p2pnet news view P2P:- Thomas Crampton is really upset with the New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune.

And rightfully so.

A couple of years ago, the mainstream print and electronic media looked upon the Net with deep disdain. They might allow online news sources to work with them, or they might not.

Now everyone with an online account has the potential to become his or her own news and information procurer and disseminator, the corporate press corpse is panicking, trying to figure out a way to stay relevant.

In an (appropriately) online letter to NYT boss Arthur Sulzberger jr (left), Crampton blogs (in part) in Thomas Crampton »»»

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.

On a personal level I am horrified that I can no longer see all my stories. The IHT logo on this blog used to link to a search of the IHT website for my articles. On a professional level, I am appaled that the NY Times would kill all the links back to the IHT website. Imagine the power of combining two sites with a Google rank of 9 instead of killing one.

Also, imagine all the frustrated potential readers who click on a link to a specific story only to find themselves landing on the generic NY Times global front page.

The only way readers can find the IHT stories is by going to places where they were copied and reposted or Google cache. Is that a good for readers (or shareholders)?

In conclusion, Mr. Sulzberger, please do what you can to resurrect my articles onto the Internet.

Failing that, could I please drop by sometime to download a digital copy of my articles for my own reference?

In advance, thank you for your help on this.

Sincerely,

Thomas Crampton

And in an update, “Thank you to those who took the time to search for my articles. While you may have found 3,510 of my articles that were also published by the NY Times, my articles in the IHT are still not there. You will note that most of the articles by me available on the NYT site are during 2004 or after, which is when the two papers became closer.”

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Thomas Crampton – Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career, May, 2009