(Chad Batka/The New York Times)

The New York Times Company has begun shopping around for tech acquisitions for the first time since 2008, CEO Janet Robinson told Bloomberg News last week. But that doesn’t mean the paper is neglecting the mother ship.

The New York Times is in the midst of adding a slew of interactive bells and whistles, including e-commerce, to its online Theater section.

The home of critics Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley has revamped its listings and added an interactive show finder that refines listings based on mood and audience (adults-only tragedies, please) called the “Show Tuner.” Get it?

Reviews now have a “Buy Tickets” link powered by Ticketmaster and integrate deals from TicketWatch, the paper’s discount ticket newsletter. The site will also syndicate video content from the Broadway Channel.

“We’ve tried to make the Theater section a more useful and appealing place for readers,” culture editor Jonathan Landman said in a press release. “We’ve learned over the years that people use our reviews, articles and multimedia to guide their ticket-buying choices.”

Such programs raise an ethical issue, however. If The Times takes a little off the top each time a critic “guides [readers’] ticket-buying choices,” can readers trust the paper to honestly assess real theatrical atrocities (yes, Relatively Speaking, we’re looking at you)?

“The business side of The New York Times is entirely separate from the newsroom,” a Times spokesperson told us. “Such arrangements have no influence on what our reviewers or journalists write.”

Page 1, baby!

This morning, The Observer awakened to something many in the architecture community have been waiting months, if not years for. By the time you read this, the moment may have already passed online. But even if readers missed that frisson of joy in finding Michael Kimmelman's first proper architecture review on the The New York Times' homepage, as much, or even more excitement can be had with an actual hard copy of the paper, where the review managed to sneak its way onto the front page.

Sure, it's below the fold, but still, the last time The Times ran an architecture review on the front page of the paper was the last correspondence of Mr. Kimmelman's oft-maligned predecessor, Niccolai Ouroussoff, and even then it was simply a teaser in that little box at the bottom of the page. This is an honest-to-god story, picture and all, on some of the most sacred journalistic territory on the planet. Does this mean The Times is actually putting more emphasis on its architecture reviewing, not less, as some had complained when Mr. Kimmelman, an erudite consumer of culture, but still one with no official architectural training? Is this an honor paid to all first-time critics, which Mr. Kimmelman isn't, really, since he's been reviewing this-and-that for decades? Was it simply a slow news day? 

Which is not to suggest that this is not a remarkable piece of writing deserving of its top billing, nor to take anything away from the talented Mr. Kimmelman, who has had his fair share of front pages over the years. Consider what he, and The Times, have done here, though. This is a review of a public housing complex designed by notable but far from famous architects—in the South Bronx, no less. It is not the latest bauble from from some boldfaced jetsetter. Indeed, Mr. Kimmelman attacks this very type of design in the third paragraph of his piece, in what seems to be, one might hope, a declaration of principles for the future of his work:

The rebirth of the South Bronx isn’t news. But Via Verde is. And it makes as good an argument as any new building in the city for the cultural and civic value of architecture. The profession, or in any case much talk about it, has been fixated for too long on brand-name luxury objects and buildings as sculptures instead of attending to the richer, broader, more urgent vein of public policy and community engagement, in which aesthetics play a part.

Are you listening, Frank Gehry?

And yet the piece serves also as a critique not only of the architectural media but also of architecture, its social and political realities, and how they might be fixed, or even if they can be.

Thousands of homeless families and others waiting for decent homes need those apartments. Higher costs for green construction have, over recent years, come to be accepted as investments in long-term savings. But spending extra for anything as intangible as elegance or architectural distinction? In Via Verde’s case maybe 5 percent more, by Mr. Rose’s estimate, went into the project’s roof and its fine, multipanel, multicolor facade, with big windows, sunshades and balconies. What is the value of architectural distinction? How, morally speaking, can it be weighed against the need for homes?

