Should the NYT go down the river?

Dave Winer on innovation at the New York Times:

Let’s remake the NYT home page as a river. It will work a lot better than the current home page, and it will also attract interest from the world. And it can be iterated in so many ways. Not just technically but with content. Rivers should be seen as editorial products. A news organization should create a river just like they create an editorial workflow. It’s the equivalent of that, but on the visible side of the curtain.

(This is in light of Buzzfeed exposing an internal report on innovation.)

The homepage as a river of news? It’s worked for others. And yet… in a well operated web site, relatively little traffic will be coming to the home page, but instead coming straight to the individual pages, via search, social, e-mail and so on.

We do need to rethink our obsession with website front pages, and rivers are one answer to be sure.