> I would also add that the NYT simply has the best online newspaper. The site itself is beautiful, and I am continually impressed with their innovation in interactive features and design.
Interesting. I would disagree, or at least I think being the "best online newspaper" is sort of like being the best WAP web browser. I think many bloggers do better.
Note that we call it an 'online newspaper' - often you can instantly identify news websites are made by former newspapers as opposed to other news sources, as if the UI of their website should depend on the archaic medium they once used.
What are you thinking of that has both the scope and depth of content of the NYT, and the innovation in design? Or did you just mean one of those two criteria?
They're content is unmatched (except arguably by one of the three I mentioned above), I was just talking about design.
As a user, I don't find the innovations very useful and the design functions poorly. For example:
1) Most of their content is hard to discover; the front page must have 100 links to stories, some old and some new, and much more is buried elsewhere - if I wanted to see every story of interest to me, I'm not sure if or how I could do that starting from the home page. I also read it via RSS and it's a whole different news source, with far more coverage. People reading on the web miss a lot.
2) Updates to news stories: If a story has been updated, how do you know? You have to look around the home page for the words 'updated xx:yy' - not really a great method of notification. And if I click the updated story there is no way find out what's changed without reading the whole story again, looking for things that don't seem familiar.
3) Their inability to integrate multimedia in story-telling: A movie review never says, 'watch the clip below; see how the colors ...' <video> 'also note how the actors ...'. They have images and video, but they are decorations stapled onto the real story in text and not an integral part of it - or even a more dramatic example, the videos with hard news are completely segregated from the text story. They still are a newspaper, stuck in the limitations of the old medium where text was the only realistic option, with a few images added on.
Note that bloggers handle many of these issues efficiently. The NYT is still a newspaper on the web.
Interesting. I would disagree, or at least I think being the "best online newspaper" is sort of like being the best WAP web browser. I think many bloggers do better.
Note that we call it an 'online newspaper' - often you can instantly identify news websites are made by former newspapers as opposed to other news sources, as if the UI of their website should depend on the archaic medium they once used.