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The New York Times’ circulation increased 40 percent, according to a recently released report by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The big bump was due to an increase in digital subscribers, which number more than 896,000, more than any other of the 25 dailies on ABC’s list.

According to the report, digital subscribers also make up more than half of the Times’ 1.6 million paying readers.

Fishbowl NY

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The New York Times recently launched an HTML5 app for the iPad. The Times is calling this part of their “NYT Everywhere” strategy. But according to The Next Web, it could also be a way for the paper to leave Apple’s Newsstand. The Financial Times recently left the Newsstand because Apple charges a 30 percent subscription fee while providing little user activity data.  The NYT said it has no plans to remove its native iOS app, but just wants to expand its reach.

The Next Web

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Adapting to the ever-increasing pace of change is one of the New York Times’ biggest challenges, according to Jim Roberts, the paper’s assistant managing editor. Once they shifted over to the web, the paper had to adapt to smartphones and iPads. Social media also took them by surprise.

Roberts uses Twitter more than any other social medium, but doesn’t use it just as a pipeline for his own paper’s stories. He said it’s important to share news from a range of sources on his feed. Roberts reads and admires his competitors’ work and when he sees something he likes, he sends it around.

Talking Points Memo

Uber

When a driver agrees to pick up an Uber passenger, they aren’t allowed to pick up other fares, which the Taxi and Limousine Commission could consider an unjustified refusal of fares. David Yassky, TLC chairman, said in a statement that NY has “led the country in terms of putting new technology to work for riders” and they were currently requesting proposals for smartphone apps.

The New York Times

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The New York Times is leading the defense of several companies that have used technology to send text messages with Web links to mobile phones. The technology was patented by inventor Richard J. Helferich, who filed an outline of how such a system would work with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in September 1997. He was granted several patents on the method, giving him the right to sue companies that use it without permission. His company, Helferich Patent Licensing, is giving companies the chance to settle by paying a one-time fee of $750,000, and so far roughly 100 companies have settled.

However, the New York Times general counsel, Kenneth Richieri, told the Associated Press he wants to prevent Helferich’s patents from becoming a burden on activities that are commonplace in the digital age.

Associated Press

About.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The guide and info site About.com, which has been around since the early days of the Internet, will likely be getting a new owner.  According to All Things D the site, which has been owned by The New York Times since 2005,  might soon get acquired by Answers.com for $270 million.

Though the deal is not officially completed, the Times (for some time now) has been looking for a suitor for the site, as it has not performed well financially for the company.  The site, however, does boast impressive audience numbers, as according to Quantcast it averages 33.6 million unique visitors a month.

All Things D

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The Sulzberger family has had control of The New York Times for over a century and seems to always be in the middle of one controversy or another, and the financial troubles of the last ten years have threatened to take the famous publication out of existence. New York Magazine‘s Seth Mnookin did a full coverage history of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his legacy at the paper. The financial troubles began with the Internet and freedom of information, which suddenly begged for free news. This left magazines and newspapers in a complicated situation with revenue structure for their businesses.

Soon, the Times was seeing a double-digit decline on ad pages and circulation, and many predicted that the paper would fail. However, most of the lost revenue was made up for by changing the newsstand price from $1 to $2, and in March the paper launched its digital pay wall, which now seems to be working better than anyone had guessed it would.

Mnookin gives a lot of the credit to Sulzberger Jr. for keeping the paper afloat in tough times. He was signed on as publisher of the Times in 1992, at age 40, and followed in his dad’s footsteps. At the beginning, he was followed by skepticism about his qualifications for the position. Now that Sulzberger has survived, it seems as though he is surrounded by the death of one famous publication after the next. Sulzberger’s first priority, to transform the Times from a local paper with a national focus to a national paper with a local focus, was a good instinct.

The Times had to deal with the Internet, but Sulzberger caught on quick, and said to Mnookin that he wanted to reach all of the, “people we think have an affinity for the Times’ news organization who currently don’t read the Times, either because they can’t get access to it or they may not read it because they don’t read newspapers and they want to access that information [some other way].”

