The New York Times | eDesiderata

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Overview

The New York Times is a global media company dedicated to creating on-the-ground, expert and deeply reported independent journalism. Established in 1851, The New York Times’s mission is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. In education, their goal is to help today’s students become tomorrow’s global citizens.

Through the Academic Site License program, institutions can provide their campus communities with unlimited digital access to one of two New York Times products:

New York Times News Access: Provides institutional access to NYTimes.com and the New York Times News App
New York Times | All Access: Provides institutional access to New York Times News plus New York Times Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and The Athletic, including all websites and apps.

Whether as a standalone product or part of New York Times | All Access, New York Times brings together breaking stories, diverse perspectives, and reporting on nearly every topic and area of interest, including business, technology, climate change and science, the arts and culture, health, world news, and more.

Formats of news coverage include multimedia articles, live feeds, videos, audio, graphics, newsletters and more. Content such as video, data infographics, and 3D interactives are only available directly via NYTimes.com and The NYT News App and not through aggregators or databases. The New York Times Live briefing has also become a critical resource for readers as they work to stay informed on breaking news and the biggest stories of our lifetime. Live feeds are only available in the report in its native format, whether at NYTimes.com or the NYT News App. An increasing number of our news stories now contain visual and interactive. The New York Times also publishes translations of select articles in Spanish language and Chinese language editions.

Through the Academic Site License program, New York Times access includes historical archive content dating back to 1851, available via search directly on NYTimes.com/search, and through TimesMachine, a browser-based and fully searchable digital replica of all issues from 1851 to 2002, exclusively available to subscribers.

In addition to New York Times News, New York Times | All Access can service as a holistic resource for both inside and outside of the classroom to drive literacy, promote critical thinking, support health and wellbeing, and foster a sense of community amongst students.

Here are a few key details on all New York Times products included within New York Times | All Access :

News: Global reporting, analysis, cultural commentary and more to deepen students’ understanding of the world.
Games: From The Crossword to Wordle and Spelling Bee — word, visual and number games that build problem-solving skills, provide a mental break, and delight solvers.
Cooking: A digital cookbook and cooking guide alike to support students’ total wellness and kitchen confidence, deliciously.
Wirecutter: Independent product recommendations and reviews based on real-world testing to help students choose products confidently and feel empowered as consumers.
The Athletic: In-depth, personalized sports coverage that can foster media literacy on a subject students are passionate about.

The Times has been a supporter of education and readership programs since 1932, and since establishing an academic site license and digital education subscription program in 2013, millions of students from nearly 3,000 educational institutions all over the world have access to NewYork Times journalism.

CRL has negotiated the terms for subscription under the academic site license for CRL member libraries. Similar terms are also available to members of U.S. consortia affiliated with CRL.

Provider

New York Times Company

Retrospective Content and Archiving

The online archive of nytimes.com includes both the articles and the multimedia content that has, since 1996, accompanied them. Material from more recent years also includes Times blogs, such as the business blog DealBook. The online archive portion of the nytimes.com site includes most materials produced for the online edition by staff and freelance reporters and photographers. It does not include certain syndicated articles supplied by providers such as the Associated Press and other wire services, or materials provided by “ad servers.” After the New York Times Co. vs. Tasini Supreme Court ruling (2001), the Times retrospectively redacted from its online archive materials by freelance and contract contributors for which it had no clear electronic distribution rights. (Since Tasini, the Times has revised contributor agreements to permit re-use of content in all forms of publication.)

As of October 2014, the online archive also incorporates the text of articles published in the print edition from its beginning in 1851, more than 13 million articles total searchable via https://www.nytimes.com/search/. The 1851 through 1980 portion of the archive includes 46,595 issues that span 2,456,075 printed pages and contain 11,298,320 articles. Pre-1981 material is largely from digitally scanned microfilm of the print edition, available either in full-text or partial articles (optical character recognition may introduce transcription errors). Partial articles include an excerpt of the article and a link to TimesMachine where subscribers can view the entire article in its original form. Full-text versions are available for all articles published after 1980.

Other sources

While the entire scope of nytimes.com content is only available in the online edition, several commercially available databases do include article and page-image content from the print edition of the New York Times. In the Appendix to this review, "New York Times and New York Times Digital: Comparing Content Across Platforms," Dorothy Carner compares content available at the nytimes.com site with the contents of various aggregator databases.

