New York Times Wipes Journalist's Online Corpus

thefickler writes "Reading about Peter Wayner and his problems with book piracy reminded me of another writer, Thomas Crampton, who has the opposite problem — a lot of his work has been wiped from the Internet. Thomas Crampton has worked for the New York Times (NYT) and the International Herald Tribune (IHT) for about a decade, but when the websites of the two newspapers were merged two months ago, a lot of Crampton's work disappeared into the ether. Links to the old stories are simply hitting generic pages. Crampton wrote a letter to Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the NYT, pleading for his work to be put back online. The hilarious part: according to one analysis, the NYT is throwing away at least $100,000 for every month that the links remain broken."

This sucks

[ILongForDarkness]

We've come to rely on being able to find things on the internet, it is sad to think that information might go away and cease to exist. That said, I guess it depends on the contract the writers have whether he has a right to have his body of work preserved or not. I mean if a company pays for your work it is theirs and not yours unless your contract entitles you to it. Once you've sold your work to somebody, they can never have anyone read it and use it to line hamster cages for all they care.

Re:CNN's website doesn't have as many broken links

[noundi]

Am I the only one who finds this funny? They've managed to keep archives older than, oh my god brace yourselves, 10 years!!!

Seriously though, don't give them standing ovations simply because everybody else fail. Tell me this in 50 years and I'll honestly clap my hands.

Re:Another story about the necessity of backups...

[pbhj]

I feel for the guy and his lost articles, [...]

I feel for him too. Of course the articles aren't his, they are his employers (unless he has a contract that says otherwise) - which is probably why he's bothered. If they were _his_ articles then he could wholesale upload them to his own site and reap the rewards (whatsoever they may be).

Re:And THIS, dear-readers, is why paper will win

[Samrobb]

Fahrenheit 451 [wikipedia.org]:

Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.

Welcome to the Web

[sjvn]

One of the greatest delusions that people have about the Web is that almost all information can be found on it somewhere. What total nonsense.

Stories rot from the Web faster than newspaper print ever has or ever will. All that we're left with is the most recent version or revision, which may have *nothing* to do with what was first written.

If you don't keep copies of your work that appears on the Web, you might as well have thrown them into a fire-place. And, as for everyone else, if you assume for even a moment that what you read on the Web about what happened even in technology news even five years reflects what people really wrote and thought at the time, you're a fool.

It's thanks to delusions like this that, for example, people can argue sincerely that Windows is popular because it's good; and not because Microsoft forced a monopoly on hardware vendors. Almost all the reports of DoJ vs. Microsoft from the time are long gone now. The proof that Microsoft's products are only popular because Microsoft made damn sure that no one else would have a chance to compete against them has vaporized.

The only thing newsworthy about what's happened here is that people think that stories disappearing like this is in any way what-so-ever noteworthy. It happens every day.

Steven