The New York Times has decided to let users post stories directly from their site to Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine. As of Monday, the paper will embed links to all three sites to most of their online stories.
The new link will not be embedded into stories used on the paper’s premium content site, TimesSelect, staff blogs or wire stories.
This seems like a begrudging move for The Times, a paper with an elitist reputation and a crossword puzzle that you need a PhD to solve. A social networking site like Facebook doesn’t seem the type of company that The Times would consort with but getting into social news sharing is just good business these days.
Christine Topalian, manager of strategic planning and business development at NYTimes.com, told The Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the paper had been “looking for ways to tap a tech-savvy audience that is accustomed to commenting on and sharing news stories.” Apparently, they started by contacting Digg and Newsvine directly, while Facebook was included because they had contacted The Times earlier this year with a news-feed service pitch.
Although you could always manually add The Times stories to news sharing sites such as Digg and Newsvine before, the capability to do it directly from the story means that The Times is paying attention to where its stories are shared, who reads them, and, more importantly, what they are saying about them. Currently, The Times offers limited ability to comment on its stories. The world of readers’ comments can be brutal (believe me, I know this first hand), and by dealing directly with the sites that facilitate this, The Times exposes itself to far more reader interaction than they have ever had before.
I think this is a great development on the part of the NYT – I think of all the big newspapers, they have done the best job in adapting to the new media environment. To take it to the next level, they need kill the registration requirement so people who are attracted from digg and facebook don’t have to deal with that barrier.
But why do you characterize this “surrendering?” This seems like more of a progressive, proactive move than anything else. And who considers the NYT that elitist, apart from the Fox News crowd? They are one of the most respected news organizations on the planet.
Surrenders? The NYT is just making a good business decision of increasing interoperability between its portal and social networking services. This in turn brings in increased traffic, readership, and eventually revenue. The NYT, to the best of my knowledge, has never been _against_ social news websites. If anything, its publishing of blogs has been an indication of flexibility and adaptability to changing times.
TechCrunch should stick to covering Web 2.0 developments and new startups; not writing about insignificant business decisions.
Jon: Looks like we’re thinking on the same frequency.
It’s about time, but of course, you still have to pay the annual subscription to access TimesSelect before reading and Digging an article. Myself, I paid the $50 or so for the first year, but by the time renewal came around it just didn’t seem worth it. No one was linking to or talking about the Krugman and Dowd pieces, and they never appeared on the social bookmarking sites like Reddit or Digg, not like the Guardian, Slate, etc. pieces that have daily spots on the front pages.
Has The New York Times Removed the JavaScript that prevented it from being in a Frame?
This made it difficult to submit a Times Story to Reddit or NowPublic or other FRAMED social sites.
Supposed Digg was a FRAME site, wonder if the impact of losing all that potential traffic would have made them do away with the Script?
I think losing traffic is not a problem. NY Times must have done a research about their online readers and found out, oops, not many tech savvy people! By adding this features, they hope to draw more readers, guess what, these readers are only small portion of digg users, 10 times more users will be able to see more Times story, the only readership will probably double pretty soon. Not a bad move.
I wonder why TC does not let me “digging”?
I believe this will be a real great news, but they gotta be careful because socialising mite lead to bad effect, this shouldnt go anti-social, as long as the tool is used for what it is made,then its fine.
The bigger side to this story from my point of view is who they have chosen to add as sharing sites. What deals have digg, facebook and newsvine made? As this will put them all a step closer to being known by the general public and further validates Diggs use of the crowd instead of an editor.
User feedback only exposes the weaknesses and indicates on strong points. It is the only unbised feedback which can be used to improve business operations and bottomlines. Blogosphere and interactivity is here to stay. Better adapt and change the way world goes than perish.
This is a great development on the part of the NYT to increase interoperability between its portal and social networking services.
This features will definitely pull in users of digg.
Let’s drop the attitude, ok? there is a difference between intelligent criticism and adolescent inventive. You guys are walking a fine line…
thanks.
You don’t need a PhD to do the Times crosswords. Each week they start easy and get progressively harder. Sure Sat’s puzzle is a bitch, but Monday’s is easy.
You might want to go a little easier — some of us don’t know you, or why your opinion matters so much. This is the world of blogging (or is it?) and what publication you write for doesn’t matter so much as who you are. Or is TechCrunch elitist, as you say the Times is? (They are, of course.) But at least they have been around for a hundred years or so. TechCrunch is a little over a year old, and Natali’s run on TC can be measured in days.
Jacob – I agree with your comment on the validation of these social media sites through the acceptance of mainstream media. The one thing that I hope is that with this integration of Digg and other Social Tagging/Media sites into the mainstream (marketwatch has added these as well), that emphasis is put into the proper usage of these new tools.
BTW, one of the reasons I find this piece so irritating is that while the Times has some technology policies that are a bit too tentative, in other areas, very very relevant to the stuff you cover on TC, they have been the leader — most notably, imho, RSS.
Without their support for RSS 2.0, XML-based syndication would probably still be mired in tech industry politics. The Times has true power in the publishing industry, others follow their technology without reinventing so you get massive amounts of compatibility, leading to usable standards. And not only do they have the power, they used it constructively. I have quite a bit of experience with the Times organization, and it’s a mixed bag, for sure, but they have done some work that’s made a huge difference in our world.
I wrote a piece explaining their role…
http://scriptin...to-support-rss/
Yes…very smart move on the part of NYT. Those other sites have traffic and if NYT is losing Readership then its a great way to stabilise or even improve things.