In the end, Mr. Kimmelman determines, quite rightly, that "Bad designs, demolished after 20 years, as so many ill-conceived housing projects have been, are the costliest propositions in the end."

Perhaps this is why the story made it to the front page, because it is not a Metro story or an Arts story—which so rarely get to the cover of the national edition of The New York Times—but it is instead something bigger. Mr. Kimmelman could have made his first review of Jean Nouvel's new carousel shed in Dumbo, or Mr. Gehry's soon-to-open Signature Theater (he'll get to it closer to the opening curtain, we're sure) or even one of those European wonders he has come to know so well during his time Abroad.

Instead we get an utterly New York story that is utterly international in scope and ambition, a call to arms of the sort that has been missing for to long in the pages of The Times and even architectural criticism at large. (We're not counting you, Justin Davidson.)

According to Times culture editor Jonathan Landman, it is exactly this statement of purpose that got Mr. Kimmelman onto the front of the paper. He emails:

In general, it's certainly unusual for any review to run on Page 1. It does happen, but not often, and when it does it's usually because the thing reviewed is momentous in some way. For example: Michael's review of "The Gates" in Central Park, a huge public event.

So then it is saying something that a South Bronx housing project is now a "huge public event." Like we said, this is good news. Here is how Mr. Landman sees it:

In this case, Michael had some things to say about the approach he will take to this beat that I and my bosses thought were worth amplifying. The old-writer-new-mantle thing played a part, but there's certainly no guarantee that a writer gets a Page 1 story when he or she switches beats.

He also notes that Mr. Ouroussoff had a run of four front page stories last fall, when he did a series on the Middle East. Important, but not exactly New York. As for the former critic and his replacement, Mr. Landman had this to say about Mr. Kimmelman's qualifications, something that had been openly discussed but never answered by anyone at The Times, as far as we know:

As to Michael's experience, it is of course true that he is not a career architecture critic but he has written about architecture. More important, he is a brilliant critic with a longstanding interest in the field. He is also a spectacular reporter who can learn anything and a man with more than enough intellectual humility to know what he doesn't know. There's value in his non-insider perspective, I believe.

Nor is this about Nicolai. He was a fine and serious critic with his own interests, sensibility and preoccupations. Critics are entitled to have those. Michael looks at things differently, and said so. Page 1 helps readers get that message.

We got the message. Let's just hope he keeps it up.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

When the news was announced by executive editor Bill Keller that Mr. Landman—one of the paper’s biggest guns, and a reported finalist for the Washington Post executive editorship job last year—was being moved away from running nytimes.com and being put in charge of the culture department, it jolted the newsroom.  

“I think the newsroom did a big double take,” said one staffer.

Only a few weeks ago, Mr. Keller threw a curve ball by moving Sam Sifton, an internally celebrated editor of the culture section, into Frank Bruni’s old job as restaurant critic. Now Mr. Keller is taking one of his closest allies and pulling him off the Web to replace Mr. Sifton.

But why shift Mr. Landman, who has been in charge of integrating the newsroom and the Web team over the past four years, at a critical moment in the future of The Times, and nytimes.com?

It was a move that Mr. Landman was apparently anxious to make. 

“It wasn’t the most rewarding job for him,” said one Times editor, speaking about Mr. Landman’s job running the online operation. “You’re in lots of meetings. You’re talking about the distant future instead of talking about what’s happening for the next day or the next week or the next month. It’s a very hypothetical job. He wanted to go back to being a journalist.”

“He was frustrated by the bureaucracy,” said another editor.

“It’s certainly also true that Jon yearned to get his hands back on the stuff that drew us all into the news business in the first place,” said Mr. Keller in an email.

When we ran this all by Mr. Landman, he said, yup, that’s it.

“Every bit of that is true,” he said. “It’s all true and none of that is in conflict. My whole adult life I have been a journalist, a newspaper guy. This was definitely a detour into office politics and business things, and I found myself in conversations about business things for which I wasn’t particularly well trained and don’t have any great aptitude. Had to be done. Learned a lot. It was great. But it’s done.

