Future of the New York Times

Looks like it's nicescroll[0], a jquery plugin (!!!).

If you had a browser extension that allowed you to execute js on each page you visited, the plugin can be turned off if you define `$.niceScroll = true`.

Maybe I should write that one day.

[0] https://github.com/inuyaksa/jquery.nicescroll

Also, apropos of nothing, kudos to these kids for sneaking a Pied Piper logo into one of their pages. :)

The bottom row of icons includes three non-advertising sources of revenue: merch, events and eduction. The merch is self-explanatory. It's what musicians rely on, too. The events parallel how tech blogs make their money. And the courses are an echo of how the Washington Post relied on Kaplan for its profit, until Bezos solved that problem.

Like most things tied to the NYT, the self congratulatory tone often obstructs a clear view of reality. This sentence, for example, is laughable:

"That same year, the Times launched its Chinese website, with staff based in China. Though later blocked by the Chinese government, it has been largely considered a success."

Losing access to 99% of all Chinese-language readers is the opposite of success, and implies that the NYT deeply misread how little its coverage was aligned with the rules of Xi Jinping's regime.

The man they wanted to lead the Beijing bureau ended up stuck in Hong Kong for lack of a visa, and is now the nominal head of the IHT newsroom there.

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I read the NYT daily (via RSS feeds). It is an important institution for the U.S. and the world; the options are rapidly shrinking for high-quality journalism and so I worry about the Times' future. From my perspective the Times' content is invaluable, but in 2015 the Times is hurting itself because it still hasn't embraced the web. www.nytimes.com is still a newspaper's website, not a news website. When I'm looking for news in my browser, I don't care that you have a paper edition, I only care which website serves me best.

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1) Design: Look at the homepage. If someone was asked to design a new news (not a newspaper) website, who would design it like that? Rather than a news website it looks like a newspaper on the web, seemingly trying to mimic the layout of a newspaper's pages. (It's not just the Times -- often it's easy to identify news websites with a newspaper legacy.) From the perspective of people familiar with the Times on paper, it might seem familiar; but get outside that bubble and it's archaic and a bit bizarre.[1]

Also, it hides so much content; why put all that talent and effort into work product that you show only to a few? My NYT RSS feeds look like a different, far richer publication than http://www.nytimes.com/. Again, it seems like attachment to the legacy newspaper design, where people can't easily pick up another publication and so will flip through Times' pages and sections looking for something interesting. The overall structure is a newspaper's sections forced into a website's medium.

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2) Multimedia is still secondary: Articles still are primarily text, but now more often with video and image bolted on almost as decoration, and not an integral part of the content, equal to the text. See today's article on Tomi Ungerer[2], chosen at random. This is about a visual artist, and it actually has several images within the text, rather than on top or in a pop-out, but the images are merely decorative. The author doesn't write, 'look at this drawing; see the use of color, the ironic shapes, etc.' and look at this detail <img: zoomed-in detail> where Mr. Ungerer uses X to do Y' It's almost as if the the author wrote the article and someone else picked some relevant decorations later.

There's even a link in prime real estate, just beneath the banner, to "Video", as if I choose my news based on whether it's in text or video. As if you are saying, 'our actual news is below, and video is something we do over here'. I just want the news; I trust you to choose the best mix of mediums to communicate that particular story.

The solution is well known: Most amateur bloggers are equally fluent in text and multimedia; rather than describing something they write 'look at this' or 'here's what happened' or 'here is the before and after' and, in the middle of their post place a video, image, or short loop as appropriate. Hundreds of millions of phone users fluently communicate with images and photos. But the talented, professional communicators at the Times stick primarily to text, I suppose because that's what they did on paper.

I'm not looking for graphic excitement; they are just communication tools and sometimes multimedia is the right tool, sometimes text is; the Times seems to choose its tools based on paper's limitations (i.e., text is cheap, images expensive in both space and $, video impossible) and not what communicates best on the web (where all are cheap and space is unlimited).

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3) Updates and the news cycle: Two things I still see in the Times: A) 'Updated at 4:55pm'. If I read the article at 3:00pm, that isn't very helpful; should I re-read the entire thing and try to figure out what changed? Run a diff? Again, the solutions are well known and most bloggers handle this situation effectively; the Times still seems to be designing newspaper articles that will be published and read once. B) When you do have someone blogging a breaking news story, sometimes I'll see 'That's it for tonight, I'll be back at 8am tomorrow'. I don't have to explain the problems with that, though I'll add that the news and your readers are in time zones worldwide.

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[1] This will be shocking to say but I'm trying to make a point about how far the Times is, conceptually, from the web medium: Consider the most recognized branding element, the detailed, archaic font used for "The New York Times", in the banner. In the days of newspapers, when readers could only type in Courier if at all, the font was special. It said, 'this was printed professionally, with skill and seriousness'. Now kids can print fonts like that on their school papers, anyone can do it on their WordPress blog, and when they do it's frowned upon. Now that element says, 'not a digital native, stuck in our glorious past'. Again, it's hard to imagine a newly created news website making that design decision. You may have a strong attachment to that design element, but billions of web users don't care. (I know branding is difficult to change; I expect the font will remain.)

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-un....