New York Times Reader

Posted on August 11, 2008 at 5:54 am

We all know how the print media industry has been struggling over the last few years, so it’s always interesting to see attempts by some publications to regain lost readers and revenue.

(Incidentally Newspaper Death Watch is a great blog to read if this subject interested you – it’s not as morbid as it sounds)

The New York Times has been creating a web presence ever since 1996 and has remained one of the world’s most popular online news destinations, however the biggest problem has been creating additional revenue from that audience.

The New York Times’ strength has always been the high standard of reporting. I live in Perth, Australia but the NYT is still my favourite news source thanks to the consistent quality. As many newspapers try to maintain newspaper distributions they resort to increasingly tabloid style tactics to grab reader’s attentions.

Sure, they still come up with the occasional questionable report, but who doesn’t?

I used to read from the website, but it was hard to remember to check back often enough, and seeing as the RSS feeds display headlines only I decided it was time to give the New York Times Reader a trial run.

Previously to this The Times had played around with some subscription models for access to parts of the website, columns and crosswords.

The New York Times Reader was a collaborative effort between Microsoft and the NYT and utilises many of Microsoft’s new technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation and .NET Framework 3.5.

This technology suits itself perfectly to creating the kind of User Interface a newspaper style publication needs. Some of the advantages with using this means the following features are available:

Content resizes to the window size, advertisements also re-adjust and resize and font can be several different sizes. Not until you use the application itself does it become apparent quite how useful this is.
Content can synchronise and refresh on demand or at regular intervals.
Content is downloaded to the computer and can be browsed offline.
Windows Search indexes all content which can then be found through the start menu. If you recall the an article from a week ago, simply type in some keywords and find it. The screenshot below demonstrates this:

The design also makes for easy to read articles. In fact before I used this, I never thought that the experience of scanning through a newspaper could be truly conveyed on a computer monitor. It seems it can.

From the Microsoft press release:

The Times Reader enhances the onscreen reading experience through Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft’s advanced display technology in Windows Vista. As readers change font or window size, the text dynamically re-flows to optimize both readability and on-screen layout. Dynamic text flow assures that readers will get the best experience across a wide selection of desktop and mobile devices. Once content has been synched, readers can continue reading whether they are online or offline.

Anyway, this is all pretty old news! The point of this article was my experience with using the application.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward, you may need to update .NET but that’s all automatic. The slow part of the installation involves downloading content for the first time.

This downloads a complete archive for the day, and takes forever (depending on your connection of course). Luckily after this first update synchronisation is automatic and incremental, updating just a few articles each time and is much quicker.

The installation is also much faster then reports from a couple years ago, even though the reader itself has changed little design-wise since it was first launched. Speed, performance, synchronisation and cross-platform support have been the main focus’ in the updates.

To be honest, I’m mainly interested in just a few sections of the paper, namely the ‘Technology’, ‘Science’, ‘World’ and a few others. ‘Fashion’ is just a waste of bandwidth for me and I often wish for a setting to filter what content we’d like to read, however apart from that its great.

I’ve been trialing it for a few weeks now, when the 30 day trial period runs out I shall seriously consider wether or not I’m going to purchase the monthly subscription fee. It’s a compelling service and great value, I think it will be worth it.

Joshua was born naked, screaming and totally helpless during the late 20th century. Some people get over these things and now he freelances while attempting to develop his own blog; extendably.com – check it out!

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