Katie Pierce

Jacquie Lamer
Intro to Web Publishing
11 September 2007
Credibility Assessment of nytimes.com

Site Description

The New York Times website is mainly a content-based website meaning that it

displays text, pictures, video, audio data and downloads. Its text consists of stories,

captions, headlines, comments, and blogs. The pictures are also buttons that lead to the

story. The video and audio data are generally grouped together since audio accompanies

the videos. There are some instances where you are able to access audio only.

In the following example, a user can access many different varieties of this story.

The complete coverage links to a separate page that provides all of the other

options shown in this example (audio, video, etc.). The expert round table is a forum

where readers can ask questions of experts regarding this topic. The audio slide show

included a slideshow of pictures and music in the background, not a narration. The video

had interviews and footage shot in China which also had audio. The interactive graphic

map showed the effects of population growth and the increase of pollution as a result of

this growth. Lastly, the ability to download an audio report in Mandarin shows the depth

the website has taken to provide as much multimedia content as possible.

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Nytimes.com is also partially a commerce site since they display The New York

Times Store button on the left side of the home page.

When you click on the link to go to The New York Times Store, you will find this

screen shot. You will notice that the URL is nytstore.com and the cart symbol indicating

a commerce website.

The website may also be considered a community website since posting

comments on a blog is possible. One could see this as a partial discussion board since

people can refer back to that specific topic and post more than once.

Nytimes.com offers their users the ability to search different facets of their

websites and the internet. The search bar is located at the top of their home page. The

different types of search that can be conducted are: NYT Archive Since 1981; NYT

Archive 1851-1980; Google/Web; Multimedia; NYC Guide; and

Answers.com/Reference.
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When you scroll down the homepage, you can also search for: stock quotes; real

estate; new & used cars; jobs (through monster.com); and all classified listings.

At the very bottom of the home page, a search link is provided to complete a detailed

search.

Currently, their website seems credible due to the fact that they have combined content,

commerce, community and search into one website, offering a great resource for their

users.

Traffic

According to quantcast.com, nytimes.com gets approximately 5.1 million unique

users in a month and approximately 750,000 unique users per day in the U.S. This

information was last updated in July 2007. Here are the highest of the demographics

listed: male; age 65+; household income $100,000+; Caucasian and African American

(tied); head of household completed graduate school; no children 6-17 in the household.

The audience composition is 66% passers-by, 32% regulars; and 2% addicts. Share of

visits: 51% regulars, 28% addicts, 21% passers-by (see graphs below). Passers-by are

defined by the website as visitors who have a single visit per month. Regulars are visitors

who have between 1 and 30 visits per month. Addicts are visitors who visit the website

30+ times a month. Between June 30, 2007 and July 31, 2007, the traffic trend appears to
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fluctuate between approximately 900,000 to 600,000 uniques. However, on July 31,

2007, the graph shows a slow upward trend.

In comparison, washingtontimes.com had 348,718 uniques in the U.S. per month

and approximately 50,000 daily uniques in the U.S. Their top U.S. demographics are:

male, 65+, $60-100,000 household income; “other” ethnicity; head of household

completed graduate school; no children 6-17 in the household. The only differences

between the washingtontimes.com and nytimes.com are household income and ethnicity.

However, washingtontimes.com’s audience composition is 68% passers-by, 31%

regulars, and 1% addicts. Their share of visits is 60% regulars, 29% passers-by, and 11%

addicts. Their trend in traffic varies from month to month. On July 31, 2007, the trend

appears to be going up.

nytimes.com washingtontimes.com

At this point, they still appear credible. After comparing their uniques to

washingtontimes.com, their readership base isn’t as broad as it could be in terms of

ethnicity and household income. Nytimes.com does have a large number of uniques that
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are not varied. This may mean that they could be more credible by appealing to a larger

audience.

Popularity

According to marketleap.com, the total number of links for nytimes.com is

2,665,900; while 726,000 of those links are off of google.com, aol.com, or hotbot.com.

Marketleap.com reports the total number of links for newyorktimes.com is 732, 068, and

for nyt.com, 736,627. The total number of links for washingtontimes.com is 21, 343.

