

Future of the New York Times - tommycollison
http://futurenytimes.org/about/

======
pokoleo
The javascript-run inertial scrolling is too distracting from the article for
me to be able to read it.

Looks like it's nicescroll[0], a jquery plugin (!!!).

If you had a browser extension that allowed you to execute js on each page you
visited, the plugin can be turned off if you define `$.niceScroll = true`.

Maybe I should write that one day.

[0]
[https://github.com/inuyaksa/jquery.nicescroll](https://github.com/inuyaksa/jquery.nicescroll)

~~~
comex
Naturally, on OS X, where scroll events are already inertia-ed by the time
they reach the browser, this makes scrolling way too fast. As a bonus, it
breaks the two-finger back/forward gestures, as well as cmd-{up, down} to go
to the top or bottom. How nice...

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jonnathanson
I applaud the NYT for opening itself up like this, and for giving these
students a seriously cool project to work on. Who knows how many of their
ideas will actually be practicable? But at least the NYT is expressing
intellectual curiosity and submitting itself to examination. And it's willing
to be examined by a segment (college students) that few other media
organizations would take very seriously.

Also, apropos of nothing, kudos to these kids for sneaking a Pied Piper logo
into one of their pages. :)

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vonnik
The Future-Facing Products page is the most interesting.

The bottom row of icons includes three non-advertising sources of revenue:
merch, events and eduction. The merch is self-explanatory. It's what musicians
rely on, too. The events parallel how tech blogs make their money. And the
courses are an echo of how the Washington Post relied on Kaplan for its
profit, until Bezos solved that problem.

Like most things tied to the NYT, the self congratulatory tone often obstructs
a clear view of reality. This sentence, for example, is laughable:

"That same year, the Times launched its Chinese website, with staff based in
China. Though later blocked by the Chinese government, it has been largely
considered a success."

Losing access to 99% of all Chinese-language readers is the opposite of
success, and implies that the NYT deeply misread how little its coverage was
aligned with the rules of Xi Jinping's regime.

The man they wanted to lead the Beijing bureau ended up stuck in Hong Kong for
lack of a visa, and is now the nominal head of the IHT newsroom there.

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ricefield
While I'm sure we're all frustrated with the scroll hacking, can we just not
discuss that and instead focus on what an interesting and exciting project
this is? I really wish I had a class half this interesting in undergrad.

~~~
nikanj
The technical staff making the page have a non-zero possibility of reading HN.
They might eventually realize that people hate the scrolling experience, if
every post mostly talks about the scrolling.

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hackuser
Resubmitting my critique of the Times from a month ago (I hope this isn't
frowned upon at HN):

\--------

I read the NYT daily (via RSS feeds). It is an important institution for the
U.S. and the world; the options are rapidly shrinking for high-quality
journalism and so I worry about the Times' future. From my perspective the
Times' content is invaluable, but in 2015 the Times is hurting itself because
it still hasn't embraced the web. www.nytimes.com is still a newspaper's
website, not a news website. When I'm looking for news in my browser, I don't
care that you have a paper edition, I only care which website serves me best.

\--------

1) Design: Look at the homepage. If someone was asked to design a new news
(not a newspaper) website, who would design it like that? Rather than a news
website it looks like a newspaper on the web, seemingly trying to mimic the
layout of a newspaper's pages. (It's not just the Times -- often it's easy to
identify news websites with a newspaper legacy.) From the perspective of
people familiar with the Times on paper, it might seem familiar; but get
outside that bubble and it's archaic and a bit bizarre.[1]

Also, it hides so much content; why put all that talent and effort into work
product that you show only to a few? My NYT RSS feeds look like a different,
far richer publication than
[http://www.nytimes.com/](http://www.nytimes.com/). Again, it seems like
attachment to the legacy newspaper design, where people can't easily pick up
another publication and so will flip through Times' pages and sections looking
for something interesting. The overall structure is a newspaper's sections
forced into a website's medium.

