New York Times‘  alternative home page with links from other sources is a step toward a new potential role for media companies – as aggregators of content.

By choosing Times Extra, you will not only view NYT’s own stories, but are also given en number of links to relevant stories from other sources.

For bloggers this is really no big deal. Bloggers have done this for a long time – and modules showing relevant content is common on many blogs. BetaTales, for instance,  is using a service from Sphere to do this.

Yet it is rather radical for a major newspaper like NYT.  Traditionally media companies have been thinking that they should focus on their own content in competition with other providers.

But sharing is caring. More and more media companies find that they need to show an open attitude in order to have their readers come back again and again.

New York Times explains that the company wants to become “a destination for compelling journalism, not only by the New York Times”.

That is a pro-active attitude, even though it remains to be seen to what extent the algorithm behind Times Extras is able to serve really relevant content to its readers, as Mashable points out.

My guess is that we will see many more similar services from media companies in the years to come. Even large media houses can no longer live in isolation from the numerous conversations going on in the blogosphere. Readers expect to be served with all relevant content at the same time, not only what the web site’s own journalists have written.

In the same way media site probably will also to a much larger extent connect to the big social networks, for instance by including users personal news feeds on the news pages of the media site, as we have discussed before.

After all, roles are changing in the newsroom and journalists must take on new tasks.  To sum up this post, I recommend you to read Paul Bradshaw’s piece “Model for the 21st century newsroom”, in which he identifies “Aggregator-Sub” as one of the new journalist roles.

Extra background

On an extra note. New York Times is aggregating the links through its own company Blogrunner. Her is an interview Beet.tv did with Blogrunner’s creator Philippe Lourier: