Stetoscope

The Internet is very often introduced as the murderer of traditional medias. Internet will kill the music industry, the movie industry, the press and television. We could be provocative questioning : how could they still be alive since the incredible potentiality of the Internet?

That is not the purpose here. I would like to highlight the very sound strategy of the New York Times. Their strategy is not to fight right on the Internet. Nor to move to a whole internet “paper”. They decided to adapt their way of thinking to the Internet way of thinking.

I mean, they deeply understood that the basic idea of the internet is the link. On the Internet : the more you are linked, the stronger you are. That is what the NYT has understood. If you still want to exist has a news and analysis producer, you have to be linked to other news and analysis producers. Thus each articles is linked to several blogs selected by the NYT and the reader can really explore a topic through different point of views.

Is that really god to their business? Of course it is, because they also link their fresh articles to their archives, the readers always have to go back to the main article to get the relation to other blogs. So the number of view pages by article does increase a lot. In fact, they build the missing link…

Why do the others industries not follow the NYT path?