The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Back then, they even had a low-bandwidth version of the site: http://web.archive.org/web/19990117023050/http://www.nytimes...
The website included various tutorials on how to use it, including a guide that covers the different browsers. None of the browsers listed are actively developed today: http://web.archive.org/web/19961112182937/http://www.nytimes...
edit: A couple of other observations:
- How many other content websites have published for nearly this long and yet have their oldest articles remain on their original URLs? Most news sites can't even do a redesign without breaking all of their old article URLs.
- I like this Spiderbites feature -- a sitemap of a year's worth of articles (likely for webcrawlers at the time): http://spiderbites.nytimes.com/free_1996/
I once saw a scene in a movie from the 1990's where the character used the NYT website to look up an article. My reaction: jealousy.
Right now, if I see a website winding up; I hit that X with the speed of a mouse hitting the stimulant lever. I don't think I'm alone.
Similarly, sites that sell products don't care how many users they have, they care how many users buy. And they optimize accordingly.
Am I the only one who thinks that the whitespace heavy and well designed NYT modern site is better? Good line height, good type choice, very good readability.
As opposed to times new roman at 1.0 line height, is that really the pinnacle of readability? Eight grade book report format?
The fixed headers are very annoying on small laptops, where vertical screen space is already limited. It makes no sense to stuff the main navigation menu into a hamburger bar on the FRONT PAGE of a newspaper web site so that a tiny amount of white space may be added to the sides.
A navigation bar shouldn't scroll down the screen with me and steal screen space when I'm reading an article. I would rather hit the back button, change tabs, or scroll to the top and click on a different section when I'm done reading an article. And the layout is just ugly when Javascript is turned off because there is no spacing between the full size images and the body text.
Anybody have any idea what are these?
I wish I was a web developer in 1996!
As someone who was actually developing websites in the years 1996-1999... no, you really, really don't.
CSS1 was released in December 1996, just to give you an idea.
Today we argue about how much JS is too much, or if there is such a thing, but back then if you wanted the markup to change you sent a request to the backend and rerendered the entire page with the small change you desired.
Loading a page was an exercise in patience, as a first pass on a _decent_ page would get you the text and highly pixelated images, then subsequent passes (and you could watch the screen redraw from the top down multiple times) would reduce the pixelation to LESS BUT STILL pixelated versions.
Some sites were just Word documents that had been "Save as HTML" -> These could be MB of markup, and basically impossible to edit.
Plus, almost immediately, the browser wars began and rather than arguing over how to push the standards, they had none, and just tried to establish their own, incompatible vision.
Basically, once the general populace was the target for content, you were no longer allowed to just worry about the content.
You can even find quite old articles from key historical times and they're presented just like articles today. For example, the famous Crittenden Compromise is at http://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/06/news/the-crittenden-compro...
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times-...
[1] http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/aftonbladetse18ar/article1...
[2] http://gfx.aftonbladet-cdn.se/image/12090393/496/normal/5b4f...
I love how different the writing is in old articles like this. The complexity of the sentences compared to today's news writing is crazy.
Sure there's archive.org - but in the old model, you'd say something in print, copy it a million or so times, then distribute it on paper around the world.
If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually.
These days, you need to add an exclusion to the archive.org bot in robots.txt and then flip a few bits. It's a different ballgame.
In the traditional model, someone could find say, an original copy of the 20 year old newspaper and present that as evidence. Forging that document would be sufficiently hard for a single individual. But in the new model, claiming something is an "original copy" of a web page can be easily disputed because such a forgery can be trivially crafted.
Think about the implications in places with large civil unrest, very little free press, and mostly state-owned media. What's the solution for those societies?
It's a problem.
> If an evildoer wanted to change a claim from say, 20 years ago, they'd have to create a forgery that looks like it's 20 years old, then secretly swap out all the archival copies in libraries and get large-scale mass obedience from librarians or manually make the swap at each library individually.
It has happened: http://www.unz.com/plee/india-v-china-border-games/ (the relevant bit begins at "India’s claim to AP is complicated in an interesting way.")
You're correct, of course, that it's become easier in the modern model. But people who feel strongly about the more adversarial issues of the modern day already archive enemy publications themselves, lest they mysteriously change in the future. The climate change issue is full of this sort of thing.
Even the fact that forged "original copies" are easy to create can be overcome; you just need to contemporaneously deposit a copy somewhere that creates records of when you make deposits and withdrawals. Again, the amount of adversarial forethought required has changed enough to make a significant difference.
