Slashdot Mirror
Searching for The New York Times
r.jimenezz writes "Adam L. Penenberg, an assistant professor at New York University, has written an interesting piece over at Wired about the contrast between the New York Times' relevance in the real world and the dismal rankings it gets in modern search engines' results. Penenberg discusses some very interesting ideas about opening up the Times digital archive and the impact this would have on its cyber presence."
Of course, like many things about the business operations of a traditional publisher that has ventured online, the reasons are simple but the solutions complicated. The New York Times requires that its users register, which makes it difficult for search engines to spider its content.
As a rule I do not read any newspaper online that I have to register for. In fact, I refuse to purchase the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press here in Minnesota because of their policy requiring user registration. Fake accounts be dammed, you want me to read your paper and have to look through your ads you will let me do so without a cookie linked to information, fake or otherwise.
an even more impenetrable barrier is the Times' paid archive. Because it stows material more than a week old behind an archive wall, you have to cough up $3 per article. Since few are willing to pay for content they can get free elsewhere, search engines, which often base results on relevancy (read: popularity), will continue to dis the Times -- as well as other media sites that make you register or pay for old news (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal).
This is a horrible problem that I have run into in recent times trying to do simple research on the web. I was trying to look for articles pertaining to a friend that currently resides in Perrysburg, OH. I did a simple search on the Toledo Blade's website only to find a link to a third-party archive company that required me to pay a fee to access more than a short blurb about the story. Unwilling to drive the 665 miles to Toledo from where I currently live just to read a hardcopy I gave up on my search for these articles due to this barrier. But while doing research about NEPA I find that The Scranton Times has a much better free searchable archive of information than does the The Times Leader which requires you to pay to visit their archive. Wonder who gets my visits?
I really think that these policies could lead to the downfall of traditional news outlets. I have absolutely no desire to pay money for information that should be easily available. Hell, if you are going to charge I can't see a $3 fee! A couple hundred words are worth $3 in storage? No way. Perhaps if I asked them to mail me the copy of the article then $3 would be reasonable.
"There isn't a compelling business argument today that would suggest that giving away our content is a good idea," Nisenholtz said. Even though the Lexis-Nexis deal is an all-you-can-eat model -- not based on usage -- the Times can ill afford to undermine its relationship with such an important customer. It simply can't charge Lexis-Nexis tens of millions of dollars while giving away the same content free over the Web.
The argument that makes sense is that people aren't going to be willing to pay you $3 for a computer copy of an article that is only a couple hundred words. Make the fee something reasonable or watch as you begin to waste a lot of money paying the third party archive to host your data and no one retrives it. Perhaps a rival newspaper would open their database up and people would start going to them instead. We can always hope.
I assume that the Googlebot can't be bothered to register ;-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
to see my opinion.
New York TIMES?
What, you think you're better than us?!
Us?!
U.S.
U.S.A!
No way!
- John "Bagger" McGurk
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you have stuff in your store windows, people will be more likely to walk in.
What a bunch of bastards. Great paper though.
Buy the President
"the contrast between the New York Times' relevance in the real world and the dismal rankings it gets in modern search engines"
how long has it been since the Times was really a relevant source of information in the real world?
Relevance is a highly subjective term. If you're a typical outspoken, liberal New Yorker, then its your Bible. If you live in a cabin in Montana, you probably don't give a shit. Calling something 'relevant' indicates much about the person doing the calling, as much or more than it tells anything about the item being discussed.
Personally, I think its a rag. It's old, its big, its supposedly a "standard", but no more relevant than my local paper. And probably LESS relevant than the sum total of whats available online - BBC, London Times, Die Zeit, Drudge, CNN.com, english.aljazeera.net, etc. etc.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Who needs the NYT! Let the New York POST open up its vast archives! Imagine searching through decades of mindless celebrity gossip and suddle right-wing propaganda?
The article assumes that the fault lies with the NYT and whether their archives are open. Perhaps the real fault lies with Google. Shouldn't there be something in Google that identifies certain sites and more reliable than others rather than basing rank solely on links? How many people link to online news articles? You're more likely to link to your friends beer-and-computer-mods page than a NYT article about Ashcroft's boot fetish.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
While the NYT may fare dismally in search rankings, I suspect their online influence is still strong. Many of the top hits on a given subject may not link to nyt.com but i'll wager that a number of them are blogs that reference Times material. Just a thought.
harmonious design
I have no problem with registering. If all I have to do is register an email address (heck, even a free hotmail address that i reserve only for spam) and my name, and maybe even my address, and I can get top quality news reporting without having to pay for the newspaper, then by all means I'm for it.
The reason why the NY Times is one of the best papers in the world is because they can afford to pay their employees what they deserve. If my registration helps up the amount of money they can get from their advertisers, then I'm all for it. People deserve to be paid for their hard work.
That said, I do believe they need to have better results on google, and don't agree with paying $3 for their archives that I can get at my local library for free.
Think of the children, people.
I think this touches upon a much larger problem.
Traditionally, libraries were the ultimate source of information. They were organised and well indexed - to help one find what they are looking for.
The internet has become an "instant library" to a lot of us. In ways, the internet is better than a library. Searching is trivial and the amount of information staggering. However, a lot of information is getting lost. I'm aware that there are Archiving sites, but often, these sites cannot index or record the information that sites present from their own MySQL/Oracle databases.
Search engines are really only good for searching a static site, and don't particularly scale well to sites that have content that change frequently.
It all boils down to this: HTML+Search Engine is not a good combination for giving people access to information over a long period of time. Web sites come and go (depending on the interest of their maintainters) and when they go, they're gone for good.
We need to start distributing the content on a global scale - the same way books distribute content among many people.
[ Monday is a terrible way to spend one seventh of your life. ]
This shouldn't be a surprise. Look at the headlines they give in 50 point type, and then when it turns out to be wrong it doesn't even make front page news.
Yellow cake in Niger, for example, they hail him as nearly a god when he says there was no such thing, and that turns out to be wrong...see here here here here
here and here.
They've finally run a story about it, but wouldn't it have been a lot better for them to have investigated those Wilson allegations themselves, when they first happened?
That's only one of the latest...
Tons of websites require you to register, not to mention discussion boards of every flava.
/. has the AC option... I wish more websites would offer a similar thing to people, and a few more benefits to registered users, and a few more benefits to paying customers.
I have to admit I have registration-fatigue.
At least
More people would be happy this way.
An inside source told me that many of the Morris Papers actually discourage spiders and search engine referrals since it does very little for their local based advertisers.
When did FARK get a newspaper?
;)
(yes, i know that UA strings can be faked)
"a specific name in that article" site:nytimes.com
in Google News and it returned me that specific article. But then, I presed "Web" search for the same phrase and it didn't return that article but a couple of older articles with the same name (I guess those were from the time before the Google News started).
I'd take half the salary of the lowest paid reporter if I could sit on my ass and make up the news like Jayson Blair did.
The NYT's has a history of slanting and even making up its news. So why would anyone who's interested in facts and factual accounts want anything to do with looking up its articles?
Not to mention some of the truely bizzarre screeds coming out of some of its journalists.
What about Judith Miller?
Seriously, though, the NY Times is a very good paper considering the huge amount of information it contains. However, I still think the Washington Post is more readable, and dare I say, more relevant in these highly political times.
As a rule I do not read any newspaper online that I have to register for.
...says user #6573, aka garcia...
/. is not a newspaper...
and yes, i realize
> Make the fee something reasonable or watch as you begin to waste a lot of money paying the third party archive to host your data and no one retrives it. Perhaps a rival newspaper would open their database up and people would start going to them instead. We can always hope.
Your fallacy is to assume that other people value the information as low as you do; you admit fees are ok if they are reasonable. Who's to say $3 is reasonable, you? I think the profit motive would drive the papers to discover the optimal price to charge. Yes they can sell ads, but those hardly bring in $3 per article.
> A couple hundred words are worth $3 in storage? No way.
The quality and usefulness aren't necessarily relaed to the word count.
In an interesting coincidence, just an hour or so ago, I was looking for an article I read online in the NYT. Specifically, I was looking for an interesting image which was in the article. (Not for any specific use, I just wanted to show a friend.)
Besides the fact that the article is in the archive now (yet less than a month old!) and costs money, the page also informs you that:
Please Note: Archive articles do not include photos, charts or graphics. Our photos are available for purchase, please click here for more information.
Clicking the link reveals that you can order a photographic print for $95, and that's if they have it.
I don't even want a photographic print! A 200x200 pixel bitmap would be fine! (and hardly damaging to their photo sales)
As the article points out, why would anyone casually link to a NYT story? There is simply no point in linking to something most can't access without paying.