Though this was a decent goal, it did not help the relationships between the paper’s print and online staffs, which were still existing as separate entities since the founding of Times Company Digital in 1995 by Martin Nisenholtz. From early on, the site published great content and by 1999 the website had a database of more than 10 million registered users. Through all of the difficulties, Sulzberger still poured money into the web operation, and by 2008, nytimes.com, “had become one of the most impressive news sites on the planet.”

New York Magazine

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The digital paywall that The New York Times implemented in March 2011 continues to pick up speed. According to Mashable, about 509,000 people now subscribe, which is up 13% from March 2012. Additionally, people who are not subscribed can only read 10 articles a month on the website, down from 20 at the beginning of the year. Digital subscriptions cost from $15 to $35 a month.

The growth, along with an increase in the price for home-delivery and single issue papers amounted in an 8% increase in circulation revenues for the first quarter, which offset an 8% decline in print  advertising and 4% decline in digital advertising. These declines are due to a decrease in display and cost-per-click advertising at the About Group. The New York Times Co. reported an operating loss of $143.6 million for the quarter, which was due mainly to a $194.7 million writedown for the About Group. Last year at the same time, the company reported a profit of $31.5 million.

Mashable

English: The New York Times building in New York, NY across from the Port Authority. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The New York Times Company recently elected Joichi Ito and Brian McAndrews to their Board of Directors. Both Ito and McAndrews have extensive backgrounds in the technology and multimedia fields.

According to a company press release, Ito is the director of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former CEO of Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to helping copyright owners freely share their work. Along with these positions, he is CEO of Neoteny venture capital firm and an early investor in numerous tech companies.

McAndrews is a venture partner with Madrona Venture Group and previously worked as senior VP of advertising and publishing solutions at Microsoft Corporation. He also worked as VP and general manager for ABC Sports and serves on numerous tech based company boards.

The New York Times Company

A senior NY Times editor told Capital that, “This experiment has had a good run and the Times has learned some valuable lessons about hyperlocal journalism and collaboration. Now it wants to harvest those lessons and see where they might be applied.” The Times began their Fort Greene/Clinton Hill Local and New Jersey Local sites (Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange) when hyperlocal news was on the rise several years ago and AOL’s Patch was just beginning. The hope was that these sites would promote a combination of strong local reporting and citizen journalism at the local level, though the Times has made it clear from the beginning that The Local projects were meant to be “pilot projects.”

It didn’t take long after the original launch before the NY Times scaled back its involvement. By the beginning of January 2010, publishing duties for the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill site were completely handed over to CUNY. Six months later, the Jersey sites were shut down and replaced with NYU’s Local East Village- run by students with editorial guidance from the Times. According to Capital, The Local sites continued to benefit from the Times’ brand, but were mainly run by the schools and full-time editor professors for day-to-day management.

Now, the schools must decide what to do with the websites after they are no longer affiliated with the newspaper giant. 

Capital

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For the first time The New York Times will grant full access to a third party app via partnering with the popular news aggregation app Flipboard. The paper told All Things D that it has chosen to emulate cable TV’s “TV Everywere” strategy, allowing paying subscribers to access their content on the device or software of their choosing. Though the act of reading the New York Times on Flipboard does not differ from reading it on the New York Times digital app, this does open the possibility of new revenue through Flipboard ads.

According to AllThingsD, the partnership also gives the startup company Flipboard increased credibility, since this is the first big publisher to grant access to full premium content through the app. Conversely though, according to Advertising Age, some outlets that have already been on Flipboard have announced that they are pulling back on selling ads and will begin offering less robust version of their magazines on the app, including Conde Nast titles Wired and The New Yorker.

All Things D

NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 21: President of New York City Economic Development Corporation Seth W. Pinsky (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

“MetroFocus: The Tech Economy” is a TV special from MetroFocus that examines NY’s plan to oust Silicon Valley as the leader in the new tech economy in the U.S. Highlights of the special will include a look inside Google, an interview with head of the NYCEDC Seth Pinsky, a special report by The New York Times on the East vs. West competition, a look at Albany’s nanotechnology center, and a trip back in time to when New Jersey’s Bell Labs was the leader in tech innovation.

