The New York Times Co.’s research and development group has some of the best views in their midtown skyscraper — 24 floors above the newsrooms, higher even than the executives’ suites. Developers in the core R&D group — with titles like “lead creative technologist” and, my favorite, “futurist-in-residence” — are charged by the brass 14 floors below them with anticipating how news will next be consumed.

Among their hunches: in the living room.

Josh and I visited the R&D group last week, and this week we’ll be running five videos showing how they’re looking at the future of news. Today we begin with design integration editor Nick Bilton, who runs through their thinking on e-reader devices, news consumption outside the web browser, and interactive advertising.

You’ll notice there’s a marketing or advertising component to nearly all of what the group is working on. While this is the first time much of the lab has been seen publicly, they’ve given similar tours to more than a hundred advertisers and agencies, Bilton told us. And keep in mind the company has an interest in appearing ahead of the curve to investors.

They drink better coffee in the R&D group, not the burnt stuff chugged by reporters on deadline. Maybe that’s because they have time to let the grinds brew: what they’re envisioning won’t reach anyone’s living room for at least two years — if at all.

Up there on the 28th floor, the group’s toys — e-readers torn apart, touchscreen displays, netbooks that bend in every direction — can feel a touch presumptuous for a company surviving debt payment to debt payment. It was just this winter when Michael Hirschorn loudly suggested in The Atlantic that the Times Co. could go out of business, “like, this May.” The Times will endure, in one form or another, and the R&D group is the beta version of the company’s future.

You’ll find the details of what Bilton and his colleagues are thinking about in each of the five videos, and I’ll address some of their key ideas as the week progresses. (Note: In today’s video, Bilton demos an Adobe AIR application that’s very similar to Times Reader 2.0, which is set for release this week.) There’s a full transcript of the video after the jump, and be sure to come back each day this week for more from our visit. Keep reading »

Here’s the second of our videos from inside the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., where they’re envisioning how news will be consumed in two to ten years. (You can catch up on the series here.) Some of the goodies you’ll notice: a Samsung tablet, an iPhone, a Sony Bravia TV, and an application called CustomTimes that they’ve developed to work on all three devices.

The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They’re not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption — like some sort of Kindle meets Chumby meets Minority Report. Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.

Nick Bilton, the group’s design integration editor who narrated yesterday’s video, and Michael Young, the lead creative technologist who stars in today’s installment, won a major hacking event in 2007 with their startup Shifd (pronounced “shift”), which is an attempt to achieve some of that cloud-like portability. And the same philosophy is evident in the way they’ve conceived CustomTimes (which, it should be noted, is more a proof of concept than a product on its way to the marketplace).

One term I didn’t hear in our visit to the R&D lab last week was “platform agnostic,” a concept once championed by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman to describe how the newspaper would offer its content on any medium desired by the audience, from e-readers to television.

That philosophy remains intact, I think, but the phrase’s meaning is worth some thought. One of the more pointed passages in Mark Bowden’s recent Vanity Fair profile of Sulzberger was a quote from Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:

When I first heard Arthur talk about being platform agnostic, I knew he was trying to suggest that he was not stuck in a newspaper mind-set. But I thought there were two problems with that language. One is, agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure what they believe in. That’s the first problem. And the second problem is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You actually have to choose which platform you work on first, which one comes first. [...] Platform agnostic means that all the online companies are going to zoom past you, because they’re going to exploit that technology while you’re sitting there thinking, Well, we don’t care which platform we put it on. You need to exploit the technology of each platform. You need to be, in fact, not platform agnostic but platform orthodox.

There’s no doubt that the R&D group — and probably Sulzberger, too — agrees with Rosentiel’s point. (In tomorrow’s video, you’ll see one way that they’re attempting to repackage multimedia content for different platforms.) But I think “platform orthodox” is a useful perspective from which to assess their work: How well does CustomTimes prepare for our gadget-juggling future?

A full transcript of today’s video is after the jump. Keep reading »

In a corner of the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., they’ve prototyped a living room of the future. It’s not as whizbang awesome as you might hope — a lamp glows red or green depending on how the markets are doing — but it does feel like a reasonable conception of Living Room 2.0. Their major bet: as Internet-enabled televisions become more common, people will increasingly choose to consume web material on those huge, high-definition screens.