They certainly deserve that Google ranking.
I'm not so sure the NY Times is outlandish in their pricing for archived articles. Articles from the past are a niche offering, and thus come with niche prices. If you really need an article from 1964, most likely a few bucks won't be too much trouble. The idea that you'll pay a price directly reflective of the cost of goods is ludacris. If it weren't, we'd be paying 4 cents for a coke, 2 dollars for a movie, and 5 bucks a month for internet service. Take a trip down to the library and spend a few hours finding the article on microfiche, if you can, or pay a few dollars and get it immediately at home.
Dude, 99.99% of Drudge's big "scoops" are just a sentence leaked from the NY Times newsroom about some big story they're going to publish the next day. Drudge is good at collecting information, but don't kid yourself: his investigative skills are nil.
I use Drudge, yahoo, google, my way, wired, and of course Slashdot as well as some other sources, like broadcast tv and AM radio and I get all of my news for FREE baby.
It's simple. Use The Washington Post. The archives remain free as long as you have a valid link....true, you can't search into the past, but for most website with proper uris, you can simply use a search engine, which will link to a blog, which will link to the article in question. Yes, you have to register, but that is what BugMeNot is for. Plus, the WaPo has Dana Milbank, one of the best reporters in the business!
First we had that scandal with Jason Blair who made up stories-- okay even top notch organizations make mistakes.
But then they came out and admitted they didn't do their job in the run up to the war (i.e., underreporting the suspect issues with the war and putting it in back pages).
OOOPS.
After such big mistakes I don't really consider them the best anymore. And like other reputations in this world, it seems to be more based on momentum than anything else.
I'm not saying they're a bad paper, just that we should demand more from the US's supposed #1 paper.
The New York Times may consider itself "America's paper of record," but it's liberal bias is legendary. In fact, it has been studied and verified:
g ro seclose.pdf
http://www.yale.edu/isps/seminars/american_pol/
One obvious impact of opening up the archive would be the immediate availability of even more information then there already is on the web that can't be believed or trusted.
As a rule I do not read any newspaper online that I have to register for. In fact, I refuse to purchase the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press here in Minnesota because of their policy requiring user registration. Fake accounts be dammed, you want me to read your paper and have to look through your ads you will let me do so without a cookie linked to information, fake or otherwise.
So they are supposed to provide world-class journalism and post it on a world-class website and you can't be bothered to host a cookie and look at some ads (which can be easily blocked anyway) in return?
What a massive sense of entitlement you have. Either that or a severe cookie-phobia...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
OK, the NYT is relevant to Americans, but hardly anyone else. They rarely cover non-US focused stories, unlike, for example, the BBC. The Googleweb already suffers enough from pulling back US related results as opposed to global results, and moving the NYT up will only worsen that.
And after all, if the NYT isn't that popular as an Internet source of information, as it seems it isn't, surely it's wrong/unethical for Google to be working with them on a way to fudge the results so that the NYT comes in higher in the unsponsored results that are meant to be bias free?
--- Band: Joey Ultra
From a newspapers perspective open archives aren't always a possiblity. I work for a newspaper in a Moderately sized (~100,000 people) midwestern city. We currently have about 135 years of paper archives dating back the the late 1800's. While we do have a decent internet presence, we don't have the resources to provide this conent online for free.
A recent estimate by me showed that we would need about $20,000 to get that project started in a very barebones manner. That isn't a small amount of money to throw at a project that you want to give away for free. On the other hand their is antoher newspaper in town that charges $90/year for access to their sports archives and at last estimate they had close to 1000 subscribers. For a medium sized paper that amount of money is hard to pass up.
Now for a company like the New York Times that is a different story. They certainly have the resources to get their content online. They though, have other reasons to keep their content available on a pay basis. They maintian strict controls over all their copyrighted material. Its hard to blame them for this though, since that content is their lifeblood.
In my opinion I do feel they keep their content under too tight of a lock. Its like having a great idea but never letting anyone hear about it because you are afraid they might steal it. Papers must decide between keeping their copyrighted material secure and providing it to readers in a new medium. But it is that delecate balance that traditional print publications now face while moving into the digital era.
I think the Washington Post and New Yorker are probably the most relevant news sources right now. Sy Hersh just *dominated* the Abu Ghraib story. Word on the street is that the worst is still to come...stories if child rape and videos.
I find it a bit strange that we are talking about the relevancy of a news PAPER on Slashdot where I bet 99% of people get their up to date information from the web. I mean, if I want day old news I will read a newspaper. If I want up to date news I will get on the web or turn on the radio.
I don't understand the logic behind charging to read news articles online and frankly I don't care about the NYT. I'm of the opinion that every newspaper and website news seems to copy and paste the same articles with the exception of a few choice words put in that I just choose to ignore - for example:
Reuters
"Man commits suicide"
BBC
"Man commits suicide after learning his wife was having an affair"
CNN
"An average Joe Worker committed suicide today after having his broken when he found out about his wife having an affair with another man"
FOX
"It was a tragic day for the family of Joe Worker who committed suicide shortly after learning that his wife was having an affiar with another man."
NYT
"It was a day like any other, except this time Joe Worker came home early from work to surprise his wife. Unfortunately he surprised not only her, but his wife's lover as well. After becoming enraged (wouldn't we all?) he proceeded to the basement where Joe Worker took his fathers P-Shooter and blew his head off. His wife later called authorities."
Now why do I need to PAY to be able to read a NEWS story that reads like an editorial on some guys pathetic life when all I really care about is "Just the facts" and getting to the Dilbert Comics?
Ave Molech Setting
I know it will sound abhorringly naive but shouldn't The New York Times have as a prime interest independent and objective journalism instead of profit driven opinion-articles passed as objective journalism? Didn't they have to appologize for participating in the national hype (that means acting as a propaganda instrument) for the war against Iraq?
A newspaper acting as a propaganda instrument is something very alarming to happen in a democratic country. That's what happens in fascist, communist and oppresive regimes in general. No wonder Michael Moore's movie/documentary is so wildly accepted. The people want the truth but the number of them that trusts US corporate media anymore decreases by the day.
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
Aren't many rankings dependant on how many people link to the site? Not many folks will cite the link if it requires registration or a "Pay to Retrieve".
Moreso - People will just cut and paste the article and post that instead.
I don't know why they still bother with the registration - who actually puts in relvant information anyway?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
We're not talking here about articles from old paper editions. We're talking about articles that they have already published online.
On the other hand their is antoher newspaper in town that charges $90/year for access to their sports archives and at last estimate they had close to 1000 subscribers.
That's also $7.50 a month for unlimited usage of their sports archive. That's not $3 for a single article.
At least they were willing to admit they made mistakes by not doing due diligence on suspect issues such as the yellow cake.
The same can't be said for the people who continue to insist:
a) that wmds do exist even though none have been found despite the fact they 'knew' where those weapons were
b) that Iraq and Al-Qaeda had long-standing, cooperative ties even though the investigative report clearly showed that not to be the case
If someone is willing to own up to their mistakes that speaks volumes compared to someone who keeps repeating the same falsehoods despite all the evidence to the contrary.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Oh..puleeze..
Since the days of Walter Duranty..to the current political 'reporting'..its all just Democratic propaganda...
They have have been proven time..and time again..to be either skewing the truth, not reporting the whole story..or outright lying...
Mod me down... I dont care...
Never let it be said that the TRUTH ever gets in the way of liberal outlets...
And to clarify, if a search engine (like Google) caches the original article url, that url will remain valid ad infinitum. So claiming that the WaPo is like the WSJ or NYT is a blatant misunderstanding of how the Post archive system works.
Yes, if you want an article published from 1982, you have to pay for it at the Post. But the gains made in the web era more than outweigh that small inconvenience. Unless you're just blinding searching through the WaPo archive, chances are you can find an original url which will be free of the archive wall.
You're right. That is why I switched to the Post for all my news. We all know that Bush / Cheney has all ready won the election and that Kerry / Gephardt have no reason to run.
In fact the Post never wavered in their support for the war. Good thing at least one paper never makes mistakes...
Do you have some facts, via a link or something, to back that up? As the owner of a pair of ovaries and the rest of that whole female apparatus, I'd like to know if the paper I read is misogynist or whether they, as I do, recognize that the general population of the country is becoming more ignorant and apathetic by the day.
A pint of high-quality water can be obtained from many municipal water systems for a fraction of a penny.
Yet people are happy to pay $2 for a bottle of the same water.
