NYT: getting the intertubes right
Most mainstream media companies seem to have responded to the growth of the internet with fear and loathing. Newspapers, in particular, have failed to break out of the aesthetic of their page layouts which have traditionally represented hierarchies of newsworthiness. This means that newspapers on the web are newspapers adapted to the medium in a very superficial way, and this is not necessarily reader-friendly.
The New York Times is exploring new ways of reading online, and the Times Skimmer is one of these. It offers a much better reader experience than the traditional page layout. I also find it easier to browse than the Google Reader format. As with Reader, you are given the headline and an abstract of the article. To read the full article, click on it and it opens in the skimmer (ads, embedded videos and all) The Times Reader is also available for download and has a similar interface to the Skimmer – the download is free and allows access to the front page stories and previews of all stories in the paper; to read the full edition of the paper you must subscribe. It has a handy “browse” feature, which you can use to flip through the stories and the stories are presented more as they are in a hard copy – columns of text with accompanying images, which are often left out in online versions.
One of the elements of Murdoch’s proposal for paid content that has most riled me is that it hasn’t been presented as anything but a grab for cash; there hasn’t been any discussion on investing in the web to make the content more reader-friendly, the ads less intrusive, or the discussion in the comments better moderated. What the NYT seems to be doing is demonstrating an understanding that the web and the hard-copy are two distinct media, and showing a willingness to invest in ways of translating the content to best fit the internet.
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