Coming soon - the New NYTimes.com

David Weinberger
The news from NYTimes.com
The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See Note at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And — the Times must hope — these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google's rankings.

Very interesting. The problem is, these topic pages will link to articles you still have to pay for to see. It feels like a big tease. On the other hand, it's better than nothing and they do need to experiment with business models. See David's post for more analysis. I look forward to seeing what they have in store for us. Anyway, good for them for giving something new a shot.

2 Comments

01. Hans - Mar 03, 2005 - 17:20

I asked Martin Wolf what he thinks about Brad DeLong's idea to open at least the archives. Here is his answer (I hope he doesn't mind seing his email published):I think it's a good way to help us go bankrupt! Producing a first-rate business paper (and the FT is, in my view, much better than the WSJ) is very expensive. It would be crazy to give the content out free.

Martin Wolf