Image via Wikipedia
Ever since the death of newspapers became a thing, there seems to have emerged a collective “holy shit” moment among newspaper publishers, reporters, editors, and readers.
But if you attended last week’s Lotico Semantic Web Meetup at the NYTimes, you would have come away thinking you were among the architects of the digital 21st century rather than those of a crumbling institution of the analog 20th. Presenters from the International Press Technology Council (including Andreas Gebhard of Getty Images, Stuart Myles of the Associated Press, and Evan Sandhaus of the Times) discussed the newly-defined rNews standard, meant to represent structured news-related metadata on the web.
Elsewhere at the Times, an outfit called the Research & Development Lab (operating out of what one might imagine to be a repurposed Crying Room) is working on some very cool data visualization projects. The team’s Cascade project was recently written up on Mashable and renders the propagation of social activity via twitter.
This is the kind of stuff one would expect to come out of IBM or Microsoft Research. And all the more surprising — and impressive — given the Times’ financial state. I’ve always thought the future of a publishing giant like the Times is to become a platform rather than a product. These kinds of innovations are what will make that possible.