“MetroFocus: The Tech Economy” premiers June 26 at 10:30pm on WLIW21, June 27 at 10:30pm on NJTV, and June 28 at 8:30pm on THIRTEEN.

MetroFocus

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The New York Times has announced a collaboration with social content/news site Buzzfeed. The two institutions will work together covering the upcoming political conventions through video segments featuring Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, as well as other reporters.

Jim Roberts, the Times‘s assistant managing editor told The Atlantic ”We’re looking to fuse the energy and the social awareness that Ben and his reporters have with a lot of our traditional reporting strengths and styles.” Production will come mainly from the Times, focusing on informative reporting, while the videos will be done without the animated gifs, lolcats, and other comedic traits of Buzzfeed, while still tapping into the spirit of social web.

The Atlantic

With the help of the Times beta620 group, the average NYTimes.com user can consider themselves a beta tester, as The New York Times has released a new browser tool (available as a Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, or simple bookmarklet) allowing readers to test experimental web features the Times is not yet sure are ready for the actual website.

According to David Erwin, a software engineer with beta620, the point of their work was to see how these experiments would play on NYTimes.com. However, the downside of beta620 was it being a separate website. With Test Drive (the name of this beta testing feature) readers can experience new possible Times’ developments as they read their daily news.

The Times’ innovation staffers are aware that the kind of people who discover and install the browser extensions are not a random sample of Times readers as a whole. However, they are OK with that. As Marc Frons, the Times chief information officer told Nieman Journalism Lab, “I think the quantitative data will be less important here than the qualitative, where people’s comments and our own understanding of how we’re using these tools and experience will be more important than measuring clickthroughs or that sort of thing.”

At this time users can beta test such features as NYT Accessible, which is aimed at making the site more friendly to vision-impaired readers and TimesInstant, an article search that produces results while you type.

Nieman Journalism Lab

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After moving to the West Coast nearly eight years ago, Facebook is now searching for a space to establish an engineering office in NY. According to Crain’s New York Business, Facebook has shown a keen interest in the former New York Times Building at 229 W. 43rd St. Though Times Square is not a favorite location for tech firms, the Times building now features a basketball court where the publisher’s dining room once was and a 12th floor terrace covered in astro turf, giving it a more whimsical feel.

Currently the company leases roughly 40,000 square feet at 535 Madison Ave and could either expand there or terminate the lease early. If they choose to terminate, brokers say the asking rent at the New York Times Building is somewhere between $70 and $80 a square foot, with Facebook seeking anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 square feet.

Though there is some concern that Facebook’s poor IPO performance could make landlords think twice about leasing to tech firms, real estate brokers are watching Facebook’s decision intently to give the market a much needed boost in the absence of large moves by financial firms. However, Facebook’s broker and a spokeswoman for the Times Building declined to comment to Crains on the matter.

Crain’s New York Business

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The New York Times and Hulu have signed a licensing agreement that allows videos produced on NYTimes.com to be viewed on Hulu. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, most of the videos will be the length of short documentaries. The first Times video to be featured on Hulu is 36 minute segment on NHL player Derek Boogaard who died last year at age 28.

Ann Derry, head of the video department for the Times, told Nieman Journalism Lab that, “We’re always looking for ways to raise the visibility of what we do and get a larger audience.” Hulu and the Times have been discussing the possibility of collaboration for a while. The Boogaard short was chosen as the first video because of the timeliness to the NHL playoffs.

Though the original film was a three-part series, it was reworked into a single film and published in one part to better fit Hulu’s content style. The Times sees this license as a way to gain ore viewer traffic not heir site and to add to more awareness of the Times. Hulu is also offering the Times videos on Hulu Plus, which allows them to be viewed on mobile devices and TV sets. Derry said that viewers can expect more videos soon, and she hopes to continue to offer great video content.