\--------

2) Multimedia is still secondary: Articles still are primarily text, but now
more often with video and image bolted on almost as decoration, and not an
integral part of the content, equal to the text. See today's article on Tomi
Ungerer[2], chosen at random. This is about a visual artist, and it actually
has several images within the text, rather than on top or in a pop-out, but
the images are merely decorative. The author doesn't write, 'look at this
drawing; see the use of color, the ironic shapes, etc.' and look at this
detail <img: zoomed-in detail> where Mr. Ungerer uses X to do Y' It's almost
as if the the author wrote the article and someone else picked some relevant
decorations later.

There's even a link in prime real estate, just beneath the banner, to "Video",
as if I choose my news based on whether it's in text or video. As if you are
saying, 'our actual news is below, and video is something we do over here'. I
just want the news; I trust you to choose the best mix of mediums to
communicate that particular story.

The solution is well known: Most amateur bloggers are equally fluent in text
and multimedia; rather than describing something they write 'look at this' or
'here's what happened' or 'here is the before and after' and, in the middle of
their post place a video, image, or short loop as appropriate. Hundreds of
millions of phone users fluently communicate with images and photos. But the
talented, professional communicators at the Times stick primarily to text, I
suppose because that's what they did on paper.

I'm not looking for graphic excitement; they are just communication tools and
sometimes multimedia is the right tool, sometimes text is; the Times seems to
choose its tools based on paper's limitations (i.e., text is cheap, images
expensive in both space and $, video impossible) and not what communicates
best on the web (where all are cheap and space is unlimited).

\---------

3) Updates and the news cycle: Two things I still see in the Times: A)
'Updated at 4:55pm'. If I read the article at 3:00pm, that isn't very helpful;
should I re-read the entire thing and try to figure out what changed? Run a
diff? Again, the solutions are well known and most bloggers handle this
situation effectively; the Times still seems to be designing newspaper
articles that will be published and read once. B) When you do have someone
blogging a breaking news story, sometimes I'll see 'That's it for tonight,
I'll be back at 8am tomorrow'. I don't have to explain the problems with that,
though I'll add that the news and your readers are in time zones worldwide.

\---------

[1] This will be shocking to say but I'm trying to make a point about how far
the Times is, conceptually, from the web medium: Consider the most recognized
branding element, the detailed, archaic font used for "The New York Times", in
the banner. In the days of newspapers, when readers could only type in Courier
if at all, the font was special. It said, 'this was printed professionally,
with skill and seriousness'. Now kids can print fonts like that on their
school papers, anyone can do it on their WordPress blog, and when they do it's
frowned upon. Now that element says, 'not a digital native, stuck in our
glorious past'. Again, it's hard to imagine a newly created news website
making that design decision. You may have a strong attachment to that design
element, but billions of web users don't care. (I know branding is difficult
to change; I expect the font will remain.)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-
un...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/arts/design/review-tomi-un..).

~~~
comex
I don't wholly disagree with your critique, but I'll counter on one point. The
Times' videos are not the raw source videos you usually see in blogs, which
complement and are given context by the text. Compared to TV news, they do
tend to spend more time on source material, but overall they tend to follow
its model: interviews, on-scene footage, and narration professionally cut
together to make a complete narrative. Like on TV (or, for that matter,
professional YouTube creators' channels), the video is the complete
experience, a replacement for a textual story, not merely a part of it. And as
TV and YouTube demonstrate, this is a perfectly valid way to tell a story
which many people appreciate; I, on the other hand, prefer text, because I can
consume it much faster. It seems reasonable to me that people should be able
to choose between the two media. Which is not to say that more of a fusion
between the two precedents isn't possible...

~~~
hackuser
I think that making the whole experience one medium or the other, all text or
all video, is a relic of platforms that only supported one medium, newsprint
and TV. Yes, some stories will demand so much of one or the other that maybe
using all video or text makes sense, but clearly that's not what's happening.

If the NYT wants to tell stories as effectively as possible, they should be
using the most effective tools as needed. Their priorities seem to be
elsewhere.

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FordPrefectAO
What is up with the scrolling on that site? It's jumps to hyperspeed about 1/2
way down the fold

~~~
morgante
Yup. Absolutely horrific.

I'd hope that someone inspecting some of the digital missteps the NYT has made
would at least get their website right...

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jay_kyburz
Watching the video makes me think this is some kind of parody site. It starts
out with some depressed looking worn out dude slouching in his chair mumbling
incomprehensibly.

