The New York Times launched today an expanded version of its online tech news section that reflects a savvy mix of traditional newspaper coverage and top-notch blogging. First, blended in with the Times' own reportage are online-only publications including Rafat Ali's paidcontent.org and IDG's publications (Computerworld, Infoworld, Macworld, PC World).
The selection of these two resources seems perfect for the newspaper of record. Paidcontent.org's writers, starting with Rafat himself, and IDG's collection of great trade reporters are solid, unassuming but nonetheless widely read scribes that obsessively and accurately document the development of everything from computers to government policy.
More interestingly, the section includes a new column called "Technology Headlines from Around the Web," which features relevant blog entries from hundreds of bloggers. The section, which has been called a Techmeme killer (although Techmeme is still better for tech junkies and bloggers), is populated both by technology and editorial choice.
The technology part is an automated algorithm developed by Philippe Lourier, the developer of Blogrunner, a content aggregation company bought by the New York Times last year. But Blogrunner's editors also scan the web for good stuff and monitor the selections for relevance. It's the best of both worlds.
Even cooler: unlike many newspaper web sites, the new NYT tech section links directly to the outside sources, rightly unfearful that readers will wander away and never come back again. On his bits blog, Saul Hansell, who is responsible for the revamping, writes:
We link off directly to other sites that we have no relationship with. We link equally to mainstream media and small blogs. Our job is to help people find the good stuff fast, both what we write and from others.
As an aside, I've noticed over the past couple of weeks an increased flow of traffic to this site from Blogrunner, which I thought was odd. Now I understand why because IP Democracy is one of the sites that pops up in the new section.
Also, Steve Rubel tweeted about the new section around one o'clock today, before the official announcement went out. So Twitterers (?) had word of the new section before anybody could blog about it.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:35 PM|Comments(0)
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