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July 16, 2004
NYT-Noids In Charge, So Grey Lady Down!
(Jimmy Akin)
Have you noticed in your surfing around the Internet lately that it's harder to access certain news stories, particularly on sites like that of the New York Times--the famous "grey lady" of journalism?
Well, you're not the only one.
In fact, the NYT-noids have restricted their stories to those who register and/or subscribe with them, and so have other papers. As a result, their rakinging in popular search engines like Google have fallen precipitiously.
This Wired News story describes the problem . . . and its solution. Exerpts:
When I googled the terms "Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib" -- certainly one of the most intensively covered news stories of the year -- the first New York Times article was the 295th search result, trailing the New Yorker, Guardian, ABC and CBS News, New York Post, MSNBC, Slate, CNN, Sydney Morning Herald, Denver Post, USA Today, Bill O'Reilly on FoxNews and a host of others news sites.Two years ago, Martin Nisenholtz, chief executive of New York Times Digital, bet $1,000 that nytimes.com would outrank all blogs on Google by 2007, based on a search of five keywords on a topical news issue. Unless Google and the Times work on their relationship -- Nisenholtz says they're talking, although they haven't come up with any answers yet -- there may be a day when The New York Times doesn't show up at all on the Net's most popular search engine. Ultimately, this could be a direct threat to the Times' legacy.
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. Perhaps 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).
But the Times already gives away content on its website, which is updated between 20 and 30 times a day, offering the day's paper, plus other articles in advance of publication, pictorial slide shows and reader forums. When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper.
The Times's strategy of charging for old rather than new news is backwards, and portents ill for the future of the paper, both online and off as more and more users (i.e.: readers) switch to getting their information online.
Fortunately, while the Times (and others) still have their heads stuck in the past, there are services to help you get around these absurd limitations. In fact, you might use the BugMeNot.Com, a service devoted to "liberating" restricted web pages such as those of the New York Times.
In the view of Bug Me Not, the registration required by sites such as the NYT is useless, as many people simply lie or give obviously false information when they are filling it out (e.g., saying that you are an incomeless woman born in 1900 in zip code 00000 and whose e-mail is x@x.com). Further, the information offered on any given news site is easily available on other sites, so if you make your data hard to get, users will simply go elsewhere.
In view of such facts, services like BugMeNot.Com seek a rational manner of allowing people access to the stories on these sites by letting people share their access information until such time as the sites themselves realize that their best interests are in letting people access to this information without having to establish new accounts.
Plug-ins (/Extensions) are available for users of Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. The same information is available without plug-ins/extensions to all others.
Another service, New York Times Link Generator, allows bloggers to make permanent links to NYT articles, even after they go into the archives.
Posted by Jimmy Akin in Internet | Permalink
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