Old media: August 2008 Archives
You probably know about the dire situation that the newspaper industry is in. With the rise of the internet, people have been getting their news online for free, and less and less people are buying and reading physical copies of newspapers. Revenues are down, losses are up, whole departments are being let go.What's interesting about the New York Times is ever since their redesign a couple years back, they've been putting up more and more interactive content. It started with basic videos of news pieces and rich media slideshows. Last week on their site, accompanying a basic article in the published paper about last stops on NYC subway lines, the Times put out a rich media, (somewhat) interactive complement for the article, with content you can only get online, like videos and high-quality color photography. Some of the Times' interactive efforts are a little behind the curve, like their penchant for 3D panoramas; though they do provide a level of immersion flat photographs - online or in print - just don't match.
My favorite feature is video speeches with accompanying transcripts that allow you to click to any block of the speech text and jump to that segment of the video. However you prefer to absorb the content - watching the video from beginning to end, reading the transcript from top to bottom, or jumping back and forth, queuing up only the segments you want to see & hear, and skimming through the rest - is there for you to use. There's even a clickable outline to the overall speech (presumably for lengthier ones), so you can jump to full portions of the speech, creating a kind of 'powers of 10' feel.
A lot of these features may have been around with the Times for a while, and there may be even more in-depth efforts with other publications, like the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. I wouldn't really know because a) I don't dwell on the Times' site as long as I might read a print edition (another of the newspapers' woes), and b) other than occasional guilty (and necessary) dabbling with the aggregation of the Drudge Report, my primary news source / brand preference is almost exclusively with the Times.
It's tough to see the newspaper industry struggle without clear solutions to adapting and monetizing to the digital world, but exclusive online features like these certainly help. Here's hoping the Times is around long enough to see a turned tide.
