Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch posted “The New York Times Clutters Up Its Homepage With Links From Elsewhere (In Beta)” today – makes a good point.

The concept here is that if readers can find the best news and opinion from around the Web right from the homepage, they will keep coming back to it as a starting point, just like they do with Digg or Techmeme. Where this breaks down is that the reason I still have the New York Times as my homepage is that I want to see at a glance what is going on in the world…I don’t need three more headlines on the same story. That clutters the page, and leaves less room for other headlines. I want that page to maximize the number of different stories I can explore about different subjects, not different points of view on the same subject.

I think Erick is giving the NYT an “A” for effort – but NYT is failing to see the point.  The links others is great – but we don’t need another Google News – we have a Google News.

When I first read this article I thought he was critizing – but after further review, Erick is right on!