“I made no secret of my frustration,” he continued.

When Mr. Landman took over the job in 2005, his mission was to convince other editors at the paper that the Web was important. The Times, unlike some other news organizations, didn’t precisely have the problem back then of trying to sell editors on the idea that the Web was relevant, but they certainly had to show them ways to embrace it. His weekly memos became a weekly exercise in exuberant cheerleading. 

But now, since the Web is a part of daily life for nearly everyone at The Times, Mr. Landman said the only way for the paper to finish the job is for Mr. Keller and managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes to take the reins of the Web themselves.

“Jill and I didn’t have to fully absorb digital into our responsibilities because we had the amazingly able Mr. Landman taking care of things. He’s right,” said Mr. Keller.

Beyond sitting in meetings all day—and being obligated to sending out those emails—the online job wasn’t going to lend itself to the most significant decision making, either. The Times is in the midst of serious internal debates right now over how and when to charge for the Web. Mr. Keller told his staff back in May a decision would be reached by the end of June. That hasn’t happened yet.

“The decision hasn’t been made because everything is based on assumptions, and there are many, many variables that can mean the difference between something that makes money and something that loses money,” said Mr. Keller.

Either way, Mr. Landman wasn’t going to have a big voice in that decision, which will be in the hands of Arthur Sulzberger. (According to sources, Mr. Landman and Mr. Keller haven’t seen eye-to-eye on pay walls—Mr. Landman is against them, Mr. Keller is in favor of experimenting. Despite this, it had nothing to do with Mr. Landman’s job change, we’re told).

So with little else left to do and with a job he considered complete, Mr. Landman saw the culture-section opening and jumped at it. Internally, the culture department is one of the most highly prized sections at the paper, and one of the more profitable. Jill Abramson told a crowd at the TimesCenter back in June that arts coverage—and the blog, Arts, Briefly—was the first thing she turned to in the morning—even before the business section, or The Wall Street Journal.

In many ways, Mr. Landman is being sent to the culture department to finish a job he started. There have been remarkably few department-head changes under Mr. Keller’s watch, which began in 2003. He believes that the newspaper, journalistically, is humming along. But one of the first initiatives he undertook as editor was replacing Steven Erlanger, a favorite of few, as culture editor. Mr. Landman stepped in as interim editor and immediately mucked with it. He brought in movie writer Manohla Dargis and theater critic Charles Isherwood. (Remember when people could hire!) Once he was finished with the shake-up, he stepped aside, and Mr. Sifton took over.

Now, Mr. Landman has the chance to go back and put his stamp on the paper. But he’s got company, of course.

Over on Sixth Avenue, The Wall Street Journal is in the earliest stages of planning a New York–centric culture section. Since Rupert Murdoch got his hands on the paper, he hasn’t been shy about his opinions of the Times culture section: He thinks it’s boring and lightweight, and can easily be outshined.

Might The Times have made their change in anticipation of a war with Mr. Murdoch?

“I don’t think they’re worried about Murdoch that much,” said one Times insider. “I don’t think it’s a major consideration at all. But what it does say is, it is an extremely important department. It shows they’re not going to be asleep on the switch.”

That’s because Mr. Landman is, far from a lightweight, a heavyweight at the paper. Putting him in charge was the big move.

When we asked Mr. Landman about Mr. Murdoch’s thoughts about the section, he said, “I don’t even think he believes that himself,” he said.

jkoblin@observer.com

He insists “nothing about the Web has changed the front page of the paper in any fundamental way.”

But in a news industry dominated by the Web, the concept of a New York Times front page is evolving. For many readers, NYTimes.com’s home page is the “front page,” where the top articles in the print edition of the paper, mulled over and chosen during two daily meetings of New York Times staffers, are kicked off within hours. Other readers get their daily headlines on their phones using The Times’ mobile application, which switches top news stories throughout the day.

