The New York Times launched a redesigned site yesterday. The changes are subtle, but substantive. The site has been optimized for 1024 pixel-wide resolution, and the wider screen accomodates a variety of different columnar layouts. From a visual design perspective, the primary font colors appear to have been lightened, a shade or two at most, reducing the contrast of headline and article text. The result is barely perceptible at first glance, but the pages definitely have a softer, more readable feel to them. Other new features include lists of the Most-Emailed and Most-Blogged articles, as well as Most Searched terms, and somewhat randomly, a list of Most Popular Movies. There’s also more focus on video and multimedia, with a tab alotted to just this kind of content.

All of these features are well thought-out and implemented, but certainly nothing groundbreaking. However, one new addition that does seem relatively novel (for a news site, at least) is the Times Topics section. It’s not uncommon for large-scale sites to cull together content editorially to create guides on important or complex topics. And of course any content management system can offer up related links with a reasonable degree of accuracy, provided the content is being tagged by someone with a grasp of the subject matter. The Times Topics seems to have combined these approaches, manually selecting topics, then letting the metadata do the heavy lifting by pulling together all articles on a given keyword. What’s more, each article provides links to additional keywords, enabling the user to find related topics within the main category. For example, if I select ‘Metropolitan Museum of Art,’ the site returns a list of all articles tagged with that keyword. I could then click the ‘Photography’ keyword link from an individual entry to display only those articles within the Met category pertaining to photography. In essence they’ve created a one-click boolean AND operator, which certainly doesn’t seem like a major innovation. But, because the keywords seem to have been meticulusly chosen by an editorial staff of human beings, there is a high degree of conceptual relevance between each.

As I said, I’m not aware of any other daily news sites doing anything like this, and while it’s not necessarily groundbreaking in the field of IA, I think it definitely shows evidence of a willingness to push the envelope in innovative ways at the Paper of Record. What’s even more encouraging is that a traditionally ‘old media’ publication that is almost entirely content-driven is investing in technology R&D, though perhaps they need to rethink some of their job titles.