DANA POINT, Calif.--Could the Information Age's fast-paced news overload be a boon to the old-media companies that it was supposedly going to force out of business?
That was one of the suggestions brought forth by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman and publisher of The New York Times Company, at his keynote address at the WebbyConnect conference here Wednesday morning.
"Our 21st-century news cycle, with its trials and tribulations, feels even more immediate because of our access," he said. "It is reasonable to ask: Do we need all this news and information? Do we want all this news and information? Can we tolerate all this news and information?"
In an age characterized by both extreme uncertainty and a glut of outlets to hear about it, Sulzberger said people will turn to trusted and pragmatic voices.
"Now that everyone is in their end-of-the-world mode, we should make a conscious effort to reject the increasingly frenzied 'apocalypse now, tomorrow, and forever' talk," he said. "Quality content matters...trustworthy voices are more important than they have ever been."
As Sulzberger addressed the small, exclusive crowd of media industry and digital-strategies types at a luxury hotel just down the road from the upper-crust towns that inspired The O.C. and Laguna Beach, the setting wasn't a perfect fit for his sobering message of adapting and keeping focused in hard times.
Neither was some of Sulzberger's underlying optimism about the Times' own future. The New York Times Company's stock has been trending downward for years now, its quarterly earnings haven't been sunny for quite some time, it underwent newsroom layoffs earlier this year, and no one's denying that many of the ad dollars once enjoyed by a few national news outlets are well on their way to distribution across a vast array of new-media publications.
Sulzberger would brand this not as a crisis, but rather as change that requires adaptation. "It's important for traditional companies to adopt strategies that enable us to be of the Internet, not on the Internet," he said. "There must be an institutional commitment to engage in reinvention, especially as the information revolution picks up steam."
That's why, he said, the Times has undergone some digital initiatives unusual for the print media business. It launched bookmarking and sharing service TimesPeople earlier this year. Soon, it will launch TimesExtra, which integrates acquisition Blogrunner onto the publication's home page to provide related links from across the Web. And it has also announced an API for developers to work with one of its most popular online features, the "Most Emailed" list.
The publisher also spoke about the Times' decision to stop requiring a paid subscription to access some of its online content, including its archives and op-ed columnists. Sulzberger said the subscription service, called TimesSelect, was a good idea in 2004 but not a good idea a few years later, and that the company's choice to get rid of it was a sign of its willingness to evolve--even though TimesSelect brought in $10 million in revenue annually.
"In those three years, the Internet changed so dramatically, and we had to adapt to those changes," he said. "Online news and information became unambiguously commoditized. Search became a titanic influence, as we all know today."
Since axing TimesSelect, Sulzberger said growth of the Times' Web site accelerated.
He acknowledged that the "evolution" pursued by the Times could mean that it will become less reliant on its venerable print edition. WebbyConnect organizer David-Michel Davies asked Sulzberger if the newspaper will even exist in 10 years.
"The heart of the answer must be (that) we can't care," Sulzberger responded, though he added that the radio, the television, and even the telegraph were all supposed to kill print reporting. "We do care. I care very much. But we must be where people want us for our information. It's the thought of cannibalizing yourself before somebody else cannibalizes you."
The TimesPeople toolbar shows the latest activity in your social circle.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)The New York Times has started rolling out TimesPeople, a sharing-and-recommending tool that the publication first announced earlier this year. It's essentially an extension of the free user accounts that are already required to read the Times' Web site: You can now build up a friends list, recommend stories to people you know, and see what they've been recommending or commenting on.
In other words, it's a social news feed for Times readers. You can also sync it up with your Facebook account to push your feed--stories you've commented on or recommended--to your profile on the social network.
We first reported on the debut of TimesPeople in June, when it was still being tested as a Firefox plugin. Now it's been fully worked into the NYTimes.com site with no download required.
Last month, we reported that The New York Times would be expanding its online-media reach with TimesPeople, a sharing and bookmarking feature on the site.
But that's not all for the Gray Lady's digital makeover, Silicon Alley Insider reported Wednesday. Also on the way is a set of application program interfaces (APIs) to get Times data to third-party sites, a custom widget generator that bloggers can use to embed news on their sites, and an expansion of TimesPeople so that it's on the Web site rather than in the form of a Firefox plug-in.
A look at the NYT's forthcoming widget generator.
(Credit: Silicon Alley Insider)There's also reportedly more in store for Blogrunner, a Techmeme-like start-up that the Times acquired and has worked into its technology coverage to pull in headlines from around the Web. And the Times will be developing iPhone applications for the new app store that Apple will be unveiling with the new iPhone 3G.
What wasn't revealed was a timeline, for the most part. So these remain projects in the works, and we'll likely see gradual beta launches before they're readily available.
software engineers for a video in collaboration with Beet.tv.
