The Times has also experimented in open-source document journalism, social recommendation, global photo crowdsourcing, online video, a continually updated news feed, and news games.

The Times was relatively late to implement blogging, launching its first blogs in 2005. Since then, though, it has become a leader among newspapers in blogging, with blogs like Bits, DealBook, ArtsBeat, and FiveThirtyEight (which the Times acquired in 2010) among the most popular in their fields. The Times also moved into hyperlocal blogging in early 2009, focusing on neighborhoods in Brooklyn and northern New Jersey. By 2010, however, it had scrapped the effort, handing responsibility for the Brooklyn neighborhoods to CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and for the New Jersey areas to the independent hyperlocal site Baristanet. In February of 2010, the paper announced a partnership with New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to create the neighborhood site Local East Village.

Despite its relatively forward-thinking approach to social media, the Times has occasionally been criticized for a lack of external links in its online stories, as well as for a general insularity in its news coverage. Some of its blogs, though, have also been praised for their link journalism.

After concerns about staff members tweeting internal information, the Times hired Jennifer Preston as its first social media editor in May 2009. (The Times has also conducted extensive Facebook-centered marketing campaigns.) In December of 2010, it announced that it would be folding responsibility for its social media strategy into an expanded Interactive News division under Pilhofer. (Preston returned to reporting in the shift, and currently covers the interplay between politics and social media for the paper.) In early 2011, Times journalists Lexi Mainland and Liz Heron took over social media editor responsibilities at the paper. For a week in May 2011, the team experimented with fully human — not automated — updating of @nytimes, the paper’s primary Twitter feed. The Times has also been measured as the top news organization on Google+ in popularity and user engagement.

The Times has been among the early adopters of e-reader and tablet technologies. It has a paid Kindle edition with at least 30,000 subscribers. In 2010, it introduced a free iPad app, Editors’ Choice, that had intentionally limited features. The app was represented onstage at the iPad’s launch, and its partnership with Apple drew some concerns about Apple’s control over content. The Times has also released a location-based city guide iPhone app called The Scoop, a marathon-training app, a real estate app, and an English instruction app. The paper currently offers its content across seven mobile platforms.

Additionally, the Times has been an early leader in online video. Beyond TimesCast, the paper has also experimented with producing more fully-reported video content. (The paper currently produces more than a hundred videos each month for its website and other digital platforms.) In May 2011, the Times announced that it would begin experimenting with user-generated wedding announcement videos as a supplement to its weekly Vows column. Later that month, the paper announced the launch of a weekly TV show, NYTV, a New York City-centric lifestyle show featuring videos produced by Times journalists.

The Times also experiments with more explicitly technological innovation. The paper’s Research and Development Group works on transitioning news onto new devices, focused on areas like touch-screen technology, augmented reality, television screens, and advertising. In 2010, the Times announced the development of a beta site for its experiments — “a place to test products without disrupting the main site.” In mid-2011, it opened the site, beta620, to the public.

Paid content online

The Times’ first major foray into paid online content came in 2005 with the launch of TimesSelect, which charged readers for access to some of the newspapers’ columnists and features. TimesSelect ultimately gained about 227,000 subscribers and generated $10 million per year in revenue, but it was ended in 2007 after subscriber growth had slowed. The Times has also experimented with offline revenue streams, including a wine club, adult-education classes, and branded pre-movie cinema shows.

In January 2010, the Times announced it would begin charging for its website in 2011, adopting a metered model based on the Financial Times’ site that would include the Times’ blogs. The Times spent a reported $25 million developing the plan.

In March 2011 the Times unveiled its digital subscription plan, which offered three tiers of access for readers: smartphone, tablet, or an all-access package, with prices ranging from $15-$35 per four week period. (All packages include access to nytimes.com.) Under the plan, nonsubscribers are able to view 10 articles per month  (originally 20) before being asked to subscribe to the Times. Non-subscribers who come to the Times through a social media or search link are not asked to subscribe, but pieces they read count toward their 10-article limits.

Reaction to the Times’ pay plan was mixed, with some applauding the Times for creating a system to pay for news online, while others wondered whether the plan had too many flaws. The future of the plan was also called into question after several methods of subverting the digital subscription plan were uncovered. Three months after the plan launched, the Times reported 227,000 paid subscribers; that number grew to 454,000 after a year. Six months after launch, the Times reported that 12 percent of its online subscriptions were international and announced a planned paywall at the International Herald Tribune. The paper also reported a slight increase in its number of annual visitors in the fall of 2011.

Collaboration

The Times has incorporated several popular blogs into its site. In addition to political statistics blog FiveThirtyEight, the paper also hosted the economics blog Freakonomics until January of 2011. In 2007, the paper also hired the TVNewser blogger Brian Stelter as a media reporter.

The Times has collaborated with Google on at least two major projects: its Fast Flip news browser and its Living Stories project, which went open-source in early 2010. The paper has also partnered with the professional social network LinkedIn to put its business news on that site.

The Times receives regular local content from the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative for a Chicago edition as well as from the nonprofit Bay Citizen for a San Francisco Bay Area edition. (The Times is planning local editions in a total of 10 to 15 cities.) The paper also publishes material from The Texas Tribune. In 2009, the paper ran a story on the Pacific garbage patch financed by the crowdfunding site Spot.Us. And the Times Magazine has collaborated with ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative-journalism organization, to produce a Pulitzer-winning story on abuses in a New Orleans hospital.

The Times also worked with the startup incubator Betaworks to produce News.me, a personalized news aggregator that launched in April 2011.

Ownership

The Times was founded in 1851 and was bought in 1896 by Adolph Ochs. The paper is currently owned by the publicly traded New York Times Co., which is still run by Ochs’ descendants in the Sulzberger family.

The Times Co. owns the online content network About.com as well as the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune. The Times folded the Herald Tribune’s website into its main site with a global edition in 2009. The Times Co. sold its 16-newspaper Regional Media Group to the Halifax Media Group in early 2012. The Times also published an award-winning but money-losing quarterly sports magazine called Play from 2006 through 2008.

The Times Co. struggled financially during the late 2000s, suffering under advertising declines and $1 billion in debt. It teetered in and out of profitability, and in 2009 took a $250 million loan from Mexican investor Carlos Slim Helú.

After resisting layoffs for years, the Times has recently made significant staff cuts. The Times currently has a newsroom staff of more than 1,100 — under the editorship, as of early June 2011, of Jill Abramson.

Video:

The Nieman Journalism Lab’s visit to the Times’ R&D group

New York Times R&D Group: Newspaper 2.0 from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The trailer to Page One, the 2011 documentary about the Times’ media desk