Nicole's Editorials

Technologically savvy "Times" on the rise!

I had a pretty bad attitude as I began to read John Heilemann's article "The New York Times' Digital Makeover." I've always been partial to the black ink on the real paper myself. As I read on, though, I couldn't help but get excited about the new ideas The New York Times are implementing on their web page.

I wasn't too surprised to read that The New York Times is considered to be the most web-savvy newspaper, but was shocked to hear the numbers behind the success.

"Amid uninspiring second-quarter results in which the company's revenue and profit were basically flat from the same period a year earlier, Internet revenue soared from $49 million to $66 million."

That's a lot of money, but the revenue was not strictly coming from ads. A new premium service program has given readers an all access pass to the columnists' articles as well as various other features such as new multimedia components and e-mail alerts and available to subscribers only. TimesSelect had 513,000 subscribers in June, contributing $9.5 million to its revenue.

RSS readers are still considered a new endeavor for the times as well, generating a great deal of traffic on the site. Personally, I've become addicted to my RSS reader, and think this genius idea will become a large part of everyone's day, as it has mine. (Boy do I feel like a huge loser for saying that!)

"Even 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.' "

The most exciting new aspect of The New York Times, in my humble opinion, is the "MyTimes" idea. Although only in testing stages with 5,000 users, this idea makes me smile.

"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."

Even as a poor college student, I'd be willing to pay the cash necessary for complete personalization. Count me in to play a role in the "seminal cultural shift!"

posted by clevergirl @ 8:37 PM