NYTimes.com has rolled out an offering that’s well worth studying, one that delivers news as it happens and not via a formal, “Here’s the lede” presentation. Times Wire publishes news to the Web as soon as the story is ready. While the Times has been publishing “instantly” online for some time, this is the first time they have put the stories up in a Continuous News, chronological format. The lede isn’t what the editors decide is the biggest story in the world. There is no lede, there is only the story that published most recently.

Whether you call this a River of News, as Dave Winer and Doc Searls have, or Continuous News, as Terry Heaton first began preaching, it means the same thing: publishers are finally recognizing we want the option to get news as it happens and to be our own editors.

The concept is not new. Anyone who has ever written for a blog has published a river of news. Winer rolled out his own proposed version of the idea in 2006. A year later, he wrote:

“Why doesn’t everyone else just go ahead and do it too. Think about it. When you want news, you want the new stuff, you don’t want to wade through sections looking for the new stuff. You want the computer to find it for you. Too many electronic news sites are patterned after newspapers, that published once a day. In the real world of today, news is published all the time.”

Also in 2007, Doc Searls endorsed the idea:

“To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

“It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.

“A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver — if not many of them. Most papers will copy other papers, of course. But one paper will start the trend, take the lead, and break the ice that’s damned up their purpose in static sites and tombed archives.

“One of them will see that there’s a Live Web as well as a static one. And that the Live Frontier is where the action is, and will be.

“I’m betting they’ll follow the New York Times, just like they always do.”

Doc was slightly off in the time frame (close enough) but he nailed it on the Times. And you can bet he’s right about how this will tip other papers (and, hopefully, TV stations) to do the same.

Really, the Times Wire is no different from the AP News Wire we’re all used to seeing in newsrooms. The latest story is the top story. That’s it. This is a really, really simple idea. For crying out loud — it’s a blog or damn close to one. So why has it taken so long to have this as an “official offering?” Because it’s ceding editorial control to our audience, and that absolutely kills higher-ups who believe they know what we need to know and in what order.

You can customize your Times Wire to suit your interests (good) but you don’t then get an RSS of that customization (bad). You still need to go to the site to get your customized information.

Given that, there is a lot to commend the site. It’s cleaner than any TV site you’ll ever see. It has a good photo interface and all the latest social sharing tools. It’s a work in progress, and it’s good to see the Times “embrace beta.” What’s also nice to see is that the developers are blogging about the process, which is appropriate given the “bloggy” nature of the site. Writes developer Michael Donohoe:

“Times Wire provides something NYTimes.com just didn’t have before: a clear, at-a-glance view of the latest content, in reverse chronological order without any other weighting or sorting. Depending on the state of the world, otherwise interesting and relevant stories aren’t always able to bubble up to the home page, or may hover there for only a moment.

“Times Wire is a stream of articles and blog posts going back over the last 24 hours, and going ahead in regular Ajax-based requests every minute…. If an article or post is updated later in the day, it’s bumped back up in the feed. It’s really that simple, and simple is exactly what it’s meant to be.”

Donohoe gives credit to those who conceptualized this before he did, tipping his cap to Winer and others. The Times is trying, and it has been great to see how the site has turned things around. It regularly releases new APIs so developers can take its information and run with it. In February, it held Times Open which invited developers to look at the Times as a platform, not a site, and to build upon it. You can build your own NYTimes.com widget, which will post whichever sections interest you.

The Times is doing a laudable job here, and we have to pay attention. Yes, it has plenty of financial issues, and some of these ideas are late to market. But the ideas are here now. As Searls wrote: others will follow.

All it has really done is put “new” back into “news.” Yet, with this simple acknowledgement of how news rivers work, the Times is also telling us it’s listening — and going with the flow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.