The New York Times has unveiled a new feature, Times Wire, which streams every last bit of content produced by the newspaper as it hits the website, from a 6,000-word investigation to the bridge column. It’s a fascinating, if not exactly useful, way to read the news and a testament to the copious material that emerges from the Times every hour — some hours more than others.
Using an RSS feed similar to Times Wire that was quietly released last year, I can graph the newspaper’s hourly publishing schedule on Google Reader. (Josh explained how to do this last year.) As you can see below, the Times is most active at midnight, when the dregs of tomorrow’s paper are finally posted online, but there are also spikes in the 7 a.m., noon, 4 p.m., and 9 p.m. hours. This is a topic I’d like to return to, but for now, what do you see in this chart?
In what seems to be a never-ending series of experiments with different ways of displaying the news — including open APIs and the new Times Reader 2.0 AIR app — the New York Times has launched what it is calling Times Wire, a feature that displays the most recent headlines from the paper in a “river of news” style. Readers can choose either “All News” or a customized “My News” feed that lets them pick categories such as business, arts, and sports. (There’s also a dedicated Business and Technology view.)
If this seems familiar, it’s because Dave Winer — the programming guru who helped develop the original RSS syndication standard (something The New York Times was an early supporter of) — came up with something very similar years ago: a stripped-down view of the paper, similar to an RSS feed. The NYT’s newest service apparently went live at some point on Monday night — I found it thanks to a tweet from Frederic Lardinois, a writer for ReadWriteWeb — and is due to be launched officially on Tuesday.
[One other note: If the idea of a "river of news" seems familiar, you can thank Twitter — which has done more to popularize the concept of a constantly flowing stream of information, complete with "permission" to dip in or out at any time. —Josh]
Go read it yourself, and think about it through the lens of journalism. Its basic arguments — that the traditional status anxieties of the middle class are now being visited upon the so-called “creative class” — are interesting in the context of once-comfortable journalists suddenly seeing their paychecks challenged (by collapsing business models) along with their position in society (by bloggers and the like).
Participants at Matt Thompson’s recent gathering on the Future of Context discussed (among many other things) database journalism — city crime maps, for example — and agreed that they can actually be a disservice to readers. The problem comes in maintaining the data: a reporter or team gathers data, analyzes it, creates interesting presentation graphics — and then often fails to maintain the data, so that it is quickly out of date, irrelevant, and even misleading. As well, a map presented without context or interpretation can lead to erroneous conclusions by readers.
As news organizations look to add high-value content that might form the core of paid-content sections for their sites, compilations and analysis of public (but not necessarily online) information is one of the areas they’re exploring. (See, for example, Steve Buttry’s laundry list of data the Cedar Rapids Gazette is looking to incorporate on its sites.) As the data imported to the site grows, so does the maintenance issue.
One way out of this is the way the Raleign (N.C.) News & Observer handles it: their crime maps are set up to pull information directly and continuously from law enforcement databases, so that the maps are always up-to-date. The N&O uses the same approach with many of the other data topics in its impressive Fact Finder resource.
Another resource that may prove useful to database journalism is Wolfram Alpha, which is set to launch on May 18. Some have heralded its advent as potentially “changing the internet forever”:
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information — all properly sourced — such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly,” according to its British inventor, Dr. Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
The New York Times Co.’s research and development group has some of the best views in their midtown skyscraper — 24 floors above the newsrooms, higher even than the executives’ suites. Developers in the core R&D group — with titles like “lead creative technologist” and, my favorite, “futurist-in-residence” — are charged by the brass 14 floors below them with anticipating how news will next be consumed.
Among their hunches: in the living room.
Josh and I visited the R&D group last week, and this week we’ll be running five videos showing how they’re looking at the future of news. Today we begin with design integration editor Nick Bilton, who runs through their thinking on e-reader devices, news consumption outside the web browser, and interactive advertising.
You’ll notice there’s a marketing or advertising component to nearly all of what the group is working on. While this is the first time much of the lab has been seen publicly, they’ve given similar tours to more than a hundred advertisers and agencies, Bilton told us. And keep in mind the company has an interest in appearing ahead of the curve to investors.
They drink bettercoffee in the R&D group, not the burnt stuff chugged by reporters on deadline. Maybe that’s because they have time to let the grinds brew: what they’re envisioning won’t reach anyone’s living room for at least two years — if at all.
Up there on the 28th floor, the group’s toys — e-readers torn apart, touchscreen displays, netbooks that bend in every direction — can feel a touch presumptuous for a company surviving debt payment to debt payment. It was just this winter when Michael Hirschorn loudly suggested in The Atlantic that the Times Co. could go out of business, “like, this May.” The Times will endure, in one form or another, and the R&D group is the beta version of the company’s future.
You’ll find the details of what Bilton and his colleagues are thinking about in each of the five videos, and I’ll address some of their key ideas as the week progresses. (Note: In today’s video, Bilton demos an Adobe AIR application that’s very similar to Times Reader 2.0, which is set for release this week.) There’s a full transcript of the video after the jump, and be sure to come back each day this week for more from our visit. Keep reading »
The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. (More.)
Another resource that may prove useful to database journalism is 