And then! What about the thousands of other readers who arrive at NYTimes.com from their more personalized “front pages,” the ones who arrive via link from RSS feeds or Google or other sites. Even TimesPeople’s home page lists links to other users’ recommended articles—ranging from a review of the new Harry Potter film to a Frank Rich column—not what’s on the front page of the print edition.

“A link doesn’t care about the surrounding atmosphere,” said New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen. “Whether or not it’s on the front page of the newspaper is irrelevant to the transaction.” And maybe even to the reader, too.

This isn’t to say that the stories chosen for the print-edition front page are less urgent or important than the constant breaks on the home page. According to a NYTimes.com newsletter, two front-page stories, one on Sarah Palin and another on Dick Cheney’s link to a C.I.A. project, were among the top-viewed articles on the site between July 8 and July 14.

Mr. Landman said the same standards are considered when choosing stories for NYTimes.com’s home page as for the print edition, “but the barrier is lower simply because the barrier is 60 instead of 6,” he explained. “What we have evolved is getting the same judgments into the pipeline faster.”

Jim Roberts, The Times’ associate managing editor and NYTimes.com’s digital news editor, is the man making most of those judgments, along with his team of editors and a home-page producer. “The front page of the [printed] newspaper has become more interpretive,” Mr. Roberts said. “It reflects more enterprise reporting, it relies less on breaking news elements of the day, and part of that is driven by the fact that so much of the day’s breaking news is covered on the Web, whether it’s our site or other sites or people on television or any other fashion.”

He considers CNN.com his competition and checks its site to compare their breaking news coverage.

“I think we also are building or managing the Web site to be in a competitive world,” he said. “We’re not CNN. We don’t pretend to be CNN. But we are in competition for them for readers. We definitely want to be in tune with breaking news.”

Mr. Roberts told The Observer that he usually kicks off The Times’ first “page one meeting,” at 10:30 a.m., by reciting which stories have appeared on NYTimes.com and what his team plans to post later on in the day. “The newspaper is at once the starting point of what we do on the Web, and sometimes it’s the ending point in [that] it sometimes is an interpretation and an encapsulation of the news that has happened through the day,” he said. Some Web items posted on NYTimes.com end up on the front page of The Times the next day, Mr. Roberts said.

Both Mr. Landman and Mr. Roberts say that Web stats have no bearing on what they choose to put on the front page of the newspaper or the home page of the site. “In terms of minute-to-minute news decisions, I think that would pretty much drive me crazy,” Mr. Roberts said.

"You know, I would say if I had more time I would probably try to investigate more in what our readers are doing," Mr. Roberts said. "I guess I would rather know some broad trends, than some specific minute to minute thing," like whether readers are more interested in science news or fashion reports. 

"Or if a profile of someone that I thought was a really really well written piece, if it sort of got miserable traffic, I would like to know about it and at least like to think about why that was the case, whether there was a message to be sent there," Mr. Roberts said.

Mr. Rosen, the journalism professor, scoffed at the thought of editors dismissing Web stats. "What world are you living in if you don't know where your users are flocking to?" he asked. "How can you edit your website?"

But he added the power of a website’s front page should not be underestimated. "What is on the front page often determines whether something gets tens of thousands of readers or only a few," he said.

Mr. Roberts said he tries to reflect what he thinks the Times institution, and its followers, would want to read on the NYTimes.com home page. “I don’t want people to call up NYTimes.com and feel like that they’ve just landed in an environment that is alien to them,” he said. “It isn’t necessarily The New York Times in print, but it needs to reflect the same attitudes and standards.”

Does he have any regrets?

“I start making news decisions at 6:30 in the morning, and I’m usually on the phone with my editors, sometimes at 11 o clock at night,” he said. “There’s a lot of decision making going on between those two hours. So we do make mistakes. But I can’t think of too many colossal ones.”

greagan@observer.com

“Think of it as common courtesy,” Mr. Keller said.

