More ripples rolling out from my breaking the story on Times People toolbar being discontinued without notice. A bunch of more diligent reporters contacted Marc Frons (why didn’t I do that?):

via AtlanticWire

The New York Times is beginning to roll out an experimental new approach to personalized news that the Poynter Institute compares to Pandora’s approach to suggesting music based on what users say they like. The paper is trying to provide a more social news experience that includes not only personalization but also a reader reputation system and new approach to commenting. So far, most of the new additions have been happening behind the scenes—rethinking how to do recommendations and tweaking algorithms. When the toolbar for TimesPeople, a simple social network launched in 2008, disappeared this week, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman suspected something biggest was in store and reached out to chief technology officer Marc Frons who explained some upcoming features.

Features planned include active personalization, a reputation system, and more, better comments.

Hmmm. Not clear if the service is going to be limited to just NY Times articles or not. Imagine a NY Times social network — designed around curating, annotating, and sharing news — but which could start with posts from any source?

5 August 2011 7 Permalink

GOt a comment from Kristin Mason of the NY Times who clarifies what happened witj Times People:

Hi Stowe, we have removed the TimesPeople toolbar and TimesPeople recommend feature, but TimesPeople profile pages are still live. They can be found by going to www.nytimes.com/timespeople and then clicking on the “View my profile & activity” link in the left corner. In the coming months, we will be enhancing and expanding our community offerings across NYTimes.com, and TimesPeople profiles will be integrated into those offerings. In the meantime, we have a number of sharing options on the site. We apologize for any confusion, and we’re working to make sure that this information is available to other users as well.

Kristin Mason
Manager, Communication, The New York Times

I wonder if they will open up the network, so I can share materials from other sources? One issue with Times People was that inward focus. Secondly, I would like a richer curatorial capability, like finding stories than many of my connections have read, recommended, and commented on.

I look forward to seeing these new initiatives.

5 August 2011 48 Permalink

If The NY Times and other mainstream newspapers are going to make the difficult transition to a web media world, changes will have to be made at the core of operations, not superficially. Jill Abramson seems to be all over that:

Jill Abramson, the next executive editor of The New York Times, and Bill Keller, who’s stepping down in September after eight years, talked Thursday about the state of the paper and what’s ahead.

Ms. Abramson focused on digital operations last year and found more than a couple ways it had to improve.

Advertising Age: What did you learn during your six-month stint last year diving deep into the online side? Was anything surprising?

Jill Abramson: It was somewhat surprising, but not completely surprising, is that although we felt we had integrated our newsroom, there was still basically something that everyone here called the web newsroom. The more I submerged into the web newsroom, I was some combination of surprised or worried that Bill and I were not really invested enough in the direction and news rhythm of our digital news report.

One thing I tried during the six months was to only read online. As I read more and more early in the morning I felt like everyone else was playing to win the morning, and we weren’t enough. Many sites, whether Politico or Bloomberg or another site, by like 6:30 in the morning were full of fresh stories. If breaking news had happened overnight, we covered it, but basically early in the morning we were an echo on the web of the six stories that were on the front of the print paper.

I think that in order to have an integrated newsroom, all the people who work on the news report have to feel that they have a real career track here. I think for our digital employees, especially web producers and some of the web editors, they felt like they loved their work but where were they going to go? They’d never covered cops for metro, that sort of thing. In the end my plan for the newsroom was that we dispersed the web producers and web editors and put them on the desks, so web producers that were working on business news now work for Larry Ingrassia, the business editor, after they had worked for a web editor.

Part of what I did was I went and visited a lot. Bill Keller came up with a great word — neo-competitors. That’s what he thinks sites like Politico and Huffington Post are. I went and spent a day at some of those. I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising but the largeness of the competitive field came to surprise me.

Our night note, the competition report which has been put out forever, would only mention what was on the front page of the Washington Post, maybe something from the Journal’s website, but never any mention of a Politico or a HuffPost or a Bloomberg. That has changed.

She really gets it. So I expect seismic changes to roll out from her appointment.

I also loved her quote, “In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” This quote has gone missing, apparently, giving some fodder to religious and rightists alike.

14 June 2011 1 Permalink

Raju Narisetti via

I, for one, think that the golden age of targeted digital advertising is yet to come. Do we really want to trade that larger opportunity for the much smaller and unreliable pursuit of consumer dollars? I also wonder if we aren’t better off redeploying our newsroom resources to create new revenue streams and more engaging digital platforms than trying to make the traditional Web experience better and charge for it. And, I think we ought to create a drawbridge around our content—not necessarily for readers but for the aggregators. A business model that insists a Yahoo or a Huffington Post uses your content through some form of syndication, giving them trusted content and giving big media an opportunity to share the upside of their more engaging offerings.

Free is indeed very expensive. But, what the prolonged and knee-jerk debate about free vs. paid inside our news organizations shows is that we still have what led us here in the first place: An imagination deficit. Rather than apply an ‘all or nothing’ approach focused, perhaps wrongly, on just our Web sites, we should be willing to make creative bets on our business model. We continue to make what is being consumed—in large quantities. It is time we figured out how to make it easier, more engaging and useful.

Moving quickly to a more liquid media model is well and good. But the dominant thread of the newspaper crash is that the world doesn’t have a need to the consolidated thing that newspapers were, and it’s as yet unclear which parts of the old regional paper are still relevant.

What is the value of a local reporter? Does the local sports guy really have a better handle on the local games? Does the local reporter really understand the Arizona immigration mess better than someone in Washington? Does someone in Detroit really have better insight into the car business that someone in New York City?

Regional papers are being obliterated, blown into bits, and its not at all obvious what will still matter once the dust settles.

I think Narisetti’s still too focused on doing better at what used to matter — producing high quality works — instead of innovating around liquid media solutions. Why didn’t the Washington Post produce a Flipboard? Why did the NY Times have to spin out News.me?

The successful media companies of the future will seem more like software companies than old school publishing firms.

11 June 2011 7 Permalink