Great strategic move.
http://www.reva...squarespace.com
If the Times didn’t make the stories disappear and be replaced with ads for premium services, they wouldn’t be hemorrhaging readership.
We don’t need a fancy button to post a link to cool sites. We just need them to stop deliberately making the links break. I’m not going to post a link to a story that nobody will be able to read in a week or two.
And also I would ask, Is any of those bigger older media houses planning to acquire any of these social networking sites or do they prefer to build their own.
Am I the only one asking myself “Where’s reddit?”
Regarding the “observations” about the NYT, no one can deny that as of late they have stumbled a bit regarding quality and reputation (Jayson Blair, anyone? It’s admitted flawed reporting during the run up to the Iraq War by the paper’s ombudsman? Judith Miller/Ahmad Chalabi situation?) Let’s just say that while the NYT is certainly still relevant and well known (but probably less respected) paper, “The Great Lady” is not as great as it once was.
@Dave Winer
give us a break…how primitive of you to use time as a messure of credibility/authority….you are getinng old dave;)
smart,
btw* i don’t remember you working for Nasa also, einstein!
I brought up the importance of this partnership as a marketing vehicle for Digg, Facebook and Newsvine in my original story last night, which includes Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson saying that he thinks it could be a huge boost to his site. (It received about 560,000 unique visitors last month).
http://seattlep...newsvine11.html
I also addressed why some newspapers prefer the conversations about their stories to occur on third party Web sites in this blog post:
http://blog.sea...ives/109532.asp
As to the broken link issue, check out my blog post above which also includes information about how NYTimes.com is now providing permalinks that don’t break after a week or two.
John Cook
Business Reporter
Seattle P-I
ABCota, it’s The Gray Lady, not “The Great Lady.”
Natali Del Conte (and TC in general), Count me as another who doesn’t really understand why you resort to snarkiness in this coverage – misdirected snarkiness.
Lars, I wondered about Reddit, too.
And I agree with the those of you who’ve mentioned the attitude towards the Times isn’t necessary.
I recall Michael Arrington, on a panel at the Online News Association conference in Washington, DC a few months ago, generalized that Times reporters and their sources belong to the same country clubs and golf together, or something of that nature (I cannot quote him directly). Later in the panel he apologized, drawing cheers from the audience.
I think TechCrunch readers would appreciate less attitude toward developments at the Times. Your post about the Times’ foray into social bookmarking sites, however, is otherwise a useful one.
What’s interesting is the that Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal has had these same features for a while now. I have no idea how many users of Facebook actually read the Law Blog, but I can’t imagine it’s much.
Either way, it is smart to increase you readership as much as possible – and we all know these social bookmarking/networking sites are the way to do it. Now if they could only get rid of that Times Select …
How about the other sites? Aren’t you supposed to add Delicious and MySpace first? If you’re going this route, go with the big guys for the numbers.
Or is that a $$$ thing?
To me this evidences the gradual shift that is taking place between the hegemony of the “old power brokers” and the emergence of the “new power brokers.”
Why else would the once formidible NY Times willingly (OK, maybe under “duress” … as in what to do to butress shrinking revenues) embed links to their “bratty” siblings known as Digg, Facebook, and Newsvine?
Oh please, cut Natali some slack. All these papers, NYT, Washington Post hesitate to recognize how they need to catch up. The WashPost recently hired Rob Curley recently b/c it’s taken them time to evolve.
Dave, I’m wondering out loud if your support for the NYT stems primarily from their support for RSS and their occasional links to you. As an occasional (but always unlinked-to) source of breaking news to the NYT, our respect for them doesn’t go quite so far. They are in the middle of a war for their life, and they are doing just about everything wrong.
Mike, no need to wonder about that, as I said, my support does stem from their support of RSS. Editorially, I think they’ve been out to lunch on blogging, writing from an undisclosed conflict of interest (the reporters are out of jobs if blogging is too successful). I’ve had other dealings with the Times that was far less than enlightened. On the other hand I’ve been reading the paper since I could read, being a native NYer, so it’s not a casual relationship, and a mixed one. And they were the ones that called me an “irascible gadfly” so there’s no love lost there either.
But Mike, they were pivotal in RSS, and I’ve heard you say once or twice yourself that RSS is pretty important stuff.
Sure. RSS is important. But the NYT is an ethically bankrupt institution. I have first hand evidence, being trashed by them at a conference (which was subsequently mischaracterized), but there are other examples, too: http://www.ther...o_point_nought/
You, Jarvis and Rafat Ali are sucking up to them to further your own agendas. I don’t think that’s a good idea in the long run. In the case of Jarvis and Ali, this loyalty has resulted in outright fabrications.
Hmmm.
I don’t think this deserves a response other than I doubt it’s true about Jarvis and Rafat, and I know it’s not true about me.
Back off dude, you’re in over your head.
Wow. You are completely lost Dave.
Arrington, please cut the crap… you’re making way more than a hundred thousand dollars a month with a blog that has only TWO employees and no more than six posts a day… even worse, it quite often features biased opinions and reviews, bought by money and nothing else…
Your editorial quality is getting worse every day, and all you do is show off yourself burning money on a magazine. You should be absolutely ashamed!
Please, let’s stay on friendly terms Mike. I have great respect for you personally and professionally. I’m offering a virtual handshake to you.
And I’m shutting down comments on this post.
Dave, I’ll still spearhead the effort to put a statue of you up in Palo Alto for all that you’ve contributed to our community, but you pissed me off today.