Cybergeeks Goosing the Gray Lady?

New York magazine has great fun with headlines... I borrowed a couple of key words for mine from its fascinating article about The New York Times online development team and what New York's Emily Nussbaum says may be "the only happy story in journalism."

The article discusses some new features I hadn't been paying attention to at http://nyt.com (or http://nytimes.com -- in this age of Internet journalism even "main stream media" can be flexible about its identity).

For Emily's full magazine story (a few thousands words, plus comments), see: The Renegades at the New York Times

Despite the swiftness of these changes, certainly compared with other newspapers’, their significance has been barely noted. That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.

Speaking of change and evolution in the media, New York magazine traces its roots to the Sunday magazine of the old Herald Tribune. See my December item, Historic magazine archive via Google. The magazine kept going after the daily paper stopped publishing in 1967. (For more of its history, try its Wikipedia page.)