Tearing Up The Tabloid: What A Hyperactive NY Times Reader Might Want

Over the past years, the manner in which I experience and participate in media has changed dramatically. I have written about this extensively on /Message and in other contexts. If this were just the whimsy of one aging, leftish, technodweeboid intellectual, perhaps nothing truly interesting could be derived from my experiments and passions. However, I don’t think that is the case. On the contrary, I believe that the patterns of my media mix and how I try to wrestle with media and connectedness shed a very interesting light on the fusion between media and social tools.

Twitter is the metronome of the real-time web, today.

One major breakthrough was (is) blogging. Blogging can be considered a lightweight and low-cost publishing model leveraging the new economics of the Web, on one hand, but on the other, the democratizing side of blogging — putting publishing into everyone’s hands — when coupled with the networked world of the hyperlinked Web has shaken old school media to its very foundations. The rise of social media has recontextualized journalism, publishing, and the public policies around open social discourse in the greatest shift since the start of the industrial era. We are moving toward some sort of post-industrial sort of media and journalism, but no one seems to have a very good idea of what it will look like.

Being inherently lazy, I am opting for a narrow examination of these issues, based on my work in user experience of social applications. I am using myself as a sample persona, a character in the Kabuki dramas we cook up to think about designing software these days. And my interest is to examine, at a conceptual level, the sorts of tools that are available to me, as I try to swim in these turbulent and murky waters. What can I do? What do I wish I could do and can’t? And what is it that tool makers out there are trying to make me do? Wat do they seem to think I should be doing, or would want to be doing?

In many ways, I am not the greatest avatar for a discussion like this. I am not average in most ways. I am hyperliterate, spending way more time reading and writing than any but the most tortured infovores. I don’t watch TV. I am overly educated. I am an independent, not working within the context of larger organizations, like a consulting firm, university, or media company. I work in the niche that I am examining, advising companies building these sorts of products as a ‘product theorist/webthropologist’.

Still, I think there is some merit to consider what it is what I do and what I wish I could do that I can’t. Partly because we all have to start where we are, and partly because I believe that my situation is something like what others — maybe many others — will want or need in the not-too-distant future. I am a template of a possible future simply because I am often few pulse beats ahead of the mob. (Recall that I coined the term ‘social tools’ in 1999, and presaged the incredible importance of streaming applications starting in 2006.)

What Do I Do? And What Can’t I Do?

I write. I read. I take notes. I comment. I curate. And I try very hard to share the artifacts arising from these activities with others.

The last activity — sharing — is in some ways the most amorphous, so I will start there and return to it again. I feel that sharing takes three forms for me these days:

1. A decreasing volume of one:one sharing, typified as a link or other commentary sent as an email, IM, or direct message in Twitter or other social platform.
   
   



2. A relatively stable volume of many:many sharing within well-defined, symmetric groups, such as the employees of a company I am consulting with, or other such teams. This could be typified as sharing posts, files, and milestones in a Basecamp instance.
   
   



3. A dramatically increasing volume of one-among-many:many-among-many posts made in social platforms, such as a) Twitter microstreaming, b) Typepad macroblogging, c) Tumblr curating, or d) NY Times or Publish2 micromediating (all to be expanded). These can be typified, respectively as a a) Twitter post with a shortened URL and a snarky one-liner, b) a post like this, of perhaps thousands of words, c) reposting of an interesting video on Tumblr that I discovered through my Tumblr stream, or d) commenting on or ‘recommending’ a news story on the NY Times to other members of the TimesPeople network.

Many of those reading this will be deeply aware of the various ways in which Twitter can be employed as a social medium through which news, conversation, links, and social gestures all flow. Twitter is the metronome of the real-time web, today. Likewise, you are equally likely to have experienced slow-twitch, large format blogging (you are, after all, reading this gigantic post), that world of posts, links, and comments.

Less of you will have experienced Tumblr, or at least the meatiest part of Tumblr — even if you have read Tumblr blogs like my /Ambivalence — since the real fatback is only available to those who create an account, and start ‘following’ other Tumblr blogs. Once you are far enough invested in this following/follower model — very much like Twitter in that regard — you begin to receive a steady stream of other Tumbler’s posts, which are often the reposting of other’s posts, further upstream. Tumblr makes it quite simple to repost other’s posts, and this sort of social curating — passing along to your own followers what you think is worthy of their regard — becomes the central defining characteristic of the Tumblr experience.

To generalize, Twitter and Tumblr are both based on the open follower model — any user can opt to follow the stream of any other user, and through reposting or retweeting, users act as curators, recommending posts’ contents or that which they refer to for those downstream, their followers.