Nieman Journalism Lab

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What do a physicist, a high school student, a U.S. Army captain stationed in Afghanistan, and New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof have in common?

They interviewed Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, in a Google+ Hangout.

The Times is experimenting with the 11-month old platform, inviting readers to participate in online video interviews. Five people were selected from the hundreds of readers. Kristof moderated the conversation, which also included a grad student and a lawyer.

Other news organizations are finding uses for Google+ Hangouts, too. Al Jazeera’s show, The Stream, also lets viewers ask questions during live interviews.

Journalism.co.uk

With big names like The New York Times, Newsday and The Wall Street Journal all with digital subscriptions for their readers, one NY community newspaper has had a functional paywall since 2003 — The Wave.  The paper, one of the city’s oldest since 1893, serves the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens.

For the last nine years, online subscribers to The Wave have had to pay to receive the digital version of the paper.  For $20 a year, online subscribers can have full access to the paper.  Sanford Bernstein, GM, said to City Room, “if you don’t do it, what you’re saying is your news doesn’t have value. You shouldn’t diminish your news value by giving it out for free,” of The Wave’s pay wall.

Bernstein noted that he is not looking to online revenue to save the paper and some of The Wave’s customers have both online access and print.  Stephen Larson, founder of Our Hometown Inc., who puts weeklies like The Wave online is pushing for Bernstein to up the price of the pay wall.  He tells City Room, “Every time I talk to him [Bernstein] I say you know you can get more for this.”

For archived stories, Bernstein does not charge readers.  “We don’t want to keep people from doing research.”

City Room (NYTimes.com)

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The New York Times has started advertising digitally on sites such as New York Magazine, Gizmodo and Bloomberg in their most recent push to attract more readers to their digital subscriptions.  The Times has been using video ads on sites that line up with specific topics (politics, invention, creativity and relationships).

Laura Langdon, VP of marketing for the Times said to Poynter, “we really wanted to speak to people more in-depth about the value of The New York Times and the richness of the content in it.”

The Times hired voice-over artists and a company to create original music for the ads, which according to Poynter, adds energy to the videos without losing focus on the message.  Nat Whitten, script-writer for the ads, said, “In the videos, we’re not lecturing to you, we’re opening a lens.”

Poynter

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For the past six years, The New York Times R&D Lab has been examining how news will be consumed in the future.

While the Grey Lady recently laid off 50 non-news personnel, the Lab might seem like an indulgence. But the Times’ Michael Zimbalist said to Digiday, over time, a lot of their ideas will evolve into products. A few of those, including its Surface reader and an in-progress database of content, have already paid off.

It’s also exploring “how the relationship between information and the self is evolving,” Zimbalist told Digiday. Using voice command and motion-capture technology (derived from Microsoft’s Kinect) the Lab is capturing personalized information that reveals how digital behavior can deliver news and information.

Digiday

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New York Times tech reporter Jenna Wortham makes her iPhone work overtime.

Once, in a writing class, it clamored for attention. She dug it out of her bag and found it flooded with tweets and texts that Steve Jobs died. She left for the office immediately.

Wortham told The Atlantic Wire that she usually sleeps with a laptop, a Kindle and an iPad close by but always checks her phone first thing in the morning. She scans it again during her walk to the subway—checking Twitter, Tumblr, Path and Instagram in quick succession.

On the train, she uses the Instacast app to listen to RadioLab and other podcasts. When she’s not skimming though the Times on her phone or reading New York magazine, she replies to emails.

At work, Facebook and Twitter are always open. She uses ifttt recipe to route her favorite tweets to Gmail. Wortham skims all the major tech sites, makes notes on Post-its and snaps photos of them with her iPhone for later reference. If she runs across items she doesn’t have time to read during the day, Klip.me saves them to her Kindle.

When she’s not reading tech sites, she enjoys perusing foreign teen fashion blogs. She told The Atlantic Wire, “The kinds of things they post and their sense of humor and aesthetic is so different from what I’m used to seeing that I find it fascinating.”

