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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."
If you have stuff in your store windows, people will be more likely to walk in.
"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.
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... ***
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.
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...
I'd rather read subtle propoganda than flagrant propoganda. (Though I refuse to apply either label while on Slashdot.) Flagrant propoganda just rubs me the wrong way. I was a writer and editor for my high school paper, and I tend to have trouble respecting news outlets that don't even bother to attempt to appear balanced.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Well, obviously, with the extra $ for home delivery, you are paying for... home delivery! I'm one of those people that likes to read over the breakfast table (breakfast: now there's a concept that's been going out of style for a few years). Actually, since I read 5 or 6 newspapers a day, I need to get most of them mailed or delivered...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
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
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.
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
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
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."
All news organizations are the same. Even Fox which isn't really a news organization but more a tabloid show.
I can easily recall numerous occasions where Fox puts out a story and either the newsheads or the 'experts', or both, conveniently leave out facts or skew things.
Don't bother trying to claim it's the 'liberal' media which lies or spews propoganda.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given the NYT and its problems with accuracy, veracity and plagiarism, who cares?
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.
The description of the fair.org survey:
"This research project examined the supposed left orientation of media personnel by surveying Washington-based journalists who cover national politics and/or economic policy at US outlets."
so...
"Hey reporter...do you think you are liberal or conservative?"
Yeah, sounds objective to me.
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
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
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.
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.
Perhaps they lost a word, and it should have been "The Gray Lady is a beautiful clipper ship, but it's losing to steam..." The paper-only news sources are a dying media, and this process will only accelerate. If the Times management can't figure that out ... well, how many companies can make a living for their employees by selling slide rules, buggy whips, and whale oil lamps these days? These things work themselves out in the market, but it'll sure suck to be a Times employee.
Or investor.