The NYT acquired the International Herald Tribune and proceeded to do the following.
From Thomas Crampton's blog:
Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career
Dear Mr. Sulzberger,
Hell hath no fury like a reporter deleted.
I have a major personal and professional gripe against The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
For more than a decade, as you know, I enjoyed a wonderful and globe-trotting career at both newspapers. I would recommend anyone to work for these publications. You were a great employer, I had great colleagues and both publications are great to read.
That said, your normally web-savvy team just made one of the most boneheaded moves done by a major news website since the dawn of the Internet.
When you merged the IHT and NY Times websites about one month ago I saw real logic and had high hopes. The NY Times has been leading innovation in online journalism for quite some time, while IHT.com was run on a shoestring budget out of Paris, by a feverishly overworked team.
Despite their small budget and small team, however, the IHT website managed to build an online global media powerhouse often outranking the NY Times website on international stories in Google News.
The IHT website earned an ever-increasing pagerank due to all of the blogs and sites linking to stories there. (Based on the number of Internet pages linking back to a site, pagerank starts at 1 and rises to 10. A page with a Google rank of 5 will show up higher than a page with a Google rank of 3 and the IHT.com grew to match nytimes.com at a Google rank of 9. You can check pagerank of any site here.)
So, what did the NY Times do to merge these sites?
They killed the IHT and erased the archives.
1- Every one of the links ever made to IHT stories now points back to the generic NY Times global front page.
2- Even when I go to the NY Times global page, I cannot find my articles. In other words, my entire journalistic career at the IHT - from war zones to SARS wards - has been erased.
Boneheaded is treating it lightly. The NYT erased a world-class library. They could have kept it online and served advertising on those pages and made a decent revenue stream but no, it wasn't relevant to the web designers so off to the bit bucket. Somehow I am not surprised by this... Hat tip to BoingBoing for the link.
