New York Times webteam nukes the careers of many journalists

Thomas Crampton, formerly of the International Herald Tribune, sez, "The NYT committed most boneheaded move by a web team since the dawn of the Internet: In merging the International Herald Tribune and New York Times sites, the brilliant New York Times web team deleted all links to every IHT story along with the newspaper's archives. In other words, they erased my journalism career online. Anyone following one of the thousands of links from over the years to a specific IHT story is now directed to a generic home page. Full horror detailed in posting on my blog."

Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career (Thanks, Thomas!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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failix

#13 is the funniest and most accurate comment I’ve read in days.

And I totally agree with Talia, what’s the use of years of work destined to the public, on your own local hard drive.
Daemon

Wait… he didn’t keep copies of his own clips?
David Newland

Nice angry rant on an interesting topic, but for a reporter, Mr. Crampton’s failed to report on some important parts of the story.

Does he actually know what happened when the entities merged?

Did the web teams actually delete everything, or did someone throw in a URL redirect “for now” while they work out what’s going to live where on the servers?

If Crampton’s right and the stuff is gone, for good, then yeah – this is a big drag from an SEO point of view and therefore potentially a bad business decision.

And it’s obviously a bummer for him as a reporter. I sympathize. I’ve seen reams of my own work disappear in relaunches like so many autumn leaves.

But it’s a pretty naive reporter who thinks things on the internet are anything but ephemeral.

And it’s a pretty hysterical reporter who thinks that the stuff he’s already published and been paid for is his “career,” rather than just evidence of experience.

Your career is what you’re publishing and being paid for now.
KurtMac

From a clearly technical standpoint, the foundation of the World Wide Web is built on hyperlinks. When hyperlinks break, the system breaks. Like the author mentioned, now all of the blogs, emails, websites and references linking to these articles are suddenly broken. Like #15 commented, a proper 301 redirect of these links would have kept the foundation in place and still allow the NYT to combine its websites.

Furthermore, I think its the same reason there are some minor grumblings arising over the long term infrastructure of using link-shortening services like TinyURL and the like. Bypassing a direct hyperlink to use a third-party link is shaky. Say, if that third-party (TinyURL, etc) were to go down or disappear, suddenly thousands of hyperlinks between content throughout the web would break with them.
zuzu

The web is fleeting and ever changing; rule of thumb is to save something if you want to be able to access it at a later date.

Clearly you fail to grasp what the U in URL is for.

Otherwise, what I would say has already been said by Antinous @14 and Jonathan W Thomas @16.

(Internet Archive and Google are good at caching, but not great. They only mirror a fraction of the entire web at any given moment.)

I’d like to think David Newland is correct in that the IHT URLs will be correctly redirected just as soon as the data has been migrated to the NYT servers.
jjasper

Dave Newland – If he can’t access the articles, the evidence of his experience is not as sound as it would be if he could. Not to mention an archive of his style and content, which anyone wanting to hire him would want to see.

So I don’t think it’s hysterical to claim that it’s damaging to his career to have that work deleted. It’s not necessarily going to end his career, but in the current economy, journalists are pretty hard hit. One solid blow could certainly end someone’s career. Kinda harsh to call him hysterical.

The question is, is it an honest fixable mistake, or some really stupid policy?

Perhaps some journalist will pick up the story and report on it :-)
Ray Maruwa

His stuff may be available on the NYT site, but the links still don’t work. Which means that if you follow an old IHT link you’ll have to re-search for it. It’s not as bad as it could be, but still annoying.

