More on the NY Times API

Read Write Web has a great breakdown of why the API is important, both for hackers, but also for journalism itself:

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity. It's hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world. They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in - that's not a safe bet for the future.

One thing that big media still does have a particularly good share of, though, is information processing resources and archival content. The Times' campaign contribution API is a good example of this. The newspaper is far better prepared to organize that raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher.

The hacker-journalist revolution just got a major boost

The New York Times announces access to their data through the Beta release of the New York Times developer's network.

I've given the Times plenty of lumps in the past, but this is incredible. One of the great values of journalism is its vast power to collect and interpret data. The New York Times has just opened that up to anyone that wants access to it.

It's a limited release right now--only access to their movie reviews and their campaign finance data--but it demonstrates the power of opening up data for anyone to use.

And it kicks hacker-journalism into high gear.

You know that time you said, "What I'd like is a social network centered around the New York Times"

... remember that?

Maybe it was a long time ago?

Perhaps you'd drunk a lot of wine?

Or you might have been doing air quotes under the table when you said "like"?

No?

Well, someone must have said it because the Times announced TimesPeople this week.

So what, exactly, is a social network built around the New York Times--besides a colossally strange idea? Well...

It's not a social network like Facebook or MySpace — you won't have Times friends, and it won't get you Times dates.

Which is too bad, because the ability to accumulate friends and get dates is pretty much the entire driving force of most successful social networks.

But no! Instead:

Instead, you'll assemble a network of Times readers. Then you'll be able to share interesting things on NYTimes.com with others in the network.

Because, apparently, sharing via a social bookmarking site like Delicious, sharing straight links with your friends on Facebook, or doing social recommending on Digg didn't quite cut the mustard for the needs of New York Times audiences.

Look, I get it: technology is neat. It's technically a very cool idea that you can sift through a paper as dense as the Times in a social way. But is there really a need to do that?

It feels to me like a misunderstanding on how people are consuming news online: People read widely. They share links already, via e-mail, blogs, and the other sites I mentioned above (and another bakers dozen of sites I didn't mention). News is spreading virally more and more. And friends are trusted sources at a time that the media is becoming less trusted on a daily basis.

But nobody reads one source--even a "paper of record," like the Times. People, especially the kind of news junkies that TimesPeople would want to attract, read dozens of news and opinion sites, increasing their touch even further with aggregator sites tossed into the mix as well.

So why then would anyone take part in social news sharing that locks you into a single site both in terms of content, but also in terms of access?

If I want to share a Times story using TimesPeople, I can only do it with other TimesPeople users. That's a pretty limited scope. But beyond that, if I have a nice network of TimesPeople users and I want to share with them a related story from another site, I'm SOL on that as well.

It's such an outmoded way of thinking--the site-as-an-island mentality of the 90s--that I've literally combed the 41-point FAQ a few times over to make sure I'm not missing something. But as best I can tell, I'm not. That's it: a lockbox for your Times links, accessible from nowhere but the Times and sharable with nobody but other people on the Times site (though they do allow a feed out to Facebook, another walled garden. Have fun with that. I'll stick with Google Reader and Delicious.

the words most spoken

I'm beginning to realize that, if they needed to, the New York Times could probably cut back to just being an infographic producer and I would engage with their output at the same level as I'm doing now. Who needs a crossword when you have this:

NY Times Infographic on the words spoken at both the DNC and RNC.

nicely done: NY Times Medal Count

The team that churns out the NYTimes interactive graphics, always a good crew, did a fantastic job with a visual representation of Olympic medal counts among nations from the 1890s to today. As with much of their best work, I'm sure it's pretty great on hallucinogens too.

PS. Back from a very chaotic summer. Finally planted in once place for the long haul. More soon, promise.

“It’s a strategy, basically, of gradually closing down"

The New York Times has an article about the changes at Tribune Co., that might be most notable for how adeptly the they're able to cover the implosion of the newspaper industry without actually putting themselves in too. It takes a fair amount of gymnastics, but the result is a story about newspapers in a newspaper that never actually acknowledges that that it too is in trouble. What other industry would present information that way? None I can think of.

Anyway, what's going to be cut? How about an order of the usual?

Mr. Zell and Mr. Michaels did not address what content would be cut, but Mr. Zell has said before that he disagrees with the heavy allocation of resources to national and international news. Many newspapers have concluded that when a mouse click can collect news of Washington or Baghdad or Beijing from a multitude of sources, local news is their only real hold on readers.

Yes, you read that right: Bring the old "hyperlocal" dog back onto the track for one last race. I'm sure it's still a good idea, right? Oh wait...

