Archives — personal, institutional
I’m always stashing links in my del.icio.us bookmarks and tagging them for future reference, e.g., examples+video. When I go back to get those examples — to show in a workshop, say — the link might very well go nowhere. A “404 Not Found,” as geeks everywhere are fond of saying.
Sure, I can show another example instead. But recently the missing link concerned a Soundslides one of our photojournalism students (since graduated) produced during her internship at the local newspaper, so I e-mailed her to see if she had a backup. Lucky for me, she did, and now she’s re-posted the package (The Nutcracker) on another server. Lucky for my students too.
I’m very fond of this example because the photojournalist, Morgan Petroski, has also posted an image of the newspaper version of her photo story. It gives me a chance to compare a traditional print photo story with an audio slideshow and talk about how the photojournalist has to think differently for online.
Now Morgan’s served up some food for thought in a blog post in which she wonders why the newspaper allowed the “404 Not Found” to occur, given that it is striving to “keep up with producing multimedia, especially video,” these days. (She also cautions all journalists to keep a safe copy of their own online projects — you can’t rely on the news organization to keep it for you.)
It’s clear to me that a lot of newsrooms have no plan when it comes to archiving, organizing, and promoting their multimedia projects.
All the effort, all the disruption, all the resources that go into producing these videos and slideshows and packages … only to end with “404 Not Found” a few weeks or months later?
It’s the newspaper mentality, I think. Fishwrap. Bird-cage liner. Always a new day, a new newspaper. Archives? That’s called the morgue. It’s a place for dead things. In this business, we care only about the living.
Obviously, this is another old notion that desperately needs to be brought up to date.
Categories: multimedia
What I find odd — and interesting — is that the business side finally understands the value of open, advertising-driven material, yet the editorial side has yet to see the inherent value in contextual “evergreen” content, such as the multimedia packages you mention. This stuff is INSANELY valuable because it’s got a long shelf life. Rather than tuck it away or let it expire, editors/producers should be linking the hell out of these packages by tying them into recent news stories.
@Mac: In some cases maybe there’s a decision that some videos — a breaking-news traffic pile-up, for example — is not worthy of archiving. What I would like to see instead of the “404 Not Found” is some kind of human-centered information, such as:
“The video you searched for, ’7-Car Pile-up,’ is no longer available because it was tagged ‘breaking news.’ The latest ‘breaking news’ videos are HERE (link). Our feature video stories are HERE (link). Other tags on ’7-Car Pile-up’: ‘traffic’ (link); ’2007dec’ (link); ‘weather’ (link).”
This would give me a good reason to stay on the site. It would also build my trust and confidence in the site and the news organization — the opposite result from seeing “404 Not Found”.
One need only to look at how much traffic nytimes.com received after opening their archives to see the benefit here — this is huge for SEO!
Also, I’m surprised more discussion hasn’t taken place regarding video storage. This is a big problem to be solved, especially if it involves UGV.
It’s great to say “send us your video!” but not so great to try and find a cost-effective way to store and serve it in the longterm.
Mindy – And I would add that the 404 pages that most newspapers provide are simple “your out of luck” or “we’ve recently redesigned” messages that leave visitor frustrated and wondering what to do next. While I agree with your larger point, there is no reason why newspapers can’t customize these pages. In some cases, the content may indeed still be there and just needs some help coming back into the light. But at least sites, they can try to keep the visitor instead of allowing them to leave frustrated.
Too true. On the internet the reality is dated content gets referenced quite a bit. Newspapers, especially would have it in their best interest to archive this stuff.
@Gordon: Yes, especially when the newsroom has invested so much in producing the content — throwing it away is kind of like throwing away money!
@Yoni: Yes, those mystery 404 pages are the WORST — and particularly if the content still exists but at a different URL. Dozens (maybe even hundreds) of newspaper Web sites have migrated to a new CMS and allowed all their old links to become broken. What a pity, and so unnecessary. You would think they could hire ONE programmer to write a redirect script, wouldn’t you?
In a related matter, one tough lesson I learned after being RIF’d out of a job in 2006 is to keep a personal, off-site backup of e-mail (especially address files), stories and projects. I lost any access to the newspaper’s digital archive, so the only clips I had were ink-on-paper.
With so many websites offering free or cheap storage, there’s no good excuse for not backing up your work to an online site accessible from any computer.
My first experience in a newsroom that really caused this to hit home was seeing copies of the day’s paper used to mop up a spill. In the newsroom, the one place where you’d think people might value it most.
But the paper I have in mind keeps meticulous digital archives and has a great web site…then there are others I know of where you (as a reader) literally cannot go back farther than 2 weeks. As an employee of the paper, you can look up archived PDFs–which are occasionally purged, leaving no backups. Argh!
Online stories are difficult to find after about two weeks, but in Australia there’s a paid service called Newstext for the News Ltd (Murdoch) papers across the country. They would probably say they have a good argument for not giving free and unlimited access to online archives if newstext.com.au is making money for News Ltd.