This week, The Times is attempting to rally that same esprit de tweet more productively by making veteran reporter and editor Jennifer Preston the paper’s first social media editor.

The announcement was made on May 26 via Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman’s Twitter feed. (A proper memo followed.) “I was just having a little fun,” Mr. Landman told Off the Record.

Ms. Preston, who previously oversaw The Times’ regional weeklies, told The Observer that “everyone recognizes that there is tremendous opportunity with these social media sites to use them to make our journalism stronger. … I’ve just been playing around with it for the last few weeks—Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us—to figure out how we can just use these tools.”

She said her early reporting experience taught her to break stories quickly by whatever means necessary, as well as the Twitterish value of pooling resources. “If I may date myself, you know, when I was covering homicides at 1 Police Plaza, I had to go to the trick book,” she said, referring to an irregularly updated, hardbound volume of addresses and phone numbers. “So you could get the quote, ‘Oh, he was a very quiet man.’”

(Asked to date herself with an age, Ms. Preston replied, “Why would you ask me that?”)

Mr. Landman said that Ms. Preston was tapped to help ensure “some consistency about what we consider good uses of [social media] and bad uses of it.”

“Jennifer is extremely enthusiastic,” he said. “She’s not an expert to start with, but I don’t think that’s a terrible handicap here in real ways. Nobody’s an expert.”

mhaber@observer.com

As we wrote this week, NBC and The New York Times are going into the Olympics with different goals: NBC is covering the sports, The Times is waiting for a big news story.

Well, Jonathan Landman, The Times' deputy managing editor, laid out his own distinctions between NBC and the paper of record in his weekly memo. Even though Jeff Zucker believes NBC's coverage over the next two weeks is "the most ambitious broadcasting event ever attempted," with a planned 3,600 hours of coverage, including 2,200 hours live on the Internet, Mr. Landman isn't so impressed:

In one case, he's saying why in a breaking news story it's great to publish on the Web and in print, especially if the news can be broken on the Web first. (So, score one for the Web.) Then in another, he's saying why some material is better for the Web than for print and vice versa.

Today, he talks about more "agnostic platforms" (what?), but now it's how print was really getting the better of the Web in the way The Times was dating its stories. No longer, according to the memo:

Agnostic ... But another victory for the Web.

One phrase we're hearing a lot lately is "platform agnostic."

The phrase seems to have been around for some time now actually, to judge from a Nexis search on the string of words. It appears first in the Nexis database in 1991, but in terms of annual use doesn't break the double digits until 1996, when the phrase appears 29 times. Then the word seems to have its big break, leaping from 64 uses in 1999 to 158 in 2000. So it's definitely a phrase of the 21st Century.

What does it mean, though?

There doesn't seem to be much agreement on the Web. One Web-marketing site has a definition of the term that seems pretty neutral: "Refers to code or an application that is able to run on any platform. A platform is a made up of the operating system, and hardware, such as the motherboard." Another advises Web entrepreneurs to avoid the term, classing it, alongside phrases like "leading-edge" and "world expert" as a "weasel word," not to be used when making presentations to investors.

Two Microsoft executives delivered a white paper heralding the 2001 development of "The Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me Systems": "With this, Unicode applications can run on Microsoft Windows NT®, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 95/98/Me," they announced, and termed the new layer of code "platform agnostic" because it can run across several versions of Windows.

Still baffled?

The phrase does not appear in this article about a company that develops cell phone applications for news organizations looking for phone-readers; AP developed one with the company for use on the iPhone. Nor does the writer here refer to motherboards and hardware, or to versions of a computer operating system, but to competing delivery systems for news and information: a cell phone, a print newspaper, the Web.

Those, it appears, are the platforms that newspaper editors have been referring to with such gusto lately.

