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NY Times quotes my blog, but no linkback

I want to say a big THANK YOU to the New York Times and then take my former employer to task for what may be a failure to understand the Internet. (Or just an editing oversight)

The Thank You:

First the thank you: You paid attention to a short post on my simple WordPress blog about how my International Herald Tribune articles were deleted in the merger of the nytimes.com and iht.com sites.

In simple terms, it was as if The New York Times had dragged the IHT archives into the street and burned them.

There were no links or archives to the hundreds of articles I wrote for the IHT in a career spanning five continents and dozens of countries writing about a few disease outbreaks, several civil wars and a great week at the Cannes film festival.

More broadly than my own concerns, however, the NY Times effectively “nuked itself” by needlessly shutting down a valuable web property. With a simple redirect of those links, the NY Times could create a powerhouse site that adds the IHT’s value rather than just shutting it down.

My posting on the issue spread via high influence Twitterers, was quoted by a significant number of high profile blogs and even written about by TIME, Reuters and other mainstream media outlets.

In the fallout, The New York Times has contacted me in the form of the spokesperson, Diane McNulty, the Chief Search Strategist, Marshall Simmonds and the Director of Search Strategy, Matthew Brown.

Now Richard Perez-Pena, one of the great Times reporters with whom I shared a corner of the newsroom, wrote a brief item  detailing incident.

Richard quotes Marc S. Frons, chief technology officer of New York Times Digital, as saying that the problem is 80 percent solved.

I can only presume that many of my stories are among the 20 percent still waiting to be restored. A search of Myanmar and my name only turns up the stories on that country that I wrote for The New York Times, a fraction of the number I have written about that country for the IHT.

In any case, I blogged and you listened. Thank you.

Not meaning to be ungrateful, but:

My thank you is, however, tempered by a shortcoming in Richard’s article that may show a misunderstanding of the blogosphere (or perhaps just an edit desk oversight.)

While the story quotes my blog, it does not - as every blogger would - link to the original posting.

Does this matter?

I think so. The new media landscape is defined by the link economy. By giving more links, bloggers and publications participate in the global online conversation while also improving their standing online.

A further reason: Linkbacks quickly bring readers straight to the source material for a story.

(If The New York Times has a policy against links, they are better than what BusinessWeek used to do: The magazine actually blocked Don MacAskill of Smugmug from deeplinking to an article written about him.)

I therefore conclude this thank you note with one final request: Once you finish with the remaining 20 percent of archiving and links to my stories, please consider adding a link to my blog from the article.

Sincerely,

Thomas Crampton

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Technorati Tags: Diane McNulty, iht, International Herald Tribune, Marshall Simmonds, Matthew Brown, New York Times, nytimes, Richard Perez-Pena