Wholinkstome.com shows Yahoo! found 6, 989,000 links to nytimes.com; 38,050

to nyt.com; and 10,629 to newyorktimes.com. Wholinkstome.com displays that Yahoo!

has found 189,800 links to washingtontimes.com.

At the same time, technorati.com shows nytimes.com has 1,202,561 blog

reactions; nyt.com has 1,175; and newyorktimes.com has 725. Technorati.com also

reports washingtontimes.com 49,888 blog reactions. The problem with this is the fact the

nytimes.com links back to itself. A good majority of the total links are provided by

themselves.

It is hard to judge credibility off of their popularity when I can’t pull their own

links out of the total. Overall, their high numbers indicate they could be more popular

based off of links and blog reactions.

Longevity

Seochat.com’s domain age checker indicates nytimes.com was created in January

of 1994 making the domain almost 14 years old. Nyt.com was created in October of 1994

making that domain almost 13 years old. Newyorktimes.com was created in June 1996

making it approximately 11 years old. This means all domains are dot-com bust survivors
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since they existed before 2000. Washingtontimes.com was created sometime in 2002,

according to seochat.com’s domain age tool. This means their website is almost 6 years

old and that they were not survivors of the dot-com bust.

According to nytco.com, The New York Times newspaper was first published

September 18, 1851. It was founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones. The

paper was published 143 years before their first website was created. According to

washingtontimes.com, The Washington Times newspaper was founded in 1982, 20 years

before the website was created. Since the print form of nytimes.com has been around for

so long, this shows they have provided quality service for over 100 years, adding to their

credibility.

Quality of Content

One of the first videos I clicked on when I got to this part of the paper had

problems loading. It would play and stop, play and stop. The user has the option to pause

it and let the video to continue to load for uninterrupted viewing.

After spending quite a bit of time clicking around through different pages, links in

copy, photos, and sections. I did find a link that didn’t exist; it said to “click here” to get

prices for online advertisements and I was unable to “click here.” This faulty link was

found in their media kit. All of the images and graphics I encountered loaded and worked

as they should have. Text was legible throughout the pages that I viewed.

While researching, I came across cnib.ca; their website caters to those with visual

impairments. Many options are offered for the visitors of their website such as changing

the background color and increasing the font size. Nytimes.com could provide more

features similar to cnib.ca to better serve their visitors with visual impairments. I did not
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find these options available on nytimes.com. Below is a screen shot of their website with

the aforementioned options.

Two features that both cnib.ca and nytimes.com offered were printer-friendly

versions of articles and the ability to enlarge photos. Another feature nytimes.com does

not offer their viewers is the alt tag for people with disabilities. Nwmissouri.edu offers

this feature for viewers.

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Nytimes.com does, however, offer their viewers what they went to the website to

get: news. They offer all types of news, in all formats from across the world. I compared

a story about Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton returning about $850,000 to campaign donors,

from nytimes.com to aol.com and found they were both very similar, causing me to

believe that they are accurate. To look for typos, since I couldn’t find any that stood out

on the main information, I looked under their “corrections” link at the bottom of the

home page.

I think that it is very honest for any company to admit that they made a mistake,

especially in the media world. I decided to look at this corrections page to see what errors

have occurred in their content. The errors that were listed included wrong facts and one

misspelling due to an error in the information from a source. The New York Times is

very timely with their information; they update their website every hour. During the time

period I was working with the website, content and designs were constantly changing and

information was updated. Any banner ads I saw pertained to technology, investing,

subscriptions and other things that pertain to their viewers. There weren’t any offensive

or inappropriate advertisements displayed on nytimes.com, including their classifieds.

The fact that they offer quality content adds to their credibility; how they handle

that content is completely different. Nytimes.com provides plenty of multimedia for their

viewers to access and utilize but they haven’t taken visually impaired viewers into

consideration and this detracts from their credibility in a big way.

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Site Design and Appropriateness

The design of the site is very clean and generally easy to read. I say generally

easy to read because there is so much content that tends to crowd the homepage and make

it very busy with so much text; however, it is organized very well. If the information

weren’t organized, then there would be more problems with the readability of the site.