The Atlantic Wire

Mainland commented that "social media is a key news-gathering medium for us too, but our strategy in distributing our content via social media is to be as engaging as we can, as creative as we can, and to generate as robust of a conversation around our journalism as we can."  At the Times, he tries to produce something with journalistic value, and photography plays an important role in Mainland's day-to-day operations.  Projects on Tumblr are based on imagery, and images shared on Facebook are more popular than text.

When asked about how the strategy differs from one medium to the next, Mainland noted that on Tumblr, he uses strong visuals.  Mainland uses crowd sourcing on Reddit, and Twitter is necessary for news and events, etc.

Photoshelter

The New York Times

A brand using Ricochet chooses an article from a Times Co. publication which ties to a topic relevant to their brand business.  A URL is created unique to that article which a brand can distribute on social networks, blogs, etc.  When a social media fan (using Twitter Facebook, etc.) selects the link, they will see the article surrounded by ads for that brand.

Ricochet will also include a ‘cascade’ tool which will output data for the advertiser to identify which Twitter users, who share a specific article, have the biggest impact. The Times will bill advertisers for Ricochet dependent on how many articles they want to tie in, as well as the duration of the campaigns.

AdAge

A new feature has been added to the News.me, a news app cultivated by The New York Times and betaworks. Users now have the ability to read stories offline via “Paper Boy,” a feature that is part of its new iPhone app automatically downloads content every time the user leaves his or her house.

According to TechCrunch, Paper Boy specifically caters to commuters who take the subway and often find themselves without WiFi connection. Besides apps located on Apple’s Newsstand, News.me is the first app to offer “background” downloading.

Additionally, in an effort to become a leader in social media driven news delivery, News.me also has a new feature called “Reactions,” which lets users comment on stories in their streams, as well as follow other users and comment on their network’s stories as well. Pre-written responses such as “awesome,” “wow,” and “Ha!” are included in the apps for quick responses.

TechCrunch

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Chartbeat, the NY-based startup which helps customers measure the traffic to their websites in real-time, is raising a $9.5 million round led by Josh Stein at DFJ and Saul Klein of Index Ventures, according to VentureBeat. The company monitors over 5 million users daily, watching what they read and what they’re writing on some of the biggest sites on the web: ESPN, Fox News and The New York Times.

The company’s new design goes beyond the number of concurrent visitors. “The big goal is to make everyone feel like a data scientist,” Lauryn Bennet, the company’s head of brand, told VB. “We want to make sure the people on the front lines of these sites feel like they can both understand, react and predict how to capitalize on their traffic.”

“The new Chartbeat is focused on letting you know when something out of the ordinary is happening, and helping you to capitalize on that for the future,” CEO Tony Haile told VenutreBeat.

VentureBeat

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NY-based startup SinglePlatform, a system which helps local businesses publish their storefront on the Web, saw a growth of around $13 million between 2011 and 2012.  In March, 60,000 companies signed up for SinglePlatform’s free software which lets them manage menus and price lists from the web, mobile and Facebook, all on one simple screen.

Local NY businesses can pay $495 to take advantage of premium service offered by SinglePlatform, and 10,000 did just that.  Signing up for premium services gives small business the opportunity to distribute their goods and services on CEO Wiley Cerilli‘s network of online publishers which includes The New York Times, Foursquare, Google and the Yellow Pages.  According to Forbes, Gabriele Ranzato, managing partner at Grand Central Restaurant Group, said, “it’s the best $495 I’ve ever spent.”

Forbes

A panorama of a research room taken at the New York Public Library with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS. Français : Vue panoramique d'une pièce de lecture de la New York Public Library prise avec un appareil Canon 5D équipé d'un objectif 24-105mm f/4L IS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The New York Public Library will soon digitize several works in its American collection and made them available online.  Some of the more notable works include letters written by George Washington, Henry David Thoreau’s pencil-drawn map of Walden Pond, Mark Twain’s manuscript of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” and a copy of the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. The project was made possible through a $500,000 grant by the Polonsky Foundation. The NYPL already has over 800,000 documents and photos in its online digital gallery.