P.S. Sorry for the absence, I've been transitioning from one thing to the next. I expect regularly-scheduled updates to continue from here on out.

That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger

The New York Times plays the nattering-old-man card today with a guffaw-inducing story "exposing" the darker side of blogging: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

It is, of course, a ridiculous premise: that blogging creates an environment so competitive for a scoop that bloggers are dropping like flies from the stress of it all.

It's ridiculous because you need to consider the source: One of the leading news organizations in the world. Are the editors and the writers of the New York Times punch out calmly at 5:00, ready to head home and take it easy? Of course not. News is a stressful business. The pressures of deadlines and the competition that results from the need to get the story right and get the story fast are enormous. They are not a new phenomenon. And job stress certainly isn't unique to blogging. But the Times sure isn't going to tell you that. Instead, they're going to offer a much more newsprint-friendly story:

Drop a blog, save a life.

Marc Andreesen of Netscape and Ning fame offers up a few new hot scoops for the Times:

Future New York Times headline submissions from yours truly:

Blogging Causes Herpes

Bloggers Shorter than Normal People

Want To Contract Malaria? Try Blogging

Bloggers Have Bad Breath

Leprosy and Blogging May Be Connected

Hitler Probably Blogged

Now Bloggers Aren't Even Wearing Pajamas

Blogging Fad Almost Over

The Times' cynical crowdsourcing attempt

When the Clinton's finally released their tax returns from the last seven years yesterday, the New York Times was quick to toss a analysis up on their website and their (generally pretty great) political blog, The Caucus. The report (both the original and the updated version now available) ended with this line:

More on this to come, as we examine the documents. In the meantime, dig in and let us know what you find

That call to the audience to help sift through the documents is a classic example of crowdsourcing, utilizing the power of the masses to achieve a result that would have been difficult without them. In this case, it would be possible to utilize the millions of eyeballs reading the times to nearly instantaneously read and analyze the hundreds of pages of tax returns There are many examples of news organizations (and others) trying things like this.

The Times echoed the call again this morning in the very first sentence of The Caucus's "early word" first-post-of-the-day entry:

As news organizations (and you) pore over the Clinton tax returns,

The "you" there is a link back to the original piece, and the original problem: There's no actual place to report your findings. Sure, you can post your findings in the comments section but then they're lost amid the typical sniping and posturing that goes on there. And does the Times really have someone checking in there for useful information? Doubtful. Instead, it's a cynical attempt to look savvy, but to pretty much ignore the many possibilities that are created when you open up to the crowd.

So how should they have done it?

Well a good page can be taken from WNYC's use of the crowd in analyzing Clinton's White House schedules. While they too simply had people post to the comments, they gave direction and organization (pick your birthday and look at the corresponding date in her schedule) and as a result got some usable information that stood out from the comment noise.

Even better would be to create a structure less anarchic than the randomness of comments. Why not build a simple database organized by year and page number that people could enter their findings into? It could even be dynamically linked to and from the corresponding pages in the PDF files the Times provides. That database would then be open to the public, but also could be used by reporters in their work--the very reporters who could then offer qualitative analysis of the raw data instead of having to create it themselves.

Instead, the reporters are left to do the heavy lifting themselves and the audience is once again left on the sidelines, another missed opportunity for something greater.

Good thing it's early...

... because a chart like this will make a person lose some serious sleep.

New York Times' info-graphics department drop peyote, make stunning chart

OK, maybe they're not on peyote, but it would help explain this amazingly psychedelic graphic depicting movies box office grosses as distributed out over time. It takes a moment to understand it (the height is amount of money, horizontal is the length of time. Scroll backwards to reach all the way back to the 80s--who knew the Patrick Swayze supernatural tearjerker Ghost brought in box office dollars for eight entire months?--or join the chart's creators in simply dropping in and tuning out with those wild swirls and trippy earthtones.

Don't go away / say what you say / but say that you'll stay

“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,” said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press, to the country’s Information Commissioner’s Office and to the TRUSTe organization, an online privacy network

Anyone not think that the site he's talking about is Facebook?

The New York Times today documents yet another privacy breech from Facebook: The inability to permanently leave.

And how do the Facebookers spin it? How do they always spin it: It's a feature designed to make things easier for users:

According to an e-mail message from Amy Sezak, a spokeswoman for Facebook, “Deactivated accounts mean that a user can reactivate at any time and their information will be available again just as they left it.”

Gee, thanks

The Times on the future of news

(via Romenesko)

So what's wrong with the newspaper industry? The New York Times offers their analysis today, including the sobering statistic that:

Newspaper executives and analysts say that it could take five to 10 years for the industry’s finances to stabilize and that many of the papers that survive will be smaller and will practice less ambitious journalism.

