NFL polka dot stats are the least of it.
The old “Gray Lady” New York Times keeps changing her spots in ways that deliver new value–but without creating new profits to replace what got lost in the transition to Web 2.0. Just for example (reverse chronological order; this is a blog, after all) …
- January 8, 2009
- NY Times rolls out the latest in a series of information-busting-out APIs, this one to track individual voting histories in the US Congress. Business model? They’re free.
- December, 2008
- NY Times creates free “Widgets” that let bloggers et al. post NYT headlines on their own web pages. Business model? Link back to NYT pages.
- August, 2008
- NY Times teams up with ManyEyes to create the kinds of data images shown in the polka dots above.
- … (lots more stuff …
- October, 2003
- The NY Times came to Dave Winer’s Bloggercon 1 (via their avatar, editor-in-chief Lenn Apcar) to hear and talk about putting blogging onto news pages.
- May, 2003
- NY Times letting bloggers create permalinks to articles via their Userland RSS feeds.
- 2002 sometime
- NY Times partners with Userland to deliver news stories via RSS feeds.
The NY Times is no longer (just) my mom’s messy mass of newsprint (see below, ca 1984.) It did a great job at that, but it is now setting out to do great things in a much, much bigger World 2.0. I just hope Web 2.0 finds ways to support them in turn.
2 responses so far ↓
1 TA // Jan 9, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Alas, I have my doubts…
I have been eyeing this Web 2.0 thing for years through my best pair of entrepreneurial glasses and still haven’t figured out a way to extract a decent ROI from it. :(
Maybe if world leaders adopt new policies designed to making me more happy? I might get back to that once I’m done reading all those Edge entries which you kindly linked to. :o)
2 Betsy Devine // Jan 10, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Yes, maintaining great resources like the NYT would be on the list of policies to make me happy. Are you listening, Obamateers?
This blogpost arose in reaction to the umpteenth lazy bit of complacency by a blogger that “dead tree” media are dying because they don’t innovate or deliver what readers want. The NYT is innovating more and delivering way lots more than said blogger. The problem is the economic model, and that’s a problem I don’t have an answer for either.
Really, bloggers blaming newspapers for their economic woes are like middle-class college Republicans, martinis in hand, tut-tutting over a homeless guy who wants some Thunderbird.