Programmable New York Times

I found this article yesterday on my favorite pop culture website Buzzfeed.

It is interesting that the New York Times is realizing who their new demographic will be and reaching out to them (us) in a way that we can relate. I personally don't read but a few articles in the Times because most of their articles are too in-depth for me. But imagine if only the articles you would be interested in show up in the margins of your blog, or in your Google searching. Or if the opposite happened, and the Times took a cue from your Twitter message or blog post about news that is happening or something spreading virally around the internet. It could mean a dumbing down of news, or it could mean news that is more relevant to its audience and therefore more likely to be read and passed along.

Processing

Processing is an open source programming software for images, videos, interactions, etc. It can be used to create random objects and shapes as well as input information and have the program be completely interactive.

My two favorites are We Feel Fine, which scans blogs for feeling words that you can then sort by feeling, age, location, weather. By clicking on the excerpts, you will be taken directly to the original blog. The other is The Dumpster, which is similar to We Feel Fine in that it scans blogs for stories of teenage breakups.

Then there is Net Worth, which with a scan of your credit card Googles your name and places it on the map in order of number of hits.

The commonality of these projects is that they take something non-visual, such as number of Google hits or a break up and turns them into visual interactive work. I am thinking about how this can apply to my project; whether I write something specific for Processing to make and allow it to inform my project or if it just the idea of the program and its abilities.

Internet killing the newpaper?

Found this blog of simple poetry very interesting. Austin Kleon takes New York Times articles and blacks out most of the text, with the remainder reading as a poem.

Housing the YouTube Generation and Beyond

Out of Print: The death and life of the American newspaper

by Eric Alterman March 31, 2008

The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.

It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding itself an “education and media company”; its testing and prep company, Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company’s revenue.

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

Article continues at The New Yorker

Research Topic: New York Times Office Culture

I have been researching the new New York Times building by Renzo Piano to learn about their office culture. Their theories of open work spaces, collaboration, and innovation are expressed in the building itself in very advanced ways. I am trying to look past the building itself at this point to focus on the workspaces themselves.

Something that I have found very interesting and that I think really relates to my thesis and the convergence of architecture and ever-changing technologies is the elevator lobby walls.

Each of those little screens is a constantly changing image of current news reports, images, blogs, comments, data, etc. from the Times' website as it is published, as well as images and news from the Times' 156-year archive. Called Moveable Type, each screen also has audio and is a great example of the New York Times ideas on the rapidly changing media environment. Much as radio station headquarters play their stations 24 hours a day, the New York Times commitment to news and New York City is displayed on these walls.