Wired has an article written by Adam L. Penenberg, an assistant professor at New York University, asking if the New York Times (NYT) is losing its relevance in the digital era. Traditionally, the NYT has been a heavyweight of the publishing world, but in a Google search for “Iraq torture prison Abu Ghraib”, the Times comes in at result number 295. Adam explains that this is due to a policy of forcing users to register to access the site, as well as archiving (and charging for) any content older than a week.
The same query returns top twenty results from Melbourne’s Age and Sydney’s Morning Herald newspapers, sites which currently offer unrestricted access to their websites. However both newspapers are warning users that they will need to register soon in order to continue accessing their content. What effect will this have on their search rankings?
If you ever link to the NYT, be sure to use Aaron Swartz’s link generator to create archive-safe links.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2004 at 10:26 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.