The New York Times has launched its beta news aggregation feature Times Extra. As the screengrab below shows, it makes for a pretty busy page with scrollable links to external, relevant content below each main news item:

The alternative version of the homepage features up to eight links from blogs and other news organisations’ sites beneath each of the top articles.

“The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over,” said Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations at NYTimes, in a release about the launch.

“Times Extra is an important part of our strategy to become a destination for compelling journalism, not only by The New York Times, but by other content providers as well. We want to give our readers a comprehensive view of the news and opinion our editors think is important.”(Not dissimilar to Scott Karp’s argument for a newspaper using link journalism)

Mashable’s Stan Shroeder wants to see how the Times’ algorithm performs in selecting the links and while supporting its decision to link out, is concerned about some of the design elements:

“NYTimes adds boxes with additional sources quite erratically, and I expect many users to get a headache, reverting to the standard view very fast. It would be a pity, though, if this initiative were to fail because of unfortunate design choices,” he writes.