The page says “We are in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition.” So hopefully this means that the old IHT links will work in the near (?) future.
milsyobtaf

The record we leave behind is one of our only chances of living beyond the precipice of death. For a person who generates creative output, your published work is the legacy you leave behind. Our modern society is based upon the premise of building upon what came before us. If every single newspaper article and book and film and song was deleted from existence when a person died, or even if they stopped working for the company that paid them to create that content in the first place, the world would be bereft of culture and accumulated knowledge. Many websites online may be ephemeral, but for an INSTITUTION of the sort that the New York Times purports to be to indulge in such short sighted practices would be a damned shame.
Mister N

oopss.I meant @ #14: Bingo…
Anonymous

Hadlock should re-read his employment paperwork. It certainly includes a “all work you produce for us is our property” agreement. Keeping local copies of your own work is copyright infrigement. (Welcome to America, btw.)
David Newland

#23 – I hear what you’re saying, but:

1) no one lives ‘beyond the precipice of death’ because of online articles

2) our modern society is generating information exponentially; more has been created in the last decade than was probably created in the previous millenium

3) if the guy had been a radio reporter instead of a web reporter, where would his archive be now?

4) attachment is the cause of all suffering.

:-)
Anonymous

I dunno. It sucks, but join the club. Most of the magazines—huge, glossy, national magazines—that I’ve written for are out of business. Pop! goes the archive and the clips.

…. such is the world we now live in.

KVS
JoshuaZ

This isn’t just bad from a business perspective, it is bad for everyone who has been using these links. A lot of websites are now going to need to be updated to remove them. This is going to create a lot of work at Wikipedia for example.

It also is very unclear to me what the NYT website people think is the advantage of this move. There’s no obvious gain.
mypalmike

Probably just some apache config problem. He should contact the webmaster @ the NYT.
Julian Murdoch

Also, apparently entirely fixed by the time this was even posted. IHT now shows 3500 well indexed articles for Mr. Crampton.
Anonymous

I’m finding his IHT stories just fine searching their site. I’m guessing it’s fixed; the NYT web team is outstanding, but it’s possible someone made a mistake.

Perhaps going to them first, rather than posting an obnoxious note to the publisher, would have been a responsible thing to do. Certainly you’d expect a journalist to get the full story before publishing.
Man On Pink Corner

You step into the river but the water has moved on.
Your data is no more.
David Newland

#28 LOL: Career Saved! Oh except for the angry rant at the former employer…
Anonymous

It’s pathetic that every link from the venerable IHT is now gone into the ether.

It’s almost as pathetic as the hot mess that the NYT has made of what was once a pretty fair and unbalanced account of international news.

count me an ex-reader.
Mazoola

You know, the reason they call them “clippings” isn’t because it was the #1 choice in a poll on editorandpublisher.com….
mypalmike

#32:

Information on the web is transient, for many reasons. [Heads up, I'm 37, so the under-20 argument fails here too.] Be it due to changes in technology (url’s are bound to change when a site switches from perl cgi to ruby on rails), the nature of the data (e.g. yahoo’s top photos urls are frequently valid for less than a day, and appear to lack any sort of “permalink”), or business or legal reasons (mergers, lawsuits, etc.), there seems to be actually rather little that is very permanent.
SamSam

I’m amazed that several people take it as a basic premise that stuff on the web is expected to be “ephemeral.”

I’m going to take a leap and imagine that both #2 Hadlock and #19 David Newland are under the age of 20. I may be wrong, but I see that attitude as that of people who have been brought up on Facebook, Twitter, and other web media where data just washes over you as a river.

The web is not supposed to be “ephermeral,” any more than the data on your hard drive is supposed to be ephemeral. That’s what the web is: vast containers of data, with URLs allowing you to access pieces of that data. Sure, the views of that data are now generated dynamically, and most of the data is now stored in databases, not individual html files, but the idea remains.

Heck, Google is basing much of its future on the idea that people will be happy keeping their entire hard drive — or at least their documents, excel sheets and whatnot — in Google’s online applications. Their goal is that the online versions are the “gold” versions, and whatever you may save on your hard drive is is just a copy.
Anonymous

@46 Both of your links work just fine now.
Nelson.C

That’s cool, Antinous. I figured it was a glitch in the system, but I didn’t want to ask in case it sounded like I was whining.
David Newland

#30 I’ve just turned 40 this week. As if that’s at all relevant.