Things are worth whatever you are willing to pay.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You can just block the cookies on startribune.com and get all the content w/o registering. I agree these sites are an annoince.
really, who cares? yes the access to the information would be great, but the new york times is a heavily biased news organization with a lot of liberal spin and mis-information. the new york times will lie to make up stories (jason blair anyone?) or just beat a story to death in an attempt to make president bush look bad. When I read the NYT I have the same reaction as when I read the National Enquirer (gasp! my gosh, what if its true!)
p osts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1145998/
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
The Times attracts 9 million unique visitors a month, while only about 1 million read the daily paper.
I find the extensive dead-tree version convenient and end up reading more from it than the on-line version that's free.
But, not having a lot of time during the week, I end up buying the print version maybe every 3 days, and quickly scanning the on-line headlines on the off-print days.
The Times really ought to open up its archive and let everyone, including Lexis-Nexis, have free access.
Many years ago at a university library they had an entire special catalog devoted to indexing old NY Times articles that one could read from microfiche. Without the individual paying, either.
There is still a fundamental chasm between archived high-quality material (especially true for scientific journals) and what is freely available and searchable on the web.
Think about how useful it would be for the general public to have access to old, high-quality archives like the NY Times and other scientific periodicals; the pursuit of science and other research would be considerably advanced over where it is today. Then there is the reality: copyright protections and the hope by the copyright owners for a few dollars more by charging for access (that only the very wealthy or institutions can afford) still persists.
It's almost enough that I think the government ought to exercise eminent domain (link to counterpoint about possible abuse of eminent domain - just as they do for land when a freeway needs to go through Aunt Tilly's backyard) and provide some reasonable compensation to the current copyright owners and to appropriate sufficiently old works and make them available publicly.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
"So they are supposed to provide world-class journalism"
Which means, exactly? For example, how many stories did they print about the non-existence of WMDs before Bush invaded Iraq vs how many reprints of government press releases?
"and post it on a world-class website and you can't be bothered to host a cookie and look at some ads (which can be easily blocked anyway) in return?"
We're doing them a favor by going to their site for information that's probably available on the web for free. Why should we be the ones paying for it?
So they are supposed to provide world-class journalism and post it on a world-class website and you can't be bothered to host a cookie and look at some ads (which can be easily blocked anyway) in return?
I have no problems looking through the ads. My point was that because I have to look through ads I shouldn't be required to have a trackable piece of information linked to me.
...anyone doing 'serious research' can easily access complete full-text archives of NYT + other major newspapers by visiting either their local library (if they have a library system that is decently funded) or by visiting their local higher education institutions. Proquest and other services are subscribed to by tens of thousands of businesses, libraries, colleges, and universities, and give you access to full text complete archive of the NYT specifically. They're protecting an investment in content, and it costs them to maintain and manage the archive and requests. $3 is high -- but it's not a major revenue stream for them. It's $3 more than anyone should have to pay, if they were wise enough to visit a library/university.
We can try to understand
the New York Time's effect on man.
The Bee Gees were obviously visionaries.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I really don't like the idea that you can't continue to link to an article beyond a certain time limit, or that after that time limit anyone following your link will get a demand for a $3 payment.
That's why, although the article may be shorter, I prefer to use BBC News if I'm referring to a story.
Having said that, I certainly feel sorry for the NYT, and I do have my own valid registration. I just can't see how they can find a for-profit way to handle their archive.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
"The Gray Lady is a beautiful clipper ship, but it's losing steam..."
--media consultant Vin Crosbie, from TFA
The Lexis-Nexis agreement is the key bit. NYT Digital profited $25M and they have a $20M agreement with Lexis-Nexis that they wouldn't have if the archive were available free. The archive therefore clearly won't be free as long as Lexis-Nexis "owns" it.
I don't know what else is in Lexis-Nexis, but I imagine they have similar agreements with their other main sources of info. But it seems like they're the ones who are more threatened by Google, since they are so clearly in direct competition. When their first customers start making their content too free on the web, there's going to be a momentum that leads to the decline of Lexis-Nexis's current model--at which point NYT Digital will figure out some other way to make money.
Well, when you put it that way... you sound like Hannibal Lecter!
I will post this anon since it is off topic.
/., its hilarious how many stupid things people are willing to say or claim just because they hate Bush. Seems the same people can be found spouting stupid things with regards to Microsoft, Warming, Nuclear Power, and other controversial subjects.
1. WMDs have been found, not just in any great stockpiles. WMDs were not the only reason/justification for going to war, only a simpleton thinks that. They have found Sarin and Mustard gas.
2. The Iraq Al-Qaeda link was first prensented by Clinton's team during the times of the first WTC bombing. The only determination of investigative work suggests that the Iraq link may have not affected the WTC bombings.
Its ignorant fools like you who keep parroting just because they are so full of hatred for Bush that they can no longer reason.
Don't think that that statement is true? Keep reading
Do your own research, quit being stupid.
There is no cry for the Turkmenistan archives because -- unlike the NYT -- not many people think much of the quality or usefulness of that apocryph.
My suggestion for this teacher is that treaching itself is a core civilization value and so he should be ashamed to accept money for it.
Nor of course should he be associated with such a craven organization such as New York University that accepts money from poor students after the decadent selfishness of feeding at the public trough.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
More discussion here.
You don't have to register to read the news and commentary on /.
For those of us outside the US, it's just another newspaper, and its rankings are about right for that.
The idea that "Because they've done this, I should pay that" is simply self serving. In capitalism, sometimes you pay alot more for something than it cost the seller to procure. If you're not cool with that, you go somewhere else. Their business model is valid, and at this point I think its safe to say that alot of people consider it a valuable service. I happen to agree it is not priced correctly, and thus I don't buy articles there.
Ah, so this is a police state? I must say, I like it. Lots to talks about, open dialog about disagreements, utter maniacs like George Soroes getting lots of influence -- not bad.
So, beyond the misapplication of terms, you do raise a good point, why would the world care about domestic politics in the US? They haven't gone over the UN's impotent head in almost a year now! Nope... no reason to keep an eye on the US... or France... or Britian... and as an American I sure don't care a lick about what goes on in Canada! I mean, who cares what our largest trading parter does!
Further more, given how unbiased and accurate the NY Times has become, I'm sure it's a great source to consult! Just consider the accurate, fair, balanced, and just visionary reporting they NY Times has brouth us over the years! Mark Levin has an excellent article on this quality publication.
Sam
- The Times should customize its content so that readers could pick and choose which stories they want based on their own particular interests, rather than having to wade through the site's table of contents.
What is being suggested here is personalized news such as Findory News. Take advantage of the online media format. Customize each page to each reader's interests. Make it easier for online readers to find interesting news.Now why would you say a silly thing like that, Clarice?
Newspapers rarely make enough in issue sales to pay the cost of printing the issue. They make the money in advertising, plain and simple.
To have a paper like the New York Times, who can command advertising rates as high as any paper in the world, bitching and moaning about their web presence and hoarding their articles like some stupid info-miser shows nothing more than a complete lack of understanding somewhere in the company. There is no excuse for it.
If any website could sell enough ads to keep itself profitable it would be the website for the new york times. They could add to their revenue and readership in one fell swoop. But no.
It's dumbass media outlets like this that had better wake up and get with the program. Doing it the way you've always done it will do YOU in the end, and it won't be pretty.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You'll find that those who are 'interested in facts' are the ones who are most interested in lies, so they can point out how obvious they were (after the fact), and keep you distracted by looking at those lies, while they feed you more of their own.
There might be a few people out there who just want to know about 'em, just so they can catalog them for whatever purposes, and actually present them in full context, as opposed to putting their own political slant on things, but it's hard to find 'em when they're mixed in with every other person fighting to get attention out there.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
In an decentralised Internet world, each net citizen will report their local news. Search engines will aggregate this disparate news into something sensible. Eventually there will be an automated 'repuation' system, which keeps track of the accuracy of each user's past reporting so we know who to trust.
Blogs are a first step along this path and Google's page rank is a rudimentary form of accuracy indicator.
So run a browser with decen cookie management. End of story. Heres a hint get the fuck over yourself.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I'm thinking of moving to Minnesota but I need to find job resources - do you know where I should look for a job in the Twin Cities area? Could you email me? Thanks in advance.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Uh - you do realize that if you try to visit the NYT with cookies disabled you'll never get to your articles, right? Unless you use google as a referrer or some hack at least...
The whole idea is that you register and they give you a cookie, which lets you bypass registration the next time you visit. If you eat the cookie, then you have to reregister...
He's from Minnesota. Everyone here has a massive sense of entitlement. We have taxes that tax your taxes.
Besides, both the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press are such left wing rags that they aren't worth much.
I only get the Sunday edition because of the coupons.
I'm better than you. I suggest that you not tell me what to do.
