NY Times Starting To Recognize That Data Is News

from the all-the-data-that's-fit-to-release dept

Last year, we pointed out that, after quite a slow (and, at times, backwards looking) start, it appeared that the NY Times was finally figuring out how to truly embrace the web. That meant more than just putting its newspaper online, but taking advantage of the unique opportunities opened up by the web. However, there was still plenty of room for improvement, but it appears that the NY Times continues to move in that direction. Two years ago, we wrote about how newspapers should start freeing up their data via APIs so that others could make useful applications out of it. News organizations often have a tremendous amount of useful data that others might not have access to. Putting it to good use by opening up an API would be a truly valuable service.

And that's exactly what the NY Times appears to be doing, if only on a limited scale (for now). It's set up an API for campaign finance data, allowing anyone to build useful tools or visualizations on top of it. And, that's not all, they're also getting ready to release an API for movie reviews. In other words, the NY Times is definitely recognizing the value in not just freeing up their stories, but making core underlying data totally accessible and useful.

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Grammar Nazis Rejoice: NYT's In-House Grammar Nazi Opens Up Weekly Critique

from the neat dept

There's a class of folks (you know who you are!) who are well known in any kind of written forum/blog/email list etc. It's the infamous "Grammar Nazi." There are nice Grammar Nazis -- and we appreciate those -- and then there are the obnoxious Grammar Nazis who like to imply that you are the stupidest person to ever touch a keyboard because you mixed up affect and effect. From my perspective, I certainly appreciate the folks who point out the grammatical errors we make (we try to fix them quickly, if it makes sense), though I often find it silly to get bogged down in some of the minutiae of certain grammar rules that for all intents and purposes are almost universally ignored.

Either way, whether you're the nice kind of Grammar Nazi (who usually emails us privately) or the obnoxious kind (who always, always, always posts their comments publicly), you'll probably appreciate that the NY Times' internal Grammar Nazi (okay, technically, the Times' deputy news editor who is also in charge of The Times' style manual, Philip B. Corbett) is now publishing that papers' "weekly critique" publicly for all to see (found via Romenesko). In it, he highlights some of the common grammatical or usage problems that he's spotted regularly in the paper, with the intent of bringing it to the writers' attention for future efforts.

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New York Times Takes On Red Light Cameras

from the good-for-them dept

Over the past few years, we've seen plenty of stories about problems with red light cameras, from the fact that they tend to cause more accidents (though, rear end accidents, rather than t-bone accidents) to the fact that some cities have been caught lowering the yellow light time in order to catch more red light runners. One thing that seems quite clear at this point is that the cameras are not about promoting safe driving at all, but are purely about increasing revenue (both for the local government and for the private companies who usually manage the cameras for a cut of the fees). And while there have been some mainstream press reports about the problems with the cameras, there haven't been many public calls from the mainstream press to do something about them.

That is, until a NY Times reporter got dinged by a red light camera (though, for some odd reason, he didn't find out about it until years after it happened). And then we get a nice report on all of the problems with red light cameras and how cities could easily increase safety by merely increasing the amount of time a light is yellow. It's nice to see this issue getting some more attention. Road safety is an important issue -- and it's a shame that governments have been making roads less safe in an attempt to increase revenue when there are much better solutions out there.

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NY Times Does The Math: Pay Walls Don't Make Business Sense

from the about-time dept

As was rumored last month, the NY Times has decided to pull the plug on its TimesSelect paywall service, making all NY Times content from 1987 forward free online (they're also making all of the content from 1851 to 1922 free, but that's already in the public domain). This move comes two years after the paywall was first put in place. At the time, we were one of many who pointed out that this was going to make the NY Times a lot less valuable, and it seems that the business folks at the NY Times finally did the math and came to the same conclusion. They note that subscription growth was slowing (something that was obvious over a year ago) as advertising growth was ramping -- and that they hadn't counted on how many people would be drop-in visitors, coming from other sites. That seems like an odd statement, since it was quite obvious more than two years ago that search engines and other sites tended to drive a tremendous amount of traffic to news sites. Either way, like others before it, the NY Times should be congratulated on doing the right thing, while questioned for what took it so long (or even what made the company make the mistake in the first place).

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Now That NY Times Archive Is Online... People Wish They Could Forget The Past

from the so-what-do-you-do? dept

It's interesting to hear that the New York Times gets approximately one request a day to delete an old article, because we get those requests at Techdirt as well (though, not nearly as often). In both cases, it's often due to someone who is upset that, even if the old article was accurate at the time, it's no longer the case any more -- but Google still calls it up on searches. Clark Hoyt, the current Public Editor of the NY Times discusses the struggle the paper has about what to do in those circumstances. Traditionally, they've just said "sorry, we can't do anything" to people. Now there are cases where they may add a correction or an additional note on incorrect information. There's even a bizarre (and somewhat silly) suggestion that they should have their archives simply "forget" certain "less important" news.

