Slashdot Mirror
Domain: nymag.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to nymag.com.
Stories · 56
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NY Times To Charge For Online Content
Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight." -
The Coder Behind the Mortgage Meltdown
axjms writes "New York Magazine has a confessional/abdication from the man who wrote the software that turns mortgages into bonds and those nasty little things called CMOs. An interesting first-person account from a coder whose work reached far beyond what he or anyone could have anticipated." -
Saving Journalism With Flash and Java
An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?" -
The Fine Art of 'Boss Science'
BoredStiff writes "NYMag has up an article that explores Boss Science and the minds of American corporate leaders. In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it. Leadership research shows that subtle nasty moves like glaring and condescending comments, explicit moves like insults or put-downs, and even physical intimidation can be effective paths to power. Research also shows that employees tend to see the jerk as boss material. The article goes on to discuss some of the science bosses apply to making an operation run smoothly: 'A researcher reported that one law firm deconstructs its HR needs by personality traits. It insists on extremely bright employees who are also extremely insecure. 'They want them to think that working really hard matters,' he explains. Through this prism, personality types can even be mixed and matched to make a team function more efficiently.'" -
Understanding Burnout
Cognitive Dissident writes "New York Magazine has posted a feature story about the growing phenomenon of 'burnout' and the growing interest of both healthcare professionals and even corporate management in this problem. Probably the most surprising thing learned from reading this article is that work load is not the best predictor of burnout. Instead it has more to do with perceived 'return on investment' of effort. So work places are having to learn to adjust the work environment to reduce or prevent burnout. From the article: '"It's kind of like ergonomics," [Christina Maslach] finally says. "It used to be, 'You sit for work? Here's a chair.' But now we design furniture to fit and support the body. And we're doing the same here. The environments themselves have to say, 'We want people to thrive and grow.' There was a shift, finally, in how people understood the question."' NPR's Talk of the Nation also had a recent feature story based on this article." -
The Softening of a Software Man
theodp writes to tell us that New York Magazine has an interesting editorial stating that no one is afraid of Microsoft anymore. The article argues that Microsoft has noticeably been adrift in the wake of Gates' philanthropy, which some cynics suspect is a Rockefeller-like attempt to 'fumigate his fortune' as he makes a play for the history books. From the article: "Like the robber barons, Bill Gates has moved from trying to take over the world to trying to save it."