The career-killers at nytimes.com
I've been steamed for years because, when fortune.com became money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/, the Time Warner powers that be saw fit to delete from existence out all web-only content that had previously resided on fortune.com, including the 'London Calling' columns I wrote every week in 2000 and 2001. Well, I'm still steamed, but not as much as former NYT and International Herald Tribune reporter Thomas Crampton is about this:
When you merged the IHT and NY Times websites about one month ago I saw real logic and had high hopes. The NY Times has been leading innovation in online journalism for quite some time, while IHT.com was run on a shoestring budget out of Paris, by a feverishly overworked team.
Despite their small budget and small team, however, the IHT website managed to build an online global media powerhouse often outranking the NY Times website on international stories in Google News.
The IHT website earned an ever-increasing pagerank due to all of the blogs and sites linking to stories there. (Based on the number of Internet pages linking back to a site, pagerank starts at 1 and rises to 10. A page with a Google rank of 5 will show up higher than a page with a Google rank of 3 and the IHT.com grew to match nytimes.com at a Google rank of 9. You can check pagerank of any site here.)
So, what did the NY Times do to merge these sites?
They killed the IHT and erased the archives.
1- Every one of the links ever made to IHT stories now points back to the generic NY Times global front page.
2- Even when I go to the NY Times global page, I cannot find my articles. In other words, my entire journalistic career at the IHT - from war zones to SARS wards - has been erased.
Update: They're gonna fix it.
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1
Time did the very same thing two years ago when it took the Asiaweek archives offline. Try accessing asiaweek.com and you are taken to time.com's Asia page. Today, if anybody wanted to read about the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 in the hope of learning lessons from that period that might be applied to today's global economic turmoil, he would not be able to access any of Asiaweek's excellent coverage online. Nobody can now access online any of Asiaweek's outstanding coverage of Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. All the web-only content is also gone. This a crime against knowledge, scholarship, and the public's need to know and be informed. This is all very tragic - misguided decisions by New York-centric media bureaucrats whose careers are probably soon to be deleted just as ruthlessly.
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2
Okay, Justin, I'll bite. How is this a career-killer? While it is probably stupid, I simply can't get worked up about it. I am a writer, and generally considered to be both prolific and respected in my field. Many of my works have long since disappeared from the Web, through company failures, confusion, and incompetence. In fact, I'm dating myself here, but many of my works have never been on the Web; only in print publications that likely are not archived by any library. In the era before the Web, this was, well, the norm.
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But I can't in any way see how it killed my career. I know what I've done, I have a believable resume that reflects same, and I am rarely asked for online "clippings." And I don't at all feel the need to go back and look at my own works; I almost never look at them again once I have approved final copy.
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Granted, most writings in my field have no historical significance. And there is something in me that hates to see any intellectual property disappear. But I just don't get your point. -
3
To be honest, my desire to participate in this blog dried up, shagged up, long ago with the takeover of WordPress. I do read your words though, Justin and Barbara, and continue to appreciate your efforts.
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4
The world is full of junk speach and writing:
http://iloveclosing.com/2009/05/11/dictionary-of-sales-bull/
Why is everyone so prejudiced these days against decent news sources - we seem to be throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water.
Cheers
TC
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