The New York Times' deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman is fond of the phrase. Here are a few examples from his weekly memos to his staff:

It appears, then, that to Mr. Landman, the phrase "platform agnostic" refers to two platforms: the Web and the print newspaper. But the uses indicate different shades of meaning in each case. Discussing the newsbreak that ended Eliot Spitzers governorship of New York, Mr. Landman appears to mean simply that there is no preference for the newspaper over the Web as the place to break news: If the news comes out, it gets published both to the Web and the paper as soon as possible (which means the Web wins).

In the second usage, Mr. Landman reverses things a little bit: Reporter Tina Kelley had two weeks of great work for the Web, but some of it also appeared in the print edition. Here, "platform agnostic" seems to indicate a belief that appearance on one platform doesn't compromise the appearance of the material on the other. But then again, hidden inside is something a little different from agnosticism. If Tina Kelley's work was so great, why didn't the print edition reproduce all of it? Presumably because some material works better in print than on the Web. That is, some material is better for the Web, some for print; some works in both cases. It seems you can be platform agnostic and still believe that some material is best suited for one platform or the other.

Which leads to the third use. All along, the term "platform agnostic" has referred to The New York Times as a news-gathering operation. Unlike the Microsoft guys, it's not about making material that fits every platform equally well, but treating news the right way for both the Web and the newspaper, and not giving preference to one over the other. Thus, the third usage, which describes the journey of Sewell Chan's story from the Web to print.

This much broader use is also favored by Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymoth:

What remains to be seen is how platform-agnostic publishers will be next year, the year after, when it comes time to draw up their budgets for both print and Web versions of their publications. The market, after all, does like to make decisions.

The Post, which is currently combining its digital and newspaper newsrooms, had come to one of its great rival news organizations for something unimaginable just a few years ago: advice.

"We're visiting a couple places to talk about the integration of our online and print news operations," said Phil Bennett, the managing editor of The Post, who joined Jim Brady and Liz Spayd, top online editors at washingtonpost.com. "The Times went through this three years ago and they were generous enough to open up that process and tell us what they discovered."

It was a four-hour session, from 10 to 2, with the top three Posties circulating all over the building with a brief lunch break in the cafeteria and a sit-in for one of the story conference meetings (hope they didn't call in those lead stories back to their paper!). The meeting was arranged when Mr. Brady asked his friend, Vivian Schiller, the general manager of nytimes.com, if The Post could come up for a tour. The Post has been making a habit of trips like this: the Post trio of Bennett-Brady-Splayd went to Europe last month to tour the newsrooms of the BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times and the Telegraph. But isn't The Times supposed to be, well, different? Aren't they direct rivals? Would Red Sox scouts visit the Yankees front office to learn how they scout players?

"There are new rules to competition," said Mr. Bennett. "We feel very competitive to The Times in most areas of journalism, but with the innovations that they are developing, I feel like I'm in the role as a cheerleader as well. We want the kind of journalism that we’re all aspiring to develop to succeed and to reach bigger audiences and to have a bigger impact."

"This is the culture of the Web newsrooms," said Jonathan Landman, top digital editor at The Times. "There are a million people doing a million different things and everybody wants to understand what the possibilities are and what’s working and what isn't working."

"We’re not talking about stories or coverage plans; none of those things come up," said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. "We're talking broad concepts digitally, we're talking about the business."

He wouldn't discuss what specifically came up on Tuesday, but the conversations are primarily focused on the mechanics behind a news site. "It would be something like, we pushed really hard with doing things with databases—we have a Congressional voting database and people think it’s cool and they link to us. Someone would come in and visit us and ask, how do you build them? How long does take to get that data and move it? How many bodies do you have to hire to do this? How hard is it? What kind of resources does it take?"

"Those are concepts you talk about," he continued. "Structure."

Mr. Bennett, for his part, said The Post was still "digesting" everything he took away, but he was plenty impressed. "I think The Times has set a standard with how to grow and develop in a creative way," he said.