The New York Times’ “Emphasis”...

In my view, The New York Times is the best newspaper in the world, not only because of the enormous amount of information it produces and the high quality of its content, or because of the fame and ability of its authors, but because of its capacity to innovate in the ways content is created and consumed. It was one of the first newspapers to dare to accept the idea that the printed press’s days are numbered—years, really—and that the future of journalism lies in digital forms of consumption through the internet.

Speaking specifically about the NYT website, which is the subject occupying me this morning, I think it is a great example of what the website of any publication or agency devoted to journalism should achieve. The information is accessible and the format is clear, functional, simple, and efficient, with a layout that makes us feel that we are indeed reading a newspaper. Beyond the site’s graphical interface, however, there is a team of people working to create and perfect the user experience. A perfect example, and what prompted me to write this entry, is the “Emphasis” feature available in the site’s news stories, articles, and blogs. This feature allows the user to generate links to specific paragraphs and phrases in order to share them. If, for example, I wanted to share through a social network or email a particular phrase that caught my attention in an article, I would only have to use this feature and send the link. If any of you followed that link, you would arrive not only at the article’s page, but at the specific paragraph, with the phrase I chose highlighted in yellow.

They achieved this through a script that detects the phrase selected by the user and generates a link using a syntax they designed themselves, which takes certain letters from the paragraph into account in order to identify it. In an article by the NYT itself, you can see the complete explanation by following this link, which is very interesting.

Using the feature is simple. While viewing the article, you only have to press the “Shift” key twice in succession on your keyboard. Paragraph symbols (¶) will then appear at the beginning of every paragraph, and clicking one of them will emphasize the paragraph in grey. After that, you only have to click the phrase of your choice, and it will be emphasized in yellow. Once you have done this, you will see that a link containing brackets has been generated in the address field of your browser, something like this:

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/emphasis-update-and-source/#p\[AltBau\],h\[AltBau,2\]

That link is the one we must use to share our selected phrase or paragraph. The information between the brackets is precisely the identification key for the paragraph and phrase we chose.

Interesting, isn’t it? Well, that is not all. The team that developed this script decided to make the code open source so that anyone can use and modify it. You can find it on GitHub by following this link.

This represents a great advantage, especially for blogs and publications. I also think it would be very useful for wikis and other sites with academic or legal content.

The script has already been implemented on this blog, and you can try it in this very entry.