Automate Your News Reading with the New York Times Channel on IFTTT

IFTTT has made it easy to automate actions on your web services like tweeting articles posted to your WordPress site or setting up email alerts for new Craigslist listings. Now, a new channel on IFTTT will allow you to connect actions by many of your Web accounts to triggers from the New York Times.

IFTTT stands for “if this, then that,” and lets you create “recipes” for automated tasks triggered by certain actions on the Web. In the case of The New York Times channel, for example, you could setup a recipe such that that if a popular article is published to The New York Times, then the article will be saved to your Pocket account for you to read later. The New York Times channel supports various triggers, but no actions.

Triggers available

• New article in section: Set a trigger for every new article published to your section of choice in The New York Times. The trigger will support 20 items per check
• Any new popular article: Triggers your chosen action every time a new popular article or blog post is published by The New York Times
• New article from search: Conduct a search on nytimes.com and set a trigger for newly published articles that fit the search criteria. This trigger will support 20 items per check
• New Critics’ Pick movie review: Trigger an action every time a new Critics’ Pick movie is reviewed
• New book on the Best Sellers List: Set an action for every time a new book is added to the Best Sellers list of your choice
• New event in category: Trigger an action for each time a new event in the category you specify (for the New York area only)

Using these triggers will make it possible to automatically save new Fiction Bestsellers to your Evernote account, for example, or share popular articles in the Business section with your LinkedIn connections. For more The New York Times Recipes, browse submissions from the IFTTT community.

 

A Shift Toward Popular Use

The New York Times joins BuzzFeed and ESPN as trigger-only media channels available on IFTTT. The The New York Times channel, however, is such a widely read publication that its addition signals a shift in IFTTT from an automation service geared toward techies to a tool for popular consumption. And IFTTT doesn’t plan to stop at The New York Times. CEO Linden Tibbets told The Verge that IFTTT has plans for expansion: “This is just scratching the surface,” he said. Content providers like The New York Times are “looking at all the ways readers want to consume or get alerted about their content,” but many are greatly challenged by the technological resources required to cater to each and every one of their readers’ needs. IFTTT wants to provide a solution to this problem.

In order to accelerate IFTTT’s channel expansion, the company is developing a way to make channel creation easier. By the end of the year, Tibbets said, IFTTT will open channel creation to the public. It’s not yet certain whether this will involve an open API or another solution.

Recently, IFTTT added a channel for the popular RSS reader feedly, and in July IFTTT released its iPhone app.

 
How do you plan to use The New York Times channel on IFTTT? Share your recipes with us in the comments section!