Newspapers Are Just Contributing To Their Own Downfall
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post on the poor value proposition of newspapers, I saw an article from the weekend by Thomas Crampton expressing his outrage at the New York Times and International Herald Tribune when they erased their archives, and all of his journalistic work on them.
First of all, dear New York Times, great work on wasting that Google PageRank of 9 that you’ve built up over the years from all the inbound links. Or maybe you’re taking a page out of the Associated Press and find inbound links to your news a copyright infringement.
Then, Thomas goes on to explain how Wikipedia is grappling with the sudden loss of these archives. Think about it: Wikipedia (and any source that has linked to these archives over the last few years) suddenly finds their information sources gone.
So tell me something. Why are newspapers, who for so long were the “gatekeepers” of information (key word being “were“), doing such a poor job of their gatekeeping?
Tags: archives, associated press, copyright infringement, google pagerank, inbound links, international herald tribune, new york times, newspapers downfall, poor value proposition of newspapers, thompas crampton, Wikipedia
