Mainstream media: killing the past
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Because 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,” I said in a post on Saturday.
The story centered on Thomas Crampton (right) who to his anger and dismay found stories he’d written for the New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune, had been filed under ‘delete’.
In an online letter to NYT boss Arthur Sulzberger jr (see below), Crampton blogged in part »»»
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.
“While the Internet has created a whole new means of communication, news gathering and news distribution, it’s started to seriously undermine the traditional media model,” Thomas told p2pnet.
“This has left the largest – and most beloved – media companies with large fixed assets to finance with dwindling traditional media revenue and tiny online revenue. The result is that the media and democracy itself face a great challenge that has never seen before.
“I trust that innovation will keep the counterbalance role of media alive, but I don’t know how.”
‘ … publications that have repeatedly claimed they fully embrace the web’
“Last night, my frustration about the casual deletion of the IHT archives and links to articles boiled over into an open letter to The New York Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr,” he says in a second post, continuing »»»
No word from Mr. Sulzberger or the NY Times yet, but I have been heartened by postings of support from fellow bloggers and even mainstream journalists.
Postings included Boing Boing, Reuters, Dan Gillmor, MyPhillyNetwork, Phiforfools, Same Rowdy Crowd, a Belgian podcast Audioboo, a site called The NYTpicker (They only writes about the NY Times) as well as TIME magazine`s Justin Fox at Curious Capitalist.
Numerous people Twittered the posting.
P2Pnet created the illustration [on] the left.
Sadly, through these conversations I have learned of similar moves by other major publications. These are the same publications that have repeatedly claimed they fully embrace the web.
The rogues gallery – in addition to my august former employer, The New York Times – now includes:
Fortune
Justin Fox on Fortune switching URL:
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.
Conde Nast
Felix Salmon when he left Portfolio magazine and his identity was stolen:
My name was summarily erased from more than 4,000 blog entries at Portfolio.com, when the site hired Ryan Avent to replace me. Now, everything I wrote has Ryan`s name on it instead of mine. You could call it erasing my career, I suppose. It can be fixed quite easily â if Portfolio.com stays up, which it`s far from obvious that it will â but I`m told there are no staff available to fix it.
TIME
Alejandro Reyes wrote in a comment to my posting about what happened a few years after TIME shut down the print edition of AsiaWeek, once Asia`s largest circulation weekly news magazine:
Time did the very same thing two years ago when it took the Asiaweek archives offline. 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. Whatever you might think about the quality of Asiaweek, it`s 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.
Knight-Ridder
Dan Gillmor wrote about when Knight-Ridder homogenized local newspaper websites in 2002:
What K-R did to its papers, to those papers` readers, to its local journalists, to the Web environment they all once graced, and finally to itself, was a coast-to-coast fuck-you. Gone or buried are all the local papers` local originalities. They were dispersed, everywhere, in a snowstorm of 404s. Gone are persistent archives. Gone are the paper`s names, sections, and local characters. In their place is the same faceless homogeneity â and no doubt the same cost-cutting, advertising-selling and content-managing rationalizations that Clear Channel gave us when they removed all sense of local origination from commercial radio. (h/t sbw)
Dow Jones (sort of)
Salil Tripathi on how her older stories disappeared behind a firewall when the Far Eastern Economic Review went monthly:
I worked at Far Eastern Economic Review in the late 1990s. The magazine stopped being a weekly around 2004, and was reborn as a monthly a year or so later. I`ve continued to write for it all these years.
FEER`s website has some parts that are free to use, and some restricted only to subscribers. When you search for something specific, you are likely to get only articles that have been published since it became a monthly. To access its rich archive of over 60 years of reporting on Asia, you have to go to factiva, Dow Jones`s proprietary service. Unlike NYT, FEER hasn`t erased stories from an earlier incarnation, but accessing those isn`t easy either.
I`ve written for the International Herald Tribune as well, but as I was not a staffer, and wrote only op-eds, and probably wrote only about a dozen pieces in the last few years, I`m not terribly optimistic that I will get to see my IHT pieces anytime soon!
Know of any other examples?
Two concluding thoughts:
1- How sad that major media companies act with such cavalier attitude towards their major asset: Content.
2- If they are so uninterested in this content, anyone want to team up to buy the content and put it online ourselves? (Seems particularly good idea in the case of the AsiaWeek archives). Anyone know whom I should contact at Time about this?
Definitely stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
May, 2009
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May 12th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Well, the guy who’s name was replace got hosed, the only think he could possibly do is sue them. Regarding archives being deleted, it seems to me that a little subterfuge is required here, if you think your blog/newspaper is going to be bought out by megacorp, burn a copy on disc, say nothing, and take it home. There may be legalities, but when it comes to corporations destroying information forever sometimes you have to find ways to thwart that.
May 14th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
This is probably more an attempt at eleminating the competition than at eradicating the past, though the end result is the same. It is another example of the dangers that were the eventual result of the corporate mergers we should have taken some action against over the last decade or two. I remember my heart dropping when I read that Proctor and Gamble had bought Gillette, and thinking “aren’t there some laws in place to prevent this?” Buy simply purchasing and dissolving the competition, nothing stands in the way of them being at the front of the SEO lines and though it would be RESPONSIBLE to maintain the archives, it probably isn’t in their $ight$ to do so, simply because the decision makers are not concerned with the actual impact that might have if it isn’t directly reflected in the profit margin.
Surely the journalists themselves have digital if not hard copy of their own work? Is there any reason the content couldn’t simply be re-released as long as it credited the original source (i.e. – “as originally published on XYZ before mergers with ABC etc., etc.”?) Surely a library that kept archives of magazines that were later bought by another company would not be forced to eradicate their stock simply because the new owners didn’t want to keep them? The beauty of the internet is partly that it has a way of perpetuating information, as it is a great deal easier to preserve a few GB of data than storing the equivalent content on a printed medium.
While I get that the search engines might not have the info available at the top of the result listing from the original server, they certainly can’t simply make it all GO AWAY. Or perhaps I don’t fully understand what is at stake… I am missing something more ominous here?