Archives: December 4, 2008
One last Times Extra thought
While I like seeing the NYT link out, on reflection, I wonder if the first draft is a bit of a misfire — at least from a reader perspective.
What Times Extra provides is additional context and coverage on the issues the Times is already covering. Today’s front page features aggregated links on the potential auto-industry bailout, the Canadian political crisis, and the Mumbai attacks. To be honest, as a news consumer, I’m probably pretty happy with what The New York Times is producing on its own on those topics — they’re the kind of big stories that the Times covers the hell out of and very well.
But the links I really want are the stories the Times isn’t covering well. I want a link to the great Washington Post profile of some obscure Congressional staffer; the Esquire piece on an injured soldier readjusting to the homefront; the CNN hidden-camera investigation into workplace-safety violations. I want to be pointed to great stuff done by other people — not stuff that the Times is probably doing better.
From a business point of view, perhaps the NYT sees their current strategy as one that protects their business model more; it’s unlikely anyone would find a news source through Times Extra that might supplant the NYT in his mind. But selfishly, I wish they were giving me a window on what the Times isn’t offering.
Five minutes with Times Extra
Here’s a five-minute (well, 4:30) video introduction to Times Extra at The New York Times, which launched today and which Zach wrote about earlier today.
Times Extra: The NYT votes for automated aggregation
The New York Times today launched its much-anticipated Times Extra homepage with links to other news sources and blog posts. Just head to nytimes.com as usual and click on “Try Our Extra Homepage” to experience the magic.
This is one of those where-have-you-been moments that’s nonetheless significant because it’s happening at the nation’s most widely read newspaper website. “The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over,” says Marc Frons, chief technology officer of The New York Times Co., in a press release (reprinted below). Well, that day was over long ago, but now it is over for the Times, too, and its peers are likely to follow suit.
Times Extra is powered by Blogrunner, which NYT Co. purchased in 2005.* The automated service finds related content by analyzing links across blogs and news sites. (Reporter Saul Hansel offered a good explanation when the Times began running Blogrunner headlines on its technology page.) Blogrunner does offer Times editors the ability to manually bump a story they consider particularly worthy. But I checked this morning with Stacy Green in the Times’ PR office, who confirmed that Times Extra is indeed fully automated. There’s no one curating the links that appear. (“That said, our editors are closely monitoring for anything obscene,” Green added.)
The choice of automation — rather than employing a producer to select the links — is notable in light of yesterday’s announcement by Techmeme, a popular aggregator of technology news. In a post titled, “Guess what? Automated news doesn’t quite work,” Techmeme disclosed that it had hired a “news maestro” to curate the site:
Early on, when our system was less technically refined, the clearest path toward improvement involved simply iterating algorithmic development. Later, as the automation reached a certain degree of maturity, we recognized that direct editing could now improve news results by leaps and bounds. Though our roadmap contains a number of novel future algorithmic enhancements, introducing editing now appears to be a no-brainer.
Charlie Sennott on the state of international reporting
Last month, the Nieman Foundation gathered its alumni and friends in Cambridge for its 70th Convocation. (You may remember this video of the Washington Post’s Len Downie from the same event.) After Downie’s speech, there was a six-person panel discussion on the future of journalism online. Thanks to our own Ted Delaney (you know him as Edward J., but he’s Ted around the office), we have video of each panel member’s opening statement, and we’ll be bringing them to you over the next week-plus.
To start off, here’s Charles Sennott, former Boston Globe foreign correspondent and cofounder of Global Post, the much anticipated international-news startup set to launch next month.
Morning Links: December 4, 2008
— Andy Dickinson argues the Kindle-like device the news companies are hoping for misunderstands how people interact with a newspaper.
[T]he compelling feature of newspaper as a medium is that we are prepared to throw it away. Bin it, shred it, leave it on the bus. Whatever we do we are happy to spend money on it and then leave it…Allowing people to download the daily newspaper to an e-reader or flexible screen may feel like it gives the industry back some of the monopoly on the distribution platform it thinks it needs to survive. But in reality it flies in the face of the way we consume and discard our daily news fix.
— Adrian Holovaty wants to call his project “microlocal,” not “hyperlocal.”
— Ken Doctor argues the bailouts of the financial and auto industries will be good for newspaper classifieds. The issue is how much of the lost ad spin in those sectors will, when they return, come back to newspapers. Ken has some ideas on that front worth checking out.
— The Christian Science Monitor’s John Yemma leaves comments.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be custom CMSes
I want to quickly highlight one exchange in that Aron Pilhofer interview I linked the other day:
Q: Are there any free or open-source products out there that small-town newspapers can use?
A: Everything we use is free and open-source. Our platform is Ruby on Rails backed by Mysql databases running on Ubuntu servers. The cost here isn’t software, or even hardware, which is relatively cheap these days through hosting companies like Amazon EC2 (on the high end) or Slicehost (on the low end).
I mention this because I’m down at Poynter today talking about blogging, and the most common complaint among the journalists here is that their news organizations use proprietary, junky, mucked-up content-management systems for their web sites — and that those CMSes can’t handle features that would be considered basic elements of modern blogging, like tags.
Please, Hypothetical Newsroom Manager or IT Person — don’t ever hire someone to write you a blogging CMS again.
