Designing the future of the New York Times
That was the title of a talk at the SxSW Interactive Festival here in Austin, Texas, that a few of us went to yesterday afternoon.
We were all looking forward to it. We’ve got some form with newspapers in the UK, having designed sites and blogging platforms for UK broadsheets and tabloid newspapers as well as creating a hugely successful blog-based community site for the UK’s leading quality broadsheet The Daily Telegraph. We’re also long-time fans of NYTimes.com. The site delivered 20 million unique users in October 2008 (okay, it was the election but even so…) and was the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. Consistently brilliant interactive and information graphics, and restless experimentation with new technologies and new models led us all to expect a great deal from this talk. Like many in the packed conference room, I was sadly disappointed.
The talk was astonishingly boring and backwards-looking, as web-hating Design Director Tom Bodkin droned on and on about a glorious past that quite frankly no-one was there to hear about, starting with his college days which were a very long time ago (Tom seemed about 130 years old). Tom, the clue here was in the title of your talk – the “future” of The New York Times.
A full 20 mins of the hour were dedicated to Tom’s slides from the heyday of hot metal. He managed to dis Razorfish in passing – the agency charged with channeling his ‘genius’ during the website’s redesign a couple of year’s back. He then set about ripping up the Web medium in general for a ‘lack of innovation’ before claiming the NYTimes website didn’t support serendipitous discovery as much as the paper product: a claim so ridiculous that I checked my ears to see if they were working properly. I say ridiculous for the simple reason that the online experience provides billions of hyperlinks that allow one to move from today’s top stories through extensive archives and related content on a fairly joyous journey of discovery in a way that the paper product simply does not.
Next up, digital Design Director Khoi Vinh presented a series of haiku-like chunks of design philosophy – statements like “we are a platform” – and some slides of the website’s extravagantly over-designed style guides. Always suspicious of interaction designers who put so much effort into crafting linear style guides like this. There then ensued a kind of mumbling competition between the two men mainly involving the words “err” and “umm”. During this phase of the talk, delivered in a hypnotic monotone, neither man looked at the audience and Bodkin mainly looked at the table. People started leaving.
The most staggering stuff came towards the end of the session, when Bodkin started to talk about the commercial model: “The most staggering stuff came towards the end of the session, when Bodkin started to talk about the commercial model: “Big display ads is sort of what we’re good at”. Oh dear. Having read Clay Shirky’s brilliant description of newspapers’ broken economic model only hours before this NYTimes talk, I’m pretty sensitive to the fact that the future is *not* about big display ads. The fact that Bodkin and Vinh are still able to delude themselves to this degree speaks volumes about why some newspapers are in so much trouble. What a shame this includes the Old Grey Lady.
Until recently, the prevailing wisdom has been that newspapers still have a few years to transition into ‘something else’. Indeed, it must have looked pretty good until very recently, with online ad revenue rocketing throughout 2008. The recession changes all of that, and it now transpires that newspapers have very little time at all. It’s ten to midnight, and the style guides we were shown by Bodkin and Vinh are rather like a layout plan of deck-chairs on the Titanic’s decks made on the morning of the collision. The nostalgia is like the newspaper’s life flashing before its eyes as it lies dying, utterly surprised at the sudden worsening of its long-term illness.
Across the industry, we’re looking at a sudden collapse rather than a managed transition, but it’s noteworthy and encouraging for us Brits that our newspapers seem to ‘get it’ much more than our US cousins. It is utterly unthinkable that the Guardian or Telegraph would make the kind of presentation we saw yesterday, and it’s clear that both are gearing up very quickly for the next surge towards becoming Web-driven products.
I doubt you’ll find the NYTimes presentation on SlideShare. And if you did wouldn’t find much at all about the future. They can’t admit it to themselves, let alone tell anyone else about it.
14 comments
I’m surprised that I’m the first to comment on this post. I’d have thought you’d have gotten more backlash saying that the Times is the best designed newspapers website in the country, etc…
I’ll put in my disclaimer that I think the New York Times does quality journalism and I’m constantly impressed by their interactive graphics and usually their multimedia. That said: Their site design is AWFUL.
It’s based around the idea that the online version should look like the print edition – what a travesty! Online should never look like print, the two design strategies are so totally different that trying to adapt one to the other will inevitably lead to failure.
travesty!
