John Cook reports that the New York Times has added a sharing feature for readers to post their content to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine as well as a long overdue permalink for their stories.
The sharing feature will not be used on TimesSelect stories, the newspaper's premium content offering, nor will it be available on staff blogs or wire stories
Christine Topalian, manager of strategic planning and business development at NYTimes.com, said it was looking for ways to tap a tech-savvy audience that is accustomed to commenting on and sharing news stories. ... The Times would not rule out adding comments to stories directly on NYTimes.com. Other partners may be added, though Topalian said the company was happy to start with Digg, Newsvine and Facebook.
I think it's great to see the New York times experiment with a distributed network impact rather than building comments directly on their site, though I expect they will eventually do that too.
I agree with GigaOm that:
"Discussions or not, it is about capturing them page views, and it is not a bad move, though I question how much traffic Facebook and Newsvine can drive to the Times."
I think the Times sees this as a dipping their toe into a space they don't presently have technology to address. This is a way to experiment and innovate without taking much risk at all. Still, it seems like a gift-horse for the Newsvine folks - exposure to a very large established audience and the credibility of the paper of record.
Cook reports:
"Davidson declined to comment when asked if The New York Times had considered investing in Newsvine. He said there is no revenue-sharing agreement, adding that it is simply a technology deal."
Editor & Publisher had some additional Times quotes:
"We"re very excited about offering our readers a new tool to share their favorite New York Times content," said Vivian Schiller, NYTimes.com senior vice president and general manager, in a statement. "This new capability extends the Web-based conversation while encouraging new communities of readers to share and discuss a wide range of interests, whether by linking to an article about politics from their homepage or adding coverage of world news to their blogs."
It's not clear what this move means for smaller, independent and open source efforts like NewsCloud. Clearly, it doesn't make our job easier - but I'm not sure the long term impact will be that big. The New York Times is leaving the door open to other partners... let's just hope they don't end up looking like this:
If the New York Times decides they really want to extend discussion of their content to bloggers, they should support blogging APIs such as Flickr has done. This allows any New York Times reader to post directly to their blog from the New York Times Web site.
Additionally, they could create a generic API for third party services to hook into that allows New York Times readers to select the bookmarking services that they want to use e.g. del.icio.us, et al.
An interesting footnote in the Cook article was that it said Newsvine "has raised about $1 million in venture financing" last year, whereas Cook previously reported Newsvine was "Backed with less than $5 million from Second Avenue Partners". I always wondered what "less than $5 million" meant, now we know.
Technorati Tags: digg, facebook, new york times, newsvine, sharing
