(2009-02-09) Nytimes Renegades

Emily Nussbaum on the Digital Media "renegades" at the Ny Times hoping to save Newspaper Publishing. For over a decade, web entrepreneurs have thrown far cheaper spaghetti against the wall, beginning with Matt Drudge. There's the Smoking Gun, Wikipedia, and especially Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo--which provides its own daring vision of what online Journalism might be. It has become easy to imagine a future without a "paper of record," in which news arrives in many forms: some authoritative, some fly-by-night, some solo, some collaborative... There's another face of Innovation at the Times Building, in a lab on a separate floor: research and development. I spoke to Nick Bilton, who designs what his website describes, with ominous confidence, as "technologies that will become commonplace in a 24-to-48-month time frame."