NY Times

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When a business has been doing something for so long, it is most often hard to change the model; the same goes for the news industry. For The New York Times, it took a long time to realize that it was necessary to allocate substantial assets to digital news, having such as successful history in printed newspapers. Richard Tanner, senior producer of video at the Times tells Streaming Media that it wasn’t until after 9/11 that the company began to see that consumers valued obtaining news in real-time rather than waiting until the next day for the print edition.

Additionally, international readers could only receive the paper at a high cost, but online content makes it more accessible for fans abroad.

Streaming Media

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When it comes to news organizations, NY wire companies Bloomberg LP and Thomson Reuters have a distinct advantage. That is, they offer subscription-based financial data and services that bring in billions of dollars, equaling 82% and 90% of total revenue for Bloomberg and Reuters, respectively, while traditional outlets are struggling to steer customers away from free content and into the realm of paid subscriptions. According to a profile story this week in Adweek, this allows them to spend massive amounts of money on acquiring top journalists from around the world, all while the newspaper industry has seen a job loss of nearly a quarter of the entire workforce between 2006 and 2010. Both Bloomberg and Reuters employ more editorial positions than The New York Times and The Washington Post combined, as the size of these companies have allowed them integrate TV, print, and digital content for a better user-experience. Additionally, they each have legal units as well as tax and accounting segments, which each contribute to their earnings.

However, some believe that both these firms only target wealthier individuals and that their content may not be palpable to a broader audience. For example, the Adweek article found that subscriptions to the “Bloomberg terminal” (which is now all Web-based, but is still refereed to by the physical computers they sold for many years)  can cost upwards of $20,000/year, so it would not be beyond the pale why they would focus on news that cater to those customers. It should also be noted that all news goes through the terminal for subscribers before about half of the content is cut out and delivered to the free website.

Even though the financial side of these business is extremely profitable, they also saw a large decline during the recession; and so, both companies are trying to diversify their business to prevent the situation from recurring. Most of Bloomberg’s diversification is done through growth in the legal units, with the acquisition of BNA, as well as  the purchase of BusinessWeek in late 2009. Reuters has also taken part in several acquisitions of both companies and talent.

According to Adweek, rumor has it that Bloomberg LP is looking to buy out The New York Times in the near future, while Reuters is supposedly looking into The Financial Times. Nonetheless, the overarching challenge remains omnipresent in both firms; that is, with rapid growth seeming to be the goal, they will need to figure out a way to expand to a more general audience while still maintaining interest and readership in their business clients. Whether or not their methods of collecting and disseminating news to masses is one that other media companies will follow in the future, also remains to be seen.

Adweek

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Not only has the way consumers receive and use data changed profoundly, but data itself has also changed. Michael Zimbalist, The New York Times’ VP of research and development, said that data is smarter.

“A tweet might know from where it is tweeted, who tweeted it, whether it contains a link and whether it contains a photo,” Zimbalist said this week at the BIA/Kelsey Interactive Local Media East conference in Boston.

According to NetNewsCheck, in his keynote address, Zimbalist said that while sharing is easy, it is harder to link data because of the non-standard HTML formats used to index it.  Zimbalist demonstrated how different organizations refer to President Obama when they index data. The Times uses Obama, Barack (Per) while Wikipedia uses Barack_Obama.

The different formats prevent frictionless sharing. Zimbalist said the Times solved this problem by linking their data to the cloud, where there are other strong “nodes” or networks.

Zimabalist said that the Times is particularly fond of GeoNames—a database of 10,000 geographical locations—that has assisted the paper in linking 76 percent of its locations to the cloud. He said the paper is also paying attention to two other networks, Freebase and DBpedia.

One the data is mapped, anyone who maps to the same networks can associate and share data—all through linked data.

Zimbalist said the future of linked data is uncertain, but people interested in created the richest content for their audience would find it worthwhile to “link in.”

NetNewsCheck