Gawker
innovation
Posts Tagged “
Innovation
”
theories
NYT.com: Weight Way Down, Traffic Way Up
Each Friday, 'New York Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman and NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week: "The number of people coming to our website has really popped. The TechCrunch blog, a respected source, attributes this to the dismantling of our Times Select pay wall. It's reasonable as a hypothesis but premature as a conclusion. Lots of things affect Web traffic so it's hard to isolate individual factors. One thing that obviously has a big impact is news. Here's another, maybe not so obvious: Page weight.... In June, the home page took an average of 1.52 seconds to load. Heavy. For September, the first month our new page-lightening technology was fully installed, the load time dropped to 1.18 seconds, roughly a 22% improvement even though our page views grew by 19% over the same period (574 million in June to 683 million in September). Our performance has continued to improve since then: October: 1.15 seconds, November: 1.14, and so far in December: 0.96, while traffic continues to grow."
meouch
'New York Times' Web Crew Trashes IMDB
Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week, we hear about the quietly-revamped movie pages: "Web sites need to be reference sources. So every actor, director, cinematographer, gaffer — and every film — has its own reference page, with encyclopedic and reliable data supplied by our terrific colleagues at Baseline Studio Systems. Thanks to Baseline, Our movie database now has over 900,000 people and 200,000 movie titles. Like IMDB, except that it's true. Want to know who mixed the sound for Titanic? No problem. Did Bosley Crowther like the 1962 version of Billy Budd? Easy to find out. Do you like trailers? You could lose yourself here for days. 'All in all,' says Ariel Kaminer, 'I really do think it stands as the best movie site in America — and that's a title with a LOT of competition.' Anybody want to argue?"
Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. This week, do your own textual analysis: "Look at the nytimes.com homepage, or any section front. There's lots and lots of stuff. Words. Pictures. Headlines. (Big ones and little ones.) Ads. (Little ones and big ones.) Video. Vertical things. Horizontal things. Icons. Navigation bars. Tabs. It's a riot of activity. It's built around information—getting it before impatient users, grabbing little bites of attention span. Look again at T Online. Not so much stuff."
Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom.As of 4 a.m. today, when this week's email was sent, more than 1000 folks had declared themselves "Fans" of the New York Times on the paper's new Facebook page. Here are some of the Facebook comments:"'NYTimes ... Freakonomics, Ethicist, Chess, Pogue, and all the news. Best!''Hi NYT. I try to never miss your daily e-output. ...'
'NYT, the nation's newspaper.'
'NYT rules!'
'Oh NYT how I love you. ...'
'Yes! The NYT is my religion.'
And this, from one Max Schindler of Mountain Lakes High School (Ah, the
elusive young reader): 'I love the nyt, more than anything else.'"
the new york times is just a fancy blog
'New York Times' Rolling Out Moderated Comments On Articles
The New York Times is now carefully allowing comments on some articles, not just blog posts. According to an in-house email from NYT.com general manager Vivian Schiller and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman, "This week we rolled out some new technology for commentary on articles. It's more discriminating than the blog-comment platform and it gives readers more control. For instance, readers can recommend comments and view them in rank order starting with the ones with the most recommendations. Editors can choose an interesting selection for readers with time to read just a few.... You'll notice that we're only putting comments on a handful of articles at first. That's because we're still building our moderation force and the tools for automated moderation. There are some important features built into the system that you can't see and that we're not using yet. For example, producers and editors will be able to designate certain users as 'trusted,' potentially allowing some comments to bypass moderation. We're excited about the chance to experiment."
Each Friday, NYT.com General Manager Vivian Schiller and 'Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on the subject of The Future and The Internet and The Newsroom. Today: "[T]hink about the compulsive clickster. She returns three times in an hour, finds a new headline, clicks, thinks, 'Wait, didn't I read that before? The red thing says, "10:12 AM." But I already read some of this at 7:43 AM. Where's the new stuff?' Kind of confusing. Not so satisfying. Think of what a blog can do for her. It clearly demarcates the new stuff. It links to things we don't have, exposing layers of perspective in real time. It is fast, rich and deep. For the person in search of one-stop comprehensiveness, it might be an unpleasant adventure in ADD. [...] We actually maintain about 100 blogs now, about half of them active. Classy new ones roll out of the factory like Mercedes SUV's in Tuscaloosa."
Each Friday, New York Times General Manager Vivian Schiller and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write an in-house email on webby advances at the paper. This week, reporters file stories from these things called BlackBerries! "Ben Shpigel made the best out of a ridiculous situation. While staking out the Yankees complex in Tampa, Ben sent short updates from the scene on his Blackberry as he and dozens of other reporters and photographers waited for a glimpse of Yankees executives (any Yankees executive) there to discuss Joe Torre's future.... In truth, there wasn't much news. And Ben was without a functioningInternet connection. But he still kept readers informed and entertained." Blog blog bloggety blog!
Listen, Kelefa Sanneh and Ben Sisario and Jon Pareles are out at CMJ shows every night and blogging about it for the New York Times and none of you care! There's not a comment on the Arts Beat blog. Go on over! Today they taught me that I had to go buy both the new Dragons of Zynth ("frenetic"!) and the new White Williams (hello, "like a color Xerox of an old Tom Tom Club song"), and that was useful. Although: When you compare Idolator's coverage with theirs, where's the famous Times innovation web crew influence? Where's the videos—heck, where's the photography? [NYT]
Each Friday, New York Times General Manager Vivian Schiller and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman write a letter on webby advances at the paper. From today's: "Web readers are different from newspaper readers. For one thing, they don't really organize their browsing along sectional lines." Thank you. Item! It's your paper now: "User. Generated. Content. Write it 100 times on the blackboard. Last week City Room featured an item about fishing in New York City... A couple of hours later, a reader submitted a video he shot of fishermen on a pier in Bay Ridge using this form we set up for that purpose. We have talented users. Let's use them." Hey, you're a user, reader!
Each Friday, deputy managing editor Jon Landman and NYT.com general manager Vivian Schiller send out an email to New York Times staffers on the subject of innovation of a digital nature. We read it to take the temperature inside the paper. Some notable moments from this week's installment: "We are way past the point of arguing (aren't we?) about whether blogs or articles make better journalism. The answer, of course, is 'Both.'" And: "Webbies like to say, 'Iterate.' It gets worse! They love to say 'Iterative.' Horrible words. Great ideas. The point is, you can start something on the web that isn't perfect. While it sits there, you make it better. (Try that in the newspaper—by the time you iterate, it's fish wrap.)"