Did you actually find the redesigned site? When I go to nytimes.com, it doesn't look any different than it has for quite a while. The nytimes.com/redesign link itself vaguely reminds me of the Mavericks announcement page that Apple had up before they actually released it.
In any case, nothing looks odd with kerning on Mac/Safari or Firefox.
It's great to see newspapers trying to improve the reading experience itself (single page stories that aren't broken up into a dozen pages for pageviews, removing distractions etc), since many of the other news websites smother the user in advertisements, popovers and social media buttons to the point where it feels like you have to battle the site just to read the story itself. It remains to be seen how this redesign will feel in practice, but it seems to have all the right intentions.
When it comes to news websites, my current favorite is the design for The Daily Beast.
It'd be ... nice? useful? different? ... if I could get the video to play.
Edit: Well, waddya know, it's downloadable. And in Ogg format ("Ogg data, Skeleton v4.0" per file(1)). So, no, doesn't work in my browser for whatever reason, but I can download and play it locally, which works better for me anyway.
Of the changes, the depagination is probably one of the more useful to me. I've actually written my own CSS to drastically reformat how NY Times pages render (a few screenshots here, among others: http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tm4ox/user_site_res...)
The side-to-side viewing stuff I've found really annoying on other sites, especially if it's tied in to arrow-key navigation or other stuff. I tend to find myself sliding off the page I want to be on.
Sorry to go off on a tangent, but: I would love to subscribe to NYT digital editions, but why must the digital edition cost almost as much as the paper edition? Imagine the waste involved (in energy and materials)! Current home delivery rates are $8.75 for paper, and $5.00 for internet. That is simply too much. Bring it down to $1/week and we'll talk.
That's just the intro price. It's $5/WEEK if you want nytimes.com + tablet apps. That's $260/year instead of $22/year. I would gladly subscribe if the long term rate was $5 for 12 weeks.
Yeah, that's too much. And that's just for the NY Times... how many other sites are you supposed to pay for?
I feel like there should be some technical way to handle letting a user pay a flat amount, and distribute the proceeds to the sites you actually visit, in a sort of fair way.
Maybe there should be one umbrella corporation that owns all media sites, that way we could pay the umbrella corporation a monthly fee and be done with it.
The main problem is that it would create an economy where the the media outlets that produce the media desired by the paying authority (people are people and the fund will not be unlimited dollars) are prioritized over others, so that the only news will eventually be that which will be known to get you paid.
I.e., the controlling body -- I'm guessing a government entity, here -- will be the sole voice of the fourth pillar, and the whole notion of press freedom is buried and forgotten.
it would create an economy where the the media outlets that produce the media desired by the paying authority
And that's precisely what you've got now, except that the paying authority is advertisers, with access mediated by whatever roadblocks Google's thrown at SEO this week. In earlier schemes, you got the content preferred by patrons (royalty and/or the Church), or what could support small roving troups of actors, players, musicians, bards, raconteurs, etc. Back in the 1980s I was watching an early "festival of computer animation" and noticed that shorts from cigarette advertisments (largely from Europe) featured heavily. It was, effectively, the Church for patronage of CGI development (nascent and expensive at the time).
The syndication need not be through a single agency, and there are existing examples in the music industry (not that that's perfect either): you've got The Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. For airtime play there is both logs (of airplay) and sampling methods to determine who gets paid for what. The licensing even covers live performance venues such as bars and nightclubs. There it's the club owner, not the band, who has the license for performances (it's much easier to conduct audits and enforcement against a street address than with a band whose location isn't fixed, has few assets, and can scatter to the winds).
The other question is how to link receipt and payment. In many locations, Internet access is sufficiently concentrated (often monopolized) that tying major providers into the scheme might work. Access bundles could be tied to your Internet subscription, possibly with tiers of service or credits available for content. This removes the problem of subscribing individually to different source publishers, though it could drive up the cost of Internet access.
Another approach would require more government involvement, essentially an income- or wealth-indexed content tax (addressing the "ability to pay" scenario). Collections are based on payment ability, _distribution_ is based on actual access and utilization.
There are a lot of thorny details, and the question of whether or not there's a process path from the present system to something resembling what I'm suggesting is very much unsettled.
Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart, the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways.
Five dollars might buy you a meal at lunch at a fast food place, once, per week.
Five dollars might buy you a specialty coffee drink, once, per week.
Five dollars might cover your commute, bus fare, maybe once a week.
Five dollars a day won't even cover what most people put into car notes, its barely less than what many pay to play some MMOs.
