Do I miss the paper? Yes. I love the seeing the news well layed out.  I like the editor designing the pages so I can easily see what they think is worth reading.  I love the serendipity of finding good stories that I may not have clicked on in the browser.  I love the act of folding the paper over. I even like the ads better.

But then, I do not like the fact that I’ve already read half of the top stories the previous night. I don’t like the idea that someone drove in his car to throw ink drawn on dead trees wrapped in plastic on my driveway. And I don’t think the cost of the paper subscription is worth the marginal value of the paper experience.

If my experience is not uncommon, then the print paper goes away and we need to see a business model that works for the local paper. Finding a new business model is not the subject but I suspect a combination of prominent and useful local ads and inserts (I still want to see if what’s selling locally), high-value ads based on a local specialty with national appeal (say tech for the SJ Mercury News) and premium content subscription may be the answer.  Fleshing that out will have to wait until another morning.

Click to see a bigger version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But more importantly, nytimes.com takes advantage of being on the web by doing much more than just repurpose text and images. The site includes a ton of video, audio, slideshows and applications that are very informative and/or helpful. Here are a few of many standouts:

While I watch CNN for their analysis and their cool touchscreen maps, I come to the New York Times for their Delegate Maps. The county-by-county information is updated as quickly for the readers as it is for their own editors. It’s very cool.

Their audio and visual slideshows can be a lot of fun. Their writers are not always the most dynamic personalities but the audio certainly adds a good perspective.

This is a fun and simple application to see the Top Surnames in the US. The information design is terrific (larger fonts denote higher rank). My surname doesn’t make the Top 5,000 but my wife’s is in the Top 500.

This is another example of an information application that the New York Times has done well. This is an application to help you figure out if you are better off renting or buying. Depending on when you bought your house, you will be either like or hate its findings.

The New York Times spent several months with updates on Life After Katrina. The stories are nicely displayed here on this map.

And when the New York Times started publishing blogs of their own, I found them immediately useful.

Now, not all is perfect with the New York Times. In fact, they have probably my biggest pet peeve on the Web. If you click into a story off the front page and then double-click on any word or phrase, a pop-up window will appear that shows a “reference search” for that word or phrase. Now, I am a “clicker” by habit; I will just click on a web page for no reason whatsoever. On the nytimes web site, that means I am poppping up useless windows left and right. This is a bad attempt, or should I say dirty trick, on generating pageviews with ads.

But other than that (huge) nit, I find myself spending more time on the New York Times web site than ever before. Nicely done.