Live from ad:tech: NY Times, Business Week Try New Web Moves
The New York Times is about to provide Web links to news stories in other publications related to its own news stories on an alternative digital front page, and Business Week is letting readers create their own coverage priorities.
The internal beta of “TimesExtra” has launched internally at the newspaper of record. A public beta test of the annotated online edition will be out soon, according to Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and GM of NYTimes.com.
She said there were internal disagreements at the Times about the new practice, which represents, as Schiller put it, “a quantum change in our culture.”
Schiller made the revelation about the new online innovation during a digital publishing panel at the ad:tech conference in New York City yesterday.
Meanwhile, Business Week.com last month launched a feature called “Business Exchange” that enables readers to create topic pages and an abstract of related articles around them.
“Immediately, your topic is populated by stories from all over the world,” said John Byrne, executive editor and editor-in-chief for Business Week.com. “The product is totally agnostic as to where the content is coming from.”
Stories that become most frequently read are compiled in an index on the site and readers can check out each other’s topic pages through LinkedIn links that enable users to connect on particular topics.
“People are creating topics that editors would never think of,” like commercial space travel, Byrne said.
Business Week has seen 700 topics created over the last two months and expects that number to hit 1,000 by year’s end.
Betsy Morgan, CEO of The Huffington Post, said her publication is happy to link to stories on both the Times and CNN Web sites.
“We’re all about curating, and Sarah Palin has been good to us over the past several months,” Morgan said, noting that they had created a Big News page for Palin, featuring a litany of links that users could supplement with their own.
Huffington Post got good play out of Katie Couric’s interview of Palin, which it archived on its site. Palin has inspired a “huge community” of supporters and non-supporters through Huffington, according to Morgan.
