Despite being affected by the same print downturn that affects all other newspapers, the NYT is still the third-largest print newspaper in the United States. The Times is available online free for “light” users, those who read 20 or fewer articles per month. There are smartphone apps available for iPhone and Android that channel Times content.

This latest price increase is yet another move by the old-school media titan making its way in the digital age. Back in 2002, The Times bought a fifteen percent stake in the Boston Red Sox, not because they had an interest in Red Sox baseball, but to get a piece of the New England Sports Network television channel that came with the team.

Indeed, many newspapers are changing their old business model for one that can remain profitable as more and more people get news via smartphone, tablet and laptop. Managers look for profit centers outside of the normal advertising sales and cover price that sustained papers throughout the 20th century.

For example, local papers may produce an entire insert for a single advertiser with a significant event, such as a job fair or grand opening. They may even assign writers to adorn the ad space with pseudo-articles that highlight topics that dovetail with the advertiser. This is one of many new approaches that smaller papers feel forced to take to keep their presses running. Others have turned to online video of news events, becoming de facto online television producers, with mixed results.

Finding ways to make these endeavors pay, via pay subscriptions, etc. has been the real challenge. So much news is available for free online that readers are loathe to pull out the plastic. Price increases like this one are sure to keep coming until the fateful day that paper is no longer viable, however far off that may yet be.

• MTV offers an embeddable video player that allows users to re-post any MTV owned content
• Creation of wide variety of highly targeted loosely connected web sites that focuses on programming like "Jackass", "VH1 Classics" and "Sucker Free". In the last year, MTV added  32 new sites. If sites find an audience they will be nurtured and those that don’t will be re-tooled or shut down.MTV will rely primarily on content and viral promotion to grow each site
• After a failed foray into digital music sales with URGE, MTV has high hopes for its new
• RealNetworks’ Rhapsody relationship
• MTV will continue to invest aggressively in gaming making a $500 million investment in a sector where they sold 1.3 million units of Rock Band last year and helped MTV sell hundreds of thousands of music downloads.

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Say Goodbye To Ye Olde Editorial Process

What’s Formatting?

In print journalism, things are done a certain way, have been for decades. Editors and writers haggle over what’s important, choose an order and a placement for the stories. The Associated Press publishes a book’s worth of guidelines, dictating everything frm abbreviations to punctuation to how numbers are to be presented.

Never begin a sentence with a numeral, spell it out; spell out numbers less than 10.

The structure of an article is also crucial, born from the logistics of wire services and the method by which people read the newspaper.

The most important information goes first; details are filled in later.

This is called the inverted news pyramid. It works on paper because people tend to skim the headlines and the leads (ledes). The rules of writing for print are so numerous that no self-respecting editor, unless he’s memorized the whole of the tradition, is caught without a copy of the AP Stylebook on his desk.

I have a copy – in storage. I work on the Internet, where the rules are changing, and they’re changing because the needs and habits of the audience are changing.

 
Nobody Ever Asks About The Language — Stephen King

Some rules will be the same, though usability expert Jakob Nielsen acknowledges what all writers have to learn: passive voice sucks. It’s too slow and confusing. Writers should use active voice as often as possible so the reader can run through without tripping.

Following in the crotchety footsteps of William Strunk, Nielsen says:

[I]t’s usually better to write a positive statement ("do X") than a negative statement ("avoid Y"), and it’s almost always horrible to use double negatives ("avoid not doing X").

Nielsen also says beginning a sentence with a numeral is not only acceptable, but preferable to online readers scanning the page. But then he refers to something much more interesting: the information scent.

Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website.

The scent is caught within the first 2 to 3 words (the first two to three words), as readers scan information in an F-shaped pattern. It is because of the information scent that Nielsen reverses himself:

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Traditional editors reading this may ask, "For what kind of effectiveness?" This may be a matter judgment, though, and not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but passive voice can help readers find the information scent in the search results, where titles and blurbs or ledes appear.

It depends on the situation, of course. Maybe your initial headline reads "Reindeer mauls Santa Claus," but if you want the information scent to begin with Santa – if optimizing for "Santa" in the SERPs – you might want to rearrange to "Santa Claus mauled by reindeer."

The most important words – "Santa," "Claus," and "mauled" come to the foreground.        

 
Move Over Editors, The Readers Want Your Jobs

It’s not only the language that’s changing, but also the editorial process. Dave Winer, the one who brought us RSS and, arguably, blogging, has been tinkering with the New York Times RSS feed to develop what he calls the New York Times "river."

Winer hasn’t settled yet on the best way to deliver, either by keyword, outline, or chronology, but what he’s developing is definitely a way around the traditional editor’s choice of what’s important. The "river" displays article headlines and blurbs from the Times in text only, organized by the reader’s preference.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg notes how Winer’s river takes the editorial process and ordering right out of the equation:

The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

At the University of Kentucky’s College of Communications and Information Studies, we often said, "The media doesn’t tell you what to think, just what to think about." This seems to be what Winer is bent on fixing.

There’s a lot more to this, but this is a Web article and most stopped reading 500 words ago. Too bad for them. They’ll miss a link to my Essentials of Font Philosophy article, a bit of a dirge for the serif fonts. (Hint: Only use sans-serif online; it reads faster.)