There is minimal use of animation; what I did see was on the article tools where the share

link and the sponsor of the tools graphics moved. This small amount of animation was

appropriate for their website. It worked because the changing symbols in front of the

“share” tool allowed users to know what other programs they could share that content

with (Digg, Facebook, Newsvine, and Permalink).

Nytimes.com does have multimedia, as previously discussed. Their multimedia

content includes audio/video/text. Because they are a news website, they should have all

of the above and do. The multimedia is used individually and in combination and all of

that works to help give viewers the best information about the news around the world and

in their own backyard. The quality of multimedia adds to their credibility because it

shows the in-depth coverage they provide to each story.

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Revenue

Although news organizations say they are there to give the public news, everyone

knows they are also in it for the money. Nytimes.com does have advertisements, and, as

previously discussed, they are appropriate for the content of the website. Here are some

examples of advertisements found on the home page:

The problem with the advertisements found on the front page is that they aren’t clearly

marked “ADVERTISEMENT.” In class we discussed that they are sometimes labeled on

credible websites. Does that mean that nytimes.com is not credible? I’m not sure because
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it’s not as though it is hard to distinguish between the content and the ads. They are

making revenue off of their advertisements but due to a faulty link, I was unable to look

at the prices for online ads.

At the top of their home page, the statement “TimesSelect Free 14-Day Trial” so I

clicked on this link to see what it was about. I wanted to find out any potential costs and

was not given any information about what it would cost me after my 14-day trial. This

disappointed me because a user who is interested in it might take that into consideration

before signing up for the free trial; however, this service is completely free to University

students and faculty.

It’s free to become a member of their website but when you want to start getting

into the advanced features and stories, you will begin to incur costs. The TimeSelect

option included such features. As a member you are able to purchase many different

things; an annual subscription to the premium crossword puzzle will cost you $39.95 or

you can give this subscription as a gift. Subscriptions for home delivery to anywhere

outside of the New York Metropolitan Area for seven days a week is $6.40 a week for 12

weeks which will end up costing about $332.80 a year. For the paper Monday-Friday, it

costs $3.20 a week for 12 weeks, or $166.40 for a year. The last option is Sunday-only

delivery, costing $3.25 a week for 12 weeks or $169 for a year.

Another source of revenue is The New York Times Store; the link is on their

home page. They sell “photos, fine art, books, and more.” I pretended to purchase a rare

newspaper costing $405 and went as far as I could before they started asking for all of my
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billing information. Up until that point, the URL remained nytstore.com and didn’t reveal

any e-commerce relationships. This tells me they want to take care of their entire

inventory themselves and don’t want to rely on a company like zazzle.com to take care of

it for them and that their store has added a huge burden to the company. When companies

do this, it causes me to wonder if they are big enough to handle the work load or if they

are trying to take on more than they can handle resulting in a lower quality all around. So

far, it appears to be that they are big enough to handle it.

When I looked at yahoo.com under the finance section, I saw that they are

publicly traded so they are making some money from that to use for their company. On

The New York Times Company website (nytco.com), they have a press release that lists

their financial information comparing revenues from July 2006 to July 2007. At the

bottom of that press release (dated August 16, 2007) it states that their 2006 revenues

were $3.3 billion.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

The main URL that I used was nytimes.com. I looked into two other URLs that lead to

the same home page: nyt.com, newyorktimes.com. They also have a URL for their store:

nytstore.com. For The New York Times Company, this URL would be used: nytco.com.

Nyt.com is the easiest to spell, easy to remember, short, no dashes or symbols, goes with

the company name and its extension is appropriate. However, they advertise nytimes.com

on their home page and most of their advertisements. The following are examples of this

usage.
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It is unclear as to why they chose to advertise nytimes.com unless research is

conducted, and then one can see that the nytimes.com domain was the first created (in

January 2004). When taking into consideration the history of the internet and the dot-com

bust in the 2000s, a viewer of this survivor website can appreciate how much work has

gone into putting everything together in one site. Nytimes.com needs to go through their

media kit to ensure that their price lists for advertisements are available, meaning the link

needs to be functioning. Overall, nytimes.com is credible; they just need to think about

how they treat their content for those users with disabilities.