An interesting take on skimming and browsing behaviours online, the Times Skimmer is now live on the main New York Times website. In the final release they’ve added the typeface Cheltenham—familiar to readers of their print edition—to the app using Typekit along with sponsorship from Blackberry, adding the commercial aspect noticeably absent in the test version I wrote about earlier. It’s a polished evolution of the idea, very well executed.
Michael Sokolove’s article “What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?” in the New York Times Magazine tells the situation facing the US newspaper industry through the story of Philidelphia’s own papers, including the possible ignominy of being the first major US city without a daily paper.
BBH Labs’ talks to Times Media Group about their redesign of The Times in 2007. Their prototyping with “Project Victoria” is a great approach to testing out new systems if you can afford it.
Among a slew of newspaper redesigns that are utilising more magazine-driven layouts popping with colour and graphics, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has launched a new design that uses more solid columns of text and smaller photos than most.
At the end of a down-beat article on the accelerating decline in circulation of the top 25 US newspapers (7% year on year) the New York Times adds a short final paragraph:
Meanwhile, the audience for newspaper Web sites continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2009, newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73 million unique visitors each month, on average, according to an analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. That is a 10.5 percent increase from the first quarter of 2008.