I recently noticed that the Newton Tab’s on-line archives seem to no longer stretch back very far. I suspect something changed on the Tab site relatively recently.
I just Google’d “Feast of the Falls” which was covered in the Tab less than a year ago. Google displayed a link to the Tab story but when you click on the link you get a “We cannot locate the link to the page you requested.” message from the Tab site. This would seem to indicate that those old stories were recently taken down since Google hasn’t caught up with the changes yet. I then searched for the same story from the Tab’s search box and also came up empty handed, so that means that the problem wasn’t that they had just moved the story to a different address.
After that, I tried “Newton election results” and did find a Tab story from the November 2012 election which of course is from well more than a year ago. I tried a few more searches and some old stories were there and others were gone.
I’ve always naively expected that anything I’ve seen on a news web site would always be available forever afterward. I noticed not long ago that there were also some sporadic disappearing archives on the Newton Patch too. So beware, a story that’s available today won’t necessarily be there tomorrow. If it’s something you may want later, make a copy while you can.
There was some discussion here this week about the fire at the new Wegmans location which happened some 15 years ago. I tried a Google for more details and found no news stories available. Five lives lost and the account of what happened seems to be lost because of website changes. Crazy
I think the new owners of the Newton TAB (New Media Investment Corp) wants to have people pay to access the old articles in the archives.
https://verify1.newsbank.com/cgi-bin/ncom/ZBCB/ec_paymentoptions
@Joshua Norman – If so, I don’t think they’ll get much business. When I searched for an old article there wasn’t any option presented to pay for it. There was just no trace of it. Maybe they’re in the middle of some kind of transition to pay-for-the-archives
@Hoss – Here’s a link to the Patch’s story about the 11th anniversary of the fire.
Jerry – When GateHouse switched the templates on all the websites a couple of months ago, the archives disappeared. It’s a huge loss. I’ve noticed lately, though, that some stories have been restored, but not much before 2012-2013. I’ve been meaning to ask Emily but I’m not sure I want to hear the answer…
@Hoss – If you haven’t seen it yet, NECN did an amazing job with their documentary “Forgotten Fire” –
http://vimeo.com/5425084
Michael — Thanks. That is quite disturbing.
It’s not just the old stories. Wicked Local is one of the worst put-together news websites I have ever browsed, and it got significantly worse when they changed the template.
For example:
It’s difficult to tell what the most important stories are. Right now, you’d think it would the indictment of a man for the recent carjacking spree, but that’s buried under a report that pulled pork is the most popular dish at a West Newton restaurant, and that local notables attended some some charity event, and so-on and so-forth.
It mixes the local and the national. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think of the Tab/Wicked Local when I look for national news. And it has the usual celebrity gossip click-bait, but that seems to infest every website these days.
It mixes opinion, letters and other kinds of article under the heading of ‘news’.
Where is the Tab blog? It’s somewhere below ‘The Dog Blog’, ‘Liberal Views’, ‘Home Improvement’ and ‘The Beer Nut’. There’s no link to it directly from the home page. If you wanted community engagement from your readership, would you not want it in a prominent place where folks can find it? As it is the last item was posted three weeks ago, and none of the recent posts have comments.
I suppose all of this is good news for Village 14, but it’s sad to see a local news source deteriorate to such an extent.
Robert –
I don’t think of any of it as good news for Village 14 because I don’t see us as competing websites. The community needs vehicles to deliver community news. Without them, there is no one to keep government officials accountable. And — no matter who the official is, no matter how sincere his/her intentions may be — government officials behave better when someone is watching. Probably most people do. But most people aren’t being paid by their neighbors.
@Gail Spector – I agree. A substantial number of items that get posted on Village14 for discussion are in response to news stories that originate in the Tab.
Gail,
True, V14 is not a news site. But it is increasingly the go-to place for local comment, and the Tab blog is a barren wasteland.
I agree with Jerry and Gail that we do not see the TAB as our competition. It’s so important to have paid journalists watching the hen house. But I share the disappointment with the lost content. Losing the archives is like losing part of our city’s history. For example, how many times has someone said that “We need to learn a lesson from the building of Newton North.” Well unfortunately a good deal of the history of that project now seems to have vanished.
As for those having a hard time finding the TAB Blog, please know that it’s listed on the Village 14 Blogroll, in the column on the right.
The story about that fire always saddens me. You see, my first real, actual tech job (while still in HS, 1975), was with the owner of the accounting firm (one of the five victims of the fire), David Stulin.
