This Year, I’m Thankful for the Times

Ah, the Friday after Thanksgiving.

I’ve heard whiff and rumor that some people were up early (3:45 a.m.!) to make the sale at Kohl’s. Barbaric! I gladly yielded last night to a tryptophan- and champagne-induced sleep, woke up late, and fully expected to spend the majority of my day on epicurious.com digging for turkey-recycling tips.

I didn’t get far. No further than my start page-the New York Times-where I found a little tab called “My Times.” Click, and play play play.

Now let me come clean, I’ve always been a New York Times fan. I think that they’re a wonderful model for communications, customer service, and information delivery. Some proof points:

• Their recent redesign that integrates tabs, a 1024-pixel target resolution, and multimedia-rich delivery in condensed spaces (see, for instance, the video or InsideNYTimes.com widgets on the homepage) is terrific. The sheer amount of information they deliver is staggering, yet at least to me, very easy to parse visually.

• As a home delivery subscriber (I am, indeed, weekends only), I have access to premium crossword puzzles that I can do online against the clock, in real time with a friend online, offline on my laptop with a nifty little program you can download for free, or printed out.

• They’ve recently increased their editorial staff to allow a greater level of reader comments to be reviewed and posted to the site. Their “most emailed” and “most popular” features also give me an idea of latest buzz (and saves me a trip to digg.com).

– I’ll soon be able to read the daily paper on my mac via the Times Reader (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/timesreader.html). Again, free, with my home delivery subscription. This is in addition to the multiple ways I can pull new news via RSS or email alerts.

But, back to today’s treat: My Times. After my experiences with Yahoo and Google News, I’m a bit of a cynic about news portals, but My Times (currently in beta) really works. I’m able to:

• Choose the sections that I want to see and select how much information is displayed (headline, headline and summary, headline and date).

• Easily drag and drop each section around the three columns of any given page.

• Implement an array of widgets (including a keyword-driven Flickr photo gallery/slideshow, a bookmark manager, and a crossword puzzle player) that I can drop into any page.

• Set up as many tabs as I’d like and configure the features in ways that make the most sense to me.

• Find information not only from the massive Times base, but also from other recommended sources like The Economist and BBC News (and the Times provides both contextual lists and a specific-search function for these sources).

• Pull in my own RSS feeds (sadly, the mStoner blog is not yet on their short list of recommended sources) into any of my pages—this makes me personally more mobile, as it untethers me from my RSS reader. It also allows me to aggregate my ancillary news sources into the site in which I spent most of my time online.

• Thanks to their stylesheet work, elegantly scale up the type of the page to suit my aging eyes (38 is a bitch!).

This all to me is fantastic! It simplifies my news-surfing time and pulls relevant information into a consistent interface that I have appropriate capability to customize. Why is this important? Well, for me, because it’s all about me. For the Times, because it fosters more loyalty from a member of its subscriber base, but more importantly because it signifies an understanding of the state of communications and service in our information mashed-up, web 2.0‑driven, P2P-soaked, search-steroided world. The Times doesn’t pretend to be the the only definitive news source on the planet. Moreover, it doesn’t attempt to restrict information access only to its “paying customers” (see, for instance, http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/lettertoreaders.html). In point of fact, it gives people the best of all possible worlds, and that’s a terrific lesson in changing with the times.