I’m not a visual design expert, but when I went to the NYT home page (which I do rarely, I realize) to look at TimesSelect, which was introduced yesterday, my reactions were to the visual presentation. More on that below.
What is TimesSelect? Read the full details, including a well-presented comparison chart speaking well of the free NYTimes.com while still calling attention to the features of TimesSelect.
However, the larger point is revenue diversification. After a decade on the free web (albeit registration required), NYTimes is reasserting that content has value. Will they be successful? To be determined. Of course, this might be too grand a goal to lay on the NYT… maybe it’s just a smart revenue mix opportunity. However, part of being the country’s (the world’s?) leading newspaper means having your every move watched like the Kremlin of old. Those on the outside interpret each small move as a possible industry bellwether. That probably makes the Times a tough place to experiment… maybe that’s why About.com is a helpful separate entity?
My first impressions, starting at the home page, were… orange is now the color of money. The mark of premium content is an orange version of the site’s cursive capital T icon. 
Compared with the favicon, the TimesSelect icon looks cut off at the bottom? 
Again, I’m no designer, but why cut off the existing letter? The reversal of field (white cutout on an orange background) would have been enough for me. As to the color… beyond the icons next to the columnists, I noted three other uses of orange on the home page:
- Navigation arrows for Job Market, Real Estate, Autos… in other words, classifieds, where there is certainly money to be made, and NYTD is making some.
- A skyscraper (vertical ad banner) on the far right for TimesSelect, where I cropped the larger cut-off T.
- Vonage ads in the left-hand navigation of the page. Ouch. This is most certainly just a coincidence, and it happens all the time on all websites.
So orange = money. Fair enough. Hey, I work for a company whose corporate color is orange, so I’m predisposed to find it attractive.
Side note: Who gets to be a visual design critic? Anyone with eyes! Doesn’t mean the critic is an expert, but that’s why those pictures get to replace a lot of words.
As a legacy of my NewsTracker subscription, I have access to the TimesSelect material. The question will be whether in my normal reading patterns, I’ll find myself using/needing the service. I don’t follow the columnists, although I see that the sports columnists I do occasionally read are behind the wall, too. If I were still following the Yankees closely (where are you now, Craig Nettles?), I might care more.
Just to try the service, I clicked on the link on the home page to Just Sports Business as Usual If the Saints Go Marching Out, by Harvey Araton. The annoying part? Even though I was logged in (member bar at top right showed my username), I was not taken to the article, but rather the upsell page for TimesSelect (specific to the article). It wasn’t until I went to the Member Center, and logged in to check my Transaction History (yup, I’m a subscriber converted from News Tracker) and then returned to the home page and clicked again that I was able to read the article. If you pay money, that’s not a happy thing. I expect the folks at NYTimes.com will sort it out, unless it was a deliberate effort to make me re-login… in which case I should have gotten specific messaging recognizing that I was logged in and explaining the reason for the extra hurdle. This is all in Safari 1.3.1 on Mac OS X 10.3.9, in case that’s useful/pertinent.
I subscribe to a Times RSS feed for Tech; I depend on other people pointing to articles of interest for my other Times reading. That’s despite the fact that I deeply respect what the Times offers… but I have a print subscription to two newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal. I can’t keep up, so I’ll drop the WSJ when it expires, even if I can continue to use airline miles to keep the papers coming. The Chronicle… well, it’s a quick skim: front page, comics, sports, with occasional reads of John King for architecture. But I digress…
The point? I wouldn’t pay for the TimesSelect content right now, so the question is whether the services are strong enough. Services include: extra access to the archives, early access to the Sunday Times articles, Times File for bookmarking/saving NYT articles (and beyond, smart), multimedia (too early to put that stuff behind the wall, but maybe too early/small an audience to sell anyway), News Tracker (email alerts). As an early customer, News Tracker doesn’t have a lot of benefit you can’t find from free services, though perhaps it’s more convenient. So, I’d have to guess that the archive access is the true value in the mix… just hasn’t proven to be a need for me personally so far.
Update: I started this post this morning, and finished it this evening. Today, the New York Times Company announced August 2005 results, which were not super. Separately, but also today, the company announced some layoffs, or, more accurately, provided details on its earlier warnings about staff reductions. The timing of the TimesSelect introduction cannot be coincidental — better to have something innovative (or at least new) to talk about.
In closing: I want the Times to succeed, both as a reader and as a member of the media, albeit on the business/product side. Intelligent, timely, accurate information and analysis has value, so experiments in finding a new balance point for media businesses strike at the heart of what I care about, personally and professionally. I don’t know how TimesSelect will fare, but it’s a step to watch, if not follow.