So, in your opinion, do you think this is a progress? I actually rather like the look of the 1997 version, but then, I am not interacting with it to know how well the design works. I guess that's the danger of "judging the book by its cover," so to speak...

Akira: sorry for the delay in responding to this.

I most definitely think this is progress. In fact, I think it's a beautiful example of a measured, thoughtful response to a) the importance of an online presence for newspapers and b) the varying types of non-paper media that has come to be expected online. They've done a great job integrating blogs, video, audio, photo slideshows and interactive data visualization into a cohesive and clean interface. And one that has been stylistically consistent for a decade! Impressive, I thinks.

Thanks Craig, I am looking at it more now and trying to see your points, and yes, the integration of varying media works beautifully. And, I say, the layout of all that information is elegant. But there's still something that jars with me aesthetically (maybe it's the narrow columns), but I guess that's more an issue of taste.

I found a little article written by the Times' designer, too:
http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0403_the_awesome_.php

Khoi has some pretty good articles on grids which I recommend peeking at to get a sense of what's going on behind the NYT structure (although Khoi wasn't involved in the redesign.)

As a counterexample to the NYT site, Amazon.com has also remained largely unchanged for the past decade; (1998 screenshot:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060522143937/www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/002-9382263-3415808

But has handled information increase on a per-page and per-site basis poorly in my opinion. Book detail pages are long, loosely structured information dumps that hardly invite deep browsing.