It used to be that when a newspaper put out an “Extra” edition, it was filled with stories written by its reporters who had toiled away the night to cover some breaking news or collection of stories. Today, the New York Times is redefining “Extra” as stories written by others. It is turning on a new feature on its homepage called Times Extra that will start adding links from elsewhere underneath the headlines of its own articles. The related links are from other news sites and blogs (even the Wall Street Journal), with the source highlighted in green to differentiate them from the New York Times’ own stories.
As you can see from the screenshot above, this adds a lot of unnecessary clutter on the page. (Don’t worry, it’s optional. That’s why they call it a beta). The links come from Blogrunner, the buzz aggregator the New York Times bought in 2006 2005. Blogrunner is a Techmeme competitor, except that it doesn’t really compete that well (see traffic chart below).
Since last year, Blogrunner headlines have appeared on the site’s technology section. TechCrunch posts often appear on Blogrunner, as they do on Techmeme. Yet of all the sites that refer traffic back to us, Blogrunner is No. 185 and the New York Times is No. 51. Techmeme is No. 5. Blogrunner is just not a factor. That could be just us.
Now, with Times Extra, these Blogrunner will move right onto the homepage. Maybe they will be harder to ignore there and will start generating more meaningful traffic. But my guess is that readers will find them distracting and annoying.
While it is certainly enlightened of the New York Times to experiment with putting links to its competitors on its most valuable piece of online real estate, the experiment doesn’t really work. I would like to see these links on individual article pages because they do provide some good context and different takes on the same story. But they don’t belong on the homepage.
The concept here is that if readers can find the best news and opinion from around the Web right from the homepage, they will keep coming back to it as a starting point, just like they do with Digg or Techmeme. Where this breaks down is that the reason I still have the New York Times as my homepage is that I want to see at a glance what is going on in the world—in business, in technology, in politics, and in world events. The editors of the New York Times do a pretty good job of distilling the world on that page. Once I know that the Mumbai attackers were trained in Pakistan, I don’t need three more headlines on the same story. That clutters the page, and leaves less room for other headlines. I want that page to maximize the number of different stories I can explore about different subjects, not different points of view on the same subject.
When I want to see what the buzz is and all the different points of view about the most important stories, I go to Techmeme or Digg. Those sites are designed to filter the news and show me just that. They are easy to read and scroll through with headlines that take up nearly the whole page.
The New York Times wants to have it both ways by jamming its news filter beneath its own stories and making readers squint to figure out which is which.
Update: I’ve added a Beet.tv video interview below from last year with Blogrunner creator Philippe Lourier where he explains how he wants to “organize news in a different way.”
Google’s minimalistic look cannot be obtained for a News Site… but too many links are no good either.
hehe. gross.
checking both FB connect and reg…
That would add spice, Cool eh.
Sabina
Wonder what the NYT would think about the clutter of your right column?
At least we try to contain the clutter in one place.
Haha! Fair enough
Just L
ve the idea.
This is how the Web should – and was intended to be BEFORE the greed and politics of backlinks took over.
This design adds a wealth of easy to browse related information.
In a sense, Huffingtonpost is testing this strategy on a smaller scale and getting massive results.
It takes much courage to send your visitors to competitors. However, this is how the web would look like if not everyone was greedy.
Interesting…looks like the New York Times is starting to realize that affiliate traffic is not the devil. Also…more content will always win out in the end. Bloggers do it all the time…why can’t the NYTimes?
NBC Universal has done the exact same thing with all of their local sites @ NBCNewYork.com, NBCChicago.com, etc. There is a much bigger story here which is that nearly all “traditional” media channels are moving to this model to compete for a presence in digital local news/events/etc.
TechCrunch missed a much more interesting/larger story..
Yeah I hear ya. I like the link offs on the nbcnewyork site better. The link offs are integrated within the site, articles and overall experience. Not like NYtimes. Plus I like the link offs in the articles. It gives me all the information I want.
I agree HmmConvenient. They did clutter up the home page, but they will figure out the best implementation soon enough. This is a big step for old school media and we should be excited that the NYT is willing to concede they aren’t the only game in town.
totally agree with you : “cover what you do best, link to the rest”
it should be a lesson for the press in the future
I think it is a pretty good idea : web is open
see the success of drudge…
maybe they should do a manual selection instead of using blogrunner, like the political browser of the washington post. there is a big value in manual selection and i think lot of users would be happy to have that
the nytimes homepage with links will be an alternative page, so if you don’t like it, just keep the old one
scott karp explaint link journalism better than me : http://publishi...wer-and-wealth/
wow. thats a really messed up design
Isn’t this (cynically) just a way to keep the page fresh with new content when they lay-off all the remaining journalists? The NYTimes is against the wall financially, so ending up a news aggregator may be all they can afford.
Is national news media really a realm where aggregation is applicable? Don’t you want people distributing your content so that you gain visitors from competitors? I suppose you could argue that this drops the likelihood of users going to a competitor site since they can get the info on here, but NYT had better be sure these feeds dont produce better content than they a generating.
Does anyone know if the other site’s content shows up in any NY Times feeds?
national news is a real where aggregation is applicable : take the success of the drudge report for example, or google news. the question is : can you do journalism and link journalism at the same time and how?
I think you don’t have to worry about giving audience to your competitors : if you do a good job and link to the best articles on the web, people will come back to your site.
How to link? In the homepage? Just on the sections and articles pages? It’s totally new for the newspapers so I give credit to the NYT for testing, let’s wait for the results
the layout of the site is definitely good but those links from elsewhere made it a little messed up
Sounds like a good idea to me. The screenshot only looks “cluttered” because of the big blue arrows you’ve overlayed on it.
I agree completely with your view. I also use the NY Times as a view of what is going on in the world. They should add related articles to the article page. This is how it’s done on Gather.com. While I’m reading an article about a particular topic, I can see what other people have written that might be related and I get a broader view of the topic. Thanks for the review of the NY Times beta program!
I agree with David’s thoughts…a good concept, but poorly executed.
It’s rather ironic that Tech Crunch, land of a thousand widgets and rollover functions would be sounding the alarm about another site cluttering their interface.
@smorty7
You are absolutely right … and the clutter on this very site/page hardly adds ANY value!
@all
NYT is doing the right thing by trying … they have a strong brand and can afford to ask their loyal fans to give these ideas a whirl. The presentation can always be tuned.
It’s the concept that’s important.
@techcrunch
why the negative/dismissive tone about Blogrunner?
and the openess of the initiative should be welcomed. it is SO not the old way to think of the press, and so necessary to be open on the web
I knows its TechCrunch’s deal to hate everything everyone is doing, but I kind of like it.
Wow, totally unfair.
If TC were showing up on the NYT, this post would be about the openness, Jeff Jarvis’ link economy, and why linking to others is all good (even if the design isn’t perfect yet.)
This time, TC got cut out (!) and now outbound links are “clutter”. SRSLY, PPL.
totally agree with you
but maybe it would be better to make a human selection, as the washington post do in his political browser
The only problem I have with NYT is that their articles are frickin 5-10 pages long, pretty much the equivalent of an essay…
I think this is a very interesting move. Traditional media companies are still trying to grapple with what to do online. While web cos like Digg, Google News, etc have thrived on other people’s content, content owners are still struggling.
I think this is a great move where Nytimes clubs it’s own content and also recommends other great read on the internet. So Nyt becomes the single point of authentic news access.
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