If someone offers him a better deal than newpapers who want to be paid for their work, then he should take that deal. Why someone would offer that, I can't imagine, but that's their problem.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There is no correlation between size in the real world vs. the virtual world. The New York Times is a gated community. It should be _no_surprise_ that search engines rank the NYT low *and* that its popularity is low. If Google starts ranking NYT links high, it won't be because they are popular or more useful that other news sources, and it will be a great disservice to Google users.
Thinking of the children would be a bad idea. :)
touché
I am now happy with my timely reading of the NYT, the BBC and happily clip to my Clie or Alphasmart when I travel.
(Plug for new reading device: the Alphasmart Neo due for sale in August, is a typing and editing machine that can hold 2MB of software and 512KB of text. It lasts 700 hours on a set of 3 AA's. Fill it up before you fly, read and discard, then fill it up on the trip with your notes. Instant on. Doesn't crash. IR xfer.)
I'm not so sure the NY Times is outlandish in their pricing for archived articles.
It's not so much outlandish as out of date. The old article prices made sense when few people wanted them, so overhead was high. Now, with the web, you have a vast audience of potential viewers. As a business venture, it certainly seems to an outside observer that it would make more sense for the NYT et al to make their profits off of advertising revenues from lots of views, rather than per-copy payments for a small amount of views or archive sales.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
It has an archive of every issue of New York Times for about the last 5 years. It's not free though.
So the paperboy was getting an extra 60c to deliver the paper to your house. That bastard!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Given the NYT and its problems with accuracy, veracity and plagiarism, who cares?
"High quality" is a very subjective term. People are not paying for unprocessed bottled tap water. Bottled water arguably tastes much superior to the locally available tap water (especially in some areas). People will pay more for higher quality products, including water (just look at Macs). People also will pay more for convenience (such as fast food). Most people usually don't carry their tap around with them, but a bottle of water is available most everywhere.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
how long has it been since the Times was really a relevant source of information in the real world?
Since computerized communication provided open sources of news that made it painfully obvious the Times had let ideology lead them into draconian self-censorship, bias, and occasional (but systematic) outright lies, rather than news coverage, to spread a political agenda.
It's tempting to say since they started that policy. But that still left them "relevant" - like the propaganda machine of ANY ideology with major political power is relevant. What killed their relevance is the availablility of sources they and their ilk couldn't suppress or ridicule into irrevelance.
This was starting to happen in the early days of netnews and bulletin-board systems. But the explosion of home-computer connectivity and web-based interfaces brought it to the general public with a vengance.
I'd say the watershed event was the Drudge Report's breaking of the Lewinsky scandal. People had been switching off mainstream media news for some time. But this made it clear to the broad public that the internet was not just a good source of news, but a BETTER and MORE RELIABLE one, than the broadcaster/newspaper/magazine axis. In particular, it brought the latter's self-censorship and bias into the public eye.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your local library. Unless you're really in the middle of nowhere and your library has no budget at all, go to the library. Heck, you might not even have to go to the library, many libraries now do chat reference, ask-a-librarian, and all libraries have a phone.
There's more, MUCH more, to doing research than using google. Paid databases have it all over google for finding current and historical news information.
If you can't find something local, try the Library Of Congress, they do online chat reference.
I'd really like a way to eliminate the pay/registration sites from my searches all together, as well as ones that use obnoxious javascript. Whenever I'm doing technical searches, one or two sites are usually in the top 10 because of an article title, but the rest of the article requires registration. I'd just as soon have those sites never show up in my searches.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Penenberg discusses some very interesting ideas about opening up the Times digital archive and the impact this would have on its cyber presence
"cyber presence" != being a competent newpaper.
This is exactly the kind of attitude that led to the dot-com fiasco.
So many crap sites have a huge "cyber presence". SO WHAT? NYT is really good at doing what they do, and they know that enough people will be willing to pay to get what they offer.
It's surprising to see this kind of marketing bull-speak come from a university professor.
Who's the sheep me or you?
I least make my own opinion taken from various sources, I don't just spit out the same-old, same-old 'NYT is garbage' crap over and over again.
Not sure if anyone noticed but in my opinion:
http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink
was the only thing of any relative importance as its another nice way to get around the NYtimes registration barrier....
What, those mustard gas and sarin canisters that the Polish troops recently aren't WMD? read it here.
Iraq and Al-Qaeda cooperative ties not the case?
You haven't really read that report have you? Or listened to all the senators that had to get on TV to say that while there was no evidence that there was a direct tie to 9/11, there certainly was that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were in bed together. Check this for one of the stories about that.
Or try reading this.
Who's to say that the NYTs last mistake was the yellow cake thing? It's certainly is not. I heard a report within the last couple of days that Libya is going to say in September (don't know why they're waiting) that Iraq was working with them on nuclear stuff. No news reports on that yet (not that I expected it them yet), but it sure would be pretty damning if it ended up being true.
Don't think that could happen? Well, everyone was SO SURE about the yellow cake, just a few months ago....
Seems like a none issue to me. Search for new york on Google, the New York Times is the first thing that comes back.
And another question... why are they not doing Google News searchs? Google made that feature for a reason.
I agree that there is the "deep web", databases like Lexus Nexus that require payment and a lot of useful information is locked up in it. Even if your school pays for it you can't just 'include' them in Google or wherever. That would be a great feature.
NYT with is quite happy making itself irrelevant in this age of information exchange boot. Should we care? Probably not. The future of humanity depends on diversity of information resources, making all propaganda monopoly obsolete.
If I were a major press industry shareholder today, I would be *very* afraid of the future.
Consider, a free news networks using torrent technology will outperform any press distribution model, including web sites.
There you are, staring at me again.
What we need is a campaign to encourage web publishers to:
- put up content on permanent URLs, not encumbered with registration or pay-to-view
- only link to content that follows the above principle
In short, we need a Campaign for Real Hyperlinks .(See also here.)
Tap water is very highly regulated, and on average is higher quality (in terms of contaminates). Bottled water producers are barely, if at all, regulated. They can put whatever they want in the bottle and call it "bottled water". It is more an issue of perception that actual quality.
Umm... You've obviously registered on slashdot, thus accepting a cookie which remains for a very long time. Slashdot has ads to help pay the bandwith bills, or if you don't like ads you have to pay.
You can post AC, and then your blatent hypocrisy is removed. But no, you willingly allow cookies and ads to read it here, even post comments to better the site, potentially drawing more people to view the ads. Why, then, can't other news outlets, those who do a whole lot more investigative reporting than slashdots link policy, display ads and have cookies?
Here comes the logic train, last stop is you.
SAILING MISHAP
I realize that, as a national/international newspaper, this complaint does not hold for the NYT, but I feel this article is a good place to get this off my chest.
I am very tired of small newspapers starting a web page than then dominating their front page with international and national news ripped from the AP wire and from places like the New York Times.
If I am online, I can go to news.bbc.co.uk or to cnn.com or the New York Times for international news and other big stories. If I go to the Kansas City Star website, for example, I am really going there for news about the Kansas City area, not to get the AP article on the war in Iraq.
Small regional newspapers need to realize they are never going to be able to compare with the competition for international news when online. They need to cater their online presence to something that no one else will be able to match - local coverage of local events.
I have noticed that some local papers are getting better about that, but I think they still have a long way to go.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
So they are supposed to provide world-class journalism and post it on a world-class website and you can't be bothered to host a cookie and look at some ads (which can be easily blocked anyway) in return?
They are not "supposed" to do anything, they can do whatever they like. And so can I; I can choose to look at whatever web content I like. If a website isn't to my liking, because it requires registration or pay-to-view, I'll go elsewhere.
To turn around your complaint:
If someone wants to control me while I use the net, they can pay me an hourly rate to do so. Otherwise, I'll do what I want.
Two principles for web publishers:
The nature of electronic publication has blurred the line between storage and publication. Newpapers fear that they won't be able to generate subscription income if anyone could get the same content in their home from the local library. They rightly consider traditional library storage to be a republication when it's done electronically. It can be just the same or even better than the newspaper can provide itself.
The paid archive solution is a greedy, stupid and misguided answer. I don't trust it, no matter how "good" a newspaper you are talking about. Traditional newspapers were authoritative because of their distributed storage. They might be wrong when they report the news, but that is worlds better than a single entity having big brother like ability to change what they say. Without this independent storage, the trust is lost. They seek to use new copyright law powers to get more than ever out of subscriptions, a traditionally small portion of their revenues, without realizing that this destroys their credibility. There are plenty of solutions that are not so stupid and greedy.
