Nisenholtz has a long and storied career in interactive media. While at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, he founded the Interactive Marketing Group (IMG) in 1983. It was the first creative development unit at a major U.S. advertising agency devoted specifically to interactive communication. Today he serves as the chairman of the Online Publishers Association and on the board of directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

He sat down with Vault for an exclusive interview on industry trends.

Q: What are the key ingredients for a well-designed news web site today?

A: I think the key ingredients are the same that they've been for a while with maybe one exception. I think that the first and most important consideration is that the web site more or less anticipates the information needs of the user. By that I mean that users come to news web sites for different reasons at different times of the day. Your site needs to be designed to anticipate all of those need states.

The change in the last 18 months has been brought on by higher speed connections. While I don't think a lot of people come to us specifically because they think they want to hear our journalists in an interview or look at a video or a slide show, we think it's in our best interests to start providing those things, so people will eventually get used to wanting those elements. Fifty years ago, they didn't see many photographs in the paper, and now they see dozens and dozens every day. There's a give and take between what users really need and what they want.

Q: Do you see weblogs becoming an integral part of an online newspaper?

A: Yes, I do think that they can become an important part of a news web site. It's always been our role to point to or aggregate what we consider to be valuable content. That can be done in a variety of different ways. I can easily envision having a weblog critic on nytimes.com or in the paper even, reviewing blogs the same way we have book reviewers or film reviewers.

To me, weblogs are a legitimate publishing activity and they're becoming more legitimate as the days go by, as more professionals get in and make them exciting and useful. I can imagine aggregating weblogs in certain categories so we're covering areas of the news that webloggers are particularly good at covering. I don't want to suggest that we're doing that at the Times right now; it's just something I've thought about as a way we could work with weblogs.

Q: There's an argument that if all news is made on demand, users will only read about their specific view of the world. Have you found this to be the case with NYTimes.com users?

A: No. The paper is an extremely powerful serendipitous reading experience. The whole notion, at least today and for the foreseeable future, that this is a zero-sum game where people either just read the paper or just read the web site is simply wrong. There's no data to actually support this notion. Most people just read the paper. Some of the people who read the paper also read the web site. Those who read the web site probably also read a paper, maybe their own community newspaper.

I don't know what newspapers our 14.5 million users are reading, but I suspect most of them are also reading papers for the very reason you suggested: you can't get that serendipitous reading experience on a PC or a cell phone. They're completely different experiences even though they share some of the same content. It's not useful to think of them as zero-sum.