Well for one, the mockups rely quite heavily on article imagery, sometimes customized images with alpha values, images that are supposed to set the hue on the page, etc. For a site like the NY Times, this is more or less a non-starter because the content that shoots up to the top of the page are breaking news articles which will be posted, often without accompanying imagery to go along with it.
Users also want to be able to take a glance at the top news stories to get an idea of what the news of the day is. This design eschews that in favor of favoriting one, or a few stories.
Basically, I think that this layout would work better for The New York Times Magazine rather than the NY Times proper, where the goal of editorial would be to highlight an individual story or two, rather than the NY Times which aims to show all the news of the day.
Well for one, the mockups rely quite heavily on article imagery, sometimes customized images with alpha values, images that are supposed to set the hue on the page, etc. For a site like the NY Times, this is more or less a non-starter because the content that shoots up to the top of the page are breaking news articles which will be posted, often without accompanying imagery to go along with it.
Users also want to be able to take a glance at the top news stories to get an idea of what the news of the day is. This design eschews that in favor of favoriting one, or a few stories.
Basically, I think that this layout would work better for The New York Times Magazine rather than the NY Times proper, where the goal of editorial would be to highlight an individual story or two, rather than the NY Times which aims to show all the news of the day.