Some measure of trust can be recouped by allowing libraries to store the information and then "republish" it on the internet after a reasonable amount of time. 17 years, the original copyright period, might is short enough to assure social relevancy. People would like to stored NYT articles on Watergate, Ronald Reagan and other more recent events. If a newspaper wants it's relevancy back, it can trade some of it's copyright power and subscription revenue for it.
A complementary solution is to charge a reasonable subscription fee to the library itself and rely more on advertising revenue. The agreement could specify that the local library must serve current advertisements with old copy. That's an approach that no print can take and it increases their readership in a way that increases the value of the advertising.
This small newspaper could do very well this way. Their largest subscription came from their sports archives at $90/year and 1,000 subscribers. I'm sure that they could coax an equal or greater amount of fees from an equal number of libraries around the country. Everyone would win.
As things stand, everyone looses. I don't trust the newspapers as a source. I've got more trust in Slashdot as an archive because they let Google and others archive their content for independent confirmation. Every single library should have an internet archive. Without it, we are all forced back on books published by interested parties who have inside information but have no way to check them. Other people might save articles, recordings of speeches and newscasts and then publish a book, but it's worthless to me because I can't independently check their sources because they can't share them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I ran across this very clever technique recently: an online magazine had a section that was open to google that had obfuscated versions of all their back articles. They randomly reorganizing the phrases in the article, but kept the metadata the same.
That preserves nearly all of the searchability without giving the articles away for free in the Google Cache. Then when you link to the article it redirects you to the "you gotta register/pay" portal.
If the NYT did that then it might get much better rankings, and hopefully it could charge a sane price like $10/mo or $.50/article instead of $3/article!
My uncle, on the other hand, takes a different view. In his view, if he can't see pro-conservative remarks in an article, it's liberal trash.
Your uncle may be making a very important point.
The MAIN tool of propoganda is not the lie. It's the omission of truth. Selective reporting creates a false image, and THAT is the lie.
By carefully omitting one side of an issue while focusing coverage on another, the covered side can be made to appear objective truth or the popular viewpoint, rather than an off-the-wall speculation (perhaps long disproved) or some far-out splinter opinion.
Scientific results can be hidden from decision-makers. Health frauds can be propagated. Cost-benefit tradeoffs can appear massively reversed. Far-out political factions (at home or abroad) can be made to appear large or universal, while mainstream movements can appear to be splinters or nonexistant. Genocidal regimes can be made to look reasonable, opposition to them marginalized.
This misreporting can convince a lot of public opinion, converting people from one side to another and sometimes swaying elections. But the real power comes from fooling legislators and executive-branch decision-makers about the opinions of their constitutents - leading them by the nose in their lawmaking, regulation-making, enforcement decisions, and judicial appointments.
Because omission of a popular viewpoint (even if it's not popular with YOU) from allegedly "objective" news is such a powerful propaganda tool, it's also a powerful indicator that the outlet IS engaged in propaganda.
So your uncle has a point - and I don't mean on the TOP of his head.
Think about it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You're wrong on one count. We wouldn't be paying $2 for a movie. You see, theaters are charged for the rental of the prints, which about 90% of the ticket price goes to cover. Theaters make their money on sales of concessions, not ticket sales. Rental of the prints can be up to or sometimes even exceed $30,000/week for one movie on one screen.
I'm talking about gallon jugs of water in the supermarket here.
I've lived in two areas (Albany, NY and NYC) where the local municipal water sources are exceptional, yet people buy Britta filters and bottled water like its going out of style. I can understand buying water in a place like Boston where the water sucks or in some suburb where the water comes from a shared well.
People are paying for branding.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The Times really ought to open up its archive and let everyone, including Lexis-Nexis, have free access.
I think it's up to them to do what they like; I don't think the government should force them to open up.
If they keep themselves closed, they will gradually become irrelevant, the way Wikipedia is making Encyclopedia Brittanica irrelevant. If they chose to be a dinosaur, I say let them, and good riddance.
You should watch Fox instead. No distortion of political agenda there
Quelle surprise, mon capitaine!
The NYT lack of presence in google results reflects perfectly its lack of relevance in the "Real World"
The dear assistant prof cannot even write an article without bringing up that favorite bit of trivia, Abu Ghraib.
From the FA:
"But the Times still ranked low, even after it plastered an Abu Ghraib story on its front page for 32 straight days between May and June."
As anyone who was paying attention to REAL news sources knows, those responsible for the abuses were already under arrest. Yet the NYT propaganda mill spewed out 32 days worth of output on this one issue.
The other "BIG MEDIA" outlets are no better:
Check out theAllahpundit comparison of Time magazine covers. The only thing missing from the black-and-white Bush pic is the brown shirt and the armband.
Hell, if a person was going to waste time reading or watching propaganda, they would be wise to choose something with real artistic merit, perhaps one of Leni's bits of snuff fluff.
The NYT, Time, and The Walrus are far too crude and obvious, as well as lacking artistic merit, to be worth bothering with.
Are they too fucking proud and do they imagine they are an unbiased bastion of Socratic wisdom?
They are fucking whores so let them pay for rankings like everyone.
Hey NYT - I have a new job for Jason Blair; Director of Google ranking.
The Drudge Report proved that the internet is better and more reliable than the New York Times?
Yes.
Because the Drudge Report proved that the New York Times was suppressing relevant news, which the Internet broke.
If "reliable" means you can count on it to report news, rather than suppress it to further a political agenda, then that makes the internet more reliable.
If "reliable" means "more likely to contain truth than falsehood" it's a different discussion. But mainstream papers - including ESPECIALLY the New York Times of late - have been repeatedly caught in falsehoods, and not just omissions. So you ALWAYS have to do your own investigation on ANY report in ANY medium, to determine for yourself whether it's gospel or bogus.
As Fox News says: "We report. You decide." If you punt that decision to the operators of ANY medium - especially on the basis of their own propaganda about their accuracy and that they cover "all the news that's fit to print" - you've just put the ring in your own nose and the lead in someone else's hand.
When it comes to the domestic animals' interests versus the farmer's, which way will the decision go?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Here comes the logic train, last stop is you.
It's coming right back at ya buddy... Slashdot does not require me to accept a cookie to read their content. I can choose to not have a cookie and not login and I can still read everything on the site.
Luckily for them I have chosen to accept the cookie and to put up with their advertising to "better their site" (subjective).
Actually, I think Tacoma Washington was going to get into the bottled water business selling their tap water. Those of us in Seattle thought that this was fairly funny.
Google correctly identifies the NYTimes' relevance on the internet via counting it's popularity amongst people who would make links to it. I for one wish they would stop making links to NYT stories on slashdot, and that news.google.com had an option to simply filter out all of the subscription required links. Artificially skewing google's results via allowing people to pay for 'relevancy' would just make Google less valuable to me.
Michael
You can't read NYT articles with cookies disabled, dipshit. Now get off the Internet and go to class.
Bottled water is unregulated. In some cases it *is* in fact just tap water. But, it's in a bottle, so it's worth $2.00.
The New York Times should add an access rule to let the GoogleBot have unlimited access to the site but not allow caching. All you have to do is add "allow googlebot." or whatever the reverse lookup for googlebot ips is. I did that for my own site which required a subscription back in the day. Now it's pure AdSense.
Their articles would then show up in search engine results but people would still have to register to read the article. The NYT could also have a simple script that checks for the referer and if it's google, the first paragraph or two could be shown to the user with a "to read more, please register" link.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
If you read any of the articles in the times, especially the magazine. Some are quite long and execellent (they have one on genetic engineering called playing god in the garden which covers all sides of the topic well..). These go away after a couple weeks into the archives. Some of that my have to do with the contracts writers contracts.
There was a big dispute being free lance writers who wern't paid to have there works published in-perpetuity and the newspaper. I don't know the exact details but it may have something to do with the limited time many articles are availabele.
But there is really few free news sources that cover topics as in depth. All are pay,Wall street journal, economist.etc...Some are just books and those aren't available online.
I thought the Google News section was supposed to handle newspapers and magazines etc.
If the NYT isn't there, then it's because of their self blocking or their irrelevance.
Those aren't the wmds Rumsfeld et al were talking about. Those are shells left over from the Iran-Iraq war and around the times of the 1991 conflict. Every shell found to date has been shown to be from that time.
If those had been the weapons then Rumsfeld et al would have been shouting it from the rooftops. They aren't so that tells you something.
Iraq and Al-Qaeda cooperative ties not the case?
Correct. Iraq and Al-Qaeda did not have any substantive ties. Yes, Al-Qaeda did try to get Iraq to give support but it was Saddam himself who specifically told his henchmen not to get involved with this group. In fact, in nearly every instance that Al-Qaeda made contact in an effort to forge closer ties Iraq ignored those requests.