I take it as a basic premise that stuff everywhere in all forms is ephemeral, and stuff on the web all the more so.

In a dozen years online I’ve seen so many relaunches, outages, server switches, protocol changes, bankruptcies, copyright battles, and the like that I would never, ever, put my faith in the web as an immutable archive or record of anything.
CapnMarrrrk

Sorry I don’t know if I signed in.

I found this from 2004 on Newsbank As well as these numbers:
# November 2004 (1)
# October 2004 (5)
# September 2004 (14)
# August 2004 (8)
# July 2004 (12)
# June 2004 (11)
# May 2004 (18)
# April 2004 (4)
# March 2004 (21)
# February 2004 (5)

If 9/11 Report Wins Award, Will 90 Authors Rise?
New York Times, The (NY) – Sunday, October 24, 2004
Author: THOMAS CRAMPTON
Abstract: The 9/11 Commission Report is chosen as non-fiction finalist in National Book Award competition; book has won critical praise for writing style and has sold more than one million copies; commission vice chairman Lee H Hamilton says commission members adopted sparse narrative style by cutting adjectives in effort to end sparring between Democrats and Republicans over partisan choices; Philip D Zelikow is closest thing to principal author of work, but he prefers to be called ‘author surrogate’; photo (M)
If the authors of “The 9/11 Commission Report” end up winning a National Book Award on Nov. 17, their acceptance speech should include a thank you to partisan politics.

But first they will have to figure out who among the 10 commissioners and 80 staff members should be ready to walk on stage that day to accept the prize — a bronze scroll and $10,000.

Even before the book was chosen this month as a nonfiction finalist in the competition, it had inspired critical praise for a writing style that is rare in a government report. “Sometimes electrifying,” said Vanity Fair. “Riveting,” said Time magazine. “Chilling, fascinating and instructive,” said The Chicago Tribune.

The report’s 585-page narrative overlays a sweeping investigation of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — 2.5 million pages of documents and 1,200 interviews in 10 countries. Sales in excess of one million copies of the first authorized version kept the book at No. 1 for 11 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. Other editions, in English and other languages, have been sold or in production.

“We set out to break every rule and precedent for this sort of work,” said Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman and a former New Jersey governor. “Not only did we want to conduct our work in open but the writing had to grip like something that people would not only buy, they would read.”

But representatives of the commission are more willing to discuss how the writing was done than who actually did it.

“Democrats pushed for adjectives to support President Clinton while Republicans pushed for adjectives to support President Bush,” said Lee H. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the commission and president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It was such a minefield that we finally cut all adjectives and ended up with a sparse narrative style.”

From Page One, the report takes a thriller’s tone.

“Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work,” the report begins, before quickly introducing the main characters. “In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run. For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travelers were Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine.”

By comparison, the Starr Report on the investigation into President Bill Clinton was written in a monotone, beginning, “This Referral presents substantial and credible information that President Clinton criminally obstructed the judicial process, first in a sexual harassment lawsuit in which he was the defendant and then in a grand jury investigation.”

In “The 9/11 Commission Report,” the narrative alternates between the perspectives of the terrorists and the government. Chapters take their titles from the words spoken by leading characters (“We have some planes”) and conclude with the terse phrases of a cliffhanger (“Time ran out”).

Commissioners and staff members say the closest anyone came to being the principal author was Philip D. Zelikow, a history professor at the University of Virginia who was executive director of the commission.

“Call me an author surrogate, not an author,” Mr. Zelikow said moments before speaking about the book before the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles. “This really is not my book tour since it is not my book.”

Mr. Zelikow credits Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton for the report’s approach and readable style.

Staff members described it as Hemingway meets Tom Clancy, but Mr. Hamilton denied they served as inspiration. “I’m not that literate and have not read either of those two authors,” he said. “We didn’t want something literary; we just scrubbed each sentence for clarity.”

