Google Reveals Times' In-Progress Article Archives

By Eric Richardson
Published: Tuesday, July 15, 2008, at 07:51PM

L.A. Times: articles.latimes.com

Recent articles tagged with the keyword for Downtown on the Times' new articles site.

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — When running a search today I ran across http://articles.latimes.com, a site that appears to be the Times’ attempt to create a search friendly index for its articles. A quick browse around reveals a good concept, but plenty of rough edges and questionable implementation ideas. It also offers an interesting view on the ebb and flow of Times coverage.

The site is implemented as a Content Management System (CMS) running on Ruby on Rails. I know that because some links on the site don’t work, leading to a Rails debugging error message.

The site’s archives go back to 1997, and it offers a number of different methods for finding stories. Clever is a view that allows you to select any bylined writer and see their stories. Less clever is the dozens of entries that got a phone number attached to the author’s name, leading the alphabetizing algorithm quite astray.

Stories are also organized by keyword. Downtown’s: downtown-(los-angeles)). Navigating to see more stories on a keyword currently brings the aforementioned error.

Another clever feature: a year view that lists top keywords for each month. Negating that cleverness: the keywords listed link to a page that doesn’t maintain that sense of time, showing any time the keyword was used.

And that, in a nutshell, sums up the site’s current state. It’s interesting, but buggy and currently disappointing. And with the Times’ ongoing layoffs, it’s too bad that there many not be anyone left writing stories by the time all the kinks finally get worked out.

Comments

skidrowdude writes:

Dude- great comments- I have too many more to add, but I will refrain for now.

LA Times was cool 20 years ago when I had to have the Sunday paper w/ by brunch. Now I need the web, and it does not include http://www.latimes.com/ what a terrible site.

I have some friends that work at the LA Times and I just hope they get a great severance package, as in the long term, that company is in a mess.

# on Jul.15.2008 AT 11:08 PM

Gregg Hartling writes:

Hi Eric,

Thanks for posting about http://articles.latimes.com. I manage the LA Times development team that built this application, which came about as an offshoot of a separate project in need of a permanent place to link to articles, something the main http://www.latimes.com/ site doesn’t do right now. As you’ve rightly pointed out, it’s still quite rough around the edges, which is why we haven’t done any publicity around the application (other than getting it indexed by search engines.)

The good news is that our editorial and product teams are excited about the possibilities for this application and we’re devoting more time to its development and user experience. A number of the bugs you pointed out are already fixed in the version that’s in testing right now. We’re also working to dig back further into the archives, a process that occasionally reveals surprises like the one you mentioned where a writer’s byline included their phone number back in the ’90s.

There are some obvious things on our roadmap, like doing a better job of surfacing the important articles from a given day/month/year, and using some of the metadata in more interesting ways, but we want this application to be a resource for the community, and so we’d like to hear any additional suggestions for improvement. (The “keyword for a month maintaining its sense of time” is a very good one – that bug is my fault, in fact).

Thanks very much for the even-handed criticism. We will be continually improving!

# on Jul.21.2008 AT 11:02 AM