When the supposed Libya tie-in comes to light we shall all have to see. If there was a link then you would think the administration would be crowing about it. However, like the wmds they aren't so that tells you something.
I said from the very beginning that the administration didn't have the evidence it claimed it had simply for the fact that it never showed the supposed evidence. If you're so sure that the guy is lying and that you have proof of that lying, show it. If you don't then obviously you're the liar (not you personally).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
uh, use the bugmenot plugin for mozilla you troglodytes.
I used to go to the washingtonpost because they didn't require any individual account, they just took basic demographic information. That was fine. I have about 3 accounts with the new york times and about 3 more with slashdot. If I couldn't post anonymously with /. I'd stop posting.
.mac and network served cookie directory that I could log into, much like I can synch bookmarks now. But that's a kludge, the real problem is that all these places are asking for unique id's when what they want are demographics and targeted advertising. I don't need to read the nytimes. I see enough news elsewhere.
I'm tired of being 30 different people. I don't care if they track me with a unique cookie, I don't want another username and password. And I'm not about to give up all privacy and identify myself with a microsoft passport. What's wrong with zip code, gender, and age? I use 4-6 different computers to access this stuff, cookies don't help me with the account proliferation.
What might help would be
-theed
hold on... banner advertising to subsidize content delivery?
didn't we give up on that business model years ago?
Dasani is tap water.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Libraries used to offer access to back issues of both magazines and newspapers without charging.
Don't they still?
O=='=++
unlike the Washington Post, where I seem to have to re-identify myself as a 55 year old woman in Afghanistan every other day
So it's you who keeps stealing my identity! Now I understand why I am having so many problems trying to read my news all the time...
A pox on you!
Yes. They should do that, to save me having to register.
Otherwise I won't go there. Not a threat, simply a fact. Someone is going to come up with a system that lets me link to their content without expecting everyone to jump through hoops to view it, that someone is going to get me linking to them. At that point I won't care what the NYT does, they aren't going to be relevant. I also don't care what sort of business model this requires, I'm never going to expect casual readers of my site to register at the NYT just to read an article I casually mention so they either make it easier or they don't get the links.
They're free to say that they don't want my links to them, or my friends who won't bother to register to read an article, but then for better or worse, they've essentially opted out of the web. No links means no search engine rating, no search engine rating means no drop-in traffic, no drop-in traffic means no new readers. No new readers means nobody will see their articles, let alone link to them and encourage others to read them, or boost them in search-engine ratings. Spiral of doom.
What can they do then? Let unregistered people in for free after they sit through a three-frame, full-screen ad. Salon does it and I know I'm not going to have to fill anything out or remember a password so I'll sit through it.
Guess which site I'll link to?
Is it a sense of entitlement? No. I don't feel they owe me anything, but I know I'm not going to pay for the right to link to their article, nor will any of my friends. They have the choice of unpaid drop-ins readings ads or nobody browsing their archives at all. I know what I'd choose, but it's up to them. If they go away there'll be someone else doing what they did, but better.
if you don't want to use their service, don't use their service. if they wish to charge for their service or require a registration, that's entirely their decision. if you don't want to do that, go read Fox News.
regardless of what you think about the quality of the information they have printed in the past, journalism is journalism. They printed the best information they had at the time, and retracted information when they determined it was false. what else can you ask for?
you're not doing them a favor, you are using their service. you want to use their service, you abide by their rules. those are the TOS.
I'm not saying they're a bad paper, just that we should demand more from the US's supposed #1 paper.
Um, we can't demand anything from them. Only their advertisers and stockholders can do that. They're a for-profit corporation, after all.
If you want a news source that you personally can make demands of, you're stuck with things like NPR and VOA, where you in fact do have some influence (though it's diluted a bit by the other millions with the same influence).
Of course, there is a way to make demands of the NYT and other corporate news sources. Just give them enough money by buying ads or stock that they have to listen to you. But unless you're willing and able to do that, forget about making any demands of them.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Old trick - leaving out capitalization and making loopy references whilst pretending to be a conservative. Get lost, Liberal!
I just walk up & down the BART trains in the morning. I get all kinds of papers!
:P :P
* Wall Street Journal
* Contra Costa Times
* Oakland Tribune
* San Francisco Chronicle
* New Youk Times
I'm saving a ton of money in subscriptions.
Funny thing is that I'm serious.. and I'm not the only one that grabs papers from the BART trains/stations.
And yes, I have a job. No, I'm not a homeless guy collecting them.
Do you honestly go to blogs to learn the news? Some fat looser sitting around at night wearing tighty whities drinking red bull alternating between typing his blog and playing counterstrike has enough journalistic integrity and resources to replace WSJ and NYT?
Yes, and the Drudge Report is accurate reporting at its best. Talk to the "Kerry intern" for her take on that journalistic integrity.
Good point, but to go one step further, it is the studios setting that price point for the theaters. Moreover, the idea that circumstances dictate price works here as well when you consider that 10 cents woth of popcorn is sold for 3-7 dollars, and the already over priced coke is sold for 3-4 dollars.
"ludacris"?
Mtv taught me phonics!
I see the author's point, and as an internet searcher myself I often resort to the free sources in lieu of better (but fee-based) newspapers.
However, I can understand why the NYT wants to, and needs to, charge a fee for articles. More than once the author mentions the fee is too high. That may or may not be true. But as a librarian in the information business I've learnd it all depends on how bad you need it, and the quality of those 200 lines. (I've known law firms that would pay hundreds for a 200 line article that hit jackpot!)
Lastly, even if the NYT charged $1, you would still have the same problem regarding internet searches. Those articles would still be invisible to Google, and most users would still choose free over fee-based content.
-Pete
Libraries are generally wonderful, amazing places: well organised, friendly and incredibly expert staff who do their best to get what you need for little or no cost.
But there is a cost - and people forget about it, because its in our taxes. (Whether or not we should pay for public libraries out of our taxes, and whether the money is well spent is another argument). But the bottom line is that we've had 100 years or so of great services because there has been a general philosophical acceptance that it's a Good Thing for everybody to throw in a few cents for a building in every town, full of good books, staffed by experts, and with an infrastructure to enable gaps in individual library stocks to be covered at a national *and* international level by an interlibrary loan service. Most developed countries now have a superbly developed system for getting paper-based information to their citizens for little cost.
My question is: would we accept paying taxes to do the same via the internet?
I think it's mainly a philosophical, rather than technical question. If we all agreed to pay additional 'library taxes' then there's no reason why existing sources couldn't be made available to all citizens (e.g. your National Insurance number is your password, now you can get the NYT online for free, NYT gets paid by the treasury for its national-to-all-citizens licence each year) and also in the same way that many library indexing systems were evolved by librarians working under public funding, why not use public funding to develop internet archiving / retrieval systems of comparable value? I think it's a philosophical issue, it depends on how you see these technical solutions being funded.
The web is a timeless medium. This post will look the same a year or ten from now, except that links to the NYT will only be freely available for a little time. Given that when I write articles I expect them to be valid for more than a few weeks I can't usefully link to the NYT.
In capitalism you often provide a product or a service than honestly cost a lot to make and is truly of value, and people won't buy it because why it's a very nice gizmo, gizmos of that type simply aren't worth what you're asking, even the best gizmo in the world.
This, imho, is where the NYT is. Their archive might cost a lot, it might save some people much more than the $3 it costs to use, but a huge majority of people are simply going to accept my quick summary of the article and not read it once they hit the 'buy access to this article' page. That article might cost $500 in total to host for a year, but I'm just not willing to pay anything 99.999% of the time. If access was free they'd at least get banner views. Maybe it takes a thousand banner views to equal the $3 payment, but they're going to get very very few $3 payments...
Wonder who gets my visits?
Who cares? The Blade wasn't making money off of you before or now. Nor is the Scranton paper.
It doesn't just get past the reg barrier, you can get past the whole freakin' archive fee. Found a backlogged story that demands $3 to purchase? Punch it in this page, and you get free access.
The idea that you'll pay a price directly reflective of the cost of goods is ludacris.
Wrong channel.
Dasani is tap water.
Well, it *starts* as tap water.
I am quite happy that the NYT doesn't show well on general search engines, and I certainly would not register (free or not) to gain access to it. The former home of Jason Blair is no place to be doing any serious reading. Just my two-cents.
Slashdot - Where the slash is most definitely to the left.
Hopefully what you learned today is that people on Slashdot, who may know a lot about computers or science fiction, may not necessarily know anything about other subjects, such as the media.
