Page N&Ot Found
Chip Alexander has a little fluff piece in the News & Observer that's a fun read. It mainly chronicles Sean May's text messaging during the Duke game, and segues into a standard little ditty about UNC's improvement and potential for the post-season. I don't mean to belittle it - it's one of the best short pieces I've read this year, and folks should take a look.
But that's not the exciting thing about this post. The exciting - for sufficiently small values of "exciting" I admit - thing is that if you're reading this blog in March, and click on that link? You'll read the article I'm talking about.
No really, this is a special thing.
The News & Observer, at least since the time it parted ways with The Nando Times, never kept things online. Web pages had lifetimes of mayflie, dissappearing within a week of publication. And this was incredibly stupid. After paying the writers and photographers, after selling the advertising space, after formatting and putting it on the web in the first place, in other words after paying all the costs of running a news operation to begin with, they decided that just letting the pages sit there, attracting eyeballs and Google pagerank and generally generating consumers interest was somehow not cost-effective. Disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, but I still can't revisit what Carlton Tudor thought after the Wake-UNC triple-overtime drama that kicked off last year's ACC season. Because it's not like having more work by your columnist out there might encourage folks to read their new stuff, or even pay to have it delivered to their doorstep or anything.
Maybe it was the onset of newspaper blogging that made them realize that promoting their own articles only work if they stick around. Maybe Carlton Tudor didn't want his entire web presence to be under the name "Toot." I don't know. I'm glad they did it though. I know I'll be more likely to link to them now.
(And with a website like Tar Heel March on your side, that'll bring in a good, 2, maybe 3 readers a decade. The Daniels' are going to be rolling in the dough.)
But that's not the exciting thing about this post. The exciting - for sufficiently small values of "exciting" I admit - thing is that if you're reading this blog in March, and click on that link? You'll read the article I'm talking about.
No really, this is a special thing.
The News & Observer, at least since the time it parted ways with The Nando Times, never kept things online. Web pages had lifetimes of mayflie, dissappearing within a week of publication. And this was incredibly stupid. After paying the writers and photographers, after selling the advertising space, after formatting and putting it on the web in the first place, in other words after paying all the costs of running a news operation to begin with, they decided that just letting the pages sit there, attracting eyeballs and Google pagerank and generally generating consumers interest was somehow not cost-effective. Disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, but I still can't revisit what Carlton Tudor thought after the Wake-UNC triple-overtime drama that kicked off last year's ACC season. Because it's not like having more work by your columnist out there might encourage folks to read their new stuff, or even pay to have it delivered to their doorstep or anything.
Maybe it was the onset of newspaper blogging that made them realize that promoting their own articles only work if they stick around. Maybe Carlton Tudor didn't want his entire web presence to be under the name "Toot." I don't know. I'm glad they did it though. I know I'll be more likely to link to them now.
(And with a website like Tar Heel March on your side, that'll bring in a good, 2, maybe 3 readers a decade. The Daniels' are going to be rolling in the dough.)
--T.H. Friday, February 10, 2006
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