I don't mean "link bait" in quite the derogatory sense it's usually used (though slightly).
I mean it in the sense that other than links from aggregator sites with provocative titles, there is absolutely no reason that I would ever be on the NY Times' site. They've done some pretty serious damage to their reputation in recent years and newspapers are on the decline anyway.
While I'm sure these stories are a big hit for them, I don't really feel like I gained anything from my time spent on the site. It looks cool and the work done in data visualization is _very_ cool, but I want to look at some of the data. I want to dig down and look at the parts of data that are interesting to me.
So yes, data scientists are transforming news, but they're still failing to deliver a product that I want..and something that I think a lot of people want now. People used to look to newspapers as their go-to information source for current events.
Oh the hours of my life that I've spent in a library looking at microfiche. Thankfully we don't have to do that anymore, but instead of going to the NY Times still, most of us go to wikipedia and follow links from there.
The NY Times is actually in a position to provide something that would give them some relevance and make people want to use their resources to find out things.
This site, however, was little more than entertainment. They could even just present a platform to crowdsource information collection about the locations (pictures of the locations over the years, places to put links to building and tax records, etc) and I would be totally pleased with it.
Just give me some interaction with the data.