NYT Open

I've been following this space for some time [1], and for me the constant struggle has been finding something that is both batteries-included, so I don't have to build a usable editor from primitives on projects where the core differentiator is not related to how content gets authored, and mobile-friendly, so that I don't have weird capslock bugs on iOS [2], completely broken Android support [3], and just general mobile weirdness [4].

To the best of my knowledge, Prosemirror has been most willing to prioritize mobile support, and currently has the best mobile browser coverage of the three most commonly mentioned modern contentEditable options (prosemirror, draft-js, quill). Unfortunately, building an editor with Prosemirror is a very hands-on process that requires you to make all the UI decisions and most of the UX decisions yourself, which isn't a great fit for most projects that don't need to innovate in the actual content creation side of things.

I would LOVE it if a batteries-included editor like this, which clearly had a lot of thought put into the UX and UI aspects, was built on the very-robust technical foundation of Prosemirror (or similar). There are a few efforts at this on GitHub, but nothing so far with more than one or two contributors that I've found. The backend of editor.js looks solid, but without any discussion of mobile IME support, and without the backing of big players like NYT [5], realistically I can only guess that mobile support for editor.js will…

Ok, where to begin...

- "The Times has tried twice to create pay-wall models that have utterly failed"

Um, not true. They did it once. It was called Times Select. It actually worked quite well, however the advertising market picked up in a big way where revenue from ads would exceed subscriptions. Not the case anymore, but thats another story.

- "The Times does very little investigative journalism of significance"

Ok, I'm gonna leave this one alone. Clearly we are on different planets.

- "The Times has strong pretensions, as evidenced by its coverage of socialite weddings, etc."

I guess so... ? Is it? I mean its not tabloid, but I think thats good, right? Whats the "etc"?

- "In the buildup to the Iraq war it was the Times' sloppy fact checking that sold the war to many, many people who had been skeptical prior to reading its coverage."

I'm not sure how this relates to helping your point about "transition into the digital age" or the whole "tweet" thing.

- The Times attack on the Pulse news reader turned what should have been superb publicity into a petty attack on a small startup that obviously loves the Times.

Yeah, I personally think that was short-sighted.

"For all its flaws, it's still a great paper, but far less great than it once was or than it could be if it had more sense and guts and had to fight harder to maintain its position."

Been waiting to say this... ahem..."{citation needed}"

"Banning a word like "tweet" suggests…"

Okay, I think you need to…

>Split up ingredients into more parts.

I wrote a service called Zestful that does exactly this.[0]

It's an interesting problem. It's hard to train an ML system on the distinction between a preparation instruction like "finely chopped" and a note like, "just the white parts." My system treats "just the white parts" as a preparation instruction, but it throws away as irrelevant things like, "My favorite brand of black pepper is Smith's Fine Peppers." But I've looked at thousands of ingredients, and there are lots of wacky edge cases.

I created the service by adapting an open source project the NY Times published and then abandoned.[1] They were trying to index all of their old recipes for what would eventually become cooking.nytimes.com. Their repo felt very experimental and half-baked, so it was interesting to turn it into a production service. I wrote about the process of creating the service on my blog.[2]

[0] https://zestfuldata.com/demo

[1] https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structured-data-from-recipes-using-conditional-random-fields/

[2] https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/

This may not be what you're looking for, but Google seems to prefer Medium content.

I think it could be natural. A lot of smart interlinking of posts, clustering different niches, and posts being spread across social websites.

I can even give a direct example. My book The Tao of tmux is available for free online. It used to be in the google top 10 for tmux. Now, a newer article on HackerNoon is up at the very top: https://hackernoon.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-tmux-8d784c404340

I think people just like the Medium posts, heh. They made a publishing platform that attracted talented writers, and the feedback loop with readers seems to be encouraging it to grow.

Medium actually hampers my personal efforts since I keep my own static website and wrote a custom blog-like application I post. I feel I may end up having to move writing efforts there since the velocity there is so big.

P.S. NYTimes digital team uses Medium: https://open.nytimes.com/ I think that demonstrates to me people just like the product and it's going to self-perpetuate until someone devises something better.

To say that the NYT is the most tech progressive media entity is understating it...besides their vast array of web and mobile apps and forays into new story telling methods (the Avalanche story was a hit here)...they've hired tech stars such as Jeremy Ashkenas (CoffeeScript/Bacbkone) and Mike Bostock (D3) whose work benefits the online ecosystem as a whole, not just the media world, and they pour a fair amount of resources into open source projects and news data APIs:
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/

Of course it's to be expected that they have one of the more prominent digital departments among media companies, given their size. But I think it's a fair to argue they've gone way beyond just trying to put out a decent digital media project, just as other notable digital companies innovate and produce and share beyond their core selling products.

https://open.nytimes.com/a-new-way-to-share-new-york-times-stories-3e66e8d7e620

Linking to the site directly, likely with a bit of tracking information related to me, but allowing non-subscribers to access it without hitting the paywall. It also gives the actual experience.

For example - from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32849962

Compare: https://archive.ph/OJYqz

and https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/14/climate/san-francisco-fog.html?unlocked_article_code=hEibO2En_XEYmK7XOTQHZVYc4t17nPAmzyUcVpfc34L0dvQ3XVNOru4XQm9FM5doav1-BQOl4AtV2dqiwm-boNQEJQeneDh955xEFmpRgV5vJkRFQwbJ0Je_HI5alm7KQTmVVHUQUbZOOBXJ7Q3ppMR5QAg5-d_aTeJe9V02ophduKr4Wf0NnVFvW0STyn1DepZp7kAyGFExIfv_EjWepYPp0lDD1dGR3_UA88KjeaTpo5zPBxFUbgrSdagL1QqHIIAHHWYk5zJHm_bctPJZIgwXPas0YXoQf6TMHk9UOHLls-jYovUbkgxiDPZ4oKC84C1nhrFLw5oQTNBV18ZEK6cP_5THk5h7S3jK&smid=share-url