However, what may be most odd is that the article does not include one of the most obvious way to deal with these issues: post a response from the person who feels wronged, to give their side. When people complain about old posts on Techdirt, assuming they're factually accurate, we simply suggest that people put up a comment on the post explaining their side of the story. Of course, this response is quite similar to the new Google News comment feature that so many journalists seem up in arms about -- fearing that it will simply be used for spin, PR and distortion. What they forget is that if such comments are clearly marked as coming from the biased party, people can take that into account, and it provides the additional info necessary for people to make a more informed decision. The NY Times piece also leaves out a second option: that the person can get themselves in the news again, and have the old stories disappear into the dark caverns of Google's later page search results. In fact, that technique may be working for Allen Kraus, one of the guys used as an example in the NY Times piece. Thanks to this new NY Times piece, many of the links on Google appearing under his name are already about this particular story, rather than the old one he's upset about.

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NY Times Launches My Yahoo Clone A Decade Late

from the 1996-is-calling...-it-wants-its-idea-back dept

We were just wondering why the NY Times doesn't seem to understand the basic workings of the internet, and perhaps the answer is just that they're still a decade behind the rest of us. The company's digital unit has now launched an offering called "My Times" which just about every observer is noting seems remarkably similar to MyYahoo, just more than a decade after Yahoo launched MyYahoo. The NY Times is hyping up the fact that the site will have NY Times reporters recommend their favorite sites, but that's hardly compelling since it's really not that difficult to find popular sites these days. I think there are some really fantastic reporters at the Times, but it seems that the people figuring out the company's digital strategy need to update themselves to the current decade.

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NYTimes Values Tracking Over Visitors; Keeps Freakonomics Feeds Crippled

from the partially-ineffective dept

It appears that despite the massive amount of reader backlash against the NY Times for switching the Freakonomics blog to partial RSS feeds rather than full feeds, the powers that be have decided to keep the feeds partially crippled. In the long explanation, Stephen Dubner references my own post about why full feeds actually increase page views, but basically says that it wasn't convincing enough for the money watchers at the Times. The reasoning behind the decision is pretty tortured, and Scott Karp does a fantastic job ripping it apart:

"Sure, you can't place tracking cookies in these people's browsers or serve behaviorally target ads. But HOW IS THAT BETTER THAN NOT REACHING THEM AT ALL??? The idea that publishers, under pressure from advertisers, can put the horses back in the barn and get people to consume content through channels that publishers fully control, just like in old offline monopoly media, is so reactionary that it really does amount to betting against the Internet. It's true that adoption of RSS is still relatively low, but when you take the case of the Freakonomics blog -- where MOST of the readers read it via RSS -- the idea that you could somehow change ALL of their behavior, i.e. force them to come to the New York Times, is just ludicrous. There's no other word for it. Really, what's the point of "partnering" with the Freakonomics blog only to alienate the vast majority of the readers? How is that creating value for advertisers? So you can show ads to the few angry, resentful readers who reluctantly come to the New York Times?"

The NY Times' reasoning reminds me of the ridiculous reasoning that many newspapers (including the NY Times!) gave for many years about why they had to put up registration walls to get to their content. They insisted that they needed much better data about their readers to give to advertisers -- not recognizing that in doing so they were getting a lot fewer readers and the data they were getting was often bogus anyway. It's this same mistaken belief that leads the NY Times to insist it needs partial feeds to give advertisers better tracking data -- even if it means fewer of the type of readers that the NY Times should specifically be aiming for. How could that possibly make sense?

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Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)

from the why-full-feeds-make-sense dept

Last week, the Freakonomics blog got some extra attention by moving the blog to the NY Times. Of course, the blog had been in support of the immensely popular Freakonomics book, but the blog has taken on a life of its own. What was interesting was how people reacted to the news. While there were a few congratulations thrown in, the vast majority of the comments on the blog when the news broke was to complain about the NY Times' decision to switch the RSS feed from full text to partial text, where anyone who wanted to read the whole thing would have to click through. This has kicked off yet another round in the debate with some thoughtful discussions about full vs. partial feeds. Techdirt, of course, offers full feeds and always has. This means that plenty of people who read this site absolutely never visit the site. We're fine with that for a variety of reasons (one of which being that our business model isn't dependent on page views or ad impressions).

However, in our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it's that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what's being said -- which makes it much, much, much more likely that they'll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing -- and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage. It's the same thing that we've talked about in other areas of the content industry. Taking value away from users to try to force a specific action is almost always going to be less desirable than providing people what they want. So while Dubner and Levitt may have to argue with the NYTimes beancounters who will claim that partial feeds will increase revenue, they may want to use the lessons they learned from their own book to recognize that the opposite may be true. Full feeds can actually drive more traffic overall.

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R.I.P TimesSelect?

from the good-riddance dept

The New York Times' plan to lock up its premium content known as TimesSelect was a terrible idea to begin with, and every piece of data that came out about it merely confirmed that the program was unpopular. Sure, the company drew a modest amount of revenue from it, but in exchange it severely limited the exposure of its top columnists, not to mention all of the foregone advertising revenue from the lower traffic. Now comes word that the paper is set to pull the plug on the offering (via Romenesko). At this point, it's still just a rumor, but either way, the company has to arrive at this conclusion eventually. Newspaper publishers cling to the dream that one day all of their content will be safely behind paywalls and that readers will suddenly wake up with an allergy to money and favor this model. But the trend is only moving one direction, as there's even talk about the Wall Street Journal, the one paper that's had a moderate amount of success charging for access, making its content free.

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