Science Times aggregating old NYT web copy
After I knocked The New York Times three days ago for inserting a link for “wrinkle” in a story on shar-peis (the link went to a Health Guide explaining that “wrinkles are creases in the skin”) I was surprised to open Science Times yesterday and discover the shar-pei story there. (I use Times Reader, not newsprint; so I can’t be sure this was also true on paper. In the Reader, the story was clearly part of Tuesday’s Science Times.)
For a moment, I thought I had uncannily developed a way to read Times stories several days before they run. I immediately tried to conjure up tomorrow’s stock market story.
Then I realized, to my dismay, that the Times was using stories in Science Times that had run days earlier on the web. The same was true for a story on competing memories that appeared Tuesday in Science Times but had run a day before online.
Neither one of these stories is what you would refer to strictly as breaking news. And Science Times generally runs features, commentaries, and evergreens of one sort or another–not breaking news. Still, there is something a little disturbing about a newspaper rerunning stories it has published earlier on the web.
If newspapers have any reason to exist on the mew media landscape, it is because they tell us what happened right up until deadline. The latest on the Japanese nukes, or from the New England Journal of Medicine or the CDC, let’s say. And the Times often features longer, more analytical news stories, in which it tries to surpass what can be done with a quick blog post or a short item on the web.
But if the Times is rerunning stories from the web, which I could have read online days earlier, is that not one more reason to discard the paper in favor of the web? We can only guess at the thinking behind this strategy. I would welcome a comment from a Times editor defending or explaining the practice.
And I would never trouble Tracker readers with annoying or silly links.
- Paul Raeburn
March 23rd, 2011 at 1:07 pm
“But if the Times is rerunning stories from the web, which I could have read online days earlier, is that not one more reason to discard the paper in favor of the web?”
The Times is putting up a pay wall this month, so there may not much difference between paper and web as far as cost is concerned.
“I use Times Reader, not newsprint; so I can’t be sure this was also true on paper.”
You can’t even be sure something was on the web site. The Times changes headlines on the web, and, for all I know, contents of some stories.
March 23rd, 2011 at 5:11 pm
I don’t understand the objection here. Embargoes on Nature and Science papers lift on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s not often that we get an article on those papers into the daily news section the next day. So the story has to wait several days till the Science Times comes out. But we can still post it earlier than that on the web. So why not?
March 24th, 2011 at 10:02 am
It may be hard to figure the business advantage for the Times, but one can think of one practical benefit in the newsroom: fewer corrections including picky picky little ones to put on p. 2. The Times’s punctiliousness over this is a marvel.
For all I know it even runs corrections on that page for web-only material, but if so I have not noticed. Assuming not, then having a breaking news or embargoed story up for a day or more prior to its imprint on paper is likely to snag a few correx from readers, esp. those annoying mistakes on date, name spelling, job titles, historical sequences, and other B matter that would never get corrected at most paper’s unless a letter from a lawyer is involved.
There may also be a slippery slope here. It’s normal at many newspapers to run a story this afternoon that won’t be on paper till tomorrow. Once that’s the practice, especially once “tomorrow” stories get held a few times for space, it’s easy to run anything right away on line, soon as it gets final edit. That’s good by one fundamental metric. Prompt delivery of news is the business’s primary service.
March 24th, 2011 at 11:28 am
Carl,
I think it’s great for the Times to publish your consistently excellent work and other stories when news breaks or embargoes lift. That’s what newspapers are supposed to do, and I never liked the practice of holding things until Tuesday.
I expect the same kind of news when I open Science Times. I don’t want to see reprints of stories that have already appeared on the web. I’m looking for fresh, exciting, new stuff.
As I said, I use Times Reader, so I don’t see the stories until Tuesdays. But now that I’ve discovered some are running earlier, I feel a little hoodwinked. Friends and colleagues are seeing some stories days before I am. As a news guy, I don’t like that. And I suspect many readers, whether reporters or not, would feel the same way.
March 24th, 2011 at 11:33 am
Charlie,
I agree, as I said in my response to Carl, that prompt delivery of the news is a virtue. One would hope that editors work as hard to correct mistakes before web publication as they do before print publication, even though the process will never be perfect.
But if stories are being published online and sometimes being held for space in the paper, that would seem to drive readers to the web if they want news promptly. The practice by the Times of running stories days earlier on the web would seem to drive its readers to the web. And maybe that’s what the Times wants; I don’t know.