Note: The spelling of Derek Gottfrid has been corrected.
(Credit: Beet.tv)
The New York Times has added a new feature to its Web site that takes a few cues from Facebook and Digg: TimesPeople, now in beta.
TimesPeople users can build up friends lists and can see a "news feed" of which stories their friends are recommending, sharing, and commenting on. Times online readers have been able to comment on stories, as well as rate reviewed restaurants and movies, for some time now, but recommending is new.
The TimesPeople drop-down menu, with a news feed and people search.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)TimesPeople is currently available only as a Firefox browser plug-in, but software engineers told CNET News.com that it would eventually be more widely available and without a download required. New features will be added too, but don't expect the venerable newspaper to try to compete with Mark Zuckerberg: Engineers stressed that the Times will always be an information source, not a social network. That's why the TimesPeople application is extremely light and minimal--profiles are limited to locations and user icons, and content from the social feature is limited to a "news feed" page and a drop-down menu. However, at some point, a "Most Recommended" tab may join the popular "Most E-mailed" story list that the Times' site displays.
The TimesPeople iPhone interface.
(Credit: NYTimes.com)Outside NYTimes.com, you can subscribe to a feed of an individual's activity using RSS, or browse your friends' updates with a specialized iPhone interface; TimesPeople members can also push their updates to their Facebook profiles by syncing the two. And if you'd rather just be an observer, you can subscribe to friends' updates on NYTimes.com while leaving your own feed updates turned off.
Many print publications have been working on social-news projects, primarily by partnering with existing sites like Digg. Conde Nast's Wired Digital went ahead and acquired Reddit. Critics might say that by building a social-news technology in-house, the Times is hurting itself by not tapping into the user base of an existing site.
But here's the catch: while NYTimes.com content is free, it requires a log-in to read more than a story or two at a time. The Times, consequently, has millions of user accounts already on file.
This story was researched and reported in collaboration with Andy Plesser of Beet.tv, who produced the video.
Automattic, the company best-known for blog publishing software WordPress, has raked in $29.5 million in Series B funding. Originally reported on several blogs, the funding round was confirmed by Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg in his personal blog Tuesday evening.
The most notable of the investors is the New York Times Co., which joins existing Automattic investors Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Automattic turned down an acquisition offer several months ago from a "larger Internet company." Mullenweg's only apparent reference to this in his blog post was his statement that WordPress had become so successful that choosing between the "approach of serious acquisition or majority-stake investments" became an obvious next step.
Automattic has about 18 employees, according to the Journal, and also operates several lesser-known software products like forum software BBPress and spam management product Akismet. But WordPress is its centerpiece, powering around 2.2 million blogs--active and otherwise--from personal blogs to the digital properties of high-profile media publications like The New York Times, Fortune, and CNN. The Journal hinted that some of the $29.5 million will be used to allow some early employees and investors to cash out; GigaOm's Om Malik suggested that the company may also hire more engineers, anticipating continued growth.
Mullenweg's blog post seemed to confirm this speculation: "Automattic is now positioned to execute on our vision of a better Web not just in blogging, but expanding our investment in antispam, identity, wikis, forums, and more -- small, open source pieces, loosely joined with the same approach and philosophy that has brought us this far."
Note: This story was updated at 6:00 a.m. PDT to include a correction from a New York Times representative regarding TimesSelect subscriber figures cited by the New York Post.
Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site. According to the article by Holly M. Sanders, the main obstacle at the moment is reconfiguring the site's software.
A Times representative told CNET News.com that the company isn't releasing any statement beyond: "We continue to evaluate the best approach for NYTimes.com." The representative did point out, however, that the Post had made an error: Sanders' article said that the number of TimesSelect subscribers had fallen from 224,000 in April to slightly over 221,000 in June. According to the Times, TimesSelect subscriber numbers have actually risen from 220,090 in April to 224,580 in June.
The demise of TimesSelect, which has been in operation since 2005 and puts archived content as well as popular opinion pieces behind a subscription wall, has been rumored for some time among New York media circles. Adding fuel to the fire is News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch. When speaking about his decision to purchase Wall Street Journal company Dow Jones, he suggested that the Journal might free up its own premium content.
New-media pundits have typically been very critical of TimesSelect, considering it a disadvantage for the legendary publication to be locking up so much content, particularly opinion pieces by well-known writers. "By cutting stars like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich off from the rest of the Internet," Peter Kafka of the Silicon Alley Insider commented in July, "the Times has diminished its (and their) influence--and helped create room for upstarts like The Huffington Post to step in."
Currently, TimesSelect subscribers pay $7.95 per month, or $49.95 per year, for access to op-ed columnists, archives dating back to 1851, extra multimedia features, and occasional access to the Sunday paper's articles before they are made available for free or in print.
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