Online Content, A Day in the Life - Annual Report 2006

The New York Times

Online, the Gray Lady of journalism has had a little more work done than people may realize.

The site is still distinctly that of a newspaper, and the differences between it and online sites managed largely by machines are enormous. But NYTimes.com makes notable use of interactive and multimedia functions. Even more important, it updates stories far more than many other newspaper sites, and a good deal more than it did a year earlier. By 5 p.m. on May 11, and even more so by 9 p.m., this was much different site from when the day started. The sense a visitor gets dipping in and out of NYTimes.com through the day is that of a living newsroom, with new stories coming in as reporters complete them, and adding to those again as new updates come in.

The news was always organized by a strong sense of what was significant, not just what was new, and that distinguished the Times from sites like Yahoo and Google.

In a sense, the approach may be “all the news that’s fit to post.”

The basics of the page, which as 2006 began had not changed since May 11, 2005, start with four top stories and a large photo. Next to the lead stories at the top, users are shown three other major stories, plus the editorials for the day, the op-eds for the day, and the latest on markets around the world. In the middle of the page, under the top four stories, was a section-by-section breakdown of the print edition that day, which gave users access to 61 additional stories, plus eight of the latest stories from AP and Reuters, all from the Web site’s front page.

At 9 a.m., the site is essentially the morning paper on-line but not completely. Already the updating has begun. As early as 7:24 a.m. EDT on May 11, the top story on the page was changed from the lead of the May 11 paper. The paper had already posted a bylined piece about violence in Iraq that occurred overnight. Next users could read about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plans for a leaner military, United Airlines winning the right to default on employee pensions and a piece on AIDS in Africa .

NYTimes.com Lead Stories

Throughout the day the news that got top billing changed as stories moved around on the site. And, unlike what we saw in cable’s use of immediacy, the time an event occurred didn’t necessarily determine where a piece appeared. Take the plane-scare story. It started as a secondary item when the news was still coming in. It wasn’t until later, after the event was better understood, that it became the page’s lead piece, at 5 and 9 p.m.

The Iraq story remained among the lead pieces all day, even after it was technically “old news.” It was updated three out of the four times we checked the site — the “at least 60 are killed in New Round of Attacks in Iraq” would become “At Least 79” dead by 4 p.m. that day. The byline would also change, from a co-byline early in the day, John Burns and Terence Neilan (editor-reporter for the Web edition), to a sole author, Burns, by the evening. A piece on a drop in the trade deficit went from a secondary story to a lead, back to a secondary and finally off the page.

By 9 p.m., five of the six top stories on the page would be new or significantly updated from the morning. Across the whole front page, basically more than half of the stories linked would be new — before the next day’s paper was posted. Across the whole front page, indeed, 31 of the 67 stories were new or significantly updated after 9 a.m. (28 of them altogether new). If you remove the 16 stories from weekly special sections such as Dining & Wine, Home & Garden or Automobiles, the degree of updating is even greater — 31 updated and 20 unchanged.

When it came to exploiting the interactivity and multi-media nature of the Web, the Times fell behind some of its TV-oriented rivals, but often ahead of the online aggregators. A quarter of its top stories (25%) contained links to video, such as the piece on Rumsfeld’s plans and the stories on the D.C. plane scare (compared with 45% on average of all sites examined). Just 5% of top stories offered audio links (the average was 6%). None of the main stories allowed users the chance to customize or manipulate data on this day (the average was 18%). And 30% of the stories offered users the chance to communicate with the Times if they had a question (the average was 39%). Incidentally, these figures are not particularly different from what we found two years earlier in a similar study of the Times Web site. In early 2006, the Times announced that all bylines on the site would become links through which users could contact reporters by e-mail.