The prices are aimed at large corporate accounts. For the casual writer like me, I will simply forgo paying altogether, and use the links for as long as they last. Thus they get no money out of me at all. By lowering the price by say, an order of magnitude, from several dollars per article down to, say, twenty-five cents, I believe they would receive much more volume, and more revenue. They would also provide a much better public service, assuming that this is still part of their mission as a business.

In short: they want 2.50 for an article, last time I checked. Isn't this absurd considering they charge only seventy-five cents for the entire printed addition?

Today, after all this sturm und drang in my last entry, I came upon the very rare instance when I would want to actually pay for an article. It happens that this week, the Times Sunday Real Estate section's "If You're Thinking of Living In..." column featured my neighborhood on Staten Island.

I put a link to this article on my weblog about New York, since I write about my neighborhood a lot. But since I knew the link would expire eventually, and I like to have people be able to read my past entries, I thought this might be an instance where I would pay money for some way to permanently link to the artcile.

On the Times site, next to the article, there is a link entitled:

Click here to order reprints or permissions for this article

I thought: maybe I can buy a permanent link. Isn't that what the link implies?

Of course, need I tell you that the link doesn't work at all?

  2:20:59 PM    

But Dave Winer is right: newspapers, by and large, just don't get the web. It's maddening to watch them come up short time and again.

Like many people, I have a habit of accumulating hundreds of browser bookmarks before I get around to cleaning them out, as I did today. Since the page titles of the bookmarks are often little help for remembering what the page contains, I click on each bookmark to verify what is is. A third to a half of them are news articles from Yahoo or from a newspaper site. Many of the bookmarks are a month or two old by the time I go through them.

You can imagine what happened today when I clicked on most of them. I got the "page no longer available" link, with a suggestion that if I wanted to retrieve the article, I would need to pay for it, usually a fee of about two dollars or more.

Users of the Times web site are used to these shenanigans. What I discovered was how universal this policy has become among newspaper sites--Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, the newspaper in South Bend, Indiana, etc.

To me, this displays a very large disconnect between "what the web wants to be" and what newspaper sites are providing. Newspapers are by-and-large abdicating their potential roles as information archives.

I do a lot of research on town planning for a book I'm writing with a friend. I clip articles, mainly from the Times. Typically I build up a stack of several months before going through with my scissors. Last summer, I decided to "go digital" and store articles from the web site. My wife was very happy about this, since it meant the end of the stacks.

What a mistake. My links started expiring and I was screwed. Back to stacking the hard copies. I could copy the stories to my hard drive, but I find that I lose track of the file names easily. The old way of cutting newsprint is still the best for my purposes. It's a lot less work.

It is inevitable that all the archives of newspaper sites will become publicly searchable again. The model they are pursuing will fail. Right now they are justifiably desperate to make their sites self-supporting, and this "pay-for-articles-older-than-a-week" philosophy is the current fad. Thankfully it won't last, but I suspect we will have to endure it for another year or two. In the meantime, I avoid links to newspaper articles in situations where I want to the link to be useful at any time in the future. This cuts out a lot of good stuff on the web for research projects.

But I have more gripes than that about newspaper sites. One thing I learned from my stacking papers for clipping is how incredibly insightful it is to review the headlines from several months all-at-once in sequence. It's as if history suddenly has a definite plot, one you didn't recognize as it was unfolding.

This would be a perfect function of the web. In my fantasy of the perfect web, I would like to be able to click through a view of the Times or any other newspaper web site day-by-day for every day since they began their site, in the format that the site used at that time. What better way to re-experience history from ground level, to glimpse the elusive themes that drive people and nations?

(for sites that change throughout the day, you could have a midnight snapshot, perhaps)

Yet I know of no newspaper site that provides this kind of "true archiving". How easy it would have been to engineer this from the beginning. How hard it would be now.

  12:42:35 AM