The work began by dividing the staff into teams to investigate and draft statements on such topics as border security and terrorist financing. Those were often released as scene setters before the commission’s 12 public hearings. The reports were then cannibalized and woven together following an outline drawn up by Mr. Zelikow and Ernest R. May, a history professor at Harvard.

“Not everyone agreed with the principle of an accessible narrative style,” Mr. May said, recalling arguments made by F.B.I. agents, public prosecutors, politicians and others.

“Historians kept insisting on chronology, the lawyers wanted to present evidence and argument, while the intelligence officials just love getting into details on how they acquired information,” Mr. May said. “The commissioners kept the broad view and repeatedly reminded us to make it a story.”

It was the commissioners, for example, who insisted on opening the book with the hijackers boarding the planes instead of a chapter recounting the history of Al Qaeda.

Style questions often prompted debates.

Should the 19 hijackers be described as such from Page One, like a lawyer’s brief, or should another term be used until events merited such a description? (The commission mainly settled on “conspirators” or “terrorists” until after the act.)

Some said the decision to declassify the report also helped the writing.

“In fighting to declassify things we were forced to concentrate only on what was needed for the story,” said John Roth, a criminal prosecutor from the Justice Department who led the terror finance team. “You cut out references to Osama bin Laden’s bank number, just to say he had an account in Khartoum.”

The battle against bureaucratic language reached a point where staffers joked that they probably needed Mr. Hamilton’s personal sign-off to include any new acronym.

The whole approach required an adjustment for Bonnie D. Jenkins, a staff member formerly employed by the Department of Defense.

“In the D.O.D. we always talk about Centcom, Socom, J.C.S. and O.S.D.,” she said. “After being in D.C. for so long, I’d totally forgotten you can write without acronyms.”
HotPepperMan

As a writer, as someone who has grown with technology, as a person who has listened without sympathy to people who do not have backups, without any anally retentive behaviour, I have copies of EVERYTHING I have written. Electronically, printed, photocopied… etc. Note: I have not screen grabbed this comment.

Anyone ever tried to recover an early Word document recently? And the stuff you did on that early BrownBag software package with pre-emptive learn as you type (brilliant!)…

I may not be a pillar of society but I am part of what makes the cement…
andyhavens

Libraries try to keep stuff, er… unephemerated. Both for physical and digital things.

See: Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home
thomascrampton

Thank you to everyone who took the time to comment and consider the problem.

Unfortunately the problem is still in place.

Those who point out that they have found 3,500 articles with my name, that is because I worked for both newspapers. You will note that most of the articles you find are from 2004 and afterwards.

Here are a couple links for people to test to see if they work:

First story: http://www.iht.com/articles/2002/05/07/t1_24.php
Second Story: http://www.iht.com/articles/2002/05/07/a4_12.php

These were scoops regarding a Malaysian official who was both negotiating for the UN in Burma while doing business with the generals. I think it would be in the public interest if stories like this were in the public domain rather than lost.

As come commenters have pointed out – and I pointed out in my blog post – my issue is small relative to NYT’s problem.

They are losing possible ad revenue from people seeking specific articles in the IHT/NYT.
O_M

…And to make matters worse, you can bet your bottom dollar that any search engine they’ve set up for the newly combined site will never be able to find 90% of the articles you search for even if you have the specific title and narrow the date range.
hadlock

Cry me a river. It’s not the NYT’s responsibility to keep copies of all your work for the world to see. If you forgot to keep local copies of all your work that’s your own fault and all the more reason to not hire someone who clearly can’t keep their own files in order.

The web is fleeting and ever changing; rule of thumb is to save something if you want to be able to access it at a later date. They’ve been teaching us that since at least 1995 in primary schools and in most cases you need to provide a printed copy of online sources for this exact reason.

