Jan. 9, 2009
Impact of the New York Times
There's been much brew-ha-ha about the NY Times being in financial trouble, the death of newspapers, and print media in general. For the last couple years, however, the Times has been doing some really great work with flash based visualizations that tie into their print articles, but obviously are available only the web. So maybe the the death of the print newspaper doesn't mean that the big, well known papers will die.
What really interests me is the stuff they've had coming out recently showing that they really are embracing the open concepts that are flourishing on the web. Within a month they've announced Represent and the Congress API, two very cool usages of publicly available data that was previously only available in a mishmash of formats. They're combining, enhancing, analyzing and promoting data in very new and innovative ways.
The Times moving in this direction seems to coencide with a growing call for "open government" which has seemed to start as a grassroots, web powered, effort and will hopefully take hold in the new administration. It seems the Times is uniquely positioning itself within this new world order to become the seminal information source for computers and the autonomous world that it already is for humans. This is a very interesting direction for the Times to take and I'm not sure if it's officially supported from the top. It seems that it either has to be getting discussed in the top echolons or the IT group has a huge amount of freedom to make very bold moves and think well outside the existing dead tree based box. Either way it's the kind of agility and/or forward thinking that could make the Times the Queen of the new web news world.
What really interests me is the stuff they've had coming out recently showing that they really are embracing the open concepts that are flourishing on the web. Within a month they've announced Represent and the Congress API, two very cool usages of publicly available data that was previously only available in a mishmash of formats. They're combining, enhancing, analyzing and promoting data in very new and innovative ways.
The Times moving in this direction seems to coencide with a growing call for "open government" which has seemed to start as a grassroots, web powered, effort and will hopefully take hold in the new administration. It seems the Times is uniquely positioning itself within this new world order to become the seminal information source for computers and the autonomous world that it already is for humans. This is a very interesting direction for the Times to take and I'm not sure if it's officially supported from the top. It seems that it either has to be getting discussed in the top echolons or the IT group has a huge amount of freedom to make very bold moves and think well outside the existing dead tree based box. Either way it's the kind of agility and/or forward thinking that could make the Times the Queen of the new web news world.