So in the grand scheme of things its not a price point, people just like to gripe about having to actually pay for what they do not place value on, or sufficient value. Face it, far too many geeks do not see the complexity of delivering the news. Oh sure they see the web side but even then they vastly under estimate the costs to create the process let alone maintain it.
As with all other pay services, find those which are relevant to your needs, but damn, quit trying to tell these places how much it costs to run their business
Just as a reference point: the digital only edition of one of the largest newspapers here in Norway is ~7$ per week and with the paper edition it's ~13$
Quick reference doesn't matter in this case, they don't compare...
The average income in Norway is $6909 (USD), monthly and the average income in the United States (which is kinda a useless stat since cost of living is significantly different in different places) is $2678 (USD) monthly.
Maybe the creation of the content is the expensive part. You still need someone creating it and laying it out on the page with proper graphics. This is just a guess though. I would be curious what their expenses are like digital vs paper.
The answer isn't environmentally friendly, but it has solid business logic behind it.
From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital.
Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.
Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.
>Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.
Presumably the price of print ads is in some way related to typical response rate? Obviously there is less direct feedback than online, but advertisers aren't flying completely blind and just assuming people see their ads, right?
Oh, no. Print advertisers are almost completely unable to gather meaningful statistics. Prices are determined by circulation x a fuzzy notion of impact.
On the other hand: with the digital edition, they are able to track _each_ and _every_ thing you do on their site, and sell that data to advertisers. Try doing that with the paper version.
Well from what I've seen, the online version has no ads, while I'm sure the print version does; that'd compensate for the difference in price. They could reduce the online price if they plastered it with ads, but then, people would complain even more because they're paying for a site with ads (???) (and they don't complain about a newspaper with ads because they know it reduces the price).
tl;dr: you pay for content without ads, instead of a disposable paper version with ads.
They are doing value-based pricing, not cost-based pricing. They feel that the content is worth 5 bucks, and so do their hundreds of thousands of online subscribers. If you don't, no love lost. There are other places you can get your news.
All of that content, written, designed and published by some of the best news producers in the world.
It's instantly accessible, from anywhere you are. Updated all the time.
I simply cannot understand how you could argue all of that is worth no more than $1. Even $5 a week for an Internet/mobile subscription is reasonable considering the volume of edited and proofed material you get.
It's unfortunate that the mashables and reddits of the world have so soundly devalued the expectation of quality in news reporting.
Why do they split out the pricing for smartphone and tablet? I think the digital should be one flat fee, so I can switch between my devices (#firstworldproblem) .
Split price for "smartphone and tablet" is only for people who use their stupid app. Reading via an RSS reader or even web browser is far more convenient anyway.
The crazy thing is: I just tried to change my Economist subscription from print to online only since I no longer read the paper version. They wrote back and suggested I _not_ do so since the price/week is HIGHER for online-only than for print (which includes free online access).
I think what's happening is that they have only one online price while there are many ways to get discounted print subscriptions.
Most of it is good, but the thing that kills it is the inline comments.
When I want to get down and read an article, I want to get down and read the damn thing, not be faced with comments that most often reiterate whatever's in the article anyway.
Keep the comments where they should be – AFTER the article.
I wouldn't knock it until you see it. I'll be curious -- and NYT articles generally have curated "Times' Picks" comments that often genuinely add to the articles. Remember, most articles don't even have comments -- only the ones which the NYT deems comment-worthy, and they do put forth editorial efforts at quality control.
People who comment on the NYTimes are literate and can use full sentences. But beyond that it's about as useful as any other general-purpose comment board: a whole lot of self-selecting, self-important, in-group tribal bullshit.
Not a great start. Clicked subsribe and was brought to a page which said: "New Features. New Navigation. New Experience. Try the redesigned nytimes.com, just $5 for 12 weeks". So I signed up to give it a try and I've still got the old design.
Edit: Just noticed an ad on the main page saying the design is actually coming on Jan 8th.
45 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadIn any case, nothing looks odd with kerning on Mac/Safari or Firefox.
When it comes to news websites, my current favorite is the design for The Daily Beast.
Edit: Well, waddya know, it's downloadable. And in Ogg format ("Ogg data, Skeleton v4.0" per file(1)). So, no, doesn't work in my browser for whatever reason, but I can download and play it locally, which works better for me anyway.
Of the changes, the depagination is probably one of the more useful to me. I've actually written my own CSS to drastically reformat how NY Times pages render (a few screenshots here, among others: http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tm4ox/user_site_res...)