Many/(all?) newspaper websites are guilty of this trend, the Times is no exception. A quick list off the top of my head:
• Nav bars that go on forever
• Not including graphics with headlines
• poor use of tags
• ads that just suck
• uncreative ad placement
• homepages that go on forever
• multiple nav bars
• including a nav link for ‘multimedia’
• buried RSS links
• disallowing comments on articles
I’m sure there’s more but that’s a good start. I’ll add this: the New York Times seems to have a fundamental disconnect with ‘new media.’ Yes, they’re good at interactive graphics. Yes, they do some video. Yes, they do podcasts. But: they don’t seem to understand Twitter at all. They don’t allow commenting on articles. And (the worst part), they almost never link in their articles, let alone, link out to other sites.
I love ‘ya New York Times, but you’re in some desperate need of some tough love.
I was at this session too and thought the EXACT same thing. I even turned to the guy next to me and said, as Bodkin was talking, ‘Is this guy for REAL?’
After the session, when I was imparting the same sentiments as your blog post, someone said it was too bad I had wasted my time when there were so many other good panels going on.
But I told them it hadn’t been a waste of time. It was a sad but important revelation that the self-indulgent journalists swimming in a sea of denial include the ranks of the NYT.
Nice write up of the event.
Hello – first I work at NYT so hence the desire not to identify myself that much and also why I’ll be very very brief…
In regards to Mr. Bodkin – yeah, he’s fixated on the paper and thats okay as long as he stays only on the paper and not on the web. Thats the situation right now. Hes a great man and has his niche. Surprised that he was at sxsw…
In regards to Khoi – I don’t think you say him at his best, or maybe he had an off day. Khoi is not responsible for the current incarnation of NYT site – that was Razorfish and there are a lot of things he’d do differently… probably address a ton of complaints we already are aware of. Khoi has played a HUGE role in maintaining consistency and applying standards to NYT. If you can gripe about something (design related) on the site, odds are it predates him or was done without his consent. Again, surprised that Khoi’s portion sucked, hes usually very insightful. Maybe Bodkin was dragging him down – you don’t want to contradict someone like him in public… ?
One of my biggest issues with the NYTimes, apart from the ones that Joey Baker mentioned above, is that they do not allow videos to be embedded – in effect making them unportable (if there is such a word). I’d think the whole point of a newspaper is to share information, no?
“I’d think the whole point of a newspaper is to share information, no?”
Umm… no. Its not about sharing (though that’s a nice idea). Its about informing (IMHO). The web is about sharing. News is news.
So you can’t embed videos… I think its on the to-do list somewhere.
@not_real with my best regards, and in all sincerity: Are you KIDDING ME!?
“I’d think the whole point of a newspaper is to share information, no?”
Umm… no. Its not about sharing (though that’s a nice idea). Its about informing (IMHO). The web is about sharing. News is news.
I guess I can’t really speak to a newspaper, but an online, newsorg has the responsibility to share anything and everything. Part of what you do is informing. But are we seriously going to turn this into another debate on how the days of the press telling the public what is or isn’t news is long gone with the net?
is or isn’t
With all due respect Sir or Madame, that is an attitude that the New York Times cannot afford to take. IMHO, it’s likely a good chunk of what’s wrong.
:)
That last one was supposed to end with a END Rant; :)
I actually saw these two speak at a Society for News Design conference a year and a half ago. I agree with you wholeheartedly on Bodkin – I think he may be one of the few people I’ve seen/heard/communicated with who actually thinks that there needs to be more one-way communication on the Internet.
Vinh, on the other hand, I’m not so critical of. He has to put up with Bodkin. I mean, that’s worth something, right?
Thanks for all these comments. I think you’re right about Vinh. I have seen him before and he was much better on his own. Someone out here suggested that he will now be able to point to the fairly universal negative reaction to the talk – and indeed the general anti-NYT sentiment seemingly generated chiefly by Bodkin’s performance – as evidence that things need to change. Vinh looked uncomfortable, as if dealing with an overbearing senior partner. Hopefully Vinh now has all the evidence he needs…
Are you saying these two American guys actually uttered the syllable “err,” complete with rhotacism? (Rhymes with cur, burr, her, aver, and masturbator?)
Or did they say “uh”? Nobody says “err.”
Also, your British single quotes are borked. Err.
It is the end of the publishing industry. Simply, the refined but deeply inefficient business practices of the big publishes are the opposite of everything intrinsic to the web. I pity them, can you blame a 100-year old business for not being able to change rapidly?
creative world and creative mind never fail in this world :)
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Creativity is the key to everything . Very good write-up.