I work in the media industry, so I can say with a lot more surety than you that advertising revenue is far from sufficient to cover the costs of producing and distributing content -- this is true for both print and online.
Last year, the president talked about how Saddam helped Zarqawi in Iraq. see this reference.
Here's another article, that's really worth reading, and I encourage everyone to do so...here's a clip from it:
The only reason NYTimes has their current price structure is to justify the $20 mil they charge Lexis-Nexus for the same information. It would be hard for them to get that money out of Lexis-Nexus if the same information was freely available online.
Are you being sarcastic? What reason was there on Day One (I assume you mean before the leak about his wife) to assme he was a fraud? Just curious -- the whole thing has really puzzled me after the Senate Intelligence Report came out.
Well in fact I do. When was the last time you picked up a NYT or WSJ? I've been reading both for the past 8-9 years daily.
If you have to choose between pop and bottled water I usually choose bottled water.
found somewhere in the internet ether...
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their smog statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave L.A. to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feministic atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.
10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
There are two boys selling lemonade, one charges $.25 per glass, the other gives it away for free. Wonder who gets my vists? The one that gives it away for free won't be there for long. "But information isn't a real item, they aren't losing anything." (I can't inflect enough whine while typing that). No, information isn't free. Data might be, but then you'd have to go out and collect all that data, and comile it, then draw conclusions on it. If you want the information for free, do do the research yourself, go interview the storm survivors yourself. Why should I give away my work, or work that I have paid for, for free? "But the papers could sell service to the consumers of their news...."
Google gives me lots of information for free, no registration, no cookies, no hassle. Why should I make any effort on behalf of another company that offers me less for more trouble?
Guess what? Libraries have less money than newspapers.
Guess what else? The libraries already have back-issues of the newspaper on fiche. They aren't going to pay twice for the same content.
So would you be willing to drive 66 miles? 6 miles? 0.6 miles?
I gave up on my search for these articles due to this barrier.
And was this barrier ($3, you later say) more than fuel and parking, not to mention time spent driving to a nearby library? Heck, it's less than return subway fare in NYC. By your reasoning, unless you can walk to the nearest public library and find it, it's not worth having.
But while doing research about NEPA I find that The Scranton Times has a much better free searchable archive of information than does the The Times Leader which requires you to pay to visit their archive. Wonder who gets my visits?
Well, in your case, the answer seems obvious, but I'd pay for quality and reputation when I have to. I don't subscribe to the New York Times online (I don't think they're worth it) but I do subscribe to the Independent, and if the Guardian charged for archived material, I'd pay them too (I do pay for their crossword, in fact). And rest assured I'm not alone.
What's amazing to me is that people will bitch violently about paying $2.00 for a gallon of gasoline, and yet they will gleefully pay the same amount for a little bottle of water.
Spoiled brat yuppie hypocrites.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
This is not the only reason to hate them. I got a call from them once with regards to a subscription to their newspaper, which I did not want, but the sales lady was really the sterotype of the pushy New Yorker and would not take no for an answer.
This of course was not helped by the fact that having done phone service and support, I hate being rude to ANYONE on the phone nor did the fact that I am a mild mannered Washingtonian (The State, silly) and a pretty much stereotypical one at that (polite, coffee drinking, weather conversationalist). She would not understand how a sane civilized human being would not want to recieve the NYT on their doorstep every morning. To her is seemed unconscionable, almost to the point of negligence, that a person of my demographic would not worship the very ground that the NYT was printed on. I simply MUST read the review of books, she informed me. I must.
But I haven't and I probably won't. I haven't found them to be any more enlightening than any other news source out there.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
You're more likely to link to your friends beer-and-computer-mods page than a NYT article about Ashcroft's boot fetish.
The day when someone's "beer-and-computer-mods page" becomes linked enough to achieve a high page rank in Google, then you'd better start reading that page. The simple fact that thousands of people think that site is relevant makes it deserving of interest. OTOH, who is so important at the NYT that makes any article printed there relevant?
The NYT isn't of much relevance in the "real world", except as a blatant example of how biased to the left a publication can be.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Most conservatives the the NYTimes as a liberal rag, though I do know quite a few republicans who read it regularly. But trust me, there's no love of the Times from the other side either. For the last few years the Times has been the mouthpiece for who is in power. Their reporters may be liberal, who cares, it's irrelevant. The editors, and the publishers are conservative, and there is a bias about what stories get in, and what gets chopped. And the Times lost a lot of credibility for banging the drum for the Administration for the last few years, and that horrible woman Judith Miller.
We can demand anything we want from the New York Times. It doesn't mean they have to listen to our demands. The key to demanding things from the NYT is that using the only power you have over them, buying or not buying a copy of their paper (or paying for online content). Now if I am alone in demanding something from the NYT, they are likely to tell me to suck an egg. However, if many people are all demanding the same thing from the NYT, they are likely to give in to our demands in order to not lose ad revenue from poorer sales.
What a massive sense of entitlement you have. Either that or a severe cookie-phobia...
The man has a right to chose not to read any newspaper online that he must register for and you cannot begrudge him that right. You may not agree, you may even think he is nuts to expect that he should receive free ad-free access. Fortunately the marketplace exists to solve such disputes. If he is willing to pay nothing then he will probably get nothing, but presumably he is not very disappointed because he obviously did not value the content enough to pay for it anyway. If however you believe that $3 per article is a fair price then presumably you are happy to pay and the newspaper is happy to provide you with access. Everyone was satisfied with these arrangements and the choices that they made: you, the man who was not willing to pay, and the newspaper. That is the power of markets.
Because the exact same argument applies to newspapers in general.
And you know what? I agree completely. I think all news should be free and unencumbered by ad revenue, special interest, corporate ownership, you name it. But that's the bitch of capitalism; it always comes down to money and everything is slanted in that direction.
So, since all the content in the newspaper is being generated by ad-biased reporters and editors (editors a LOT more than reporters) in the first place, then why not charge ads for the online stuff?
Though one of the uncle posts was right about the revenue stream from archives. Definitely somethign to think about.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I don't know about your water, but mine contains chlorine, which I don't like the taste of. Sure, I could just fill water jugs and let them sit in the frig for a day and the chlorine would all evaporate, but I prefer the convienence of filtered water.
There's also the unknown factor of lead leached from solder in the plumbing. While it doesn't really keep me up at night worrying about the small possibility of lead, I have a slight preference to filtered water to eliminate this small risk.
AccountKiller
No, this is ludacris.
The idea that you'll pay a price directly reflective of the cost of goods is ludicrous.
The author of the referenced article, Adam Penenberg, is the one who broke the story on Stephen Glass fabricating stories at the New Republic. At the time, Penenberg was at Forbes.com.
That story is told in the movie "Shattered Glass", which I had the pleasure of watching for the first time the other night.
I only use a filter or buy bottled water if the municipal water tastes like chlorine. I absolutely despise the taste of chlorinated water.
As long as the water tastes decent and isn't hazardous to my health, I'll happily drink it. The cheaper the better.
Where I used to live there was a machine at the nearby supermarket that filtered the municipal water and gave you a gallon for 25 cents. I considered that well worth it. It tasted much better than the chlorinated crap that the municipality produces, yet no worse than the cheapest 85 cents per gallon water just inside the supermarket (not to mention those horrible expensive ones like Evian).
While I was filling up at the machine, someone told me they had seen some show that claimed those machines produced unhealthy disease water. Pah! Fear-mongering. No doubt some machine somewhere hadn't been maintained in a while or wasn't working right, causing people to get sick. That happens every day in restaurants and municipal waters supplies across the country. The water was just fine and I enjoyed the chlorine-free taste.
In Germany where I lived the tap water was by far the best tap water I've ever had, being piped fresh out of the Bodensee. It was unchlorinated and tasted great. I never had the desire to buy bottled water. A lot of people there, however, swear that their tap water is somehow unhealthy and instead buy carbonated water in bottles. How bubbles in water suddenly make it more healthy I have no idea, but a lot of people seemed to believe it. They had no idea how good their tap water was.
...between the ideals of the intenet literate cognoscenti and the real world. People complain about a "soul sucking registration" but want all this info at their fingertips. It is no different in the real world and the online world. If you want to look up info at the library, you still have to get a library card. To get that card, you are going to have to give a physical address, a telephone number and frequently a social security number.
Wake up people, we live in an age where the only real currency is information. If another entity isn't going to value what you necessarily value, you are going to have to give them something they value to get what you value. If your PERL programing skills aren't something they value in that instance you're going to have to give them something that they DO value, in this case, some information.
Last time I looked, you can't buy a car with sand dollars.
If you value your charade of "privacy" more than the information you seek, don't bitch if you either have to forgo the info entirely, or work a whole lot harder to get said info.
