A Sign of the Times: “Extra” Lets You Really Read All About It

Too much wordplay in that title?  Nah.

Times Extra associates articles from across the web with NYT headlines

In an interesting move, the New York Times has started to beta test a feature called “Times Extra” on their homepage (to try it out, click “Try Our Extra Homepage” to the right of the search box).  Once enabled, each headline will be accompanied by a box full of links to related stories across the web — be they from blogs or even rival newspapers.

The service is powered by Blogrunner, a service bought by the NYT sometime in 2005 (I briefly gushed about it in the opening paragraph of this post on the social graph back in January, but haven’t used it regularly since).  Blogrunner runs as its own service at blogrunner.com, but it has also been providing links on the NYT tech page since November 2007.  It uses a mix of computer algorithms and human editorial oversight to match and organize articles based on topic and theme.  For example, check out this clustering based on a NYT article about the Big Three, or this one based on the Official Google Blog post announcing the general availability of Friend Connect.

The step from geeky sidebar widget to a fairly prominent beta test on the latest and most important headlines is large and bold — and the management is fully aware of it, too.

Via HuffPo:

“The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over,” said Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations, The New York Times Company. “Times Extra is an important part of our strategy to become a destination for compelling journalism, not only by The New York Times, but by other content providers as well. We want to give our readers a comprehensive view of the news and opinion our editors think is important.”

“We are addressing a common desire for comprehensiveness, enabling people to find all the news and information they could want from all sorts of sources,” said Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising officer, The New York Times Media Group. “Initiatives such as Times Extra and our other new products allow us to do an even better job of responding to our audiences’ demands for interactivity, community, multimedia and news and information on an increasingly wide range of topics. This makes Times Extra an appealing buy for advertisers.”

This shows a real commitment by the NYT to exploring innovative ways to adapt to the changing landscape of the news business.  Among its peers, I think the NYT has really done an exemplary job of trying to harness this revolution to both ease its bread-and-butter reporting into the new era of journalism (see NYT Blogs, TimesPeople, and BloggingHeads) while also coming up with creative new ideas, such as this one.  Though the idea of having machines help aggregate news content is not new (see Google News and Techmeme), the fact that a major content provider is willing to even consider promoting stories from other sources — including major competitors — on their homepage is quite a development.

Despite this smart move, I’ve gotta say, this particular implementation just doesn’t work for me.  I don’t like the green color that is disrupting the usual “clean” palette of white, black, and blue (it looks OK in the screenshot above, but not when it’s all over the page).  I’m not a fan of the scrolling boxes, either — whether you show me fewer articles or figure out some way to show me more without scrolling, don’t make it look like a widget that you just copy-pasted in.  Leave that to us.  And please, put the headline first, not the source: content should be your priority anyway, not advertising your rivals any more than you already have.

So, kudos to the Times for its willingness to think — and experiment — outside the box.  Let’s work on that user experience a little bit, and I think you’ll see some real success in this space.