Markets

New York Times' TimesPeople Still Not Full of Times People

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: April 7, 2009 / 12:35 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Back in October, for another one of my writing gigs, I wrote about TimesPeople, the New York Times' Twitter-like social networking tool that launched at nytimes.com last September. At the time, I wrote that as worthy an experiment as it is for the Times to give its readers a community, there was one problem: very few real TimesPeople -- as in reporters and executives at the Times -- were participating, executive editor Bill Keller and senior vp/digital operations Martin Nisenholtz excepted.

But that was six months ago. Surely buy-in would be much better now, right? Unfortunately, no. This morning I did a search within TimesPeople to see if ten prominent people at the company were members. Here's a scorecard:

Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert: No. (I also looked under Robert Herbert.)
Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd: Yes. (She was not a member last time I searched for her.)
New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.: No. (I looked under several variations on his name.)
Film critic A.O. Scott: No.
Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof: No.
Reporter William J. Broad: No.
Tech reporter Saul Hansell: Yes.
Tech reporter John Markoff: Yes.
Arts reporter Robin Pogrebin: No.
TV reporter Bill Carter: No.

All told, that's seven nos and three yeses, with two of the three being tech reporters Hansell and Markoff. Would greater participation by the reporting staff turn the Times' fortunes around? No. But there's something amiss when your company is being transformed by digital technologies and yet the staff only minimally participates in its company's own, consumer-facing digital community, agreed?