New York Times to Block Employees' Desktop Access to Home Page Next Week

The Old Gray Lady really wants folks to read their paper on smartphones, heh.

At WSJ:

Next week NYT will block access to their homepage on desktop in their entire building. forced to read on mobile https://t.co/hkqat9fxx7

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) June 12, 2015

Desk jockeys at the New York Times are about to get a lesson on the importance of mobile — whether they like it or not. Next week, the company will temporarily block access to the nytimes.com homepage on desktop computers at its headquarters, according to an email sent to staff Friday. Employees that try to access the desktop site will receive a message prompting them to switch over to phones or tablets.

“More than half of our traffic to The Times is on mobile. We’re hopeful that this temporary change will help spur us to make mobile an even more central part of everything that we do,” read the email, which was attributed to a handful of top newsroom and company executives, including Publisher and Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Executive Editor Dean Baquet.

The switch will apply to just the homepage on desktops, not all articles across the site.

The Times’s experiment comes as Web publishers reckon with a handful of unnerving shifts in digital media. Mobile traffic is on the rise, but publishers are struggling to monetize that audience. That has made new offerings like Facebook’s Instant Articles — where publishers can post articles directly to the service and take home most of the ad money — more attractive. In some cases, publishers already derive the lion’s share of their traffic from Facebook...