New York Times Online: An Inside View
Check out the presentation “The Surprising Path to a Faster NYTimes.com.”
I was surprised at some of the information in the slide deck. First, I thought the New York Times was first online in the 1970s via LexisNexis.
I thought that was an exclusive deal and reasonably profitable for both LexisNexis and the New York Times. When the newspaper broke off that exclusive to do its own thing, the revenue hit on the New York Times was immediate. In addition, the decision had significant cost implications for the newspaper.
Phi Beta Iota: The reference briefing by Eitan Konigsburg is an eye-opener and absolutely worth a full reading. The long analysis by Brother Stephen is one of the most incisive detailed slams he has ever written. In a word, the NYT was stupid. They self-destructed. Google is suffering similar issues and these are touched on briefly. From where we sit, no one “gets” the open source everything ecology within which affordable, interoperable, and scalable is possible — least of all Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and little Yahoo — and no one “gets” the huge open space for marketing the conversion of information into intelligence (decision-support) relevant to a specific person at a specific time and place. As the briefing notes, the hand=held devices and their memory short-falls are one obstacle. There are others. In combination, the briefing and the commentary by Brother Stephen are one of the most helpful “state of the fart” briefings we have seen.
See Also:
Stephen E. Arnold @ Phi Beta Iota