The Evolving Newsroom

Recognising the dominance of Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg and other social bookmarking services, nytimes.com is winding down its own file-saving service. Makes sense.

This from the email to users:

Dear Times File user,

Thank you for being a loyal user of NYTimes.com and Times
File, the tool that allows you to save articles from
NYTimes.com and other Web sites. (On NYTimes.com, Times File
is the "Save" option that appears on the top right area of
most of our article pages.)

We wanted to inform you that, as of Dec. 22, 2008, we are
removing the ability to save articles to Times File from
NYTimes.com pages, and on Jan. 21, 2009, we are removing
Times File from the site entirely. Social-bookmarking sites
like Delicious and Digg, which can be accessed through our
Share tools, have proliferated since the creation of Times
File. This changing Web landscape has resulted in the
decision to divert resources from Times File to other areas
of NYTimes.com.

We realize that our removing Times File may be an
inconvenience, so we have worked out an option to keep your
saved pages.

Times File is powered by LookSmart technology. If you'd like
to keep the pages you have already saved using Times File,
we've created a process allowing you to easily transfer all
of your saved pages to LookSmart's online-bookmarking tool,
Furl. This way, the pages you've saved will still be
available through your new Furl account.
...

We value you as a loyal user of NYTimes.com and hope that you
enjoy our many other current and upcoming features. If you
have questions or concerns about the removal of Times File,
please contact our Customer Service team at help@nytimes.com
or visit our Times File FAQ at
http://www.nytimes.com/membercenter/faq/timesfile.html.

Thank you,

The New York Times

"Every media brand, to remain relevant, needs to get into the business of helping their audience find the best content on the topics they cover, and not just publish their own content."

A quote from Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 which appears in DigiDave's useful post on Social Bookmarking for Journalists 101.

DigiDave, aka David Cohn, makes the following excellent point early on in his post:

"My bone to pick isn't that news organizations don't know about social news sites. They obviously do - and want to benefit from the traffic spikes they can offer. My concern is that individual journalists aren't using them enough - which is a pity, because if anybody should be recommending news articles through these sites [Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc] it should be journalists, whose job it is to know what is good and bad information. If we live in an era of micro-internet celebrities, and micro-blogging - these sites offer a platform where collectively journalists can show our inherent value on the social web."

I also like his sketch of the main social bookmarking sites, using the device of imagining what news publication they would be if they were print products. For example, he likens Digg to a teen magazine (tend to like easily digestible content: pictures and top ten lists), Reddit to the San Jose Mercury News (heavily focused on hardcore technology) and Propeller to USA Today (packaged for the masses, not a tech or geeky audience).

Plenty more good stuff in there. Well worth a look.