New York Times Redesign

http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/

by stevewilhelm • 13 years ago

85 45 13 years ago

minimaxir• 13 years ago

Text renders oddly on Windows/Chrome (lots of kerning issues)

dded• 13 years ago

Did you actually find the redesigned site? When I go to nytimes.com, it doesn't look any different than it has for quite a while. The nytimes.com/redesign link itself vaguely reminds me of the Mavericks announcement page that Apple had up before they actually released it.

In any case, nothing looks odd with kerning on Mac/Safari or Firefox.

stevewilhelm• 13 years ago

Front page indicates the redesign is coming Jan 8th.

alphakappa• 13 years ago

It's great to see newspapers trying to improve the reading experience itself (single page stories that aren't broken up into a dozen pages for pageviews, removing distractions etc), since many of the other news websites smother the user in advertisements, popovers and social media buttons to the point where it feels like you have to battle the site just to read the story itself. It remains to be seen how this redesign will feel in practice, but it seems to have all the right intentions.

When it comes to news websites, my current favorite is the design for The Daily Beast.

tambourine_man• 13 years ago

Crashes iOS 7 Safari and Chrome on an iPhone 4S

baddox• 13 years ago

Isn't quite crash on iOS 7 Safari on iPad Air, but it felt like it would at any moment.

dredmorbius3• 13 years ago

It'd be ... nice? useful? different? ... if I could get the video to play.

Edit: Well, waddya know, it's downloadable. And in Ogg format ("Ogg data, Skeleton v4.0" per file(1)). So, no, doesn't work in my browser for whatever reason, but I can download and play it locally, which works better for me anyway.

Of the changes, the depagination is probably one of the more useful to me. I've actually written my own CSS to drastically reformat how NY Times pages render (a few screenshots here, among others: http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tm4ox/user_site_res...)

The side-to-side viewing stuff I've found really annoying on other sites, especially if it's tied in to arrow-key navigation or other stuff. I tend to find myself sliding off the page I want to be on.

ajays4• 13 years ago

Sorry to go off on a tangent, but: I would love to subscribe to NYT digital editions, but why must the digital edition cost almost as much as the paper edition? Imagine the waste involved (in energy and materials)! Current home delivery rates are $8.75 for paper, and $5.00 for internet. That is simply too much. Bring it down to $1/week and we'll talk.

cageface• 13 years ago

Seriously? An extra dollar a month is a dealbreaker for you?

ajays4• 13 years ago

I dunno, maybe our math is different, but how are you getting $1/month difference?

ddebernardy• 13 years ago

Not sure what you're complaining about... It's $5 for 12 weeks...

abat• 13 years ago

That's just the intro price. It's $5/WEEK if you want nytimes.com + tablet apps. That's $260/year instead of $22/year. I would gladly subscribe if the long term rate was $5 for 12 weeks.

See full prices here: http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...

aheu• 13 years ago

Maybe the creation of the content is the expensive part. You still need someone creating it and laying it out on the page with proper graphics. This is just a guess though. I would be curious what their expenses are like digital vs paper.

jld• 13 years ago

The print version is subsidized by a lot of very expensive print space.

crazygringo2• 13 years ago

The answer isn't environmentally friendly, but it has solid business logic behind it.

From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital.

Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.

Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.

beachstartup• 13 years ago

yes, the economist does this as well. generalized rule:

in order to promote sales of product X, make it only slightly more expensive than the one it is marginally superior to.

eurleif• 13 years ago

Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.

Presumably the price of print ads is in some way related to typical response rate? Obviously there is less direct feedback than online, but advertisers aren't flying completely blind and just assuming people see their ads, right?

ajays4• 13 years ago

On the other hand: with the digital edition, they are able to track _each_ and _every_ thing you do on their site, and sell that data to advertisers. Try doing that with the paper version.

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

Well from what I've seen, the online version has no ads, while I'm sure the print version does; that'd compensate for the difference in price. They could reduce the online price if they plastered it with ads, but then, people would complain even more because they're paying for a site with ads (???) (and they don't complain about a newspaper with ads because they know it reduces the price).

tl;dr: you pay for content without ads, instead of a disposable paper version with ads.

ajays4• 13 years ago

If they guaranteed an ad-free paper, and guaranteed that they would not share my info with anyone else, then the price would be more appealing.

But they don't.

beggi• 13 years ago

You're paying for content - not paper.

majani• 13 years ago

They are doing value-based pricing, not cost-based pricing. They feel that the content is worth 5 bucks, and so do their hundreds of thousands of online subscribers. If you don't, no love lost. There are other places you can get your news.

mattlutze2• 13 years ago

You can get internet and mobile access for $3.75 a week.

http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.htm...

All of that content, written, designed and published by some of the best news producers in the world.

It's instantly accessible, from anywhere you are. Updated all the time.

I simply cannot understand how you could argue all of that is worth no more than $1. Even $5 a week for an Internet/mobile subscription is reasonable considering the volume of edited and proofed material you get.

It's unfortunate that the mashables and reddits of the world have so soundly devalued the expectation of quality in news reporting.

brianbreslin• 13 years ago

Why do they split out the pricing for smartphone and tablet? I think the digital should be one flat fee, so I can switch between my devices (#firstworldproblem) .

gumby2• 13 years ago

The crazy thing is: I just tried to change my Economist subscription from print to online only since I no longer read the paper version. They wrote back and suggested I _not_ do so since the price/week is HIGHER for online-only than for print (which includes free online access).

I think what's happening is that they have only one online price while there are many ways to get discounted print subscriptions.

arkj• 13 years ago

Though off topic, I couldn't agree more. Get the pricing right and then designs will matter more.

kunai• 13 years ago

Most of it is good, but the thing that kills it is the inline comments.

When I want to get down and read an article, I want to get down and read the damn thing, not be faced with comments that most often reiterate whatever's in the article anyway.

Keep the comments where they should be – AFTER the article.

crazygringo2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't knock it until you see it. I'll be curious -- and NYT articles generally have curated "Times' Picks" comments that often genuinely add to the articles. Remember, most articles don't even have comments -- only the ones which the NYT deems comment-worthy, and they do put forth editorial efforts at quality control.

danielweber• 13 years ago

People who comment on the NYTimes are literate and can use full sentences. But beyond that it's about as useful as any other general-purpose comment board: a whole lot of self-selecting, self-important, in-group tribal bullshit.

ParkerK• 13 years ago

not be faced with comments that most often reiterate whatever's in the article anyway

The comments are hidden by default it looks like, they won't be in your face unless you want them to be.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Not a great start. Clicked subsribe and was brought to a page which said: "New Features. New Navigation. New Experience. Try the redesigned nytimes.com, just $5 for 12 weeks". So I signed up to give it a try and I've still got the old design.

Edit: Just noticed an ad on the main page saying the design is actually coming on Jan 8th.

blueskin_• 13 years ago

I really hope this isn't another bandwagoning AJAX infinite scroll implementation. When will people learn those are a bad idea?

BadassFractal• 13 years ago

Is this your doing, dnolen? :)

sp4ke• 13 years ago

The font aliasing is awful

New York Times Redesign

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