UPDATE2: A report by Brian Knowlton on NYT editor Bill Keller’s reaction to the deleted clips in today’s staff meeting:

“Tom, in case you haven’t gotten a report from Bill Keller’s Q&A session with the newsroom yesterday, he dealt with the IHT links question (which I and apparently somebody else from the IHT had sent in). The migration, he said, was “taking longer than we hoped, but these articles will be accessible through our web site or through Google, by searching” … They had wanted to reconnect the old links, he said, but “reconnecting all those links was an incredibly onerous, expensive, labor-intensive process. We have not entirely given up on the idea that we might do that, but it has not been at the top of our priority list.”"

UPDATE1: At bottom of post an estimate that the bad links are costing the NY Times US$100k per month.

Following my series of postings about The New York Times deleting links to the entire archive of iht.com articles, I just received the below note from Diane McNulty, Executive Director of Community Affairs and Media Relations at The New York Times. (She said I could blog our exchange.)

Thomas,

We are in the process of migrating all IHT original content dating back to 1991 to nytimes.com. We are also working with Google to index the articles so they are searchable on Google.

Some of your articles have already been migrated http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=Thomas+Crampton&srchst=cse. We will be in touch with you when the process is complete.

Best,

Diane M.

In a subsequent email Diane added that there was no formal timing for resolving the situation, but it was a “work in progress”.

While very pleased to hear from The New York Times that they are actively dealing with the issue, this response – without a timetable and without a clear statement about keeping the URLs of iht.com articles – is not substantially different from the message posted since last month every time you try to go to reach the URL of an iht.com article.

(I waited roughly a month before posting about the situation in the hopes that it would get resolved, but it has not.)

Please, former colleagues at the NYT, restore links to the iht.com articles before too many of them go dead.

As Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in my interview with him about this situation: It is a shame to squander a web property with so many good links.

Killing links to iht.com articles is bad for journalists, readers and NYT shareholders.

UPDATE: I now have an estimate of just how much the bad links are costing NYT shareholders. According to calculations by Rick Burnes of the Global Tech Products blog:

From a business perspective, the NYT is throwing away money — at least $100,000 every month the links are broken. According to Compete.com, IHT.com was getting over 1.5 million visitors/month before it shut down. If a third of those visitors were from search and direct old links, 500,000 visitors a month are hitting the dead end in the image above, instead of the page they were looking for. To buy that traffic from Google at $.20/click, you’d have to pay $100,000 a month. Add that $100,000 to the value of the SEO authority IHT.com accrues from its 3.9 million inbound links, and you have a sense of the money The Times is leaving on the table.