Dan Gillmor (of course) notes that the most important change coming from nytimes.com is not the opening of Times Select, but the opening of the archives.
NY Times’ Brave Change: Opening Archives – Center for Citizen Media
That guy you know from the Internet, probably.
Dan Gillmor (of course) notes that the most important change coming from nytimes.com is not the opening of Times Select, but the opening of the archives.
NY Times’ Brave Change: Opening Archives – Center for Citizen Media
The annual Online News Association conference is going on in Washington, D.C. at the moment.
I didn’t make plans to get across the country to be there in person, which turns out to be convenient given the fact that I’ve been out of the house most of the week while it gets tented for termites. Don’t ask. The hotel was entertaining, the poisonous gas seems to be gone, and our new Internet connection is up and running, replacing our old wireless, which was fueled by our neighbors, who dealt with the whole fumigation issue by moving out.
There, I’ve vented.
Anyway, you can follow all the ONA action at CyberJournalist.net.
Meanwhile, back in California, Doc Searls has some of his usual advice for newspapers:
“First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There’s advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow’s fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it.”
Doc’s got the right idea about this and nine other things.
I’d love to get a look at the numbers for an online paper to add up how much income rolls in from the pay-per-article archives versus how much pure profit they could be making by serving advertisements on those pages.
Who pays for archived stories, anyway? PR firms? How many page views do they get when they’re behind a paywall? Does the CMS still serve up the ads on the archives?
If you’ve got answers, comment away…
Wow. Search Google News for the last 200 years or so, with labeling that lets you know whether you’ll have to pay for the archived newspaper story or not. Thanks, Google.
Bob Stepno lays down the first draft of a pretty wide-ranging essay on newspaper archives and hypothetical battles against the ravages of academic linkrot.
Bob Stepno – Digital archives: From old newspapers to screencasts and read-write scholarship