The New York Times Should Be a Social Network

The New York Times web site has gotten much better in the past year, but that hasn’t stopped their stock price from sinking like they have rocks in their pockets. And the sale of the Wall Street Journal shows that family ownership is no bulwark against predatory forces.

To survive in recognizable form the Times needs to accelerate their transition from a newspaper company to an information company. They need to find a sustainable business model before someone buys them and either remakes the company in their own image, or bleeds it dry.

One important step they should take: become a social network.

Social networks benefit from an organizing principle. MySpace sprang from the natural aggregators of bands and music, Facebook from academic communities. News as an organizing principle is potentially larger and stickier than either of those, and has the potential to foster a more engaged, less inane community, a social network for adults. In the real world the Times already facilitates social networking: people talk about what’s in the news, and they especially talk about what’s in the Times.

There has been an enormous amount of me-too bandwagoneering around social networks, but in the case of the Times this move makes strategic sense, and can be accomplished gracefully and incrementally. First, allow users to create public profiles, tied to their comments and other site activities. Allow comments on news stories as well as blog posts. Let readers vote up good comments, à la Amazon (and USA Today). Let readers create and join interest groups, and talk to each other.

In practice the Times would be a confederacy of networks. The people talking about books on Paper Cuts and about parenting on Judith Warner’s blog would not be the same polemicists attacking each other on the op-ed pages. This is a good thing. With the depth of content on the Times, there’s something for everyone.

Two things they should not change: the requirement that commenters register, and editorial oversight of comments. The air of gravitas that hangs over the Times is a feature, not a bug, and high standards are and should remain a positive differentiator.

How does journalism fit into this? As it always has: professional journalism should remain the heart of the Times endeavor. But creating an ecology of engaged readers around the professional content could significantly extend the Times reach, raise traffic levels, and create the possibility for significant new revenue streams. A social networking strategy works hand in hand with the Times historic mission of democratizing information, and it would dovetail nicely with recent experiments like My Times.

Other changes that should accompany this shift:

  • Nix mandatory registration. The slight benefit it offers (to advertisers; it doesn’t benefit readers at all) is far outweighed by the downsides. Create an engaging network and people will register on their own.
  • Get people who have led successful Internet companies on the board and in senior management. See my previous post on Marc Andreessen’s piece (which is what got me thinking about all this in the first place).
  • Enter the local news arena. Partner with the likes of Outside.in, EveryBlock, or my employer, Curbed.com. The web excels at local and neighborhood information, and there are ad dollars to be had. Again this would work nicely with My Times.
  • Seriously improve search. Partner with Google.

Right now NYTimes.com traffic is dwarfed by MySpace and Facebook. The Times has national and international reach, fantastic content, and an incredible brand. It can and should be one of the most popular sites on the web, rather than the 201st, which is where Alexa ranks it today.

There is a way out of the morass of the past year, and social networking, with the benefits it would bring to both readers and the company, is one step towards it.

Judge Selya, we salute you

If Wordie is ever sued (for libel?), I hope it’s in Judge Bruce Selya’s court. When he throws the book at you, it’s a dictionary.

Frederick Brodie had a lovely bit in last week’s National Law Journal (found via Dan Slater’s post in the WSJ Law Blog) about the linguistic proclivities of the good judge, which seem so straight-up Wordie that I had to turn them into a list. Selya loves ten-cent words (Law Blog, adjusting for inflation, calls them five-dollar words), and has managed to work doozies like philotheoparoptesism, repastinate, sockdolager, and thaumaturgical, among others, into his opinions.

Not exactly plain English, and I can’t help but wonder if a more straightforward style would also be more democratic. But c’mon, sockdolager? Makes me smile.

Marc Andreessen’s New York Times Deathwatch

I love The New York Times, but like the rest of the newspaper industry it’s being decimated by the Internet. Marc Andreessen has a great post* outlining just how badly things are going for them.

He’s at his scariest and funniest when he lists the members of the Time‘s board, on which, he points out, not a single Internet luminary sits.

The Times has a great web site, but they need to transition from being a newspaper company with a web site, to being an Internet-focused new media company, one that treats their newspaper business like the legacy app it is. To make that transition they need people who’ve led successful Internet companies in senior management and on the board.

Not being an Internet luminary I don’t have any brilliant ideas, but one thing they could do is significantly beef up their online classifieds for jobs and real estate, two specialized areas unlikely to be completely devoured by Craigslist.

* On his consistently fantastic blog. Who knew Andreeseen was such a great writer?

Punctuational Outburst

A friend in academe sent me a paper on the evolution of language, from this month’s Science. I’m reposting it here, so you can read it for free. Academic journals are a racket.

Even free, I’m not sure you want to bother. “Languages Evolve in Punctuational Bursts” is boring and largely self-evident*. But mostly just boring: If real language was as dry and devoid of life as most academics make it, I’d give it up. I’d stop reading, stop talking, and just grunt.

The authors lead with an implied claim that American English emerged abruptly as a language when Noah Webster introduced his first dictionary. You could say that publishing a dictionary is a sign that a language has emerged–that dictionaries are symptoms of language. But they insinuate that Webster published his dictionary and, ipso facto, the American Language was created. I can’t imagine the authors actually believe this, but it’s how their forced analogy comes out.