That wouldn’t, on its face, be an advantageous development for the Times, which produces the vast majority of its content in longform text you’d never consider reading on TV. But as Alexis Lloyd, a creative technologist in the R&D group, explains in today’s video, it may be possible to shift gears in the living room and emphasize the newspaper’s multimedia content. She demonstrates the concept with “Choking on Growth,” a major series on environmental damage in China from 2007.

This is the third in our weeklong series of videos from the R&D group, and it may be the one that’s easiest to imagine coming to pass. Laptop and desktop computers are already commonplace in the living room, Boxee is a huge hit, and Apple keeps plugging away at converging TV and the Internet. (On Oxygen’s The Bad Girls Club, the cast members check their email on a television in the living room. QED.)

Still, reimagining The New York Times in HDTV is a challenging leap. (You might recall the Times Co. made an unsuccessful foray into television with the Discovery Channel earlier this decade.) The newspaper produces a ton of multimedia content — certainly more than its competitors — but a satisfactory living-room experience would require video on a scale the Times isn’t yet producing. That’s why they call it the future.

You’ll see more of the R&D group’s living room in tomorrow’s video (yesterday’s was also shot in there). After the jump, you’ll find a mock-up by design integration editor Nick Bilton, which adds a projector but is otherwise pretty faithful to the actual room. And below that, there a transcript of today’s video. Keep reading »

We’re back in Living Room 2.0 at The New York Times Co. today for their research and development group’s vision of how news will fit into the armchair experience of the future. Ted Roden, a creative technologist in the group, describes two applications for Times content that might work well on your television or other large screens.

The commuter app is a mashup of publicly available traffic cameras, Google Maps, and location-specific content from the Times. Laying out news on a map is a tired concept that rarely lives up to its promise, but this app points to what feels like a truly effective use of geocoded articles and blog posts: informing me of what stands between my current location and my destination. In his keynote address at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference, design integration editor Nick Bilton discussed some other promising uses of geocoded news.

Roden also demonstrates what RSS feeds, Twitter, and other lifestreams might look like in the living room. The concept seems poised to go mainstream this year or next with Yahoo’s widgets for web-enabled televisions, though who knows if people really want their friends’ tweets to share the screen with Lost. (There’s evidence they do.)

It’s important to note that the R&D group doesn’t expect people will mount four screens on the wall of their living room, awesome as that would be. Their best guess is that consumers will segment their widescreen TVs in the style of cable news channels. A lot of innovation will be required to make that a pleasant experience. My living room is a two-screen operation — three, if you count a picture frame that could be repurposed to display the latest New York Times photography — and it works pretty well, even if I can’t yet flick a Mark Bittman video over to my television.

This is the fourth installment of our five-part series on the Times R&D group. Tomorrow we’ll conclude with their stabs at the future of advertising. A transcript of today’s video is after the jump. Keep reading »

Our tour of The New York Times Co.’s research and development lab, which concludes with today’s video, represents the first time many of their projects have been seen in the wild. But before we got in there, similar tours had been given to more than 150 advertisers. The company, of course, has a huge stake in the next generation of marketing, which appears as uncertain as the future of news.

Some of the R&D group’s advertising innovations include: RFID chips that connect print ads to more dynamic content on the web, ads that can shift from one screen to another, ads that are linked to what friends are chatting about online, and targeted advertising of all sorts. They also developed the new, more-prominent, advertising units that have been adopted by members of the Online Publishers Association. Those ads are scheduled to roll out in June on major sites like the Times, ESPN, and CBS.

If the news industry’s paradox is declining revenues amid unprecedented popularity of its content, advertisers face the opposite problem: in the midst of record spending, there’s increasing evidence that their work is largely ignored. And while the fate of advertising is not necessarily tied up with the fate of news, the opposite is certainly true, so it’s no surprise that much of the R&D group’s work is focused on this area.

Loyal viewers of our first four videos from the R&D lab will notice that I’ve repurposed some footage for today’s installment, but most of it is new. And as always, a full transcript of the video is after the jump. Keep reading »