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What really strikes me here, aside from the technical aspects, is the note on p. 21 about how the project was supported from the top because SEO was lagging as a result of site load time, and this line especially: "NYT became an e-commerce site since the last redesign."

Once you are focusing on e-commerce and SEO as an executive team, are you still committed to journalism?

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If you're selling subscriptions, wouldn't that leave you more committed to the journalistic quality readers want rather than letting advertisers dominate that discussion?

Yes, if you're selling subscriptions. SEO is not meant to maximize subscription revenue, but to get people to click for free, aka ads. Which will it be for them?

Two recent pieces are leading me to believe that NYT is floundering around, without a real cohesive online strategy, still:

[1]http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_timess_digital_li....

[2]http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_times_cant_abando....

Why must it be either-or? The web is another medium for the journalism. There's no reason to assume performance was of greater importance than our core mission. The point of that slide is to explain why this redesign had a performance goal at all. Perhaps the slides don't explain this point well, but I think you're reading too much into it.

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