The New York Times is Blogospheric

Posted on December 8, 2005

It was only a matter of time before the New York Times became active in the blogosphere. The Times has launched an entertainment blog called Carpetbagger and have a real estate blog and a few others planned. The new blog has a designated URL, permalinks and comments. L.A. Observed has a memo from the Times explaining the new blog launches.

We're blogospheric.

Yesterday we launched a genuine, authentic, by-the-book New York Times blog. It's Carpetbagger, by David Carr. It's part of a new movie-awards-season web site called Red Carpet, which includes a bunch of things you won't see in the newspaper, like weekly columns by Joyce Wadler and Caryn James. You'll see a refer on today's front page, which I boldly, if ignorantly, declare to be our first-ever page-1 refer to a web-only feature. At the very least, it's our first-ever page 1 refer to a blog.

Within a few days, we'll put up a real estate blog by Damon Darlin and others. More blogs are in the works. Even more are at the idea stage. We've come late to blogging, obviously, though we've put toes in the water on a number of occasions, as when our movie critics sent running commentary from last year's Cannes film festival.

The mainstream media is starting to get the blogosphere. Corante's Get Real says the Times is getting sort of clueful. More media companies are launching blogs with unique URLs and permalinks. These are better than many of the initial MSM blog launches that lacked permalinks or only lasted for a short time.

MSNBC.com told us earlier this week that they have switched to a more weblog-centric model. This is likely to become the trend -- permalinks and direct URLs make it much more likely blogs will be linked to by other bloggers. Bloggers need to be able to link directly to a particular post.