The New York Times is not Digg
Posted by Carolyn Lo on March 14, 2008 at 2:23 PM
With news changing every minute, why do news sites like The New York Times remain mostly unchanged throughout the day? Scott Karp writes, "Why shouldn't the WHOLE site -- especially the homepage -- be aligned with the web, instead of aligned with the static print product?"
Instead of display the news by importance, Karp suggests a blog-like method of arranging the news in reverse chronological order so viewers can read what's new. Better yet, news sites can offer different default page options like Digg: articles ranked by importance, by reverse chronological order, and by readers' favorites.
Though The New York Times and other newspapers have blogs, their links are not prominently featured on the homepage.
Karp brings up the debate of editor vs. reader discretion, and one has to question the consequences of his proposition. The New York Times certainly has the staff to constantly update their website, but hundred of new updates a day would create a chaos of news, not a well-organized news site. Also, if readers voted their favorite articles to the top, The New York Times could resemble a celebrity gossip site, which is not the purpose of news sites. The job of editors is to filter out articles so that readers get the important news, which is why news sites are arranged the way they are.
Source: Publishing 2.0 through IFRA
Instead of display the news by importance, Karp suggests a blog-like method of arranging the news in reverse chronological order so viewers can read what's new. Better yet, news sites can offer different default page options like Digg: articles ranked by importance, by reverse chronological order, and by readers' favorites.
Though The New York Times and other newspapers have blogs, their links are not prominently featured on the homepage.
Karp brings up the debate of editor vs. reader discretion, and one has to question the consequences of his proposition. The New York Times certainly has the staff to constantly update their website, but hundred of new updates a day would create a chaos of news, not a well-organized news site. Also, if readers voted their favorite articles to the top, The New York Times could resemble a celebrity gossip site, which is not the purpose of news sites. The job of editors is to filter out articles so that readers get the important news, which is why news sites are arranged the way they are.
Source: Publishing 2.0 through IFRA
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Hi Carolyn,
Thanks for the write-up. To clarify, I am not at all suggesting that the ranking of news on NYTimes.com homepage be determined by readers -- that is not the specific element of Digg I suggest that NYTimes.com adopt. Rather, I suggested, first, that they rank news by default in reverse chronological order, i.e. newest first. The next step would be to give the readers the option of viewing news ranked by importance.
That said, what determines importance is a completely open question. I could be that the NYTimes.com editors continue to determine importance, with a traditional command and control approach. The alternative is not necessarily to put it in the hands of readers. It could be putting it, at least partially, in the hands of other people whose editorial judgment the NYTimes.com might be inclined to trust -- other journalists, for example.
Lastly, you're also assuming that the NYTimes.com ought to have a single homepage, which in physical form it must -- and which, you are correct, would overwhelm the user with news updates.
A more web-native approach is to think about an near infinite number of homepages, defined by the metadata attached to each story, both broad topics and narrow subtopics. So a homepage for Sports, for Baseball, or for as granular a topic as the doping scandal. NYTimes.com in fact has these Topic pages, but still runs the homepage as if, as in print, there can only be one.
Instead, NYTimes.com might allow users to define their own homepage by indicating which topics they are interested in, and see a single homepage for just those topics, which would make the flow of news presented chronologically more manageable. In other words, unlike print, each reader doesn't need to take the whole bundled package of NYT content -- they can take exactly what they want.
Digg offers just such customization and homepage filtering options. The significance of Digg as a web-native news model goes far beyond the "user decides importance" aspect of it -- which again to clarify was not at all the aspect I was addressing in my post. There are innovations in news presentation and content filtering of content that are worthy of adoption, even by news sites that continue to use traditional editorial models.
Cheers,
Scott