All The News that’s Fit to Post, Not Print
Posted on March 10, 2008 - Filed Under media |
 
The stunning news on NY Governor Eliot Spitzer today is also a reminder of how media is changing. Today is not a day to praise the New York Times. It is, however, a day to praise the NYTimes.com.
The Times did a marvelous job with its coverage online. Aside from breaking the story, it provided additional context to it all day by adding pdf documents of the federal indictment, audio clips of the reporters discussing the story in depth, video of Spitzer’s statement to the media and blogs for users to comment on the story. In short, the Times showed its teeth not as a newspaper but as a multimedia news entity.
Traffic on the Times website was up over 60% from a typical Monday afternoon once news of the story broke. NYT mobile doubled its usual traffic. In fact, the traffic became too much for the servers to handle at times between 2pm and 4pm. If you tried to hit the Times homepage you found a slow load of no load at all. The last time the Times had this kind of load trouble on its site was on 9-11, and in November of 2001 when an American Airlines flight crashed in Queens. But since then the Times has added 10 times the amount of bandwidth.  It will be a day or so before we know the numbers but no doubt the traffic, and the ads that were served were unprecedented for the Times.
Tomorrow’s paper will certainly be filled with front page headlines about the Spitzer imbroglio, but all of that content will also be online as well. In short, the print edition will be virtually irrelevant for coverage of this fast developing story. But the Times has demonstrated terrific growth as a news service by adapting and providing a full plate of coverage on their site.
If Spitzer formerly resigns at 3AM, well past the deadline for the Times final print edition, it will still be the lead story online. Its no longer all the news that’s fit to print — its now all the news that’s fit to post.
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