The New York Times has certainly embraced blogging, but it was striking to see in this post from The Lede just how much they’ve embraced link journalism:

Newspaper brands like the NEW YORK Times, WASHINGTON Post, BOSTON Globe, etc. face a unique challenge in the online media age — how to value non-local readers.

I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times:

As I observed previously with my critique of the Washington Post’s circulation marketing, this marketing […]

We all know that news consumption is no longer passive, whether it’s reader comments on a blog post or news article, or individuals starting a blog to have a voice of their own — the evidence is everywhere.

Less evident is how search has fundamentally changed how we consume news. Instead of passively accepting the information […]

Nothing like the biggest business story in recent memory — JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 (a share) — breaking on a Sunday to bring into sharp relief the difference between news on the web and news in print — not to mention differences in how news is presented on the web.

What’s the most obvious sign that a traditional news brand is merely reproducing online what they do in print, instead of publishing in a way that makes sense for the web? They way news is organized on the homepage.

Let’s compare three news site homepages — TechCrunch, Digg, and New York Times.

I was reading the New York Times public editor’s rebuke of the NYT McCain ethics piece that alleged an affair with a lobbyist, when a line at the end reached out and grabbed me by the collar (bold is mine):
The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good […]

I’ve argued that a blog is just a content management system, which can be used to publish journalism or just about anything else. But as a practical matter, the conventions of blogging — e.g. fast publishing, conversational tone, expressing opinion, linking — mean that a blog in the hands of a journalist will not, and […]

I somehow got logged out of my NYTimes.com registration and just hit the registration wall when I tried to read an article — I almost forgot it was there. Which made me wonder, now that the TimesSelect pay wall is gone, what the real ROI of this registration wall is for the New York Times […]

NYTimes.com wasn’t the first traditional media brand to aggregate third-party content — and it certainly won’t be the last. But the New York Times, once considered the national newspaper of record, represented one of the last bastions of the traditional media approach to content, i.e. we produce it ALL ourselves.

And if anyone makes a […]

Linking to third-party websites used to be anathema to the traditional media mindset — why would we send people AWAY? We want to keep (read: trap) them HERE. Attitudes began to change when an online media company that did nothing but send people away started making billions in advertising (i.e. Google).

Still, most media companies resist […]

Freakonomics author and blogger Stephen Dubner has a long, tortured post about why the New York Times will only offer a partial RSS feed for the Freakonomics blog now that it’s being published on NYTimes.com. The most interesting and utterly damning part by far is this:

But can’t they sell ads on a full feed, so […]

The New York Times has reportedly decided to abandon TimesSelect, its experiment with paid content on the web. This comes as no surprise since the pay wall was controversial, both internally and externally, from the beginning, but it’s even less surprising when you look at the fundamental economics of content in the digital media age […]

I’m picking on the New York Times because they are the 11th largest “audience aggregator” on the Web, but many newspapers and other traditional media companies are similarly using strength in their digital operations to conceal weakness in their legacy businesses. Here’s an example of the consequences of such “obfuscation” from MediaPost’s coverage of the […]

How will newspapers shift their business center of gravity online the same way most have shifted their audience center of gravity? That is the question keeping every newspaper executive awake at night.

Bill Keller, the New York Times Executive Editor and excellent editorial emissary, made the following comment in an interview:
But the Web audience is growing […]

I was on the New York Times site just now and was a bit freaked out when I glanced at the adjacent ad:

I live in Leesburg, and the ad knows this. What struck me is that I was “freaked out” even though I understand the geo-targeting technology that makes this kind of customized ad possible […]

If I were in a shareholder of a newspaper or any print based media company, I’d be demanding that financial reporting breakout the absolute amount of print and online revenue, rather than concealing the actual amount by which increasing online ad revenue is offsetting decreasing print ad revenue — or rather the degree to which […]

I just went to the New York Times homepage and saw that political reporter Katharine Seelye is “live-blogging” the democrat’s New Hampshire Debate. Newspapers and other mainstream media have had blogs for quite a while, but this strikes me as the moment when blogs officially went mainstream and when journalism crossed a tipping point of […]

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller made a series of announcements at a staff meeting that make it clear the Times is aggressively accelerating its transition from print to digital publishing with some dramatic changes (via Gawker):

Google has disintermediated media companies, not just through Google News, which has been the focus of newspaper lawsuits and handwringing, but also through Google’s main search results — and even more so with the introduction of Google Universal Search. But of all the features in Universal Search, the most disruptive may be the Video PlusBox, […]

The issue of whether Google’s indexing of news sites constitutes copyright infringement is likely to receive more attention following a report that Google has entered into licensing agreements with several large UK news groups, similar to the licensing deals that Google has made with the Associated Press in the U.S. and Agence France-Presse in France. […]

Yesterday, there was the the news about a current and a former New York Times Digital executive joining DailyCandy, the successful email newsletter company targeting young women with the “ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered.” Today, there is the news about print ad revenue at the New York Times continuing to fall, […]

Here are some watershed moments that mark the radical transformation of the publishing industry to a non-print-centric business:

1. New York Times becomes an aggregator

The New York Times, paper of record and one of the last great bastions of the belief that one entity can create all the content that anyone needs, has finally capitulated to […]

If Craigslist is killing the newspaper classified business, then it appears that newspapers’ real missed opportunity may be in failing to provide a sufficiently conducive environment for seeking and selling sex and love.

Reading this analysis by Compete was one of those Doh! Of course! moments (and, as a commenter on the Compete post points out, […]

Has anyone noticed that the New York Times is completely dominating the tech blogosphere today? Five of the top eight stories on Techmeme today are from the NYT — and the #1 story is ABOUT the NYT:

All of the stories are indeed notable for one reason or another — here’s my .02 cents:

In Web Traffic […]

In a review of Digg v3, TechCrunch declares that Digg is challenging The New York Times online in terms of page views. As evidence, Mike references an Alexaholic graph. Let’s look at the actual numbers.

According to TechCrunch, Digg has 800,000 daily unique visitors and 9 million page daily views. Here are the NYTimes.com […]

Nick Carr emailed me Saturday morning with the news that Dan Mitchell’s NYT column had referenced my MySpace downturn post and that I had “dragged” Nick along with me. “One could make a career out of this MySpace skeptic thing,” I quipped back, “probably pays as much as a career in user-generated content.”

And then I […]