By Christopher B. Daly
Today brings a long-awaited redesign of the New York Times online in all its various incarnations — desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile.
An overall first impression: it’s clean, smart, fast, and user-friendly. A clear winner.
To learn more, here’s an article by former Times media reporter Brian Stelter.
Some concerns:
–In the mobile version I am seeing on my iPhone, one screenful displays only 1.5 stories. It feels a bit like following a flashlight beam. I get no sense of the overall news picture.
–I am, of course, concerned about the simultaneous introduction of “native advertising” — which I consider an insidious erosion of the separation of “church and state” within news organizations. I don’t care that everybody’s doing it. (On the other hand, I was just roaming around the site on my desktop computer, and I saw zero ads of any kind: is that courtesy of my ad-blocker?)
Your thoughts?
For comparison, here’s the way the Times looked when it made its debut in 1851 (price, 1 cent):
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