PressEthic

New York is a city of granola food co-ops and brick tenements, of Yankee Stadiums and wildlife reserves, of opulent wealth and gritty dreams, and the New York Times' Dan Barry takes his readers through it all. In his "About New York" column, Barry reports on the unreported, profiling subjects ranging from umbrella salesmen to teenager basketball players with NBA dreams. His columns work as snapshots of the city, using deft prose to tell real stories.

But now, thanks to an innovation on TimesSelect, readers can take a visual tour through Barry's world. In a new feature, titled "About Dan Barry's New York," the locations for Barry's columns are spread across a map of the five boroughs, a handy link to each article accompanying each red pin.

While TimesSelect has drawn fire for putting Times columns behind a subscription-based wall, the paper should be commended for using technology to enhance the paper, rather than replace it. The focus is still journalism, it's just the visual medium that has changed.

Want to read about Staten Island? Click on a red pin, and follow Barry into the opening of the Great Kills Public Library. Want to see the underside of holiday mirth? Click on a pin in Midtown, and ride with Barry on a 3 train from Penn Station on Christmas Eve. Have no idea what City Island is in the Bronx? Click on the pin, and read how residents in one of the most remote parts of the city react to the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

With this feature, which has the sole purpose of making the jumble of "About New York" columns easier to navigate, the Times is venturing into the same territory of the Apple iPod – they have found a way to make consumption easier. Readers have the ability to read good journalism with the added feature of physical geography without having to resort to sticking articles cut out of the newspaper onto a subway map.

Maybe the solution for what ills the business of journalism is to follow the TimesSelect model, and add features that make readers want to come back in a way that a blog cannot take and post on its own site. Maybe this big scary world of web-based journalism isn't so scary after all.