It's an engineering blog post, which usually serve double duty as being both informative and also useful for recruiting ("Look at the cool stuff we are building! Come be a part of it!"). Case in point, the post ends with "we’re currently hiring for a variety of roles and career levels".
In addition to not being really appropriate for nytimes.com, I'm guessing that publishing content there brings along a lot of extra cruft that is probably not necessary for a post like this (advertising, paywall system, isolating it from the "real" NYTimes content, etc.). Easier to just throw it up on Medium and call it a day.
This is really fascinating to me. Is this because engineers who they want to recruit dislike the New York Times brand, or because readers of the New York Times don't want to read things as informal as transparent blog posts about internal NYT decisions?
It's very easy for me to see something like blog.newyorktimes.com with a similar design / community philosophy as Medium, but would that somehow cheapen the experience for NYT readers? Or does NYT just not see itself as a "hip tech company" like Medium? I have endless questions about this, haha.
It seems to me like there's a lot of unstated assumptions hiding in "not appropriate for nytimes.com". Some things mentioned include -- "advertising, paywall system, isolating it from the "real" NYTimes content, etc.". This is absolutely baffling to me! I would be much more inclined to read regular NYT content were it not for these things.
I think you're over-thinking this. There isn't a huge crossover audience for engineer blog posts and general NYT audience, and I imagine the engineering blog posts do not go through the same editorial process content on nytimes.com does. That alone makes the case for using a different domain.
I'm being a cheeky detractor of NYT here. I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are the future of news, and ancient vehicles like New York Times are long dead. I think the "general NYT audience" is participating in #FakeNews, and they should radically reconsider their information diet.
As vivid example of this, compare James Birdle breaking the "Youtube exploitative kid videos" story way before, and in greater depth, than in any major publication. This is actually the future of news, and pretending like aging institutions like the New York Times are remotely relevant anymore is longshot wishful thinking.
Editorialization, fact-checking, and cultural leadership have important roles to play, and I'm excited to see these features unbundled into separate services. I'm long on services like Verrit and Snopes, and wish that I, as an independent publisher, could pay an intern to get official statements, cross-check narratives with history, and perform some of these functions. As is, I think people are operating under the delusion that ONLY NYT-style institutions can perform these functions, which baffles me.
(Actually, the future is probably more like James posting on jamesbridle.com, and then aggregating it through sites like Hacker News. But what do I know, I'm just a millennial who doesn't understand all these big partisan topics like modern journalism)
Hmm. I'm going to disagree with that! I think "candid, engineering-style blogposts" are and will continue to be great for an engineering audience, but I'm very skeptical that they will be great for a wide audience. For instance, I read and was fascinated by the YouTube kids post, but I do not know anyone outside of the tech industry that read it. And you're wrong to say he reported it way before, the NYT published this two days previous:
and Birdle's post itself links to reporting by New York Magazine from 2016. I don't dispute that his post goes into more detail, I just dispute that longer automatically equals better. Someone with domain knowledge reporting a story in great depth and a major publication reporting a simplified version for mass consumption is certainly not a new model.
I'd also strongly disagree that NYT is an ageing institution unable to adapt to this modern tech reality. John Herrman writes some of the most perceptive pieces about the state of tech out there:
(and a minor quibble: I don't think the post linked here and the Youtube Kids post are in any way comparable. The engineering writeup is not news in any way, shape or form, it's just a guide to how NYT implemented something)
Thank you for this good response. I didn't notice the NYT covering this story before, because I have cut NYT out from my life due to their malicious, partisan reporting. So maybe I should be less bold about my evaluations of them and just continue to enjoy my personally-curated, high-information-dense feed.
(Sorry if this is off-topic)