ProQuest Newsstream - Provides searchable access to abstracts and full text of Times articles from June 1, 1980 to the present. No photographs or multimedia content.
Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) - Articles June 1, 1980 to the present.
Factiva - Articles June 1, 1980 to the present.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers - Full-text searchable page-images of the Times published edition from 1851-2015*.
ProQuest Recent Newspapers (formerly ProQuest Digital Microfilm) - Searchable page images of print edition, covering 2008-recent (3 month embargo on current editions).

Selected text content from the Times can also be found in databases from EBSCO, Gale (Academic OneFile), and Dialog Newsroom (from ProQuest).

Some nytimes.com content also has been captured by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but Wayback Machine coverage prior to 2012 is limited, and most dynamically generated and multimedia nytimes.com content is not captured at all. (See analysis of retrospective coverage of TheTimes in CRL's review of the Wayback Machine.)

2020 Update

The New York Times reports that access to New York Times InEducation is included in the academic site license. In addition, daily limits to access articles published during the years 1923-1980 have been removed by the New York Times.

Delivery

The Times online site retains the traditional newspaper multi-column layout, but is richly embedded with links to individual articles and features. Some articles are appear in various sections, such as "World", "N.Y.", "Arts", as well as on the main landing page. The website also features advertisements at the top, bottom and middle of the page.

There is a basic search function on the website, enabling users to search digital content by keyword. The search bar is on the upper left side of every page within the NYT website. Search results can be sorted by: Relevance, and Newest or Oldest articles and can be filtered by date range. Content can also be browsed by content category such as: World, U.S., Politics, etc. or by subject area, e.g. Arts, Style, Food. The various categories can be selected from the menu bar accessible on the upper left side of webpages.

Subscribed users can engage in discussions on the NYT website through the commenting tool. The Comments panel is initially hidden when a user lands on an article webpage but can be exposed by selecting the comment icon at the upper right side of the screen. When exposed, the Comments window enables users to view all existing comments and discussion as well as to submit their own. Users can save articles by clicking the ribbon icon at the upper right side of the screen. Once saved, users can revisit the article via the "Reading List" associated with their account.

The mobile site is a single-column format, with a menu of sections and a search feature. In recent years the site has increasingly incorporated multimedia content in its features and reporting, utilizing extensive still photography, datasets, animated information graphics, and video. Subscribed users have unlimited articles on any device.

Methods of Access:

In 2011, the Times implemented a subscription paywall for NYTimes.com content, offering free access to a limited 10 articles per month and charging non-subscribers for access beyond that number (print subscribers received free digital access).

The content is available through web browsers as well as mobile phone apps (for androids and iPhones) and tablet apps. The Mobile apps allow users to save articles across all devices and customize sections lists. The addition of tablet access on the Academic Site License plan now makes the subscription "All Digital Access."

Under the Academic Site License users must each register for an academic pass with The Times individually, using a valid campus email address, or from within the subscribing institution's IP range. Once an academic pass is obtained, users have unlimited access in any location via a web browser, mobile phone apps, and tablet apps.

Depending on the option chosen by the institution at the time they sign up for the academic site license, an academic pass can last up to 180 days or 364 days after a faculty or staff member registers for it. Once a pass expires, users need to register for a new pass and re-authenticate via a valid email domain or within the institution's IP range. Beginning in 2017, students registering for their academic pass are being asked to provide their anticipated graduation date. Students will not have to re-authenticate for a new pass until that date.

2021 Update to academic passes for faculty:

As of April 2021, The NYT is extending their academic passes for faculty from the current 1-year passes to 4-year passes. Therefore, re-authentication will not be required until 4 years from the day the faculty member retrieves their pass. Academic passes will remain active so long as the subscribing institution continues its NYTimes.com subscription.

This update will go into effect immediately for new subscribers and subscribers that have joined since November 2020. The NYT is reviewing all existing site license accounts to transition their accounts to the upgraded pass system.

