'New York Times' Prunes Some of Its Blogs

By: E&P Staff The New York Times is culling some of its blogs, cutting a few and combining others, reports Zachary M. Seward at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

The Carpetbagger and TV Decoder, in one cited example, will role up into one new blog called Media Decoder, a memo to staffers from New York Times' Jonathan Landman and Denise Warren revealed.


Part of the memo follows:

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For much of the last decade, becoming a digital platform has meant doing more -- adding features and the people who produce them. Think of multimedia and comments and blogs, new ways to navigate, new kinds of advertising.

When things don't work optimally, can we be more efficient? Can we pull the plug?

We can, and do. This week we're shutting down the blog component of The Medium, leaving the weekly Magazine column untouched. Bloggy thoughts about Web video will appear from time to time on ArtsBeat, the Culture blog that has gained a big following and is getting more attention from the Culture department.

T Magazine has redirected its energies in a different way. For more than a year, the T team labored to produce a weekly e-mail newsletter, Up to the Moment. It didn't produce enough benefit to justify the work, so in its place there's a new Sunday Styles feature based on The Moment blog. We'll see if the print feature does a better job of drawing online attention to T and The Moment than the newsletter did.

Two media blogs have become one. TV Decoder and Carpetbagger are now Media Decoder, with contributions from the media staff in LA, New York and beyond. We'll see if a one-stop destination for media news and analysis from The Times is our best mechanism for competing with trade-oriented blogs and Web sites.

The same premise explains why a new column from the Magazine will have its online home in the Well blog. It's Phys Ed, which looks at the science behind fitness and exercise. The challenge was to develop a community around something that appears online just once a week. Why not associate it with similar journalism that already has an online audience? The folks at Well welcomed Phys Ed to their midst.

Fewer freestanding features; more impact.