Times Extra: The New York Times Opens Web Front Page to Outside Content - ReadWriteWeb. At a time when the online world is continually seen as a more trusted source of news, mainstream media outlets find themselves forced into the position of becoming more and more open to keep their readers coming back.
Removing "paid subscription" requirements that prevented everyday users from accessing content was one of the first cracks in the walled gardens. Opening APIs to other developers has been gaining favor. And now, another trend is coming to light: incorporating third-party content to supplement the original content the sites are offering. Today, the Gray Lady joined those ranks as the The New York Times launched Times Extra, a view of its front page supplemented with content from other news sources and blogs. The third-party content will be gathered and ranked by Blogrunner, a news aggregator purchased by The Times Company in 2005. Now, this may seem like a relatively insignificant step for people who live and breathe the Web every day.
The greater failure of old media. I am not a big reader of Seth Godin even though he is said to be one of the smartest folks in this realm we call new media.
Every once in a while though I’ll catch one of his posts via a link in someone else’s post; or like I did today via Robert Scoble’s Shared Feed. It is this post of his today that has had me thinking for most of the day because what he wrote is in my opinion nothing short of brilliant. In his post Seth walks us easily through why an old media icon like the Grey Lady has become; or is quickly becoming irrelevant but also why this didn’t have to happen.
As a one time thought leader and a social-political influencer the New York Times had all the pieces it needed to survive our shift to a whole new way of interacting with our news and information. Seth's Blog: Watching the Times struggle (and what you can learn) Page by page, section by section, the influence of the New York Times is fading away.
Great people on an important mission, but their footprint is shrinking and the company is losing stock value and cash and power and the ability to have the impact that they might. Today's Sunday magazine has a cover story on Jennifer Aniston. Of course! "All the News That's Fit to Print" is the heart of the problem. It was never that, of course.
Lots of organizations go through this analysis. When you think about your business, realize that it is a combination of assets and constraints. When in pain, the answer is not to pander to the masses and undo the very things that made you special. Ten years ago, the paper knew what it had to do. 1. Hiring and promoting David Pogue is a great example of expanding that base into the online world. 2. What would happen if the huge team of existing Times editors and writers each interviewed an interesting or important person every day? 3. 4. 5. New York Times API Coming - ReadWriteWeb. As print circulation continues its slide at most newspapers, one of the United States' most respected newspapers, the New York Times, is taking steps to boost online readership.
The paper is already the third most cited web site on Techmeme, and the first on Memeorandum, proving that bloggers at least pay attention to its reporting. Now, the Grey Lady is working on an API that aims to make the entire newspaper "programmable. " In addition to the API, New York Times CTO Marc Frons told mediabistro.com that internal developers at the paper will use the platform to organize structured data on the site.
Following that, the paper plans to offer developer keys to the API allowing programmers to more easily mash up the paper's structured content -- reviews, event listings, recipes, etc. "The plan is definitely to open [the code] up," Frons said. The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months. Conclusion.