The New York Times is celebrating the size of its Facebook group. “An internal memo from the NY Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy touted the newspaper’s ‘successful’ advertising campaign on Facebook,” following the US election, reports the NiemanJournalismLab. The number of fans of the NYTimes Facebok page went up from 49,000 to 164,000.
Citing a recent article that was built on public documents, Amy Gahran explains why the Times should have linked to or supplied the background info to the piece.
“Is this more detail than most people would want? Probably. But providing that information and making those links inobtrusively demonstrates a willingness not just to inform, but to empower,” she says.
Financial news website breakingviews.com has added another content partner in the guise of Chinese financial title, Caijing.
Caijing’s editors will select a daily column from the site’s output for re-publication from today, a press release from breakingviews.com said.
The site, which was founded in 1999, has already entered into syndication deals with the Telegraph, New York Times and Fortune.
The AIR-based news reader for desktops will include ‘a fast text-rendering engine that re-flows text as you resize the screen’.
Pranksters gave out a fake New York Times in NYC and LA this week, with the headline ‘Iraq War Ends’.
In Marc Andreessen’s world the Christian Science Monitor wouldn’t be the only traditional print product going online-only.
In this interview in the latest edition of Portfolio, Andreessen, who is co-founder of Ning, Netscape and investor in Digg and Twitter, says the New York Times should cut its print losses and focus on ‘the market of the future’.
If you were running the New York Times, what would you do?
[Andreessen] Shut off the print edition right now. You’ve got to play offence. You’ve got to do what Intel did in ’85 when it was getting killed by the Japanese in memory chips, which was its dominant business. And it famously killed the business – shut it off and focused on its much smaller business, microprocessors, because that was going to be the market of the future. And the minute Intel got out of playing defence and into playing offence, its future was secure. The newspaper companies have to do exactly the same thing.The financial markets have discounted forward to the terminal conclusion for newspapers, which is basically bankruptcy. So at this point, if you’re one of these major newspapers and you shut off the printing press, your stock price would probably go up, despite the fact that you would lose 90 per cent of your revenue. Then you play offence. And guess what? You’re an internet company.
Following the release of its first campaign finance API earlier this month, the New York Times is handing over even more of its data to users with the launch of the Visualization Lab.
Using IBM’s ‘Many Eyes’ technology, the lab allows readers to experiment with different ways of visualising data sets from the Times, whether these are stats and figures included in articles or simply the words used in a speech reported in a news item.
Visualisation options, of which there are currently 17, range from graphs and maps, to word trees, for example:
According to an introductory post on the Time’s Open blog, the Visualization Lab is the first in a series of tools scheduled for release in the next few weeks both internally and for readers.
NYTimes.com has developed a new video player to allow clips to be embedded in more sections of the site.
The player, which uses technology from Brightcove, will make video available on the homepage, individual article pages and on the site’s blogs, a release from the title said. The player also lets users send footage to social networks and bookmarking sites, including Digg, Facebook and LinkedIn.
As part of a video overhaul, the Times’ video library has been redesigned and a regularly updated list of ‘most viewed’ clips now features on the site.
“Demand for high-quality video is on the rise across the web from both our users and our advertisers,” said Nicholas Ascheim, vice president of product management for NYTimes.com, in the release.
“To meet this need, we have upgraded our technology, increased our production values and given video even more prominence across the site.”
According to the release, the Times produces 100 videos a month, while also featuring content from Reuters, CNBC, MSNBC and Bloggingheads.tv.
The New York Times campaign finance API gives users and third-party developers access to presidential campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission collected by the paper.
The film of Toby Young’s book, depicting his failed five-year attempt to make it in the U.S, as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has shot to the top of the UK box office in its opening weekend.
‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’ took £1.5 million over the weekend according to Screen International. It has, so far, failed to enjoy the same success in the US.
Young was accused of plagiarism by New York magazine, last week. He has been accused of lifting passages from a June 16, 1996, New York Times story by John Tierney.
Young’s response in the magazine: “I don’t think it’s a sort of mealy-mouthed or weasely defense to say that the standard that British journalists are expected to hold themselves to are not as high as the standards that some American journalists hold,” he explained. “We’re a little less precious about this kind of thing.”