The Grey Lady on The Blue

September 19, 2007 3:36 AM

The Grey Lady on The Blue Now the The New York Times subscriber wall has come tumbling down, I though it might be interesting to see what she's had to say about us over the years.

Of note, though not surprising, is how they rarely credit individual posters when quoting from the site.

posted by Optamystic to MetaFilter-related at 3:36 AM (37 comments total)

'It was like a story being reported by locusts,' Mr. Cadenhead said of the diligence of the Scooby Doos. 'They swept in and just pulled facts out of the air.' Heh.
posted by cgc373 at 4:28 AM on September 19, 2007

And "Huh," I guess, since my cut-n-paste there is supposed to have double quotation marks around Mr. Cadenhead's remark. What's up with them turning into single quotes?
posted by cgc373 at 4:29 AM on September 19, 2007

Severe drought in Zimbabwe has depleted the apostrophe harvest, leading to a shortage.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:00 AM on September 19, 2007 [6 favorites]

Does wholesale quotation of short comments count as fair use? You people should be out there demanding royalties for your insightful analysis.

Who does own what we post here anyway?
posted by public at 5:16 AM on September 19, 2007

Down in the bottom righthand corner there, public, it says:

© 1999-2007 MetaFilter Network LLC
All posts are © their original authors.
posted by cgc373 at 5:42 AM on September 19, 2007

I can't see the point of owning my posts until someone can tell me what they're worth.
posted by Jimbob at 6:17 AM on September 19, 2007

rcade has been too damn good for us since the whole popesquatting thing. Ah well.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:25 AM on September 19, 2007

Two-fifty, same as in town.
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:25 AM on September 19, 2007

What would be interesting is to look at the timing between an interesting FPP made on Metafilter, and that post's subject matter and content ending up being the focus of a brief article in the NYT about a week or two later. I wish I had examples I could cite here, but I'm certain it's happened a few times.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:26 AM on September 19, 2007

You can calculate the worth by dividing your total of posts and comments by number of favorites given to you, then subtract the number of favorites you've given, then multiply that result by $0
posted by sleevener at 6:26 AM on September 19, 2007 [5 favorites]

I'll pay you a penny per post, Jimbob.
(Offer not valid in Australia)
posted by Floydd at 6:26 AM on September 19, 2007

"I wanna see the body," wrote a commenter at Metafilter.com. Another simply wrote, "$."

Hell yes. It's (a) a variation on the thread dot (b) cited in the goddam NYT (c) who had no idea, and how could they.

That's a keeper.
posted by cortex at 6:28 AM on September 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

my formula works site-wide, not just for you personally, Jimbob
posted by sleevener at 6:29 AM on September 19, 2007

What is the subscriber wall that has tumbled down, for those of us not in the know?
posted by achmorrison at 6:33 AM on September 19, 2007

Interesting—Kaycee got us our first mention back in early 2001. I knew she had to be good for something.
posted by languagehat at 6:33 AM on September 19, 2007

NYT used to charge for access to most of their content, achmorrison—you had to sign up on the website to read most of the fresh content, and further pay for TimesSelect to have proper complete-and-unfettered access, if I understand correctly.
posted by cortex at 6:44 AM on September 19, 2007

And "Huh," I guess, since my cut-n-paste there is supposed to have double quotation marks around Mr. Cadenhead's remark. What's up with them turning into single quotes? (cgc373)

Something in the Preview process turns two single quotes ('') within tags into one -- we all learned that in the Crazy Thread That Never Really Happened.

I liked the parenthetical (Oh, btw, we attributed quotes to this fictional person at one point, but it was no big deal, plus someone told us she was real) statement in the Kaycee article.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:56 AM on September 19, 2007

Also single quotes not ''within tags'' -- I meant to edit that out.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:57 AM on September 19, 2007

Damn, could my post have had more typos in it? Ah, the hell with it. You get the gist.
posted by Optamystic at 7:02 AM on September 19, 2007

Thanks, cortex...

Guess I should keep up more with the blue.
posted by achmorrison at 7:02 AM on September 19, 2007

The NYTs never sold their online rights to NEXUS like most (all?) other major papers did, back in the day at least. Wonder what ever happened to $100/hour-to-search-newspapers NEXUS/LEXUS anyway. What other papers are still locked in?
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:13 AM on September 19, 2007

The Blue Lady on the Grey!
posted by klangklangston at 7:45 AM on September 19, 2007

That's no lady, that's me fi!
posted by cortex at 8:07 AM on September 19, 2007

What would be interesting is to look at the timing between an interesting FPP made on Metafilter, and that post's subject matter and content ending up being the focus of a brief article in the NYT about a week or two later. I wish I had examples I could cite here, but I'm certain it's happened a few times.

All the time I see stuff on the newspaper cover or on mainstream news websites where all I can think is how I knew more about it two days ago from the rest of the internet.

What I actually want to do if I get the chance sometime, though, is write something that scrapes Metafilter, Digg, etc. and watch things propagate. I specifically watched for one of my posts on Digg and a link to the Wikipedia article in my post was submitted within, if I remember right, 25 minutes. It would be interesting to include the NYT and CNN but harder without the ability to just match URLs.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:34 AM on September 19, 2007

Great post Optamystic. I would have never thought of doing this.
posted by eyeballkid at 9:07 AM on September 19, 2007

What other papers are still locked in?
Not Nexus, but WSJ is still mostly behind a paywall, and a few British papers too.

NYT's Select "experiment" was a big failure--they lost so many hits (and tons of ad $) and so much buzz by hiding their columnists--it was a really stupid decision. I bet it didn't even earn back the columnists' salaries.
posted by amberglow at 9:14 AM on September 19, 2007

Newspapers: yesterday's news in a couple of days
posted by Cranberry at 10:56 AM on September 19, 2007 [4 favorites]

newspapers contain very few YouTube videos, hence they must suck ass
posted by matteo at 2:26 PM on September 19, 2007 [1 favorite]

I bet it didn't even earn back the columnists' salaries.

They say it earned $10 million annually, but the potential future ad revenue generated by folks coming from Google, etc., swamped whatever subscription revenue they gained.
posted by mediareport at 4:25 PM on September 19, 2007

Yeah, but Thomas Friedman gets $6 million annually just in moustache-related expenses. And you don't even want to know how much it costs to wax Rich.
posted by klangklangston at 4:32 PM on September 19, 2007

Can someone please tell the Grey Lady that their subscription-free version of their site locks lynx into an infinite loop of redirects?

yours textually.
posted by nomisxid at 5:25 PM on September 19, 2007

lynx? Get with the times, man.

w3m 4 lyfe
posted by cortex at 5:55 PM on September 19, 2007

I find it utterly hilarious that I might be quoted in the NYT as some sort of credible "blogger" with an opinion worth putting to print. Trees might die, that my words might be read.

Yeesh. I am distinctly less impressed of the NYT as a "newspaper of reputation." Seems they'd print any ol' shit, if they're printing blog quotes.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:49 PM on September 19, 2007

although I guess since they haven't actually printed anything I've written, it may be they actually are selective about the quality of user...
posted by five fresh fish at 6:51 PM on September 19, 2007

They have a strict minimum of seven fresh fish and/or twenty-three stale ones.
posted by arto at 8:15 PM on September 19, 2007

elinks, motherfucker!
posted by blasdelf at 4:29 AM on September 20, 2007

Do you speak it?
posted by cgc373 at 4:36 AM on September 20, 2007 [1 favorite]