Writing for an online-only journal and then complaining when they pull the article off the web is like buying a house in a flood plain and then asking for federal assistance when you lose everything. Nobody made you live (write) there, you chose to.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  And yet, hadlock, why do I believe that you would squeal like a possum with his tail caught in a curling iron if I accidentally wiped your comment history?
Anonymous

Does that make you an unperson?
pork musket

I agree with #2. Yes, this is unfortunate, but I didn’t see the journalist accepting even a shred of responsibility in his letter.
thomascrampton

@hadlock

Forget about my concerns and look at it from the NYT point of view:

They are now losing all the readers directed from the hundreds of thousands of links across the web to now dead links.

Surely you cannot argue that killing all those links was a good idea from anyone’s point of view.
Nelson.C

Antinous @14: About that, does that mean my Boingboing comment history before April will be restored sometime? It wasn’t exactly deathless prose, but there were a couple of remarks I wish I’d saved….
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  does that mean my BoingBoing comment history before April will be restored sometime?
  
  Yes. I’m trying to get it fixed, but the upgrade created a big-ass disturbance in the force, as if hundreds of thousands of comments suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
imipak

I call bollocks. They might not be accessible over the intartoobs, but erase a newspaper’s archived content? No-one’s that stupid. I’m sure it’s all there on DATASTAR and suchlike for-pay databases.
Mister N

agree with #5

@ hadlock:

What about all the institutions that used those links as reference?. Researchers , Teachers, Investigative Journalists have no way to read upon what this journalist covered. It could be people from around the world and now it’s all gone.

It’s not just Thomas Crampton’s loss, it’s everybody’s loss. When you truly realize that, then you will cry a river.
WarEagle

@HADLOCK

The tragedy here isn’t that this journalist doesn’t have backup copies of his online stories. The tragedy is that all his stories are not available to the public any longer. You can’t be a journalist, online or paper, without being published. NYT has de-published his entire career at IHT.

I can certainly see why he’s a little miffed.
Talia

#2, I must vehemently disagree. Archived articles are not infrequently a good source of information. I’m not exactly sure what you’re suggesting either, that the author should keep all his articles in a file on hand and email out to anyone he sees searching for information on the subject?:P

Basically this is the NYT deleting a vast swath of potentially useful online information. This is much like the much-maligned “unpublishing” feature the BB staff took a lot of crap for a while back, but more far reaching and done completely without any consideration for the authors in question.
Anonymous

Links to the IHT website were often provided as source within other material. In that aspect, it’s a move that undermines the status of the IHT as a reference media.
jjasper

Access to submitted articles isn’t the same as access to the final edited copy. That’s on the web site. Most journalists I know don’t archive that.
Haakon IV

The journalist may not even have the right to repost his stories on his own website if he doesn’t hold the copyright. But clearly his main loss was that his articles previously had high google rank and many external links, bookmarks, etc., all gone now.
The Unusual Suspect

archive.org?
Mister N

at #13: Bingo.
Anonymous

His stuff is there now:

http://globespotters.blogs.nytimes.com/author/thomas-crampton/?scp=1&sq=thomas%20crampton&st=cse
Anonymous

Some folks don’t get it. For this reporter, it means his stories will rot out of google ranking, which is a loss of prestige for him no matter how you cut it.

And, as others have noted, this is a foolish loss of ad revenue and search engine rank for NYT.

No matter how you cut it, this was ham-handed and inept, technically. When I move content around, I always use permanent redirects, and leave them in basically forever.
jonathanwthomas

I work in SEO and I’m familiar with this debacle. It’s not so much a tragedy because his work has disappeared (I hope he had backups) it’s a tragedy from a business perspective.

Instead of simply moving the content to NYtimes.com or redirtecting properly, they simply redirected all the IHT traffic to a landing page. This is terrible because people finding your content are directed to somewhere they did not expect to go. Meaning you’ll lose them and all the ad revenue they could have generated. I bet their bounce rate is now horrific.

They wiped almost 200,000 pages from the web that could have brought a significant amount of revenue in if they had simply done a proper 301 redirect to the same content on NYTimes.com.