This morning I was trying to research some of the media coverage of the events surrounding stripping former Greensboro Police Chief David Wray of his authority and his subsequent resignation. I am frustrated and disappointed to find that search result links to News & Record articles lead to page after page of broken links: "Page not found. We're sorry, but the page you've requested does not exist."
This blog post by News & Record editor John Robinson about the N&R's reporting of the Wray affair has seven links to what the editor purports to be relevant News & Record articles. Each one is broken.
The local newspaper should serve as an historical record. It doesn't. It sucks. The whole enterprise should be gutted, torn down and rebuilt from the ground up with the goal of some modicum of competence; or someone should start a new media enterprise to replace the N&R. That could probably be done for a quarter of the rumored sale price of the N&R and without the drain of a legacy culture and financial overhead that weigh like an anchor of perpetual incompetence around the neck of the N&R.
We talked about this at the library the other night in our discussion of digital archiving. It's not just the N&R, it's a lot of big media sites -- the example I used in our talk was the Charlotte Observer -- the move from one system to another and rot their links along the way. Meanwhile, I can still retrieve every post from my crappy old Radio blog.
ReplyDeleteSorry I missed that talk. No doubt the updating of systems presents a challenge for preserving archives. It's not impossible though. To their credit, we have a good local example at WFMY. They changed their site platform and their domain name yet managed to preserve their archives. It's doable.
ReplyDeleteDear Roch:
ReplyDeleteTo answer your pleas, we have started a new media enterprise called The Greensboro Telegram at greensborotelegram.com which we officially launched this October.
As an online weekly, we will in no way "replace" the News & Record as we don't have 400 people working for us, but we do hope to supplement its community coverage with more Greensboro news, photos, and videos.
Also, all of our archives are freely available, just as they are on our Raleigh Telegram newspaper (raleightelegram.com) where people can still easily find archived newspaper stories and videos from the past several years.
All they have to do is search at the bottom of our site. I think newspapers are "record-keepers" of history and as such, people should be able to easily find information and articles to review the past.
Thanks,
R.Gregg, The Greensboro Telegram
http://www.greensboro3.com