Old Content
Jon at River City Rapids has a post about inrich.com’s content expiration.
In case you are scoring at home or link blog posts to the the flailing, trying to stay relevant newspaper that is the Times-Dispatch, be warned they are killing links to stories more than about 50 days old.
Although it’s not at all uncommon for many newspapers to expire content from their systems, I happen to agree with Jon that storing news content, particularly local news, over a long term should be the de facto standard for media companies. I love the fact that I can read an article on the BBC site from 1999 about dead trees.
History provides insight to our future.
Jon asks that we “refrain from the server space excuses”, so I won’t go there (although it’s actually relevant to the discussion). More importantly though, Jon fails to address who will pay for the massive amounts of storage space required, the hardware to support it and the people to administer those machines in a mission critical, load-balanced environment.
[I don’t see any hands coming up in the audience of people willing to fork over money for that free content served up on inrich.com every day. Anyone? Anyone?]
To make matters worse, in case you haven’t heard, newspapers aren’t doing so well lately and advertising on the web sites hasn’t brought in the bucket loads of cash needed to offset the loss in print.
I’m not here to badger these points though, nor to pick on Jon.
I happen to agree with his premise—that local, historical news should be accessible via a newspaper’s web site—and I certainly don’t dispute the fact that there’s significant room for improvement on inrich.com (and the others run by MG).
Fortunately, there are people here that are working on those problems. Case in point, around noon tomorrow, a small team of (totally cool) IMD employees will update the web site for our CBS station in Mobile, AL, WKRG.com.
We’ve added a number of capabilities to the site that simply isn’t possible on some publishing platforms, including the ability to inexpensively store content for a very long time.
Other features (some visible to our customers, some not) include:
• RSS for everything
• Comments on all articles
• GeoRSS and KML for news
• Recipes for Peanut Butter Pie (oh yeah)
• A reader submitted photo gallery that actually works well
All I can say is that it’s a small step in the right direction.
[Jon - forgive me if you’ve addressed this on your blog before but what’s the deal with you not allowing either trackbacks or comments on your site?]
Edit: Never mind Jon. I found your post about why you don’t allow comments. Whatever. It’s your site. Your rules.
Tripp,
We’re all eagerly anticipating the launch of the all new WKRG.com!
Good luck!
August 01, 2007 at 10:39 AMTripp Fenderson
A little later than we expected due to an unforseen issue with our ad serving solution...but it’s up and running.
http://wkrg.com/
August 01, 2007 at 04:01 PMLooks great!
Where do I sign up to get my sites over to that?
August 01, 2007 at 04:10 PMTripp
while working on the WKRG build out i have given a good deal of taught about how to deal with our old media and the volumes that we create on a regular bases. and my train of taught right now… is to rank content by its popularity over time (which our new system can do quite well).
So after a few years if a piece of content does not meet a given “Popularity level” then perhaps it looses its attached image. Then further down the line it may loose its video asset. or that asset may be replaced with a more compressed version.
i am all for content that is available always. but some content just does not warrant it. for instance a video article about police road blocks which are done every few months. or the lines at the post office on tax day, traffic on 4th of July weekend etc. relevant content for the time but meaningless next time. in that case the text may do just fine.
the ultimate solution would be if the article does loose content over time based on popularity then that content would be still be available on a sub site as archived content.
August 01, 2007 at 09:48 PMTripp Fenderson
Great point David. Some content may not be worth hanging onto for years on end. In fact, 50 days may in fact be too long.
In that regard, it’s not unlike Funny or Die
Content on the site is categorized by views and rating. Over time, the content is either dumped into the crypt or immortalized.
You can read more about their process here:
http://www.funnyordie.com/about
Perhaps there’s a similar model for news content out there.
August 02, 2007 at 12:16 AM