Thinkcorps

I just finished up a super-simple view of the New York Times that answers a simple question: What’s new?

SimplerTimes, What’s New at The New York Times
http://simplertimes.smithmag.net

The Backstory

All I wanted was a simple page where I could see what’s new at the NYT. I’m a bit of a news/blogs junkie, and I check my feeds throughout the day. However, in the case of the Times, I check a few regular sections in the morning, but then only return to the homepage. There’s so much I knew I was missing, but I didn’t feel like digging through the site or subscribing to a whole mess of RSS feeds.

Separately, it’s been bugging me that newspapers are still hanging on to the idea of “editions” on their Web site (an always-on medium, if there ever was one). The editors program the day’s news, package it up into an updated homepage, and voila! Success! Eureka! Brilliant! Their job is done! Their paychecks justified.

Unless I visit their site more than once a day.

At which point, I’ve already seen all those homepage stories, and I’m looking for something new. Which I can’t find anywhere, because it’s all buried in a mess of sections and categories. So here I am: a voracious reader, at your site, ready to engage with whatever you’ve got — and you give me nothing.

So i decided to take a stab at fixing it. SimplerTimes is my little experiment to create a reader’s view of the news. It’s what I expected from MyTimes, but didn’t get.

The site is very simple. You simply click on the “Categories” link to customize the sections you want to see. Click “Update” and your preferences are saved in a cookie. The page now lists recent articles from the sections you’re interested in.

Articles with a red flag are brand new within the past 2 hours, articles with a yellow flag have been published today. Just a few simple visual cues to help you navigate your way down the page, until you decide you’re done and there’s nothing more to see.

I’ve also included “Top Stories” articles on the first page. These come from the NYTimes Home Page feed. This way, I still get a taste of what the NYTimes feels is important today. So now we’ve flipped the balance of power, the main content is personalized, and the sidebar is editor-driven. I think I like it better this way.

The concept is very simple and can be extended in any number of ways.

• The categories are all feeds from the NYTimes (pulled from their OPML file, though, inexplicably, not ALL their feeds are in that file). The feeds could come from any number of sources.


• The displayed content is very limited, with better data in the feed, you’d have more options for how to display it


• I wanted to use Thickbox to display the article in an iframe on the page, but NYT uses an iframe breakout script. Bah, no fun at all.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary here. You can certainly add each feed to your newsreader and get the same effect (without the css elements of course). But there’s something compelling to me about reconstituting all this RSS data back into a Web page that’s been customized just for me.

Just finished SimplerTimes, my lil experiment in creating a reader’s view of the NYT: http://simplertimes.smithmag.net/

First, I love print media, though I work primarily in online. I also have tremendous respect for those people who are trying to figure out what the future holds for their businesses and careers. That said, to all the journalists and editors who’s only response to these looming changes is to grouse about how blogs suck and the olden days were awesome: please, shut the hell up.

The latest I’ve seen is an interview with Kerry Eggers, Portland Tribune sportswriter.

What gets me is the tremendous arrogance of the “journalist” when it comes to their readers’ intelligence. In Eggers view, readers of sports journalism don’t know anything about sports and are easily hoodwinked by “unaccountable” bloggers. How silly does that sound?

If the job of the journalist is to inform, then wouldn’t it follow that the reader might learn something about the subject matter? Wouldn’t you become smarter and more discerning about what you’re reading?

Maybe—just maybe—sports readers are smart enough to take care of themselves when they venture off the path to read those scurrilous blogs.

The reason people read sports blogs in the first place is because they love sports. They can’t get enough of it, the nuances, the details, the sidelines chatter, the armchair managing. In fact, while Eggers decries some jounalist/bloggers for writing about peripheral things like “troubles with their rental cars” on their blogs, isn’t that exactly what fills up the pages of sports books (books that Eggers himself writes)?

Maybe if these old-school “journalists” got up off their asses and paid for regular, crappy seats at games, or god-forbid, watched the games on TV like the majority of us unwashed masses, they might rekindle the love of sports that first got them into the business.

Maybe then, they’ll remember what it was like to be fan, and stop treating us all like idiots.

I see so many companies fretting about new initiatives like Facebook apps, mobile, video and more. Yet their sites suffer from many obvious blunders, inefficiencies, bad usability, and detritus from failed experiments.

Your Web site is your digital home. Just like a regular house, you need to clean it regularly.

I guess most people just don’t like housework, but it’s actually the nature of the Web. There are frontiers and trails to be blazed online, but in most cases, innovation happens close to home, where new strategies and methods are improving the basics of how we build Web pages and interact with readers.

It’s these basics that your entire online business is built upon—get them wrong, and it won’t matter how cute your Facebook app is. Everyone gets distracted by shiny objects some times, but great companies keep their focus on core values and work very hard to continually improve and refine them.