Note that this is also a theme in blogging, but the mechanisms by which it is accomplished there are different. Curating is not the dominant motivation of large-format blogging; instead, conventional blogs are increasingly the place that people go to write essays, and other things that people have used blogs for in the past are being taken over by these newer, stream-based solutions.

In the middle of this collection of social tools, though, there are gaps, places where the various bits don’t meet well, or where integration has not yet occurred.

The NY Times As A Case Study In Sharing

Consider the case study of my attempts to integrate reading online newspapers into the world I have sketched above. Even more specifically, integrating the NY Times into me.

The primary user experience of the NY Times online is a digital analog of the printed paper. This may be a satisfying approach for those who are just getting started with online newspaper reading, but it is far from optimal for serious bitheads. I find it is not that important for me to see what is on the front page, for example. To see how this causes a user experience mismatch for me, consider these examples:

1. The notion of breaking stories over multiple pages — as is necessary in newsprint — is an unnecessary hassle. I know that the NY Times and others do this to artificially drive up page counts and the number of times I am shown some dieting ad, but that offers me no value.


2. The primary organization of the paper is around sections, like sports, op-ed, or business, which is a holdover from physical newsprint. This approach leads to me opening a series of stories, for example in op-ed, each in a new tab. But the Times doesn’t allow a simple “open all stories in this section in new tabs” option.


3. Much more interesting for me is coverage of thematic stories over time — like the unrest in Iran, or the rise of artisal food wagons — or stories written by certain authors. I find it is functionally impossible to organize my reading experience around these dimensions, because the Times doesn’t offer me the knobs to turn.

What I wind up doing is to manually open all the stories that look interesting — I can’t suggest turning off the Sports section, for example — and then to read them sequentially.

As I am reading, I begin to do the things that pull Times stories into the rest of my world, for example, as I write a long-format blog post, bookmark something for later examination, or Tweet a one-liner with a refernece to a Times article. Notably, I find I perform these activities that are motivated by NY Times materials using services not provided by the NY Times.

My blog, /Message, is hosted on Typepad from SixApart, so I might select a few paragraphs from a David Carr piece on media, and using a Typepad bookmarklet, I start a blog post which I then (or later) edit and post using the Typepad hosted service.

If I were to instead just tweet a reference to that Carr article, I would use Bit.ly, the URL shortening and metrics service. To do so, I use a Bit.ly provided bookmarklet and select, let’s say, a single line or the headline from Carr’s piece, and fire it off to Twitter through that tool. Later on, I can monitor how many of my Twitter followers have clicked on the link, or retweeted my post.

There is an opportunity for the NY Times team to consolidate much of what they have developed in these experiments, and then to take a few bold leaps into the 21st century, and to accomplish something truly innovative. But to get there they need to see that the future will be populated with people more like me than today’s subscribers, who get the paper thrown into their driveways.

Alternatively, I might decide to bookmark the Carr article, either to retain the link for later research, or as another way to curate the web. For years I used Delicious, the Yahoo social bookmarking solution, but at various points it became flaky, and so I migrated to the now-dead Magnolia, and then to other linkblogging tools. Just recently, I have tried a number of solutions, the most promising of which is Scott Karp’s Publish2 tool. However, I have not converted to using that tool completely for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with its lack of integration with Typepad, which they are planning to remedy. As result, I separate the two aspects of bookmarking: if I intend to read something later, I use Instapaper, but if I want to publish a link curatorially (for the benefit of others) I either tweet it or I tumblr it.

Note that there is also a different use case that occurs all the time: I stumble upon a link to a NY Times story, perhaps in a post I am reading, or in a tweet, or on a service like TweetMeme. I then click through that link to the NY Times story, but the paper’s website doesn’t reflect back to me any of the specific information about the story that I could find with these other tools. The web version of the article does not display how many people have twittered the story, or collate comments or posts from across the web that refer to the story. In fact, with the exception of NY Times blogs, I can’t even comment on NY Times’ articles. It seems like the NY Times doesn’t acknowledge that there is a web outside, except for the links that NY Times authors create explicitly, or the generated links to other NY Times stories.

In this way, the NY Times is profoundly unsocial, and ingrown.

NY Times Experiments

At the same time, however, the organization is experimenting with other ways to experience and share the NY Times.

The NY Times Reader is a client that readers can download, allowing a somewhat different user experience. I find the tool fundamentally unusable given that I am so active a participant, and I want to make notes, bookmark, tweet, and riff on what is said. Since the Reader is a dedicated client, and is not running in the browser, most of what I want to do is blocked, or at best is an extra mouse click or two away. If I want to get the URL of a story, I have to open a browser window to the story. So nearly everything I want to do — except for passively reading the paper — I can’t, directly. I always am brought back to the browser. So I just stay in the browser, instead.

