New York Times Launches "Times Extra" In Beta

NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2008 - NYTimes.com announced today the beta launch of
Times Extra, an alternative view of the home page featuring news headlines
with links from third-party sources. Times Extra aggregates headlines from
other news organizations and blogs across the Web, and matches the most
relevant of those sources with lead articles on the NYTimes.com home page.

In the Times Extra view, relevant headlines from around the Web appear
beneath many of the articles in the upper half of the homepage. Source
names are highlighted in green. Users can scroll within these boxes to
view up to eight Extra headlines.

"The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over,"
said Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations, The New
York Times Company. "Times Extra is an important part of our strategy to
become a destination for compelling journalism, not only by The New York
Times, but by other content providers as well. We want to give our readers
a comprehensive view of the news and opinion our editors think is
important."

"We are addressing a common desire for comprehensiveness, enabling people
to find all the news and information they could want from all sorts of
sources," said Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising
officer, The New York Times Media Group. "Initiatives such as Times Extra
and our other new products allow us to do an even better job of responding
to our audiences' demands for interactivity, community, multimedia and news
and information on an increasingly wide range of topics. This makes Times
Extra an appealing buy for advertisers."

To view Times Extra, users click on the new "Times Extra" button at the top
of the home page, above the search bar. After 24 hours, readers will need
to click the button to reactivate Times Extra for another 24 hours. The
"Switch Back" button at the top of the Times Extra view returns users to
the standard home page.

The automated ranking of news stories is powered by Blogrunner, a news
aggregator owned by The Times Company that continually crawls the Web and
links to stories from more than10,000 sources; the ranking on Blogrunner is
determined by its popularity on the Web.

For more information, view the Times Extra FAQ.

According to Nielsen Online, NYTimes.com had 20.3 million unique visitors
in the United States in October 2008, and was the No. 1 newspaper Web site
in United States, a position it has long held.

The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), a leading media company with 2007
revenues of $3.2 billion, includes The New York Times, the International
Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other daily newspapers, WQXR-FM and
more than 50 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com.
The Company's core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting
and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.

Comments

[SoD1]

Hmm.. The MMS sure is "efficient" in being adaptive. But not neccessary when it comes to reporting.
It still can and will only continue to get better with our Informal News Media..

[piquet]

The St. Pete Times here in Florida has a paper called the TBT. It's a small free daily paper that is geared towards people that just want fresh interesting news written smartly and to the point. That little rag is exploding. They can't print enough copies.
It would serve the NY Times well to do something like that on a national level. Maybe not free, but definitely not a dollar. I could see this thing littering every coffeehouse in America for people with short attention spans that just want the dirt. With a style of writing that is not unlike the whit of a good blogger.

[Opt1musPr1me]

Oh brother.