New York: The New York Times has shut its India Ink blog, "the first-ever country- specific" news site after a nearly three-year run, as it no longer wants to "direct its resources" towards blog-style content.
NYT had said in a June 30 blog post titled 'We're Moving' that 'India Ink' will have a new online address and it will be merged with coverage of news stories from rest of the world. Public Editor at the Times Margaret Sullivan said that from a high point of about 60 blogs that the publication had launched, half are already gone with more to go.
When The Times launched its India Ink blog in September 2011, it noted that this was the paper's 'first-ever country-specific site for news, information, culture and conversation.
"Now it's gone. These days, that kind of specificity is no longer the way The Times wants to direct its resources - at least not in the form of a blog, and all that usually comes with it: embedded content, reverse-chronological order, curation of other source material and a personal or conversational tone," she said in a post in the Public Editor's Journal.
Assistant managing editor Ian Fisher said the Times wants to continue "this kind of journalism without the manufactured shell of a blog, with its constant pressure to fill it up. Such coverage would happen through blog-style pieces that crop up when needed.
"Readers will recognise them through visual cues that are still being worked on. That could be through specific typography, or some form of labeling," Fisher said. The Times has so far ended or merged about half of the 60 blogs that it had two years ago and another 10 blogs may be dropped in future.
In bringing the curtains down on its India-specific blog, NYT had said that it would continue to "produce web-only India Ink sketches, analyses, narratives and news stories, but they will appear on the World page, along with the rest of the newspaper's coverage."
The Times had launched the blog in September 2011 as part of expanding its global reach. India Ink was The Times' first-ever country-specific site for news and information and was aimed at providing a distinct perspective on news and events that mattered to Indians and those who follow news about India.
India Ink featured contributions from New York Times journalists as well as from top writers in India and the Indian diaspora. The Times had recently decided to end The Lede blog, which aggregated news content on major breaking stories, because it "was getting increasingly incoherent" in its purpose and was "losing its value".
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