Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Hot 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
Posted in Poor Practices, mainstream media | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
Newspaper Fail
One year later from a somewhat controversial post explaining why Generation Y doesn’t read newspapers and if the newspapers can do anything about it, I’ve come to realise more and more how ineffective newspapers are, compared to online news sources and blogs.
Firstly, let’s state the obvious that physical newspapers cannot be searched easily, as compared to bookmarking and saving a link online.
Next, even if there were links online to the news articles, it usually ends up in one of two ways:
1) The link expires when it is transferred to their archive section or some similar movement (Ever bookmarked a page to find it’s not there anymore? That’s what happens)
2) They try to make you register with them after the “free access” period has expired. Whether or not they try to charge is another issue, but registering for news which is essentially free, is ridiculous.
With such a poor value proposition (information can’t be found, or is hard to access), is it any wonder we’re turning more and more away from newspapers? Yes, there are some mainstream media news sources that are doing a good job online as well. That’s fine and good, but the industry as a whole doesn’t seem to be getting it’s act together.
Add in the Associated Press threat of legal action against bloggers who wrote about news and linked to them (which incidentally, actually helps the papers), and you just wonder if newspapers and mainstream media are enjoying themselves walking backwards instead of progressing
Tags: ap, archive, associated press, bookmarking, controversial, free access, generation y, ineffective, mainstream media, newspapers, poor value proposition, register on newspaper sites, search newspapers
Posted in Poor Practices, mainstream media | 5 Comments »
