Times Extra has launched, and it’s even less impressive than I’d feared it would be. This is not, by a long shot, the ideal newspaper site, which leads with its own content where that’s strong and which links to the best of others’ content where the newspaper is less strong. Instead, we have a site which:
- Is really hard to find. You can’t even link to it, or bookmark it: you have to navigate first to the "clean" NYT homepage and then click on a small Times Extra box.
- Is slow to load, and clunky. The links to blogs come in a box with a tiny scrollbar down the right hand side, which doesn’t work well at all.
- Provides external links precisely for the stories which the NYT is doing well — the ones where the NYT is leading with its own content. Those are the external links we don’t need!
- Provides way too many external links for each of those stories, and gives no indication of which ones are worth following and which aren’t.
- Does not provide external links for stories which the NYT hasn’t covered yet.
All of these are niggles, however, in contrast to the biggest problem of all: the Times Extra links are automated! I’m sure that’s great news for Blogrunner, a technology the NYT acquired and now is putting to use. But it completely defeats the purpose of putting external links on the home page to begin with.
There’s a reason that the top dog at any newspaper is called the editor: the first and most important function which newspapers perform is to edit out the noise and serve up what’s most germane. And nowhere is that function more important than the front page, which is essentially a second round of editing giving you just the handful of the top stories of the moment. Installing automated links destroys that hugely valuable editing function.
So much as I would love to see external links on the nytimes.com homepage, I’m actually glad that they’ve buried this function, because the current implementation is horrible, and I for one won’t be availing myself of it. I just hope that this isn’t an elaborate plan to allow them to say "well, we tried external links and it didn’t work". Because this isn’t even close to what such an experiment would look like.