The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Black, White and Read Online
Can Khoi Vinh save The New York Times?
By Derrick Koo
While in Austin on a speaking gig at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW), one of the world’s largest digital media conferences, the thing that struck Khoi Vinh above all else had nothing to do with digital media or technology.
“Silly as it may seem,” he later wrote on his popular design blog, subtraction.com, “the one thing I really can’t stop thinking about is how bad the conference schedule, map and badges were this year.” The printed materials were unusable, in his opinion.
So Vinh did what he does best—sat down and designed a better one. Diagrammatic sketches laid out his ideas: perforated pages so that pages could be discarded as days passed; a booklet small enough to fit inside the conference badge pouch; a fold-out map beneath the schedule so that both could be scanned simultaneously, color codes coordinating events with their geographical locations on the map. Together, these innovations are designed to guide interaction between the products and the users who encounter them.
If Vinh can do for journalism what he did for SXSW’s print materials, perhaps the ailing industry has a chance of survival. That’s why The New York Times hired Vinh as design director three years ago to direct their website, nytimes.com.
“I think in the next year or two news organizations will have to make some major decisions about the role of print versus online,” said Times executive editor Bill Keller in a Q&A in January. “The fact is, we don’t really know yet how the behavior of readers and advertisers will evolve.” But, he added, “I’m optimistic because there are a lot of smart, creative people in the company studying the business model for quality journalism and devising ways to change it.”
Khoi Vinh is one of those people. With the help of innovators like him, publishing outlets like the Times are trying to redefine how news can be experienced—and maybe, just maybe, save journalism in the process.
Attendees line the walls. The room is the largest in the 2009 SXSWi conference, but this event is overbooked. Vinh is tall and gangly, dressed in all black, his boyish face dominated by a sweep of black hair and a pair of oversized wireframe glasses. The crowd cheers as he walks onto the stage and takes his place at the table behind his microphone.
“My name is Khoi Vinh,” he says to the packed room. An anonymous fan lets out a loud “wooo!” to cheers and laughter.
“Thank you,” Vinh deadpans. “I’ll have that twenty bucks for you after the talk.”
Despite Vinh’s attempt at levity, the gathering is serious: it’s a panel discussion entitled “Designing the Future of The New York Times,” and Vinh is a featured speaker along with his boss, Tom Bodkin, current assistant managing editor of graphics and design director of the Times’ print edition.
“What does the future of newspapers look like?” Bodkin asks the audience in the panel’s introduction. “Nobody, including us, knows for sure.”
That print journalism is fighting for its life isn’t exactly breaking news. The Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy in December 2008; The Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed its print business in March and The San Francisco Chronicle may be headed for the same fate. On April Fools’ Day, The Guardian announced it would begin publishing only 140-character “tweets”—a prank story, but one that rings eerily plausible these days. The Times itself has had a rough year. This April, it reported a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million, dwarfing 2008’s loss of $335,000. Advertising dropped 28.4%, and the very existence of The Boston Globe is now in doubt.
Oddly enough, the Grey Lady doubles as a veritable new media journalism laboratory. It has been rolling out its experiments on nytimes.com in rapid succession: blogs have popped up in every section, encouraging direct reporter-to-reader interaction. Times People, the paper’s social network, enables users to share and discuss their favorite stories. A Global Edition (now linked to the newspaper’s global edition, The International Herald Tribune) allows users to view the paper depending on their interest in international news. A Times Extra feature posts links to external news sources on the same topic—a practice that the paper’s philosophy once precluded. Times Extra is especially significant, Vinh points out, because the Times, like many mainstream media outlets, was at first reluctant to acknowledge outside news sources. Now that aggregation is all the rage, perhaps even the Times’ editors realize that it has a place in their own publication.
These experiments are the fruits of Vinh’s expertise. He is a different kind of a designer, concerned less with how the site looks than the way readers interact with it. The goal, he says, is for the Times to become a medium-agnostic publication, whether read on a web browser, on a mobile phone or via future technologies.
Vinh is a pioneer in the field of interaction design, which defines the interactive relationship between content and user. Imagine the relationship between the reader and newspaper as an ongoing “conversation”: the content itself can react to its readers’ actions. In a system like Times People, users don’t just read the content. They build a community with the tools Vinh provides—tools which are continually refined as the community grows (or fails to).
“We really look at our work as trying to create a platform,” says Vinh. “nytimes.com is really a platform that helps people make the most of our content—not just read the content, but to make as much use of it as they can.”