A BUSINESS strategy of The New York Times to get its articles to pop up first in Internet searches is creating a perplexing problem: long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life.
People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.
11 Comments
People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.
11 Comments
Comments
This was a very interesting article. It is really true what they said - gone are the days of breaking out dusty microfiche to search through old news articles. It’s totally mainstream now; anyone can search through articles from home. However, I thought the policy of most media sites was that you had to be a member/subscriber to dig through the archives? Maybe this is changing because of the big opportunity in ad revenue... We all know how often newspapers and general media make mistakes, and then put out a tiny correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, unless they change something that mistake can haunt someone for eternity now...
Seems like journalists have gotten lazy over the years. Now technology is biting them in the rear. They are going to have to become more thorough at their jobs.
SEO Reputation Management, a promising field?
I thought this was kind of a yawner or non-issue, in that plenty of sites with archives that were never closed already have to deal with this. Seemed pretty simple to me. If a article starts ranking well and someone has a complaint that a newer article has fresher info that perhaps shows them innocent of some charge, get the paper to link prominently to the newer article.
i think the issue is that many of those sites had password protected archives that didn’t rank organically or as well as the NYT. also, the case made in the article is that the editorial staff (or their interns) would spend the majority of their time figuring these things out and it’s not possible to keep up with every individual case or provide just investigation of whether or not to add links, etc. to each article for correction. Also, sometimes a paper will not print/post updated information about a news topic once it has past and isn’t that interesting anymore.
I would think that if the paper ever published a correction to an article, the online version of the article should at least link to the correction.
^^ exactly.
i agree, but it seems like that it too much work
Good -- let the NYT invest time making sure online versions of articles get updated with links to important follow-ups. They make money by publishing stuff. If they publish stuff that’s incorrect, they run corrections. This isn’t new to the newspaper industry, and online, corrections means linking to the corrections. Now the issue of older articles that don’t cover the latest topic, where someone is concerned about a bad rep. If they’re getting only one complaint per day about that, it’s easily managed. Instead of whining that SEO has caused some new problem for them, just get an intern to find the most recent article, add the link and issue solved. It’s actually good research practice for the intern.
Genius Danny. I completely agree.
I think we might be missing the point. If you assume that newspapers are in the business of objectively reporting the "news", then this discussion is sensible. But if you understand that the media is in the business of influencing public opinion, then this presents a whole new opportunity to do just that. People are noticing the archives republishing old news that was emabrassing, incorrect, etc... but are they noticing what is *not* being republished?