“Hell hath no fury like a reporter deleted,” writes Thomas Crampton, former reporter for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times, in a scathing letter to the New York Times publisher today.
Apparently, when the NY Times online merged with IHT’s website, they redirected IHT to the nytimes.com global homepage, essentially removing IHT’s archives — and in a way “deleting” Crampton’s portfolio (from these specific sites) of stories he’s written over the years. In his own words:
On a personal level I am horrified that I can no longer see all my stories. The IHT logo on this blog used to link to a search of the IHT website for my articles. On a professional level, I am appalled that the NY Times would kill all the links back to the IHT website. Imagine the power of combining two sites with a Google rank of 9 instead of killing one.
If you’re in the business of news media, you’ve had an interesting week. Between The Boston Globe’s imminent threat of getting shut down, to the launch of the new Kindle, to the “Future of Journalism” Senate hearings, the tension between old media (read: traditional newspapers) and new media (online content) seems to be reaching a boiling point. In short, newspapers are afraid of getting cannibalized by the online industry due to fast-shifting business models and changing ways in which people are consuming news.
There’s much fodder for discussion in this debate (or futile fight against a fast-paced evolution), which I’ll discuss in a future post. But let’s focus on Crampton for a moment. The interesting thing here is that he built his career portfolio online, so he’s outraged that one day, it can just — poof — disappear.
One of the bi-products of moving news online (with pretty much everything else) is a reliance on our digital trail as a proof of history — and thus an inherent assignment of power to those who own the means to publishing that trail. This isn’t a necessarily bad thing; in fact, digital publishing makes it easier for us to store the same content in different places for safekeeping (the flip side of which, of course, is piracy). But it’s something to keep in mind as we continue to move forward.
[photo: Flickr/Mi azzardo a vivere°]
