|
Reliability: Do RSS search results match website's search results?
|
Inclusiveness: Does RSS offer non-staff & archived stories (if also come through website search)?
|
Key info: Does RSS give headline/summary, date, time, reporter?
|
| Timeliness: Are RSS stories as timely as those from website search? |
|
|
Excellent |
|
Very Good |
|
Acceptable |
|
Not Acceptable |
|
|
 |
Overall Score |
Reliability |
Inclusiveness |
Key Info |
Timeliness |
| 6. The New York Times
|
2 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
THE HEADLINES: Four RSS feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: International, Opinion, Times Select, and Multimedia. On average, the four RSS feeds returned about 30 percent of “today’s” stories that came up on the New York Times’ website. It is probable that using more RSS feeds would have returned a higher percentage of stories, but the chief disconnect between the website results and the RSS feeds was that the majority of the website search results were articles written by other news outlets (such as AP and Reuters) and the searches through the RSS feeds only returned staff-written stories. As a consequence, the results the feeds returned did not consistently match the articles (especially the most timely articles) found on the website. The search results via the RSS feeds remained very inconsistent whether a major story was searched for (i.e. “Iraq”) or a secondary story was searched for (i.e. “Sudan”). |
| Other Issues: |
 |
The RSS feeds only showed articles that were written by the Times staff. However, all of the articles written by the Times staff did not always come through the RSS feeds. Oftentimes, there were additional articles written by the Times staff, including top international stories on Iraq, that appeared on the website that did not come through the RSS feed. There were never articles that came through the RSS feeds from outside news outlets. |
|
The stories that came through the RSS feeds appeared to be relatively timely as they were from "today." But was difficult to determine any precise timing lags between the RSS feeds and the website because times were never posted on articles written by the New York Times staff, and these were the only articles that came through the RSS feeds. One could presume from the list of stories that came up on searches on the website that the New York Times staff-written stories were written earlier than stories that came up “higher” in the list. |
|
Parallel searches conducted on the Times’ website and through the feeds consistently brought up the same multimedia on both sites. |
|
Search results for the RSS feeds gave the articles’ headlines/summaries, but other information was only available after clicking through to the full article. Neither the website nor the RSS feeds gave the time that New York Times staff-written articles were posted, although wire service stories were time stamped. For example, wire stories from Reuters that did come up on the website search were time stamped—but that time was only visible once one had clicked through to the article. |
|
There were never any archived stories that came through the four main RSS feeds that were used. Secondary “regional” feeds did return archived stories. The New York Times website gives visitors the option to search for "today's" articles—that was the search method used for this study. Therefore, archived stories were never received. Interestingly, when searches were conducted late in the day, "future-dated” or “tomorrow’s” stories were returned. |
(Kristi Ellingsworth and Nicole Alberico ) |
|
| About The New York Times |
| Circulation/Audience |
| 1,103,600 daily; 1,637,700 Sunday – 2006 average |
| Online Access |
| Most NYT articles can be read free of charge and without logging in. Select articles, however (TimesSelect) require a NYT login and online subscription. These articles are primarily opinion and feature pieces. |
| Parent Company |
| The New York Times Company http://www.nytco.com/index.html |
| Other Relevant Ownership and Interests |
-The International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/
-The Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/
-15 other daily newspapers and 9 network affiliated TV stations http://www.nytco.com/company-othersites.html
|
| Parent Company Revenue |
| $3.3 Billion (2006) |
| |
|
|
