nytimes.com Design Director Q&A

This is an interesting installment in the New York Times' "Talk to the Newsroom" series -- a question and answer session with Khoi Vinh, Design Director.

In the discussion, he notes:

Over the past two-plus years, as The Times newsroom has embraced blogging with tremendous alacrity, we've created over 150 blogs, and over a third of those remain active today.

This actually goes back to my first post. That is HUGE number of blogs!!! Way too many, in my opinion, and I think that the fact that only a third of them are still active is a testament to that. Granted, some may be blogs devoted to specific news events. For instance, I know Newsday had a Pope Blog to chronicle the recent papal visit. (Not sure how successful that was, but seems like kind of a silly idea to me.) The Times, though, had this special section, which I think is well-designed and works well.

Vinh also notes that they use Word Press to publish their blogs, not their custom content management system. It seems like it would be only a matter of time before blogging technology is built into their CMS.

Other interesting points from the Q&A:

• They prefer to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver
• They are focused on maintaining the 150-year-old brand identity of the Times, even in the online medium
• They recognize The Guardian as a competitor that uses design well