What The NY Times Is Thinking

from the one-step-forward,-one-step-back dept

It's tough to figure out exactly where the NY Times is going these days. One day they announce plans to start charging for certain content, taking themselves out of the discussion, and another day they suddenly merge their offline and online news rooms. While that last move seemed to be a bit late, Mark Glaser has been talking with folks at the NY Times about what their real plans are moving forward. While they claim to have a vision of being the news source people turn to, some of that vision still seems a bit cloudy. The rationale for merging the newsrooms apparently goes beyond the idea of wondering why they were separate in the first place, but to promote some of the more creative ideas their reporters (on both sides) were having about ways to actually use the web for more than just a place to repost stories. Among the ideas they hint at is offering up a news aggregation service, similar to Google News or Topix.net. That's interesting, given the NY Times' relationship with Topix.net (though, they were not apart of the newspaper buyout of the company) which involves highlighting NY Times stories in appropriate sections. The good side of all of this is that the NY Times understands that it can't stand still. The bad side is that it's not entirely clear if they know which direction they're running in. So, expect many false starts, but hopefully, they'll figure out which way to go eventually.

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