Clippers and other flightless birds

Strategic Finance, August, 2008 by Michael Castelluccio

* MAYBE IT'S JUST A GENERATIONAL THING, but there still are people who periodically clip articles from the newspapers. There used to be many more of them--clippers, that is. Academics would cut and save magazine and journal articles, as would freelance writers and ordinary people for whom the correct facts mattered as much as the story line.

But last year, at the Davos World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the chairman of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, said, "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either." He further explained that The New York Times was on a journey that would conclude the day the printing presses stop and the server drives continue humming. That day will mark the end of the transition.

At the same conference, Sulzberger insisted, "We are curators, curators of news. People don't click onto The New York Times to read blogs. They want reliable news that they can trust."

But that's exactly what the clippers are, or were--curators, creating their own news archives, some as large as file cabinets, some in smaller boxes. So where is the future for those who trust their memories only slightly more than Wikipedia, with no absolute faith in either?

Just as you can cause the extinction of a species by altering or eliminating its habitat, if you take the large arm span of newsprint, such as the Sunday Times, from the clipper, you will have removed its habitat, or, rather, moved it behind glass. Sure, you can now print an article and save a copy that conveniently fits on 8.5" X 11" sheets instead of those long-tailed narrow clippings that begin to yellow as soon as you put them away, but clippers tend to be too traditional to want to mess with printer setups.

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The Curator Button

Thankfully, what the Times chairman will take away by eventually removing the habitat, his company has returned in the form of a curator button. Unlike the usual print/share/e-mail line menu that appears at the top or bottom of news stories online, The New York Times has updated its sharing offer to include My Times File--a free virtual file cabinet for saved articles, recipes, editorials, or whatever from the Web pages of the newspaper. Saving the articles on the paper's servers lets you access your clippings on any computer that can reach the www.nytimes.com website.

To set up your file box, you create an account. It's free and requires only a user name and password. Then when you log on to NYTimes.com, you'll notice many of the articles have a SAVE icon (file folder with a cross) in the top right area. Click on SAVE, and the article is immediately packed away into your Times File.

To sort your clippings, you can click "edit" next to the entry and give it a tag. Sort "Recipes," "Kruger editorials," "Gadget reviews," "Foreign banks," whatever you're collecting, categorized in any way. Then, instead of digging through a box of folded articles later, just click Cloud View in the My Tags box, and you have your categories listed as hyperlinks that will "pull out" just the recipes or just the gadget reviews. The more conventional user can opt for the List function instead of the Cloud.

And there's something else you can't do with a stuffed shoebox: There's a Search feature at the top of the My Saved Pages area. As you collect more articles, this feature becomes more valuable.

At the top of the File page, there's a Most Popular tab next to the My Saved Pages tab. Click on it, and a list of the most popular saved pages shows up in three separate lists: Last 24 Hours, Last 7 Days, and Last 30 Days. The number of those who save the pages is listed for each entry. Not enough encouragement to read more widely in the paper? Well, then, below each entry on the Most Popular lists are category tags in case you want to see more articles about "media," or "health," or even "Wow, I can't believe that."

Once you're hooked and have retired your banker box with the yellowed clippings to the basement, you might want to add the Times File Browser Button to the toolbar of your browser window. You can do this with a single drag-and-drop move. Step-by-step instructions are on the help page. Then you can import your bookmarks from either Internet Explorer or Netscape, which will show up on a Topic titled "Imported Bookmarks."

I think you get the idea of what The Times is actually doing. They are enabling a single information portal. Not a bad idea if you're a regular, or even occasional, reader of the paper. The company will make money on the advertising on the pages, as well as some revenue from historic searches and requests for articles. You can search the paper back to 1851. The articles are presented in PDF format. Those that are in the Public Domain (1851-1922) can be accessed for free. Articles from 1923-1980 and those classified as Premium Articles from 1981-Present can be purchased in article-packs. Much of today's edition, though, can be clipped and filed away free.