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June 01, 2005
The News and Observer and Blogs
Last month The News and Observer started up Tar Heel Blogwatch, a local-oriented meta-blog that, in The N&O's words, "spotlights notable posts by bloggers in the Triangle and Eastern North Carolina". Last night, my fellow blogger and former Independent music editor Karen Mann was kind enough to post a link to my recent bout of Pyewacket nostalgia. Now I happen to like where The N&O is going with their new online content and I definitely appreciate the hyperlink (thanks Karen!). But there's actually a bit of irony in the fact that The N&O website is now linking to that specific post of mine.
See, when I started writing my Pyewacket post a couple of days ago, I was hoping to include links to a couple of pretty detailed Chapel Hill News articles that came out a few days before and a few days after Pyewacket closed on 5/30/2002. Kirk Ross wrote a 5/26/2002 story about owner David Bacon's decision to close Pyewacket, and Dave Hart penned a 6/2/2002 obituary that went into way more detail about Pyewacket's last night than my own brief personal account did. But the old links to those two stories must've stopped working when The News and Observer took over the online Chapel Hill News site, and I had to use my N&O subscription number to log into the paper's text-only archives simply to be able to read those articles again. If you're not a 7-day N&O subscriber like I am, you can't even read these particular articles without paying $1.95 for a single article or $4.95 for a one-day pass. And of course the possibility of anyone hyperlinking to the stories is out of the question if the full text is walled off behind a login screen and/or credit card form.
I understand that maintaining newspaper archives isn't necessarily cheap and that charging a small fee for older articles is often a pretty reasonable business model. But in this case, The N&O lost an admittedly very minor opportunity to gain a few extra eyeballs - eyeballs that could've at least viewed some ads or maybe even clicked through to some other parts of the online paper. If The News and Observer is pretty serious about its new interest in local blogging, maybe they would be willing to create or enable some sort of N&O version of The New York Times Link Generator, which generates persistent weblog-safe links to articles for which regular NYTimes.com readers eventually have to pay. Ideally, subscribers could have the ability to hyperlink to N&O articles that few casual blog-readers without N&O subscriptions would ever discover in the first place, much less pay money for.
Of course, maybe The N&O could just liberate those old Chapel Hill News articles entirely and restore the free CHN website to its former user-friendly state. I mean, after all, we are talking about a twice-weekly paper that shows up for free in people's driveways...
Posted by Tim at June 1, 2005 09:43 PM