With a down economy and a softening ad market, much of the discussion surrounding “The New York Times” these days tends to focus on the possible sale of their building, or perhaps Jon’s beloved Red Sox. That does not diminish the fact that 2008 was a great year for innovation on the website of their flagship brand, NYTimes.com. Additional site features and the inclusion of online research demonstrate the New York Times’ commitment to dialogue with its visitors, even if that dialogue takes place off of their site: their innovative Blogrunner service fed a “Most Blogged” list on the homepage and article pages while Director of Consumer Insights Jeffrey Graham used Nielsen data to illustrate the importance of CGM as a type of word of mouth marketing. Shying away from strictly replicating the print edition, the site incorporated more video features and blog coverage and opened a conversation with visitors, encouraging reader comments on blogs and in topical discussion forums.

The table below gives a basic read on the effect some of this new video and blog content has had on the site. Working with the knowledge that much of this “new” content exists in sub-domains other than the primary www.nytimes.com, instead having sub-domains like video.nytimes.com or cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com, we subtract the “www” pages from the overall brand:

This is far from a perfect methodology, but it does illustrate that while news overall saw a bump in usage (thanks to the election), the blogs, video and other “non-standard” news content drove an even greater increase in usage.

Enough rehashing of the past: while these developments have had an important impact on the site, there are two relatively new features on the site that are worth watching in 2009: TimesPeople and TimesWidgets. TimesPeople, which began as a Firefox plug-in in June 2008, and fully integrated into NYTimes.com in September, is a unique take on the social network. Sort of a hybrid of social network (think Facebook/LinkedIn) and news aggregator (think Digg) that sits on top of NYTimes.com, TimesPeople allows users to follow the activity of friends and contacts using the site, while making it easy to share their own activity. Simple and unobtrusive, the service doesn’t overpromise social functions (the FAQ clearly states: “you won’t have Times friends, and it won’t get you Times dates”) and, more importantly, the interface doesn’t take away from the news experience. Instead, TimesPeople provides users a new way to find interesting/relevant content from their most trusted source—their friends. Early reports show the service has a relatively small following at this point, but as it grows in popularity it will be interesting to see how it affects engagement levels among dedicated Times users.

While TimesPeople is a great way to get regular site users to engage with more content more frequently, TimesWidgets may prove to be an excellent source for new audience. This widget takes advantage of already available features: NYTimes.com section headline RSS feeds and Times Topics, a brilliant collection of topical feeds ranging from headline grabbers to recipes. The widget is an easily embeddable feed reader constantly updated with the user’s choice of headlines or topics. Embedded in users’ Social Network profile, blog or personal homepage, the widget not only places relevant headlines in front the user every time they access these pages, it also provides a tacit endorsement or recommendation of the articles to any network friend or visitor to the blog.

NYTimes.com shows that an old news player can still develop the tools to stay relevant and grow audience and engagement in the process. These two new technologies both use simple interfaces to extend the reach of NYTimes.com brand by allowing users to share what is most interesting to them. 2009 will show us how effective these tools can be.