The side-to-side viewing stuff I've found really annoying on other sites, especially if it's tied in to arrow-key navigation or other stuff. I tend to find myself sliding off the page I want to be on.
See full prices here: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...
I feel like there should be some technical way to handle letting a user pay a flat amount, and distribute the proceeds to the sites you actually visit, in a sort of fair way.
The main problem I see is that there's a fairly strong argument to paying based on your ability, so that wealth customers ought to pay more.
Pricing information goods is hard.
The main problem is that it would create an economy where the the media outlets that produce the media desired by the paying authority (people are people and the fund will not be unlimited dollars) are prioritized over others, so that the only news will eventually be that which will be known to get you paid.
I.e., the controlling body -- I'm guessing a government entity, here -- will be the sole voice of the fourth pillar, and the whole notion of press freedom is buried and forgotten.
And that's precisely what you've got now, except that the paying authority is advertisers, with access mediated by whatever roadblocks Google's thrown at SEO this week. In earlier schemes, you got the content preferred by patrons (royalty and/or the Church), or what could support small roving troups of actors, players, musicians, bards, raconteurs, etc. Back in the 1980s I was watching an early "festival of computer animation" and noticed that shorts from cigarette advertisments (largely from Europe) featured heavily. It was, effectively, the Church for patronage of CGI development (nascent and expensive at the time).
The syndication need not be through a single agency, and there are existing examples in the music industry (not that that's perfect either): you've got The Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. For airtime play there is both logs (of airplay) and sampling methods to determine who gets paid for what. The licensing even covers live performance venues such as bars and nightclubs. There it's the club owner, not the band, who has the license for performances (it's much easier to conduct audits and enforcement against a street address than with a band whose location isn't fixed, has few assets, and can scatter to the winds).
The other question is how to link receipt and payment. In many locations, Internet access is sufficiently concentrated (often monopolized) that tying major providers into the scheme might work. Access bundles could be tied to your Internet subscription, possibly with tiers of service or credits available for content. This removes the problem of subscribing individually to different source publishers, though it could drive up the cost of Internet access.
Another approach would require more government involvement, essentially an income- or wealth-indexed content tax (addressing the "ability to pay" scenario). Collections are based on payment ability, _distribution_ is based on actual access and utilization.
There are a lot of thorny details, and the question of whether or not there's a process path from the present system to something resembling what I'm suggesting is very much unsettled.
Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart, the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways.
Five dollars might buy you a meal at lunch at a fast food place, once, per week.
Five dollars might buy you a specialty coffee drink, once, per week.
Five dollars might cover your commute, bus fare, maybe once a week.
Five dollars a day won't even cover what most people put into car notes, its barely less than what many pay to play some MMOs.
So in the grand scheme of things its not a price point, people just like to gripe about having to actually pay for what they do not place value on, or sufficient value. Face it, far too many geeks do not see the complexity of delivering the news. Oh sure they see the web side but even then they vastly under estimate the costs to create the process let alone maintain it.
As with all other pay services, find those which are relevant to your needs, but damn, quit trying to tell these places how much it costs to run their business
The average income in Norway is $6909 (USD), monthly and the average income in the United States (which is kinda a useless stat since cost of living is significantly different in different places) is $2678 (USD) monthly.
I used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway
for quick stats.
From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital.
Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.
Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.
in order to promote sales of product X, make it only slightly more expensive than the one it is marginally superior to.
Presumably the price of print ads is in some way related to typical response rate? Obviously there is less direct feedback than online, but advertisers aren't flying completely blind and just assuming people see their ads, right?
tl;dr: you pay for content without ads, instead of a disposable paper version with ads.
But they don't.
http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...
All of that content, written, designed and published by some of the best news producers in the world.
It's instantly accessible, from anywhere you are. Updated all the time.
I simply cannot understand how you could argue all of that is worth no more than $1. Even $5 a week for an Internet/mobile subscription is reasonable considering the volume of edited and proofed material you get.
It's unfortunate that the mashables and reddits of the world have so soundly devalued the expectation of quality in news reporting.
I think what's happening is that they have only one online price while there are many ways to get discounted print subscriptions.
When I want to get down and read an article, I want to get down and read the damn thing, not be faced with comments that most often reiterate whatever's in the article anyway.
Keep the comments where they should be – AFTER the article.
The comments are hidden by default it looks like, they won't be in your face unless you want them to be.
Edit: Just noticed an ad on the main page saying the design is actually coming on Jan 8th.