Each month, Nielsen Online releases data on the most-visited newspaper websites and each month, The New York Times tops the list, the only U.S. newspaper to challenge the big portals like MSNBC, Yahoo! and CNN. The Times' competitiveness in this area is also helping the company grow its digital income, which accounted for 12 percent of its total revenues in 2008.
In June, 2009, The Times had more than 17.4 million unique users, according to Nielsen. Inside The Times, this figure is viewed as low. Other metrics would indicate The Times attracts 20 million unique users each month, according to Deputy Managing Editor Jon Landman.
Landman is The Times executive responsible for digital journalism. He credits the success of NYTimes.com to the quality of the paper's journalism. The Times is perhaps the best newspaper in the United States and one of the best in the world. It routinely breaks major stories, and it is one of the few U.S. newspapers that still maintains bureaus overseas.
Under Landman's leadership, The Times has brought a different kind of journalist into its newsroom. The paper has assembled a team it calls the Interactive News Technology Group, which is made up of 10 computer-savvy journalists who stand in stark contrast to the age and formality of many others in The Times' newsroom.
One member of the technology team is Brian Hamman, whose educational background is a mix of computer science and journalism. Just seven years ago, Hamman was selected as the outstanding student in the University of South Carolina's high school journalism institute. Now he is working on projects like an interactive map that tracks homicides in New York.
The Technology Group is producing some of the most innovative online journalism anywhere. Its "word trains" use a computer program to capture the reactions of Times' readers and turn them into graphics in which the frequency a word is mentioned determines its type size. Click here to see the word train from the day that Barak Obama was elected President of the United States.
For Landman and others at The Times, the main issue is not web traffic or journalism, but revenue. The Times is exploring several models for charging for at least some of its online content and an announcement is expected this fall.
Story by Randy Covington of Newsplex.
