On Medium David Riordan, chief technology innovation officer at the Brown Institute, has written a eulogy for The New York Times' R&D Lab, which closed after 11 years. Bringing together designers, reporters, and software engineers, the R&D Lab aimed to forecast game-changing technology trends for the news industry. Last week, the R&D Lab was replaced with Times Story X, which will be more closely integrated into the newsroom and advertising teams.
"The work done by NY Times R&D was somehow always ahead of the time, in that they would make vivid prototypes and experimental services and then most of them would simply become how we consumed and created the news. It was convened to work on new problems, technologies, and opportunities that the rest of the organisation would start to seriously face 3–5 years out. It wasn’t their place to “solve and scale” outright, but to create research — made manifest by incredible interactive prototypes — that would help the organisation think through, and adapt to these changes, and to show where The Times could go." David Riordan
The 2009 prototype Custom Times revealed how how a personalised version of The New York Times could seamlessly transition across multiple platforms including print, web, mobile, and TV. As Riordan writes, "unlike many prototypes, rough around the edges, designed to quickly prove to management a thing could be done, Custom Times was a prototype made for the world to see, like a concept car for what a news organisation might produce in a few years time."
The Cascade project enabled precise analysis of the structures which underly sharing activity on the web. The visualisations created a time-based representation of how content was being shared in Twitter’s social space. This helped staff to identify what strategies would enable work to “go viral” and to identify key "influencers" in the sharing network. Cascade received much attention as an example of groundbreaking information aesthetics that could drive data-driven decision making in newsrooms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p-5lfGSLhA
The Madison platform pioneered crowdsourcing design to extract data from New York Times' archives and Streamtools was developed to provide a general purpose, graphical tool for dealing with streams of data. Riordan suggests that such projects developed within R&D Labs became "relics from a bygone era."
"Many succeeded in helping their organizations adapt, but that hasn’t really been a solid predictor of whether the Labs’ still survive. ... We could be more optimistic and still vaguely Utopian about technology in public institutions and innovation produced more than operational efficiencies and new ways to track users. ...until this past Monday you could still elicit a sense of surprise and delight by telling someone that The New York Times had its own R&D Lab. And all the while inspire hope that the New York Times’ future was bright." David Riordan
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