Monday, January 29, 2007

OK, I'm getting this thing done early so I can sit on my butt the rest of the night and so you all can enjoy mine first!

"Searching for The New York Times" by Adam L. Penenberg

I'm assuming you all have read "Searching for The New York Times" by now, but if not I will give you a little overview of it. Basically this article is saying that despite the fact that the New York Times is one of the largest newspapers in the country it really isn't that huge online. The author, Adam L. Penenberg, googled The New York Times and it didn't show up in the search until the 295th result. That is pretty pathetic for such a famous paper. He goes on to discuss the reason for it. The New York Times makes it very hard for search engines to spider its content because they make users register. They even have a paid archive which is pretty much impossible for them to get through. Because of this it is very difficult for search engines to find relevant sources in the website to whatever it is that you are searching for. If they can't get to the information they can't get it to the searcher. The article goes on to say that The New York Times only makes about 2-3% of their profit from their website. So something needs to change.

They had an interesting idea in the article that the New York Times should flip flop what people pay for (as of now, new articles are free for 2 weeks). The article stated that the old information should be free and people should pay for the new. I personally agree with that, but I would like to know what the rest of you think they should do?

The article also said that this could be the end of the New York Times if they don't figure something out. Do you all think that is true or is the paper too famous at this point? I'm not sure either way.

It also said that The New York Times is trying to work something out with Google to get them higher up. Do you all think that is fair and something Google should do, or does the New York Times need to figure this one out on their own?

Jessica

1 comment:

tom peele said...

I think the author makes an interesting point, though I don't know enough about web economics (or, really, economics at all) to make decisions about what the NYT should do. I do know that I never pay for web content, and that it seems ridiculous to charge three bucks for one lousy article, especially when you can get any NYT article through any database. I think if I owned the Times (and I believe it is privately owned) then I think I'd want its articles to surface frequently in searches for current news.