When the founders of Upworthy were planning their site, they considered a question that a few years ago would have sounded suicidal: “Should we have no homepage?” They wondered whether staffers’ time would be better spent meeting readers where they were already hanging out--on social media, largely--than to hope readers would type a URL into their address bar. It was clear that most people simply didn’t find content through homepages as much anymore, and that is was only a matter of time before a media outlet didn’t even bother with one.
Few sites are immune to the abandonment of the homepage, but if there was one survivor, it was reasonable to guess that it would be nytimes.com. News consumers have long made the trusted site a habit, and the Internet Wayback Machine shows that the Times has barely felt the need to tweak its homepage design in the last decade and a half. But last week, an internal New York Times report attained by BuzzFeed showed that even this homepage is quickly becoming less relevant.