I wish archive.org wouldn't delete old material based on new robots.txt policies, though. :/
The electronic newspaper
(address: http:/www.nytimes.com)
"If he were do it over again today, would he do anything differently? Any regrets?
Mr. Berners-Lee smiled and admitted he might make one change — a small one. He would get rid of the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses.
The double slash, though a programming convention at the time, turned out to not be really necessary, Mr. Berners-Lee explained. Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes. (Today’s browsers, of course, automatically fill in the “http://” preamble when a user types a Web address.)"
If only they had any idea of the pain they were about to cause themselves. :)
Not anymore. :)
> The New York Times on the Web, as the electronic publication is known, contains ..., reporting that does not appear in the newspaper, ..."
Funny how the NYT wanted to charge nearly two dollars to allow you to print older articles. Asking people to pay for the own digitization.
The merc used to include a PDF version of its front page, I believe.
Nando was the first time I read of breaking news online. The story on the Oklahoma City bombing jolted me awake one morning. Reading Nando over coffee on my tiny 12 inch screen of a Macintosh LC.
I've often wondered if they could have leveraged their very early lead into something else.
It seems odd looking back now, seeing how "newspapers" have all become lumbering dinosaurs, but at the time this particular newspaper was on the bleeding edge of innovation.
raises hand
Good memories... Claris Home Page!
A quick start:
* The separation of different forms of content: They don't really mix text with video, images and graphics, even though most web-native bloggers will do it. They seem to lack fluency with mixing media; it's a project for them. They'll staple a video and decorate text with images and graphics, but they don't really commuicate with it; they don't say, 'here's how Clinton responded to Sanders:" <video>, or, 'here was the scene when the earthquake struck' <video>, or even in a movie review, here's what the scene looks like: <video> or <image>. Instead, they try to describe the visual with text. Even explanatory graphics are a separate, special production, on a separate page.
* The font in their title: Back when printing fancy fonts was a technological feat, this font communicated that they were serious and sophisticated. Now, if you step back and ignore the history, it looks like a kid playing with fonts. (Look at it this way: would you ever use that font on a website you were designing?). It says, insists even: We're anchored to the paper age and will never let go. We're the old, dying generation. If you want something new, go elsewhere.
* The discoverability of content: Obviously mimicing a newspaper, but a bad choice for the web. How many links are on that home page (scroll down)? And even more content doesn't even appear there. All that hard work and content, unlikely ever to be found, buried and lost forever. It's tragic. But that's what they did in the hard copy newspaper so I guess it's ok.
* Also, where are stories updated since I visited a couple hours ago? Oh look, if I look at every link a red 'updated' indicator is next to some links (just like the web 20 years ago!), which I see if I examine every one of them (and how do I identify brand new links in this massive page of links?) - but where in this multi-page story are the new parts? I guess I'll just re-read the whole thing.
I say this all out of love. They are an very important institution. The news business is hard enough; stop handicapping yourselves! From the outside they look like they still, in 2015, haven't fully embraced the new technology. What would you say about another business' web team (that was not adapting a newspaper to the web) that produced a site that looked like this? Egads. [1]
EDIT: Some minor edits and additions
[1] I'm not blaming the web developers; I assume they are working within the general constraint of: Make it look like the newspaper.
I'd start by not hijacking clicks with JavaScript. In Firefox, double clicking the body of the article (which I do often to search for terms in the article) changes the font size (??), clicking in some parts of the body activates a link to another article. It's been like this for years.
I use Firefox as my main browser and read nytimes.com every day. I haven't experienced any of those behaviors, nor am I able to replicate them.
Nothing I mentioned was abouut trends or short term page view revenue. It's about making their site more functional, improving their content by taking advantage of multimedia (hardly a trend by now) and making their excellent content more available to their readers.
> there are tons of articles with embedded media, here's one: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/nyregion/bronx-school-embr....
In that article, the photos are what I meant by 'decorative' media (I'll agree it's not a perfect choice of word). the not integral to the story - you could skip the photos and not miss anything. The video is separate from the text of the story; they are not integrated; from reading the story, There is no indication that the author of the text knows that the video exists.
What I see many amateur bloggers do is tell one story and use the right tool for the right moment. Where text tells the the story best, use that; switch to video/audio/whatever when that does best. The story is what matters, not the media used. As one possible example:
At New Visions Charter High School in the Bronx, here's how one innovative class starts its day:
<video of segment class> Click <here> to watch the full class (45 min.)
