I bet every one who reads this blog reads the NYTimes and so you will have seen the banner across the top of the page that suggested you view their global edition. I think it's great they are experimenting but I was both bemused and affronted. Firstly, I thought they already had a global view. To me the NYTimes isn't the provincial Daily News or Newsday: it's The Times. It has a global perspective so why would I be inclined to narrow my view; why isn't the international/global perspective inculcated into all the news and in-depth items in the newspaper? I thought it was, and it probably is (where appropriate) but of all the 'segmentation' they could do with the newspaper this one strikes me as a little off.
They stumble on execution. I hit the 'switch to global' version and the first thing I did was look at the opinion section. As I expected, they seem to have done is make more prominent those editorials pertaining to the global marketplace. They do have 'foreign' contributors but surely in this section these need to be more prominent. More egregiously, I can't seem to find bio information about who these people are. I know who Ban Ki-Moon is but without consulting wikipedia I don't know who Evgeny Morozov is. Even the comic is American. Wouldn't opinion be where the Times could set its self apart? Since that's what they appear to want to do.
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