Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down that Wall[ed Garden]!
December 4, 2008 by Craig Stoltz
So the New York Times has capitulated: Its website now links to related content written by individuals not employed by the New York Times.
True, it is doing this with a tentativeness that’s almost sweet, like a shy child uncertain whether he is misbehaving badly enough to be punished.
To activate Times Extra you first have to find, below the masthead, an iconette the size of a Chicklet [the chewing gum, not the RSS thing]. See it? Just south of the “me” in “Times”?
Times Extra
Click it, and the home page is transformed. Little boxes appear below some stories, full of links to content published elsewhere on the web.
NYTimes Extra
The links are admirably ecumenical, just as likely to point to frisky indie blogs ["Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite to Stupid"] as they are mainstream news sources [U.S. News] or established online purveyors [Talking Points Memo.]
Having said that, there is plenty wrong with this alpha-ish iteration, aside from the find-the-little-icon game.
The link boxes feature retro-’90s scrollbars. If you want to see more than three links, you have to scroll. [Jakob Nielsen, code blue!]
The links are displayed on the home page rather than the article pages. This has the odd effect of inviting you to read content elsewhere before you’ve read the Times piece. Or maybe they figure you’ll read the Times piece, click the “back” button on your browser, scroll through the little link box, click on one of the links and then leave the site.
The usability errors are so bad that they almost make me question whether this whole thing is set up to fail. [Look, nobody used the Extra home page, and when they did, they didn't click on the links anyway!].
But let’s give the Times the benefit of the doubt and say they just haven’t worked through the details.
In which case the Times has demonstrated that it understands trying to contain news consumers on one’s site is a loser’s game. Online news consumers won’t stay in a walled garden, even the rather nicely tended one chez Sulzberger.
News consumers still value brands like the Times. They just don’t let their respect for a brand get in the way of native online behavior. They ricochet from link to link, impatient and curious, easily distracted and hard to engage. If the Times tries to trap them by failing to provide links to the outside, readers will leave anyway–but now with a residue of annoyance that adheres to the brand.
It’s significant that the related news is aggregated by Blogrunner, a newsmixing service owned by. . .The New York Times. Is the Times trying to amortize its investment in Blogrunner? Is it afraid it won’t able to sell the service to other media if it, um, doesn’t use it itself?
Beats me. But I do know this. Blogrunner has something far more odd and strange than Times Extra. Check out Blogrunner’s “Annotated New York Times.”
Annotated NYTimes
Say, do the Sulzbergers know about this?
well surely US is going through tough times.
Wow, it IS the size of a Chiclet!
Pretty cool though, I just tested it out. It makes the page look a little more crowded, but I do like the option to browse elsewhere to find related content. And blogs might get some great exposure…too bad they don’t make that view the ‘default’, most people would look right over the chiclet.
[...] with newly appointed New York Times GM Denise Warren in which she discusses, among other things, Times Extra, a feature that for the first time automatically integrates journalism from outside sources [...]