As Gail speculated, the issue with TAB archives is related to the switch to our new website.
This is outside my area of expertise, so I asked one of our IT people to explain what’s happening. Here’s what he had to say:
“We moved a massive amount of data for all 160 wicked local sites from one database to another with a move to a different website management system. We targeted as best we could the hundreds of thousands of articles and galleries to their new home. But there is more cleanup work to do, and it will continue until we fix the issues.”
Although some of our dailies have recently added pay walls, the TAB is not currently charging for access to our site.
This matter deserves an inquiry by the BoA. We shouldn’t be set back in time where we need to look up articles like the Boylston Street Office fire and the Oak Hill bus tragedy in Reader’s Guide (or whatever the newspaper equiv.) and ask a librarian to pull the microfiche.
I also wanted to report that we have a handy new link to the TAB blog on our homepage.
If you visit newton.wickedlocal.com, you will see three rectangular images at the top of the page. The middle one has a photo of Crystal Lake and the words “Newton TAB blog” under it. One click will deliver you directly to the old familiar WordPress site.
It’s worth a visit, I’d say. Definitely not a “barren wasteland,” although we’d love to hear some more voices commenting over there. Jim and I will post and reply as often as we can, but keep in mind that we will be short-staffed until June 9 when our new reporter starts work — and we occasionally have a pesky thing called a “newspaper” distracting us from our digital life.
@Emily Costello – Thanks for commenting. Good to hear that the archives still exist but are in the process of being re-indexed.
My wife and I just moved to Newton from Needham, where the paper edition of the Needham Times is delivered to every house. Is that also the case in Newton? We never see to receive it, so I’m wondering how it works here.
We do pick up the print edition at CVS and it seems to be of very good quality in the same vein as the Needham Times, especially on policy issues. The big difference that I’ve noticed is the police report – in Needham it’s always been quite exhaustive, but in Newton it seems to be more piecemeal and delayed by a couple of weeks. Is there any plan to make it more consistent and timely? The Needham Times has always said that it’s the most popular part of their paper.
Also, if you could fix the website to get rid of the undersized scrolling pane, as well as the constant “up-to-the minute” popups, it would make for a much more enjoyable experience.
Just my two cents!
Emily,
I am very pleased that you replaced the celebrity click-bait with a direct link to the Tab blog. When you go direct to the blog via that link, I see that there are indeed posts which are more recent than three weeks old, but if you click on ‘Blogs’ in the navigation bar, scroll down and click on ‘Newton Tab Blog’, then the latest entry shown is dated 22nd April.
Also, you might want to do something about the PHP error message that can be found mid-way down the front page.
Greg: Nor is V14 immune to such problems. I keep getting ERROR: Unreadable CAPTCHA token file messages.
Robert: Can you explain that a little more? When do you get that message? And is any one else experiencing that?
Greg: It tends to happen if one forgets to put in the CAPTCHA, get a message warning of no CAPTCHA, hit the back button, fill in the CAPTCHA, and then hit submit.
I guess we CAPTCHA’D you off-guard!
Except that this time it worked.
@Greg, I get the error message a lot, even when I am using the correct CAPTCHA code. The workaround I use is to copy the post, refresh the page, and try again with the new CAPTCHA code.
Guys if you are Village 14 Bloggers you should be logged in to WordPress to comment. That way you won’t get the CAPTCHA at all.
In the meantime I’ve made some changes in the settings regarding the token error.
Ted let us know if you get that error again, you may have to close your browser and open it again to stop the errors. Hopefully that issue will be fixed.
I recommend using the FireFox browser.
About the archives, my sources tell me that the decision was made by (Greg you know who!) to basically abandon a lot of content when making the switch to the new CMS platform.
Anything is possible at GateHouse now, but perhaps it may have been a miss-understanding of the technology. Or perhaps not including any technical folks on the team deciding on the new platform vendor, who knows. I can only assume my sources are correct, as, well, there are no archives now are there.
In any event this has caused a huge kerfuffle as you may imagine, hopefully someone is working to get them back at some point.
By the way, I always put the CAPTCHA code in first, before I comment, if I’m not logged in.
Also I recommend allowing cookies in your browser
s settings. If you don’t want everyone’s cookies at least allow village14.com and blogsofsteeel.com to place cookies in your browser.
@Rob: V14 rocks. The TAB Blog? Well, rhymes with ‘ducks’.
I get the CAPTCHA error code whenever I write a post that takes more than about three minutes to compose. So I’ll hurry this along…