Doc Searls has a thoughtful post about his recent interview at his local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. Two of the great points Doc makes (archived stories that must be paid for in order to be accessed, lost exposure and authority in search engines) can also be applied to our local paper’s website, Statesman.com.
The fees for the Statesman archive are $5.95 for a period of 24 hours, or $9.95 per month for an ongoing subscription. I don’t know how much money they make from the subscription archive business, but as Doc points out in his Santa Barbara example, “there’s no way to measure lost exposure and authority on Google and Yahoo”.
To use a similar example, “Austin” gets 533 million results. Add statesman and it drops to 5.2 million - 1 percent of that total. None of those from the Statesman archives, because they’re behind a barrier where search engines can’t find them, rendering them practically useless on the Web.
2 responses so far ↓
1 ttrentham // May 22, 2006 at 4:22 pm
I completely agree. If you’re an Austin Public Library cardholder, you can get access to older articles without having to pay here:
http://www.austinlibrary.com:2048/login?url=http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/txshrpub100020rp?db=SP02
Access to Infotrac is one of the many reference databases you can reach as an APL cardholder:
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/library/databases.htm
2 End of TimesSelect Reinforces the Power of Free | The Jeff Beckham Weblog // Sep 18, 2007 at 9:24 am
[...] Other publications would be wise to follow suit. [...]
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