- Editor & Publisher Staff

NEW YORK The New York Times Co. today launched a beta version of Times Extra, an alternative view of the home page featuring headlines with links from third-party sources.

The automated ranking of news stories is powered by Blogrunner, a news aggregator owned by the NYT Co. that continually crawls the Web and links to stories from more than10,000 sources. It aggregates headlines, and matches the most relevant of those sources with lead articles on the nytimes.com home page.

To view Times Extra, users click on the new “Times Extra” button at the top of the home page, above the search bar. After 24 hours, readers will need to click the button to reactivate Times Extra for another 24 hours. The “Switch Back” button at the top of the Times Extra view returns users to the standard home page.

Relevant headlines from around the Web appear beneath many of the articles in the upper half of the homepage. Source names are highlighted in green.

“The days when content sites were afraid to link to other sites are over,” said Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital operations, NYT Co. “We want to give our readers a comprehensive view of the news and opinion our editors think is important.”

Denise Warren, svp, chief advertising officer, added: "Initiatives such as Times Extra...allow us to do an even better job of responding to our audiences' demands for interactivity, community, multimedia and news and information on an increasingly wide range of topics. This makes Times Extra an appealing buy for advertisers."

As the popularity of print media has waned, NYT Co., like most of its competitors, has struggled with declining ad revenue and dwindling readership, particularly in its newspaper units. NYT Co. and others have increasingly sought to beef up their online operations to reverse the negative momentum.