I love the New York Times. I am in the tank for the New York Times. I am so in the tank for the New York Times that I’ve got an invisible NYT wetsuit tattooed to my body.
Today there was a 6-column headline in the print version of the New York Times delivered to our house, and I thought this would be a good time to do an index of the projects I have done with, about, and/ or for the best newspaper in world history.
Also: I want to do a three-month project of some sort for the NYT, so please hire me, thx.
Front Sections with Six-Column Headlines
Six-column headlines in the New York Times are rare. The New York Times does not yell at you. The New York Times does not get caught up in the moment. The New York Times can be trusted to let you know when something is a big fucking deal.
The way they do that is by publishing a headline that stretches from one end of the newspaper to the other. That’s it. That’s how you know.
So in the early 90s, I started collecting every front section. The entire section, not just the front page, of every New York Times that had a six column headline.
I have ~145 of them, and counting. The collection covers the Gulf War, the fall of the Soviet Union, 9/11, presidential elections, Supreme Court vacancies, papal vacancies, and so on.
John F. Burns archive
I was obsessed with the reporting John F. Burns. He was the first to tell me what the Taliban was, he was everywhere in Baghdad during the first Gulf War (the one we won). He was the first thing I read during the Bosnian war.
This was the early 2000s. I wanted everyone to feel the same way I did about John F. Burns, but not everyone had an NYT subscription.
The NYT had a policy at the time of honoring links from blogs without requiring a login. I described the archive this way:
This is an archive of links to John F. Burns articles on the New York Times website. These links (click on the title of any article) do not require registration on the NYT site and are impervious to linkrot.
In total, I copy/pasted 180 of his articles written from 1997 to 2005 into a Blogger blog.
Copy/ pasting is sort of my thing, it seems.
Googobits
In 2002 I developed a methodology of publishing called, “hypertext enjambment“, which is a way to add more meaning and context to items on the World Wide Web using alt tags, title tags, Google searches, and hyperlinks in nontraditional ways. Here’s a good overview of what that is and how I’ve deployed it over the years.
My longest experiment in hypertext enjambment was with GoogObits, “Obituaries and essays augmented by Google seaches. There is a lot to learn from the dead”. It was first a Salon blog, starting in 2002.
The source for every Googobit was the NYT — I copy/pasted the best and most interesting obituaries from there into my blog and went to town with annotations.
Software development training
I was an internet consultant in 2003, just when a lot of people working on the Web were getting our feet back under us after the devastating Dot Bomb crash.
One of the ways that I was able to keep my job when others were fired is because I was willing to become more technical and learn new things.
One of the things I learned was Rational Unified Process (“RUP”), a software development process from IBM. Rational is not the greatest way to do things– it is widely considered to be waterfall and kind of silly.
I was not a true believer of RUP, but what I appreciated about it was that it allowed you to think about how people use systems in structured ways.
One of the classic exercises in RUP was the consideration of the ATM experience. User does something, system responds. User does something, system responds. This was a great focus for me. I used that a lot in my classes, which I delivered to Web engineers in the New York Times IT team. I added a lot more bootleg content around listening to users and making adjustments to the plan.
The cool thing about that time is that the New York Times used to own a series of regional newspapers (New York Times Regional Media Group– “Night Train” for short). This meant I did training at the Boston Globe as well as in Tampa Bay. It was glorious. I got to go into the boardroom of the New York Times in their old building in Times Square. The frisson.
Anonymity clauses
After the 2003 Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times implemented a new policy for the proper granting of anonymity to sources.
One of the requirements was that the reason for granting anonymity had to be explained in the text of the article.
As an editorial matter, this meant that the reason for anonymity was often accompanied by a predictable set of phrase (“asked for anonymity”, “to be named”, etc. Such predictable and well-formed text meant that I could do a search for it using RSS and copy / pasted (I’m a copy/paste artist maybe?) items.
I considered it a derivative work, an art that I did on the internet. That’s why the first tweet I ever made (and the 49,024 tweet ever) was simply the phrase “making art”.
Here’s seven pages of “because clauses”.
At some point I saved a slew of the phrases here in this blog post. There’s some good stuff in there.
Condition of
After a while I got connected with some developers and we made a Twitter bot. I created a model for the system to analyze NYT articles That didn’t really go anywhere. Also, the standards for granting anonymity seemed to be changing, so I just sort of left it alone.
Here’s something of a specification I wrote for the developers. Frankly the hand-crafted attitude was pretty much the thing itself. Lots of times more technology ruins things.
What Pictures Mean
This is a pretty simple, long-term project that involves scissors and paper. I cut out images from the New York Times and write down what they mean, in the clearest most concise language I can find to express the intensity of each.
Here’s a Twitter thread I did earlier this week of some of the pieces:
All hail the New York Times, and let the universe hook me up with more.