Andrew Golis

I’ve argued in the past that going forward, newspapers are going to have to embrace aggregation (linking out to the best content in the world, not just their own) to compete with the likes of Drudge, HuffPo and TPM.  They need to not just be a source for news, but a portal to find it.

Today they took a big step by beta-launching Times Extra, a widget that algorythmically generates related stories for their main headlines.

But the execution here is pretty terrible.  It’s basically a plug-and-play widget with teensy links in a scroll box. An outside link could never be a headline itself, they’re ghetto-ized to the widget box.  They’re auto-generated so they neither augment the core story with new information nor gel with the editorial direction of the headline itself.

Compare this package with the Times, CBS and Fox headlines all telling the same story in different, somewhat contradictory ways:

To this one that uses outside links to fill out the story and create a coherent editorial package:

There’s value to having different takes on a story, but there’s more value in having the Times’ take (with their story, or the story they think gets it best) with other important background and historical information included.

I suspect that their execution will improve as they suck it up and dip more than a toe into the link economy.  But this is a good example of the ways in which old media’s failure to succeed online isn’t technical, it’s cultural and conceptual.  They still want control and clear differentiation, and they still think of outside content as something that shouldn’t be handled by their editors.  If they want to get the hybrid model right, they better drop that fast.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under media, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.