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New York Times 2.0
Business 2.0 (they were 2.0 before everything became 2.0) has a great piece on the moves the New York Times is making to take advantage of digital media and web 2.0. It was penned by my friend John Heilemann who is doing a damn good job profiling some of the most interesting characters in the web world. In this piece he talks to Martin Nisenholtz about how far the Times has come in a fairly short period of time and the moves they are making to remain at the top of the online news space.
I am particularly interested in this story because my firm Flatiron Partners was an investor in the New York Times Digital and my partner Jerry Colonna was on Martin's board for several years before we sold our interest back to The New York Times Company. Since starting Union Square Ventures, we have partnered with The New York Times on our investment in Indeed and we are always looking for other opportunities to work with them.
I am particularly interested in seeing My Times, which is apparently in private beta (how come I never got an invite?). This is how John describes My Times (apparently he did get an invite):
the free service lets you customize your own news homepage, adding feeds from third-party blogs and news sources in addition to slicing and dicing Times content. But what sets it apart from other user-customized online news sites is that it includes access to pages maintained by Times journalists - about two dozen of them at the moment, including such A-listers as Frank Rich, John Markoff, and David Carr-that contain their own bookmarks and feeds.
Now that's a cool idea. I'd subscribe to a feed of Frank Rich, John Markoff, and David Carr's bookmarks for sure.
But the most interesting thing in the story is the gap between the new stuff that the Times is developing and the reading habits of their user base. Here are some quotes from the story that I found particularly interesting on that subject:
On the Most Popular page, while the Most E-Mailed feature is, as he puts it, "the big kahuna, a significant driver of interest," Most Blogged and Most Searched are catching on more slowly. Tagging hasn't caught on at all.
RSS newsfeeds, which the Times adopted early, are still "a niche," Nisenholtz says. (In June, RSS feeds generated 12.2 million pageviews for the site out of a U.S. total of nearly 295 million.) "RSS is still very techie," he says. "Most people outside the business are totally unaware of it."
"We touch 25 or 26 million people a month," he says, "and a very minimal number of them are technologically savvy.... Our median age online is 44 or 45 years old. So we have to find ways to bring people into the loop who don't know what a tag cloud is."
Well they've got one reader who knows what a tag cloud is right here and I am eager to try out some of this new stuff. I just hope they don't fall into the temptation to put it into Times Select, the one part of the Times strategy that makes no sense to me.
Comments (10) | Posted August 25, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
Times Select is one part of an otherwise admirable Web strategy that makes no sens to me either. The other, more frustrating one, is their clueless, out-of-context, and often comical self-referential links as I wrote about here:
http://tinyurl.com/rzz48
Posted by: greg | Aug 25, 2006 12:47:25 PM
to heck with tag clouds. with that demo, they should add slot machines (and i'd like to sell them some). ;)
Posted by: steve | Aug 25, 2006 1:25:12 PM
The BBC are doing some similar "popularity" boxes on their news site, including Most Read, Most Emailed, and most popular in certain continents.
Posted by: dwlt | Aug 25, 2006 3:43:11 PM
Frank Rich? Are you serious? Lemme guess...you're a Dowd fan too?
Posted by: Dave | Aug 25, 2006 5:47:25 PM
Everything about the My Times sounds great...well except for Frank Rick, Paul Krugman, Maureen Down, the whole Op-Ed department, the features department...actually if they could just leave off the NY Times content altogether and just have the feature where you can link OTHER news sources and third-party blogs, THEN it would be great.
Posted by: T. | Aug 25, 2006 10:00:55 PM
Fred
Interesting ... Very interesting ... The "My Times" thing sounds very cool ...
I riffed the other day (and took a swipe at the Times Select)on the NYT;
Top Ten Cloves: Things About New York Times Hiring A Perfume Critic
http://puregarlic.blogspot.com/2006/08/top-ten-cloves-things-about-new-york.html
Peace
JTD
Posted by: J. Thomas Duffy | Aug 26, 2006 8:41:09 AM
One possible shortcoming of the My Times offering: I still think it is important to see the "standard" hard copy NYT front page each day. I want to know what Keller and co. thought should get placement on the front page (and in what location on the front page). I want to know what the rest of the world (offline reader) is seeing and what the Times is telling them is most important in the news that day (or the previous day, of course).
Posted by: Rich | Aug 27, 2006 9:00:56 PM
Great articel with good information thank you.
Posted by: Manns | Aug 30, 2006 12:43:58 PM
You would subscribe? Do you mean you would pay?
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