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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."
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.
I think you're painting with too broad of a brush, but I don't think that the New York Times has been the 'paper of record' since Watergate.
The entire idea of their *being* such a thing seems a little outdated to me.
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.
B) Not indexed by search engines
C) Not electronically archived
Yeah, looks like they're really relevant in the 21st century. (And this is a good indication that land-grab IP attitudes have no long term positive benefit in an information society.)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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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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
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
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.
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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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.