Changing Interactions with News Media – NY Times’ Alexis Lloyd

An interesting presentation by Alexis Lloyd, Creative Technologist in the NY Times R&D lab, on profound shifts occurring in user interaction and product design in news media.

So what does working in the NY Times R&D Lab entail? Here’s how Lloyd defines its mission:

The R&D Lab was founded about 4 years ago, and our mission is really to look around corners, to foster innovation at the company by researching technology trends and projecting outward anywhere from 18 months to 2-5 years. And we design and prototype ideas for what future interfaces for news media and content might look like.

Cool. The rest of this post highlights key messages from Lloyd’s talk, and is broken down into 5 sections:

• Introduction (this section)
• Trend #1: From one (or a few) to many Devices
• Trend #2: From a Web of Pages to a Web of Data
• Trend #3: From static web to Real-Time Web
• The Future of News

Introduction

From Static Publishing to an Interaction paradigm

Lloyd says that if she had to boil her entire presentation down to one sentence, it would probably be this:

The web is shifting from a publishing paradigm to a paradigm of communicating.

And this is having profound effects on the way we understand, experience, and create content.

The old paradigm

First, Lloyd presents the traditional publishing paradigm:

She comments:

In the old paradigm, information was at the center, and people actively seek it out. So you have a website, and people make this pilgrimage to your website to experience your content.

The new paradigm

Then, the new publishing paradigm:

Again from Lloyd:

In the new model, people have shifted to the center of this equation. And more and more often, content and information is getting pushed to them rather than them actively going and seeking it out. Which really changes how they experience it, how they interact with it. And furthermore, those arrows are now moving in two directions a whole lot more. So not only is content being pushed to users, but they’re increasingly broadcasting it and creating their own content and pushing that outward.

This new paradigm (or model) can be described in terms of three profound shifts. They are:

1. From one (or a few) to many Devices
2. From a web of pages to a Web of Data
3. From static web to Real-Time Web

These three shifts are described in the following sections.

Next: Trend #1: From one (or a few) to many Devices

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Topic-based News – Living Stories (Google Labs)

A very interesting announcement by Google, the NY Times, and the Washington Post around an experiment called Living Stories. The ideas is to have a page devoted to a specific story Topic, where the evolution and unfolding of the story can be tracked at a single place.

Here’s a video that describes the Living Story concept:

Here’s to Google Lab’s Living Stories page. And here are a couple of examples, one from the New York Times on The Struggle Over Health Care, and the other from the Washington Post on Fixing D.C.’s Schools.

Coooool.

glenn

Semantics (and Metadata) at the New York Times

***** Nov 10 2009 Update:
I have uploaded a summary doc of the NY Times presentation. Please click the following link to access: Semantics at The New York Times – notes – SemTech 2009
*****

Yet another great presentation from the SemTech 2009 conference this past June in San Jose. This presentation is on Semantics at the New York Times.

Here is a slide presentation that the New York Times delivered at a different conference, but it’s very similar to the one delivered at SemTech.

The (Long) History of Metadata at the New York Times

The presentation starts out exploring the history of metadata at the New York Times, from the beginnings of their Morgue archive which was created at the newspaper’s inception in, if you can believe, 1851. The so-called Morgue was not a collection of corpses (thank goodness), but rather a collection of newspaper clippings and photos.

No subject was too big or small to be indexed in the Morgue. As the Times VP of Digital Production Rob Larson states in the presentation, in 1907 the Times’ Managing Editor Carr Van Anda invested in the Morgue to add staff and rigor of organization to the files, and a Tagging system grew up around this effort.

At the Morgue’s zenith a few decades ago, the Morgue had a staff of 24 persons, creating 600 new clip folders per week, cutting up 36 editions of the final New York city edition of the Times, as well as copies of other prominent newspapers.

Within its main operation on the third floor, there were more than 4,000 cabinet drawers of newspaper clippings, containing 1,126,000 named individuals (including animals, etc), 65,000 subject headings, 300,000 ships and planes, 500,000 places, and 500,000 corporations. (Wow!)

The Morgue is only one form of tagging system used at the Times – others include the New York Times Index and the NYTimes.com website.

So what is the Tagging workflow at the New York Times?

A few slides to show from the presentation. The first slide depicts the tagging workflow at the New York Times, and what roles apply metadata at what step in the workflow.

This visual oversimplifies the underlying complexity of the application of metadata, however, in the editorial workflow. Here’s a very-hard-to-read workflow diagram of the stages at which metadata is applied in the NY Times – which suggests the overall complexity of the end-to-end workflow, to both Print and Online channels.

Why Tag?

Another core visual is shown below, which summarizes the motivation for tagging – that is the various use cases for metadata-tagged content at the Times.

Rob Larson specifically addresses the importance of metadata for generating NY Times Topic Pages, 4 examples of which are provided below:

The Future

Next the presenters address the future of metadata (and now the talk turns more to “semantics”) at the NY Times.

What near-term plans does the Times have for evolving their metadata management practice? See the slide below:

Next up the presenters discusses the New York Times’ various Open Data initiatives, and the APIs the Times is making avaiable to the public to access and build applications on top of its data.

New York Times and Linked Data

Finally, the New York Times announced at SemTech the next phase of their Open Data strategy, which is to prepare their Corpus to be exposed to the Linked Data Cloud.

Interesting stuff.

glenn

More on News Media Open API Strategies – New York Times

I previously blogged about The Guardian’s Open API strategy. Today, let’s have a look at the New York Times.

New York Times Open API Strategy

Early in 2009, the New York Times launched its Article Search API.

While this is a somewhat innovative strategy for a News organization, it’s a classic Web 2.0 strategy, pioneered by the likes of Amazon and Google. This is an inevitable outgrowth of the emergence of the Web as a Platform, and the Open Business Models and Value Chains that it enables. It’s going to force traditional News Media companies to make some tough discussions, as The Guardian’s Martin Belam points out in his post MPs expenses, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ models of 21st century journalism.

So in a nutshell, the New York Times and The Guardian are making their data open to the public to build Mashup applications. In the case of the New York Times Article Search API, here’s one example, where someone took the raw article data, and created a visualization of the most popular topics for NY Times articles from 1985 to 2001. This may seem like a rather cheesy example, but the possibilities are profound, as suggested by the post above by The Guardian’s Martin Belam.

In Summary

Nothing too profound here. Just wanted to point out that the New York Times is also incorporating Open Data into its business strategy. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

glenn