Archive for the 'New york times' Category
New York Times still doesn’t include a Twitter button on its “Share” function
Considering how much traffic Twitter drives to news sites now, this is bizarre, especially because the Times includes a button for social news site Mixx, which is one of the tiny Digg-like news sites
Should the New York Times be responsible for its Google ads?
Stinky Journalism has an investigative report out today highlighting the fact that NYTimes.com has been displaying advertisements touting sleazy health claims that it has decried in past editorials.
An article “With Resveratrol, Buyer Beware” published in the Science section of the New York Times on Aug. 18 takes aim at various Web advertisers—specifically age-reversing drug supplement companies—hawking their wares using deceptive cyber practices. However, omitted from the story is that The New York Times itself is at best nonchalant in its ad screening practices, and at worst complicit in trafficking these same deceptive Web sites–not disclosing the conflict they are lining their own pockets with ad revenue from this scam.
But where are these ads being displayed? Through contextual advertising from Google, it seems (though at least one didn’t come from Google). Given that Google is a third-party advertiser that is serving up the ads independently from the New York Times, should the Times be as responsible for these ads as they are for ones they place on their own?
Based on my own experience with Adsense, I know you can reject ads that are appearing on your site, but because of the contextual nature of them it’s not always easy to keep track of the hundreds of ads that are served up when users come in from different searches. You could be running sleazy ads in your archives that you didn’t know existed. So it seems unfair to expect the newspaper to keep track and squash every single questionable ad being served up by Google.
The New York Times to sell access to unfinished stories?
Gawker got hold of a survey being run on NYTimes.com testing a scenario in which the newspaper charges for premium content. As Gawker points out, this isn’t a far cry from another Times experiment: TimesSelect.
But buried within the piece is a nugget called “FirstLook” which would give paid users a peak at stories before they’re even finished. It reminds me somewhat of TotalFark, the premium account you can pay for at Fark.com that allows you to see submissions before they’ve been green lit for the front page.
New York Times shows a slight profit
The New York Times Company on Thursday reported second-quarter net income of $39.1 million, up from $21.1 million in the period a year earlier, as another steep drop in advertising revenue was largely offset by aggressive cost-cutting.
A favorable tax adjustment inflated the earnings in the most recent quarter. But even discounting that factor, Thursday’s results marked a return to profitability — albeit slight — after a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million.
How stories are chosen for the front page of NYTimes.com
How The Times’ Home Page Gets Made
Jim Roberts, The Times’ associate managing editor and NYTimes.com’s digital news editor, is the man making most of those judgments, along with his team of editors and a home-page producer. “The front page of the [printed] newspaper has become more interpretive,†Mr. Roberts said. “It reflects more enterprise reporting, it relies less on breaking news elements of the day, and part of that is driven by the fact that so much of the day’s breaking news is covered on the Web, whether it’s our site or other sites or people on television or any other fashion.â€
He considers CNN.com his competition and checks its site to compare their breaking news coverage.
“I think we also are building or managing the Web site to be in a competitive world,†he said. “We’re not CNN. We don’t pretend to be CNN. But we are in competition for them for readers. We definitely want to be in tune with breaking news.â€
Metafilter accuses New York Times of digitally altering photos; Times removes the photos
The New York Times published photos by Portuguese photographer Edgar Martins who shot photographs around the United States of abandoned construction projects left unfinished because of the housing and securities market collapse.
When you go to the page where these photographs were published, you find this:
Who pointed out this alleged fakery? The community at Metafilter
I call bullshit on this not being photoshopped. Look at that wooden ‘triangle’ right near the top center.
This actually is (or should be) a major embarrassment for the NYT. The simple mirroring could almost be forgiven, but the photographer decided to get cute and photoshop in a few stray boards propped here and there to distract the eye from the perfect symmetry. It might seem a minor thing, but I think there really serious issues of journalistic ethics at stake here