What you just saw is a new school program that seeks to use hip-hop music to reach teenagers who may not respond to more traditional counseling. Called hip-hop therapy, it encourages them to give voice to their day-to-day struggles in neighborhoods where poverty and crime are constants, and provides a foundation for school leaders to engage directly with them in a way that seems more enjoyable than intrusive.
We should be fluent enough to use whatever medium best gets across the next idea in the article.
Strictly speaking, their mission of the NYT is to make enough money to survive. In the long term, that will prove difficult if the audience does not grow.
It's all very well trying to be a reliable source of information, but a reliable source of information combined with frothy light articles is better than a bankrupt company.
Disagree. The NYTimes is at the forefront of dynamic content and page layouts. They inspired a couple of startups to build publishing tools after their Snowfall article was published http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
For more interactive articles, check out this http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/us/year-in-interacti...
>* The font in their title... Serif fonts aren't dated, and this is part of their branding and aesthetic. Of course a company founded in 1851 will not have the same aesthetics as a company founded in 2016. As a designer, I think their text and page layouts are some of the best I've seen.
>* The discoverability of content... Unless you have access to their analytics, you aren't in a position to criticize their page layout. The problem with these armchair critiques is they are never argued with data.
Perhaps, but it's not implemented in production; that is, it's not implemented in the vast majority of their content. I know Snowfall was a big deal to some, but I'll bet most readers of the Times have no idea what it is. I've never heard it discussed outside news/tech insiders.
Also, dynamic content and page layouts are not multimedia.
>* The font in their title... Serif fonts aren't dated, and this is part of their branding and aesthetic.
That font is dated, beyond a doubt.
> a company founded in 1851 will not have the same aesthetics as a company founded in 2016
That's what I meant. They are tied to 1851 and say it loud and clear. Others do update their branding.
>They are tied to 1851 and say it loud and clear. Others do update their branding.
They have modernized it, but it still acknowledges their past, which is in line with their branding. I don't think anyone looks at their typeface and is turned off by it.
Neither of us have any idea. Old newspapers are the only ones using that design, so I expect people will associate it with the old, fading industry.
There's a point to be made about the separation of print and web, but you also should consider that text is much more easily saved than images/video/interactivity. The NY Times is a journalistic paper, and part of journalism is to create content that will be readable for generations later. If someone comes along 20 years from now and tries to read about an earthquake, are they going to be happier seeing a giant "video 404" or being able to read it?
> The font in their title...
While I doubt I'd launch a product with that font in my current design, there's not necessarily anything wrong with harkening back to a design scheme that over a century old. The NY Times logo and font associate journalism that's austere and unchanging, and for that I'd say they're serving their audience quite well.
>The discoverability of content...
I'm fairly certain you're not meant to complete the front page. It's not a bucket list of things you need to check off, it's to give you access to the news that's currently relevant. If you go to one of the subpages the content discoverability is much better.
Agreed. The problem is that it seems likely that readers will miss many stories they would be interested in.
Content that loads as you scroll is, I absolutely believe, a trend that will be either overhauled or reviled within five years. And reaching the end of the page actually makes me respect the publication more: they have the respect to tell you nothing more is worth your time, rather than a desperation to milk every possible page view out of you with content of lower and lower quality. I don't want "content until you're sick of it", I want just what's a good use of my time.
The font communicates sophistication to me. It's carefully designed and doesn't impede usability. It's branding, at a higher effort level than the more common approach (a color palette). Typography is increasingly a staple of high-quality web design and they do it well. (I wouldn't use it, but only because they've made it theirs.)
Your other criticisms I agree with.
I am also a paid subscriber and so I have a vested interest in seeing them do this right
Unbiased? Some quality reporting to be sure, especially when politics aren't involved, but they jumped the bias shark a long time ago.
https://twitter.com/chartier/status/689867033031258113/photo...
That's not what you're paying for. You're paying journalists to research and fact check important news stories, and for developers to build interesting and novel ways to display content, and about a million other things that I'm not going to list here. It's one thing to get around the paywall because you don't read NYT often or don't have the money and wouldn't pay anyway, but if you've got the means to pay then you probably should.
And before someone says something to the extent of "the NYT is a rag, they print misinformation all the time!" I'll preemptively say that every writer has their own internal biases and you should ready multiple news sources if you want to distill some semblance of the "truth." I don't think there's any denying that NYT is at the very least in the upper tier of news organizations today.
The reason I did it isn't so much due to their intellectual property, but to support and pay for quality journalism.
In the 2 years I've subscribed, I find myself not going to their website as much as loving their email updates. They do a very good job of sending morning and evening updates encapsulating the important news of the day.