I know and those same people will die defending their locally obtained water that they pay more for a gallon than gasoline. I am allergic to chlorine, so I am unable to drink the locally purified water (chlorine is a common additive in America). There are only two or three bottled waters I can drink because all of the others have approximately the same amount of chlorine that the local water has, they are just filtered to take the taste out (easily and cheaply done), imagine that. Americans are sooooooo gullible.
i use a 6 stage DI/RO filter to filter/bottle and refridgerate tap water to be 'pure/clean' with a .5 conversion factor ppm of 2. its tasty, healthier than drinking all the crap in our relativly great water system (starting ppm of 270) but its the only way i will drink water, otherwise it tastes like pool water.
I also cook with fresh ground sea salt to readd micronutes being filtered out.
at any rate the filter setup and replacement cartridges only cost me $200 and it will filter 6 gallons a day for 5 years for less than $0.0003 a gallon.
i tell you what, you keep drinking poolwater and get lead poisening, ill drink my nice bottled water (1-2 gallons a day everyday) and we will see who is happier.
And who cares about the NY Times? They have a fame of professional journalism that influences the media around the globe, but why? Do they really create much better journalism or is this result of some corporate propaganda? They even denied the false articles one of their writers created, and only when everibody knew it they admmited. Their are slaves of corporate interests just like any major journal. Here in Brazil, where we have Globo TV, which is praised for their professionalism and all, it doesnt matters that they lie and twist truth towards their bias, I cant believe when people that knows they lie praise them! F* power and propaganda changes peoples minds! How long did it take for the NY Times to have an independent ombudsman?
And who cares about the NY Times? They have a fame of professional journalism that influences the media around the globe, but why? Do they really create much better journalism or is this result of some corporate propaganda? They even denied the false articles one of their writers created, and only when everibody knew it they admmited. Their are slaves of corporate interests just like any major journal. Here in Brazil, where we have Globo TV, which is praised for their professionalism and all, it doesnt matters that they lie and twist truth towards their bias, I cant believe when people that knows they lie praise them! F* power and propaganda changes peoples minds! How long did it take for the NY Times to have an independent ombudsman?
I can understand buying water in a place like Boston where the water sucks
Ever since 1988's presidential election, people have been repeating this line of BS. Boston's water supply isn't just very good, it's exceptional. And not just "for a big city" but for any place in the country. I lived in Boston for a decade and the water not only tasted great, but you could actually lather and wash yourself in it, unlike the craptacular water in, say, Nebraska. Just about the only thing you'd have to worry about is living in an ancient building and having lead in your pipes, but that ain't the city's fault.
I lived in NYC for a while as well, and their water is great, too. I just can't stand all this FUD from small-town America about the "evil big cities" when they're usually dealing with much stricter regulations than the rest of the country.
Don't take my word for it; read the annual water report for yourself.
I'm not familiar with the US system. But in Canada municipal water systems are more heavily regulated in quality than bottled water. Bottled water is officialy classed as a food here.
There is a flavour difference too, but that tends to be because the bottled water dosn't have to be as heavily chlorinated, so there is a higher risk of biological contamination.
Bottled water also tends to have a higher content of minerals (iron, copper, lead) and organic chemicals (gas, hexane, PCBs).
Most of the water bottling plants use municipal water systems (For example Montclair is Montreal water) then either filter or ozonate the water just enough so they can put it on the lable.
How ever I can't argue with you on the convenience factor.
Filtered water dosn't get rid of heavy metals or chlorine. If you want to get rid of the chlorine taste try leaving your water in a pitcher. As for the lead let your water run untill it is cold then you should have flushed all the water out that collected in the pipes and soaked up the lead.
You don't have the God given right to read information in the pioneer press other site. YOu can go to the library and read one of the copies there, or you can pay for the convience of havibng home delivery. I may not like cookies, and I'd rather they weren't there in the first place, but if they want to set them, and you can't be bothered to reject them, (really easy in firefox) that's your problem.
In the end, if you don't like it, you don't have to read it, I guess. I find them to be a suitable paper, (OT: Joe Sourchary (sp?) has never, ever been wrong.) and thus I will view thier ads at least once before adblocking.
SAILING MISHAP
So you take in multiple leftist news sources and have determined that the NYT is part of the vast right wing conspiracy!!!
It has corporate ownership! Their corporate masters who *dare* to make a *profit!!!* by *selling* information that *wants to be free!!!* are all Dead Rich White Males! ACK!
Down with those hateful NeoCon Pro-BushCo Fascists running the NYT!
"I have absolutely no desire to pay money for information that should be easily available."
SHOULD be evailable? You sound like a freeloader to me.
Good journalism takes a lot of time, money and effort to produce. *You* might think that it "should" be available for free, but I can assure you that ain't going to happen any time soon.
Out of curiosity, does your allergy prevent you from using swimming pools?
One of the nice things about Albany and New York City is that politicans during the turn of the last century in these cities saw fit to secure good & pure surface water supplies. The NYC reservoir system extends nearly to Binghamton and provides clean, aerated and flouridated water without chemical filtering. Albany water is just as good, without the fluoride.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Not that I buy bottled water, but I could understand an argument based on taste. Some water definitely tastes better than others (in Vermont, for example, I think the tap water tastes HORRIBLE), and so buying "standard" water instead of local water could be a valid argument.
No sig for you.
You can also use Aaron Swartz's link generator to create archive-safe links for the NYT. Two of our prominent Australian newspapers are planning to require registration in the near future - I wonder if that will drop their search rankings (which are currently much higher than the NYT).
Theres some brand of bottled water here (I think it's Dasani) that comes from the same place our tap water does. I thought that was kinda ironic people still buy the stuff and claim our local water is trash.
Given the stuffs filtered, but give me a break.
If a corporation does it under the guise of "journalism," suddenly they don't have to tell the truth or check the facts, they only have to stay in line with the views of their owners (Rupert Murdoch/Fox, anyone?)
Capitalism doesn't trump the right of the public to a free and open press. At least, by law it doesn't. But those making the laws and amending them are most often those on the payroll, so...
The point of even having a press/media is to give the public the facts. How can you give people the facts when the facts often interfere with the bottom line, and you have advertisers to worry about, and you're owned by a wide ranging conglomerate that has multiple interests in several hot button issues? (Would you trust CNN or MSNBC to give you a fair look at the DRM/Piracy topic? You are a fool if so...)
There's a Firefox extension that solves this problem: BugMeNot. It keeps a database of known good registrations, and you can add your own and report back any that stop working.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Most search engines have a way to exclude information. In Google, use "-" before what you don't want. See the Advanced Search page, under "without the words".
Though it would be incredible to have all of this online (or the even greater archive available from NYT), what they are charging for are things that have been on the web since 1996. It's not like they have to send someone off into the stacks to find, scan/type and upload a 75 year old article, they just have to do a database lookup, just like they're doing with the current articles.
In other words, it's already electronic from end to end, but they're charging $3 an article.
What I don't understand is that using current ads, much of this older content can actually make money again, something that newspapers haven't really been able to do before. Currently, if someone wants to read an article from 5 years ago, they go down to their local library, find it on microfilm and read it. The original paper doesn't see any money at all. If they made these archives available online, they'd at least get new ad revenue.
Be glad life is unfair, otherwise we'd deserve all this.
I worked in a laboratory in a water bottling facility for a year, and I can tell you that after working there I will gladly pay the $1 or $2 for bottled water when I am away from my home filtration system. The reason I will do this is because I have run the tests myself and know that tap water has about 7 times the mineral content of spring water and about 10 times the content of drinking water. So while you are getting ripped off paying $1 for a bottle of water that the company paid about $.07 to make (including price of the platic bottle), I would say you will pay the greater long term price in the amount of sheer chlorine you consume from our trustworthy (note the sarcasm) public water sources.
You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test. - George W. Bush
What reason was there on Day One (I assume you mean before the leak about his wife) to assme he was a fraud?
The fact that he was rather unqualified to conduct any sort of investigation, the fact the he went and wrote a New York Times story on his supposedly official CIA findings, the fact that the CIA didn't even have access yet to the Niger documents that Wilson criticized.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I dunno, did you kill your television set?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Likewise, the core of most NYT articles consist of re-writes of wire feeds from AP, UPI, Reuter, Tass, AFP, and so on.
McDonalds has volume. NYT has volume. But volume is not the same as quality. How to measure quality is a good question, but one common metric is the frequency of citation and in which publications the citations occur.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Offtopic, I know, but the thread where you and I discussed the Florida voting mess has expired, and I wanted to direct your attention to this article on that topic.