Permitted Uses:

The uses of nytimes.com content permitted by the publishers are described in a set of "Help" pages on the web site. http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/permissions/permissions.html .
A special set of guidelines on linking to nytimes.com content is posted at: http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/linking/linking.html.
General terms of service: http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/terms/terms-of-service.html

Management of Times Digital Content:

As of 2019, the content management system used at The Times was a "homegrown" digital and print system called Scoop. According to The Times:

Scoop was initially designed and developed in 2008 in close partnership with the newsroom. Unlike many commercial systems, Scoop does not render our website or provide community tools to our readers. Rather, it is a system for managing content and publishing data so that other applications can render the content across our platforms. This separation of functions gives development teams at The Times the freedom to build solutions on top of that data independently, allowing us to move faster than if Scoop were one monolithic system. For example, our commenting platform and recommendations engine integrate with Scoop but remain separate applications.. . . our journalists can create articles in Scoop and publish to web and mobile first before sending them to CCI for the print newspaper. We call this change “Digital First” — a multiyear project that will make Scoop the primary CMS for both print and digital by 2015.

The Times has also developed and employed a homegrown text editor in order to meet the specific needs of the publication. The text editor is built on the foundation of ProseMirror, an open-source JavaScript toolkit for building rich-text editors. ProseMirror represents documents using its own non-HTML tree-shaped data structure that describes the structure of the text in terms of paragraphs, headings, lists, links and more. According to the publisher, as of 2018 The Times uses a single responsive article for both mobile and desktop on the web, and uses a subset of the same code to render stories in the apps and the content management system.

TimesMachine

Subscribed users are granted access to NYT archival content via the TimesMachine (more information on the The Times archives in the "Collection Content" section above). The TimesMachine provides access to page scans of The New York Times issues published between 1851 and 2002.

TimesMachine includes PDF versions of articles from 1851-1980, articles published after 1980 are available only in full-text form and not as PDFs. Subscribers can download up to 100 PDFs per month. The archives are full text searchable and can be browsed by date and search events can be limited by date range. Archival articles are indexed by subject categories including: People, Organizations, Creative Works, Places and Descriptions. By selecting an index term, the user is taken to the corresponding article and page section where that term can be found.

TimesMachine is currently available via a web browser, and not in the NYT app. Users are able to access TimesMachine via a mobile device's web browser, but page may load different as it was designed for use on a PC or laptop web browser.

Terms

In September 2013, the Times announced availability of an Academic Site License Program for educational institutions. Pricing is based on billable user count, which is the number of student FTE plus faculty headcount (both part time and full time faculty), to be covered by an institution's subscription.

As mentioned above, the license is available in three options:

Option 1. Group Subscription: An institution can enroll a small subset of its entire student/staff/faculty population. The institution supplies a list of the names, email addresses, and status of all individuals to be included in the subscription, and updates the list with the Times as names and addresses change. This is the most customizable option. Option 1 is used only for academic departments or courses (not selected individual users).

Option 2. Email Domain: This option covers the entire faculty, staff, and student population covered by the institution’s selected email domains (such as law.institution.edu), and possibly including the entire domain range. The institution provides the email domain information, which is used to authenticate eligible users. Users then register themselves, providing the Times their names and school (.edu) email addresses. Once registered, users can access New York Times from any location.

Option 3. IP Range + EZ Proxy: This option covers the entire faculty, staff, and student population. Eligible users are authenticated by subscribing institution IP address ranges, rather than by email domain. Each user must first register with the Times through a registered institutional IP address, providing the Times with their name and email address. Once registered, users can access NYT from any location.

The proposed terms include faculty and students in a subscribing library's FTE count, an unusual condition for database licensing to libraries.

CRL member conference calls in October 2013 and February 2014 surfaced a number of questions about the product and about the terms proposed, including subscription price, inclusion of faculty and staff in FTE calculations, means of authenticating users, and the provisions for archiving nytimes.com content and its interoperability with Times content in databases offered by ProQuest, Factiva, and others. These and other concerns, as well as responses from the Times, are outlined in a summary of call notes and updates.

Continuing discussions between CRL and The New York Times, to address and resolve these issues continue. The terms of a new negotiated offer were posted on April 25, 2018 and are accessible by CRL libraries under CRL Offers and Activity.

Subscription periods now available via the academic site license are January 1-December 31 or July 1-June 30. For institutions signing on to other posted entry dates, fees will be pro-rated for the partial year. Subscribing institutions must give CRL/NYT 60 days’ notice for cancellation of the site license.

