SXSW Interactive Panel Preview: Designing the Future of The New York Times

By now, we've all heard that traditional advertising is dead and real, honest-to-goodness papyrus-based newspapers are becoming extinct. Our need for news isn't going away, it's just changing. Who buys papers at newsstands any more? We use RSS and Twitter to track the daily happenings of the world around us. So what is a legend like the New York Times going to do? If they're smart, they will not only adapt to change, they'll embrace it.

This afternoon at SXSW Interactive, two leaders of the NYT's design team will be discussing how old media is reinventing itself to change with the times and educate attendees about how they are using emerging technology to lead the paper of record through the next great wave of customizable, interactive content.

• Tom Bodkin, the paper's Assistant Managing Editor Design Director, has been with the New York Times since 1980. As head of the art department, he overseas a staff of 130 and is responsible for the look of the newspaper, website and other digital products.
• Khoi Vinh is Design Director for NYTimes.com and is responsible for the user experience design group. He is responsible for online features, functionality and content. Khoi sits on the AIGA professional association for design and is the author of the design and user experience forum subtraction.com.

Though the New York Times R&D team has said that some of the technology they are working with is still 5-10 years away from being implemented, we think the panelists are likely going to discuss their work with semacodes, smart content and location specific-content.

Semacodes take URLs and turn them into digital barcodes that can be used with cell phone cameras to access the paper's latest news and video content. A user could take a picture of the barcode located on a movie ad and their phone would auto-load a movie trailer and open a new URL listing out movie times at their local theatre. Being the film nerds that we are here at Austinist, we geeked out at the the idea of implementing semacodes into our daily life.

Smart content is a system that tracks what a user has read across digital platforms so that if a reader read an article on his laptop but then loaded the New York Times application on their iPhone, the story would be marked as read. Makes our lives so much easier when we are attempting to catch up on the headlines while zooming blindly down Mopac. And speaking of reading-and-driving, the New York Times team is hoping to leverage GPS-enabled mobile phones to provide location-specific content that would also detect whether a user is in their car, allowing the paper to provide content in audio format. Brilliant!

Really exciting stuff that we think will appeal to both the programmers and the designers attending SXSW Interactive.