Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » The New York Times Company

The New York Times Launches Tumblr Blog With Old Photos

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:22:26 +0000

The New York Times has launched a new Tumblr blog that is dedicated to old photos. The Tumblr blog is called The Lively Morgue and it launched this past Monday. The photos are in black and white. The blog is called The Lively Morgue because the images are being grabbed from the physical photo “morgue” where millions of pictures are stored in filing cabinets and manila folders.

This project was many months in the making. There are no specific reasons for what pictures are used other than “We’ve chosen images that delight us,” said the New York Times in their intro post.

The Lively Morgue allows you to buy prints for $169. The back of each paid photo includes information about how much the freelancers were paid to take the photos, what captions were published with the photo, and the sequence numbers. According to the introductory post, the New York Times could post about 5-10 archived images per day and they would still have enough to spare by the year 3935.

[Mashable]

New York Times Accidentally Sends Subscriber E-Mail To 8.6 Million People

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:05:30 +0000

“We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised,” stated New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy. The e-mail that was sent out around 1:15PM said “Important information regarding your subscription” as the subject line. The company offered a special home delivery rate for subscribers that recently cancelled.

“The email was sent by the NYT,’ a spokeswoman said. Should’ve gone to appx 300 people & went to over 8 mil,” wrote Times reporter Amy Chozick at 3:29PM on Twitter.

“It looks as though @nytimes gave Epsilon permission to send emails on its behalf. So this was likely just a mistake,” stated Yuri Victor, the Washington Post user experience director, who traced the e-mail sender to an IP address connected to Epsilon Marketing. “It was likely meant to go to a specific email group (cancels) and someone checked send to all by accident. Just a guess.”

There you have it folks. If you received that e-mail from The New York Times, most likely it was not intended for you as it was a glitch with the marketing company that the NYT works with.

[Poynter]

New York Times Paying $250 Million Back To Carlos Slim 3 Years Earlier Than Expected

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 02:26:20 +0000

The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) is expected to pay back Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim the $250 million loan three years earlier than expected. The loan is expected to be payed back on August 15th.

The reason why the New York Times is able to pay back the debt early is because of the improvement on financial flexibility that the company made over the last 2 years, including the “paywall” that the company set up for subscribers.

Back in 2009, Slim let The New York Times borrow $250 million. This increases Slim’s stake in The New York Times from 6.9% to 17%.

[BusinessInsider]

The NY Times Traffic Declines 24.4% Between March and April After Adding Paywall

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 12 May 2011 20:28:58 +0000

After adding a paywall in March, website traffic at The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) has dropped 24.4%. According to a spokeswoman at The New York Times, the numbers are better than their own internal predictions. Despite the drop in numbers, The New York Times was able to retain their unique user, pageview, and engagement rankings. “Our framework suggests that even if The New York Times loses 20% of its web traffic, it will need to add about 107k subscribers to break even,” stated Citi analyst Leo Kulp in a note to investors today. [AdAge]

NYT Kindle Subscribers Will Not Have To Pay Extra For Access To Website

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:13:20 +0000

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has announced that The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) subscribers on the Kindle will be able to read news articles for no additional charge free. The New York Times recently said that they are limiting the number of articles to 20 per month before the user is required to pay. The Kindle subscription cost for the NYT is $19.99 per month. [TechCrunch]

New York Times Announces New Digital Subscription Plans

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 16:23:34 +0000

The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) is in the top 100 of the most visited websites on the Internet. In an effort to capitalize on that, The NYT announced a new digital subscription plan (also known as a paywall). Starting March 28th, the New York Times will charge $15 per month for those who want to read more than 20 articles per month.

The reason why 20 articles per month will be free is because company executives want to draw revenue from the most loyal readers without driving away traffic from casual visitor. Those who subscribe to the paper for home delivery will have free and unlimited access to all of the digital platforms except the Kindle and Nook e-readers. The packages are:
- $15 per month for website and mobile phone app access.
- $20 for web access and an iPad app
- $35 for all-access plan

[New York Times]

The New York Times Launching An iPad Newspaper Called News.me

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 05:11:07 +0000

TechCrunch has revealed that The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) is putting together an iPad newspaper called News.me that is the company’s response to News Corp’s The Daily. News.me is a social news reading application that shows you what your friends are reading on Twitter. News.me pulls in data from Twitter and bit.ly.

The Daily has a 100 journalist team that will write their own articles and produce their own videos. You can sign in with Twitter and see a stream of news stories. When you launch News.me, you will see a welcome screen similar to the one below. When you tap on the people along the top, you will see what stories are appearing in their Twitter streams.

Below is another couple of screenshots:

Pulse iPad App Gets Praise From Jobs, Pulled From App Store Shortly After

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:56:38 +0000

Pulse News Reader was an application on the iPad app store. Essentially it was a RSS reader and news feed service created by a couple of Stanford University graduate students. The application was talked about by Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

However the application was pulled from the Apple App Store by the afternoon because of a written notice from The New York Times lawyers. “The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use*. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use.” said the letter from the lawyers. The app contains news feeds for the New York based publications which links back to the original content. The funny thing is that The New York Times wrote an article last week praising the Pulse Reader app too.

“I don’t blame Apple, because they have to respond when contacted by lawyers from the Times,” said Akshay Kothari, one of the app’s creators. “But it was definitely a roller coaster of a day.” Kothari worked on the app with Ankit Gupta, who are both students at the Stanford Institute of Design. Kothari and Gupta worked on the app for four weeks through a company they created called Alphonso Labs. It was downloaded 35,000 times at a price of $4. [AllThingsD]

Twitter Drives 10% Of The New York Times Website Traffic

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:56:02 +0000

Martin Nisenholtz, the SVP of Digital Operations at The New York Times Company was speaking at the OMMA Global conference in New York City. Nisenholtz revealed that Twitter drives 10% of The New York Times’ traffic. The New York Times Twitter account has 1.8 million followers thus far and the number is growing at a rapid pace. This is “up from 0 a year ago,” according to Nisenholtz.

The interesting part about the traffic that The New York Times is getting from Twitter is that the micro-blogging company is not getting any money out of it. Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model as of right now. But given how much major news agencies are relying on the micro-blogging service, the company could eventually take advantage of their situation. Dave Morgan of Simul Media revealed the quote from Nisenholtz as shown in the above screen shot.

Why The New York Times Refused Geffen’s Investment

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 30 May 2009 07:28:51 +0000

The New York Times needed an infusion of cash recently as their stock price has not been doing so great. Harbinger Capital, a company that owns about 19% of NYT stock wanted to unload it to Hollywood exec David Geffen and Google.

Last winter the New York Times decided to get more money out of Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim instead of David Geffen, $250 million to be exact. They did this for a reason. Geffen even offered the same terms for the loan.

The New York Times Chairman told Geffen that the company would rather work with Slim because he already owns a major amount of shares in the company and that “he was reportedly also worried about Geffen’s ambition to take over the company.” Geffen made an offer to completely buy out The New York Times this past September.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his family are the major shareholders in The New York Times. His family has controlled the newspaper since 1896 and the company was founded in 1851. Their family said that they were not interested in selling the company outright, but this is the same sentiments that the Bancroft family had with The Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones. Both Dow and The WSJ are now owned by News Corp.

[via AllThingsD]