Since starting on the site redesign last year, I’ve known I wanted the website to have a now page:
Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.
Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.
So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.
I finally had some (quaran)time to make one this weekend, so if you’re ever curious what I’m up to, you can now visit /now.
I’ve soft-launched a new version of this website designed by my pal Robyn Kanner and developed by Martin Giannakopoulos. If you’re reading this in RSS and haven’t seen the site in a while, come take a look around and send me feedback on Twitter.
Inside The New York Times Building next week, it’s going to get harder to do your job. Clifford Levy, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist, and former coworker tweeted that the way to get this company thinking mobile first, is to block the website. Wait, what?
Just like Cliff and the others, I believe very strongly that if The Times is to survive, it needs to think about its apps and mobile website a hell of a lot more than www.nytimes.com, or “triple dub” as it’s known inside the company. But is blocking the site for its own employees really the right way to do that?
It feels like a punishment. Your dad is turning off the TV and making you eat your vegetables. This kind of paternalistic attitude is not what will spur the brilliant engineers and journalists at the Times to improve their pocket-sized offerings and consider the report from a mobile angle.
So what’s a better way to get a company as large and old as The New York Times to care more deeply about its report on phones, tablets, and watches? There’s no magic bullet, but in my years there I saw incredible ideas, people, and talent wasted on a website with declining traffic while the iOS app suffered a lack of attention from the newsroom. I saw initiative after initiative to make mobile more important flounder while many of the reporters still aimed to be on the front page of a gray piece of paper.
It may be that the way to make sure that employees of the Times care more about mobile is to point out when these failures happen, to be critical of the web first mindset, and to remind people every time they try to perfect a web layout, that they’re doing so for a rapidly declining number of readers. Along with that, the Grey Lady should be celebrating the teams and people who are getting this right, without putting people who still rely on the website in time out.
The newsroom brass at the Times are trying to solve a social problem with a technical solution and I can’t imagine anyone there that’s too happy about it. It feels robotic, oppressive, and downright annoying. Honest conversation and critique of the attitudes and norms of a century old organization will almost certainly be received better than playing with the valve of information flow inside the Times. I hope they reconsider.
For years now this website has merely pointed people to my profiles on other websites and social media services. It wasn’t always that way. In the past, it housed my blog, a podcast I hosted, and even a photoblog at one point. Remember those?
It’s time to make this place my own again. A place to put the things I write and make. And more than that, a place to experiment.
Inspired by my heroes and my friends, I’ve decided to write under my name. And while I expect that what’s here will change a lot of over time, I’ll try not to break too many links along the way.
If you want to come along for the ride, subscribe in your feed reader, and if you want to know more about the person who’s writing this, there’s an about page.