Governing Law

The agreement between CRL and the NYT is governed by the laws of the State of New York and is the venue for disputes.

The nytimes.com Terms of Service states:

11.1 These Terms of Service have been made and shall be construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the United States of America and the State of New York as an agreement wholly performed therein without regard to their conflict of law provisions and the United Nations Conventions on Contracts (if applicable).

Strengths and Weaknesses

As noted by Dorothy Carner in the Appendix to this review ("Comparing Content Across Platforms"), the value of the New York Times online products extends much farther than access to news. Its reporting on the arts, politics, health, business, and finance, to name a few, is regarded as some of the highest quality information available from a news organization. For the academic market, the Times provides source material for a wide range of disciplines: the arts and humanities, social sciences, business and finance, and the life and health sciences.

Content is not downloadable, although the text of articles can be printed and emailed; and the URLs assigned to articles and multimedia content by the Times seem to be relatively fixed and stable, and are thus likely to support persistent citation. This is less true of content provided to the site by syndicates, like the interactive databases that track the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 indexes over time, provided by Thomson Reuters. That content does not sit on servers controlled by the Times, but rather is licensed by the publisher for inclusion in the site.

Nytimes.com is highly searchable. The site is "powered" by Google custom search and relies on their crawls of the site. Times also has an internal search capability called "ADD." According to the Times, ADD "powers article lists on our topic pages and a number of other search-related internal services." To enhance discoverability Times has a rigorous annotation regime. Editors and producers apply metadata to articles in the Times content management system using a vocabulary developed by the publisher's "digital taxonomists." The tagging is then double-checked by Times indexing staff on a 24-hour delay.

While the publisher's platform offers rich, dynamic content, the extent to which this content will remain intact and functional for the long term is an open question. Because Times publishing decisions are driven in part by the quest for revenue, the extent to which the priorities thus established will align with the interests of historians, social scientists, and other academic researchers is not clear.

Reviewers

Center for Research Libraries

Contributors

University of Missouri

Dorothy Carner - Head, Journalism Libraries

Endnotes

¹The New York Times Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times (accessed 5/28/2019).

²“Future of the Times,” (articles by Michael Kinsley, Marc Tracy, and others) The New Republic August 19, 2013 https://newrepublic.com/tags/future-of-the-times (accessed 5/28/2019).

³Ken Doctor, "The Newsonomics of The New York Times' Paywalls 2.0," Nieman Journalism Lab, November 21, 2013 http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/the-newsonomics-of-the-new-york-times-paywalls-2-0/ (accessed 12/10/13).

⁴Joshua Benton, "The Leaked New York Times Innovation Report is One of the Key Documents of this Media Age," Nieman Journalism Lab, May 15, 2014 https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/ (accessed 5/28/2019).

⁵ "Our Path Forward" (October 2015) https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2018/12/Our-Path-Forward.pdf (accessed 5/23/2019). For additional insights into NYT's growth strategy, see: "Journalism That Stands Apart: the Report of the 2020 Group" (January 2017). https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html (accessed 5/23/2019)

⁶New York Times Company, "2017 Annual Report" https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Final-2017-Annual-Report.pdf (accessed 5/23/2019)

Appendix

Attachments

New York Times and New York Times Digital: Comparing Content Across Platforms (9.43 MB)

Dorothy Carner, Head of the Journalism Libraries at the University of Missouri, Columbia, produced the attached analysis of the New York Times online, comparing news content appearing in the online edition on October 8, 2013 with New York Times content appearing in the print edition and in LexisNexis and Factiva. Carner also reports on the Times current digital business plan and prospects.

As part of the Academic Site License Program, The New York Times has created a Marketing Guidebook, which includes key messaging and digital graphic assets to help schools promote the program to their students and faculty. This has been shared with all new accounts and all existing account holders. In addition, The New York Times has created a series of video tutorials on activating Domain and IP/proxy authentication to assist subscribers with setting up access. These videos can be downloaded via Dropbox (linked) and posted on library resource pages or other school digital websites and properties.

Copies of the NYT Order Form and Participant Agreement with CRL have been uploaded to provide interested institutions with an example of the paperwork requested by the NYT and CRL for subscription orders.

Community Ratings

Content scope and completeness

Cost and price-structure

Platform and user interface