On 26 February, The New York Times will beef up its coverage of the social impact of emerging technology by adding a new section called Circuits. The section, which will appear on Thursdays, will serve up two to three 1,500-word features by seasoned Times tech-watchers like John Markoff and Peter Lewis, plus new columns on subjects ranging from computer gaming to consumer advice.
Section editor Jim Gorman says the broad scope of Circuits will encompass "anything with a chip in it," with stories highlighting individual point of view over "who's making money and how they're doing it." Though the section will supplement in-depth features with software ratings and what-to-buy guides, Gorman promises that Circuits is not positioning itself to be Consumer Reports meets PC World, but will offer the same kind of "high-level intellectual entertainment" that has distinguished the ScienceTimes section on Tuesdays, which was also under Gorman's stewardship.
Gorman will edit Circuits with Tim Race, currently the technology editor of the business and financial sections of the Times. One of Gorman's ambitions for the new section is to put under one roof coverage of the social and political dimensions of technology that might otherwise have ended up in the business or general news pages.
"It will be a mixture of 'news you can use' and news that you don't necessarily need to know about, but is just interesting and fun," says Gorman, who assisted in the revamp of the Sunday Times magazine four years ago, after contributing humor and science features to The New Yorker and other periodicals, and authoring such popular science books as Digging Dinosaurs and Ocean Enough and Time.
Circuits will set a new tone in design for the Times, dressing up the columns of text with visually engaging sidebars and graphs offering Web links, supplementary information, and suggested software. A regular feature called "How It Works" will demystify terms like "megahertz" for the lay reader.
The section will also feature profiles of individuals whose lives have been affected by the proliferation of digital technology and the culture of the Net, "from a sculptor who uses computers in his work, to multimedia artists, to someone deep in the heart of Microsoft who has really interesting ideas about how the world should be," Gorman predicts. Along with Markoff and Lewis (who has returned to the Times staff after a hiatus at Bill Gross' IdeaMarket), Circuits will include contributions by Amy Harmon, Steve Lohr, and a handful of freelancers each week.
Elizabeth Weise, who earned the title of "cyberspace writer" at the Associated Press before becoming the technology writer for USA Today, observed that with the launch of Circuits, the Times will join other dailies in shepherding high-tech reportage from the business section to more general-interest lifestyle pages. (USA Today added a section called Tech Extra to its Life pages on Wednesdays a month ago.) A significant catalyst for this shift in context, Weise believes, has been increasing engagement in online life by mainstream users.
"The Internet snuck up on editors," Weise says. "At first, they thought these stories belonged in business because IBM and Microsoft was business. But people don't care what Netscape's stock did yesterday - they care about what browser to put on their desktop."
While Peter Hillan, executive business editor of the San Jose Mercury News, allows that the Times' new tack affirms his own conviction that high-tech reporting should be "less about the widgets and more about the people," he perceives a certain hubris in the Times trumpeting its human-centered angle as innovative.
"We've been doing that kind of coverage for two years," Hillan says. "I find it fascinating how our competitors like to define what they're doing as 'new'.... I think it shows how some of the media who were not as quick to respond to these developments are now responding."
Circuits has been in development for more than a year, Times staffers say. The launch of the new section is the latest development in the most comprehensive makeover of the paper of record since the late '70s, including expanded arts and sports coverage, and the addition of color photographs on the front page this year.
