NYTimes.com has today launched a new version of its technology section, which includes more aggregation of news from around the Web. Of most interest perhaps is that its Techmeme-like news aggregator, Blogrunner, has been fully integrated into the Tech frontpage. It has the headline “Technology Headlines From Around the Web” and is positioned in the middle of the page. Blogrunner links will also feature at the bottom of NYT articles. Finally, two new feature content providers were announced today: IDG Media Brands and paidContent.org.
NYTimes.com/Tech Editor Saul Hansell told Read/WriteWeb in an email that Blogrunner “is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we’ve built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year.” Further, Hansell said that “unlike Google News and Techmeme, we aren’t trying to prove machines can be better editors than people. We have a hybrid model, with Web Crawlers and Editors both helping find and ranks posts.”
Blogrunner.com is a news aggregator that was acquired by the Times Company in 2005. NY Times has been building on the service since then – at one stage it was called “The Annotated New York Times”. In February 2006 we wrote that Blogrunner offered an “interesting way to remix the NY Times and bring in external citations”; although we didn’t think it was one of the top news aggregators at that point.
It’s taken a long time for NY Times to integrate external news aggregation technology into their website, but kudos to them for doing it now. It provides opportunities for leading tech blogs – such as Techcrunch, PaidContent and of course Read/WriteWeb – to distribute their content to a wider audience. It also exposes NY Times readers to the more social – and arguably much faster – news cycle of leading blogs.
Blogrunner itself still seems behind Techmeme in some areas. For example Techmeme provides an easy-to-scan look at all related stories, on its frontpage. Whereas you only get the top story on Blogrunner’s frontpage – you need to click the “related” link to see all the coverage. Also, and admittedly this could be seen as a pro rather than a con by mainstream readers, the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors (thankfully R/WW seems to be among the chosen ones!).
So there is a strong editorial focus with Blogrunner, which NY Times states in its press release “enables readers to get a thoughtful overview of the day’s top print and online coverage, all on one site.” I think this is a sensible move, as a key part of the NY Times experience is its reputation for editorial quality – so Blogrunner should leverage that. As noted above, Google News and Techmeme by comparison are automated (although with both, the initial news sources were editorially selected).
All in all a great move by NY Times – tell us what you think in the comments. Will you use the NY Times Tech frontpage more because of this new feature?
