My Times Opens Up and Why Not

Posted by: Heather Green on August 23

The NYTimes opened up its personalized home page/RSS reader My Times today after being closed for forever. Ok. So it’s a standard personalized home page/RSS reader but it’s still clean and easy enough to use that I think that plenty of people (certainly not the cutting edge techies, but others) will sign up to use it.

And it is interesting to be able to look through the personalized pages of writers who are otherwise just names on a page for me, like the legal reporter Linda Greenhouse. Is this going to get the kids to sign up? Probably not. It will probably be a mid 30s and up crowd that will use this. That doesn’t solve the NYTime’s long term problem, but like a lot of the things they have been doing, it’s a good step. The issue of course is its hard to imagine that the Times will not be able to have as many staff reporters as they do now, because of the economics of what online advertising pays versus what it costs to hire a print reporter. However, step by step.

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