They then present the thesis that, basically, language evolves more rapidly during times of social upheaval. Sure, but how did they discover this? It was “inferred from vocabulary data,” and in a footnote they say their “materials and methods are available on Science Online.” Their methods would have been more interesting to me than their conclusions, and I wish they’d included at least a precis of them in the paper*.

I have no idea of the actual merit of “Punctuational Bursts.” I am, clearly, totally ignorant when it comes to, among other things, linguistics, and in general the academic side of language and words. But wadding through academic writing like this makes me want to cry tears of vomit. Can anyone recommend an intro to or overview of linguistics that’s actually pleasant to read?

* UPDATE: Maybe I was a little gassy or something when I wrote this. I just reread the paper, and yes, it’s rather dry, but I think that’s almost a requirement to get published in a fancy journal like Science. And I wasn’t previously aware of some of the limits imposed by them. See the comments for a response from one of the authors, and yet another lame, arm-flapping mea culpa from yours truly. Note to self: work on impulse control.

Who Gives a F*** About An Oxford Comma?

That’s the question posed by New York band Vampire Weekend in a song of the same name, and posed in turn to a bunch of wordie types by Michael Hogan of Vanity Fair.

The panel included Grant Barrett of Double-Tongued (answer: “a little bit”), V.F.’s own copy editor, Peter Devine (“a modest-size fuck”), and David Rose, a V.F. writer and actual Oxford grad. Perhaps not coincidentally, Rose was vociferous, ardent even, in the comma’s defense, professing to also give “a damn and a bean.”

Vampire Weekend’s lead singer, Ezra Koenig, says “the song is more about not giving a fuck than about Oxford commas.” But Ezra, it’s just so rare that anyone outside of our tiny world even knows what an Oxford comma is. Yours is almost certainly the first song ever to mention it. Even if you are using it as a metaphor for small-minded failure to see the forest, please, let us have this little moment.

Vampire Weekend is having an extended moment, and their new record is great, laced with Afro-pop and ska beats, twinkling guitar and piano parts, and lyrics that are literate without being all Professor Von Schmartzenpanz about it. The band themselves claim to be “specialists in the following styles: ‘Cape Code Kwassa Kwassa’, ‘Upper West Side Soweto’, ‘Campus’, and ‘Oxford Comma Riddim.'”

Fred Wilson, blogging about their record release show last night at the Bowery Ballroom (funny that they’re just getting around to releasing a CD), has posted an MP3 of “Who Gives a Fuck About An Oxford Comma.” I don’t want to hotlink him, but it’s worth heading over for a listen.

Loose Climate Change

Bill Safire, my nemesis, writes about change in his most recent On Language column. He leads with an overview of politician’s perpetual calls for it, from Dewey in ’48 through Obama (“Change We Can Believe In”) and Romney (“Change Begins With Us”) seeming to almost quote each other.

He then heads for shakier ground with the term “global warming” and how it is being slowly supplanted by the phrase “climate change.” He speculates it may be a desire to be “less judgmental,” then decides it’s part of the inexorable march (or ensorcelling, as he puts it) of “change.”

In fact there is a scientific basis to the shift. According to Dr. Kristina A. Dahl, a scientist at Rutgers’ Climate and Environmental Change Initiative (and my wife), on average global temperatures are indeed warming, and fast. But “on average” is the key, since conditions in a given place can change in a number of ways: changes in temperature (almost always upward), but also in precipitation, storm patterns, or conceivably, in some areas, cooling (though the emerging consensus, she says, is that there is so much CO2 in the atmosphere that Europe and the Northeastern U.S. won’t cool much, if at all, even if thermohaline circulation shuts down. There will be no Day After Tomorrow). Safire finds citations for both “global warming” and “climate change” at least as far back as 1957. The recognition of other types of related climate change in addition to warming led to the related coinage global weirding in 2002.

So the use of “climate change” is preferred by scientists to “global warming” because it is more accurate. This is born out anecdotally by job searches for each phrase. A search for “global warming” generally returns activist and advocacy-type jobs, which often make scientists shudder. “Climate change” tends to return jobs of a more technical or scientific bent, fields where technical accuracy is more valued.

Donald Rumsfeld: "Pods are there"

UPDATE, 2/21/08: I was sent the audio of this speech, and Rumsfeld does not say “pods,” he clearly says “blogs.” My apology for the error. The point about lumping email and talk radio still stands.

After lying low for a while America’s premier linguist is back. Here he is, as quoted by Sharon Weinberger of Wired’s defense blog, Danger Room, speaking at a conference on network centric warfare:

“There are multiple channels for information . . . The Internet is there, pods are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there.”

Yes, the pods! Seed pods, perhaps. Connected by a series of tubes, no doubt. Lumping talk radio together with email, all I can think of that unites these things is that they transmit words, and require electricity. By that measure we might as well throw in intercoms and bullhorns. All of this makes more sense when you remember it’s coming from a 75 year old man who apparently doesn’t have an email address.

The quote is part of a talk in which Rumsfeld proposes a successor to the U.S. Information Agency (now part of the State Department) and the ill-fated (and ominously named) Office of Strategic Influence. The full Wired post is worth reading.

This one is making the rounds; perhaps my favorite commentary so far is by Spencer Ackerman of the recently-launched Washington Independent.