A second experiment, called Skimmer, is in beta. This is a browser based reader tool, providing some interesting ways of displaying news stories, and stripping out most of the window dressing on the NY Times website.

Here you see that I have opened the Settings, and selected “Priority” display, which like the others is unexplained, and not tailorable. One of the real problems with Skimmer is that items aren’t timestamped in any of the views. I find that the topics selection intriguing but I can’t select my own topics of interest. So, an interesting prototype, but amazingly inflexible and totally unsocial.

A take on participating socially around the NY Times is the NY Times People system. This is a application overlay to the base NY Times website that incorporates an open follower/streaming model. As a registered user, I can follow other readers as well as writers for the Times, and they can follow me. I can see their curated recommendations, and vice versa. Here’s the incoming stream on my account, showing recommendations from those I am following.

The problems? First of all, there are no comments: you can recommend, but not make a note. Second, there is no way to publish these recommendations outside of the Times People world except to Facebook: no Twitter, no publishing to blogs or bookmarking services. (I guess I could laboriously fix that via Facebook hacks, but seems like a lot of work when I can’t comment.) Third, there is no way to message other users. Fourth, any cascading from my recommendations are lost: I may have led 10 others to recommend a story bceause I reconmended it, but there is no place thatTimes People shows that social consequence. Last, and perhaps most damning, I can only curate NY Times articles or blog posts: there is no way that I could recommend a BusinessWeek article or a /Message post into the Times People service for the benefit of those following me there.

So while an interesting and nice-looking app, NY Times People is far too closed to actually replace other more general approaches. I would much rather comment on my blog or tweet about that David Carr article, and if I wasn’t actively experimenting with NY Times apps and betas for personal edification, I wouldn’t have even done as as much as I have — which is very little — with People.

The app supports view called “Live Feed” or “The Latest’ depending on which page you are looking at. This is a ‘what’s hot’ kind of view.

The ‘Most Commented’ category is misleading, since comments within People aren’t supported. However, many NY Times blogs (but not articles or columns) support comments. So, bizarrely, here in NY Times People (which doesn’t support comments) we are presented a view called ‘Most Commented’, and if you click on the items in the view you are taken to a blog, outside of People, where you can leave a comment.

Conclusions and Recommendations

For all I know, the NY Times may have other experimental projects going exploring other dimensions of social interaction around news and opinion. Based on what I have seen to date and my desire that the NY Times step up to participating completely in the social media future, here’s a short list of thoughts and recommendations:

1. Why not support comments across the board? Yes, there will be a level of overhead involved in moderation, but that’s a given of a social world. If commenting was elevated to a first class status — not just an afterthought for blogs — the NY Times would be a much richer experience.


2. Make Times People a fully integrated experience of the online Times. Let people make recommendations, with comments. Allow users to direct posts to specific others, in a Twitter like way. Integrate — or implement — a Publish2 style bookmarking side of this, as well. Integrate Times People with other external solutions, not just Facebook, like blogging platforms and Twitter.


3. Open up a more open Times People so that users could bookmarklet from outside of the NY Times, and share with their communities on the NY Times.


4. Why doesn’t (at the very least) the NY Times support Tweetmeme or JS-Kit Echo or some other means to display tweets and blog posts elsewhere that reference NY Times artickes and blog posts?
5. If the Times is supporting blogs for its authors, why not give away blogs for readers? I think Le Monde did that years ago. Make it a real community, and offer services to the bloggers that integrate them deeply into the NY Times world as real full-fledged contributors. Some of them might be great contributors, and a few may be good enought to get paid for their work.

An advanced NY Times People service could augment my active experience significantly, and could mirror some of what the Huffington Post is up to, and with an even richer involvement of NY Times staff and readers. To the greatest extent possible, the NY Times should move to offer all the services that I use in my daily streaming: just gathering the analytics surrounding these activities would be priceless.

Mike Arrington’s recent piece on what a New New York Times could be was him envisioning a NY Times that had adopted the TechCrunch model, more or less. My recommendation is to create something new in a different vein: a social news experience that is strongly shaped by the NY Times editorial conscience and news perspective, but one that is significantly more social than Techcrunch or Huffington Post are today.

There is an opportunity for the NY Times team to consolidate much of what they have developed in these experiments, and then to take a few bold leaps into the 21st century, and to accomplish something truly innovative. But to get there they need to see that the future will be populated with people more like me than today’s subscribers, who get the paper thrown into their driveways.