[WikiEN-l] Online Newspapers Considering Subscription Model

[Andrew Gray]

2009/8/7 Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com>:

> I'm wondering if, if newspaper content goes behind a pay wall, we
> would really have to be giving citation information that pertains to
> the actual printed copy of the article, ie, Newspaper, Print Date and
> Page Number?

We should really be giving publication date (which usually equates to
print date, if only because the newspapers fudge it accordingly)
anyway, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. If someone's
quoting news stories without saying where they're from, hit them. ;-)

> Also, though you don't see a problem and are comfortable with how you
> would handle this development I wonder how you can be sure how editors
> (particularly anon and policy ignorant editors) will respond to this
> new turn of events. People will have an entirely reasonable
> expectation that if they click on a citation link that they will,
> indeed, be taken to a page that backs up any given assertion (and not
> a registration screen). If that doesn't happen they may respond by
> removing the link and the content it was supposed to verify.

It's interesting to note that we don't tend to find this with
scholarly sources - I don't think I've ever noticed anyone removing
JSTOR links or the like because "I can't see them", whilst people
*will* happily remove links to commercially locked news stories. I
think the expectation there is that we are used to one being
restricted-access, but we expect the other to be accessible, so if
it's not we assume something's wrong or it ought to be replaceable.

If news goes routinely to paid-access, well, we'll change our
expectations accordingly!

More broadly, there's a good side and a bad side to this. The bad
side, yes, a lot of our existing references will break, and it'll be a
bit harder to write good, robustly cited, articles in the future. On
the plus side, it might help wean us off an over-reliance on news
stories and (often slapdash) journalism as our preferred sources, and
that's got to be beneficial.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk