touchy subject of paid content have led to speculation that the dearly departed Times Select will be reincarnated in some more palatable form,” writes Tom Grubisich.
With 20 million monthly unique visitors, the New York Times could make $240 million from charging these users just $1.00 a month on average, according to Poynter’s calculations.
“Beyond being a gamble worth taking because of the potentially significant payoff, there is no realistic alternative to charging for quality content that anyone has presented,” says Steve Brill, who goes on to set out his plan for getting off ‘the free-content treadmill’.
The Bivings Group‘s recently released Bivings Report of the top 10 US newspaper sites in 2008 consisted of:
The study, which picks the list based on usability, design and web features of the US’ 100 largest newspapers, is purposefully limited to covering US-based, newspaper sites.
But as one commenter on the Bivings blog says, ‘No Mention of any of MY best news sites’ – he then goes on to list his own top 10, including Huffington Post and EveryBlock (which another commenter then takes as the Bivings’ list).
Is comparing like-for-like really that useful – newspapers aren’t just competing with each other – or other mainstream news organisations – anymore. What the Bivings Group rates the sites on may be completely different from the readers’ criteria – particularly if these comments are anything to go by.
It reminds me of this Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) study from 2007, which found a different news agenda on UGC sites than mainstream platforms (e.g the agenda decided by journalists).
Users’ online agendas are different (and that’s not to say news organisations should completely adhere to UGC inspired schedules – that’s a debate for another day) and influenced by a plethora of different online sources. As such their expectations of newspaper sites will be shaped by the other tools and information websites they use. Ranking newspaper websites against each other won’t deliver the kind of comparisons that these sites can take away and use.