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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

:-)

…. such is the world we now live in.

KVS

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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…

See: Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

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

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.