It's a good overview but misses some major factors--like bad acquisitions by newspaper's parent corporations or mismanagement (or straight-up corruption) by the same--and manages to gloss over the fact that the high-point in ad revenues they keep referencing (the year 2000) was also the height of the dot-com boom, when every IPO'd dot com was taking out lavish national ads touting their bubble-fueled companies. In fact, the dot-com boom was a statistical anomaly in advertising statistics.

PS. Not sure why there's been so much Times coverage this week. They must  be doing something right.

It's official: Someone's started the New York Times deathwatch

And that someone is none other than Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen (who, come to think of it would know something about deathwatches). He does a good job of charting the story up until now, and leaves readers with a very good question that nobody seems to be asking:

given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with noted Internet experts.

He goes on to list all the board members, which include the former CEO of Nabisco and the current CEO of Sara Lee, both of whom seem like odd choices even in the best of days.

Is there a designer in the house?

The New York Times could not have come up with a less interesting way of presenting the photos they're pulling in from their citizen journalism experiment, the Polling Place Photo Project? It's possibly the least inspired design I've seen on the Internet since the end of GeoCities:

What's the incentive to click on any given image? What's the logic in the order? Or the overarching narrative in the design (seemingly the only place to find a narrative in the project)? The AIGA, the leading design trade group country, was involved in this project--were they brought in to cater?

Compare this with a truly dynamic photo project, The Whale Hunt, which dealt with a similarly formalist challenge of presenting a huge number of photos in a compelling way, but broke out of the table structure the Times chose:

Sure, photos of polling places are kind of boring, but there are hundreds of photos in the Whale Hunt that are just as boring as many of the polling place photos are--if not more so. But the way Jonathan Harris chose to present them simply demands a user click on them, ponder them, and think about the story they tell, both individually and collectively.

With the Polling Place Photo Project, the Times had a chance to tell a new kind of story about an overlooked institution. But in choosing the least creative way possible to display the images, they end up telling no story at all. It's worse than a missed opportunity--it's a blown one.

Google's old-media envy

“We need to find ways to target people of particular demographics that are comparable to the people you might find in The New York Times or a particular publication that you may be familiar with.”

That's a senior VP from Google interviewed in the Times (dug up by Rough Type's Nick Carr), talking about the search giant's shortcomings in selling ads on social networks. That's the trick about turning your ad sales over to an algorithm--there's no good way to target demographics and, as a result, for every spot-on ad that gets placed, there are plenty of total misses (like the ones in the sidebar on this page, which are currently advertising get-rich-quick schemes because a few posts on the front page deal with the challenges of making money with online publications). In the social networking space, where most pages aren't going to return easily computed subjects (how do you come up with an ad for a page filled with people commenting "thanks for the add"?) the challenges are even more daunting.

One wonders if that's part of the driving force behind Google's new initiative to create a semantic social web: Once you can define relationships between users across sites, you're starting to create a machine-definable demographic.

Until then, though, Google will be looking back fondly at the ease of how a publication could define its readers and then sell them to high-value advertisers. Ironic then, that those very same publications now look to Google to bail them out of web advertising.

NY Times mobile fumble

Odd that I blogged about the advances in mobile text in Japan earlier today, the same day the New York Times announced a major new text-message based initiative. While at a surface level, it's a step in the right direction, the Times marches straight into the limitations forced on text messages by US cell carriers, according to Text and Ideas' Nick Martin:

The Times ran out of room. With only 160 characters to work with in a typical text, it may be impossible to get the news, context and insight readers of the Times expect squeezed into a single text message.

Whoops.

"There is a chance that historians will examine this period in American history and wonder if journalism left the field."

The New York Times this week published a captivating essay that manages to hit on:

1) The layoffs at the Chicago Reader and how...

2) They have grave implications for the future of investigative reporting and how...

3) That's a bad thing for us as a democracy but how...

4) All is not lost.

Your milage may vary on that last point, especially when he trots out Rupert Murdoch as his proof, but the rest of it is pretty awesome and includes a nice hook into the continuing Chicago police torture cases and how the Reader's the only paper that truly cared--that is until they laid off the lead reporter on the story last week. A truly haunting line:

Google and Digg never made a phone call, never asked hard questions of public officials, never got an innocent man out of jail

Holy crap, someone's making sense!

Jaron Lanier can be excused for the white-boy dreadlocks after penning a hell of an op-ed for the New York Times.

There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough.

And it just keeps getting better from there. Xerox this and stick it up around Mountain View.