How Esquire magazine is mining its archives

The Atlantic has (had) a regular Flashbacks feature. It's become difficult to stumble upon online:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flshindx.htm

For example: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flshindx.htm

This is an introduction to two past articles, As We May Think, from the end of WWII, and The Computers of Tomorrow, from the sixties.

As We May Think is posted to HN at least once a year, and you may as well read it now. But really, the two articles should be read together.

From the Niemanlab posted article: "In the Times’ innovation report last year, its authors wrote that it needed to do a better job taking advantage its massive archives: “We can be both a daily newsletter and a library — offering news every day, as well as providing context, relevance and timeless works of journalism.”"

Yes, that's very much what I've been personally struggling to describe, as the future of an established and respected news outlet. I would refine that a bit, to be not just a library (of itself), but a consciously curated library, to which the current world is regularly considered against.

The only thing like that that I can find easily from the Atlantic's front page is the automatically generated archive. The Flashbacks linked above used to be more prominent online.

To relegate past articles to a generated archive list is a loss. Every outlet, particularly outlets like Atlantic and NYT, should have "scholars of themselves" regularly maintaining and calling on their publishing history.

This is great. While nearly all the other magazines and newspapers are on a race to the bottom, essentially competing with BuzzFeed and worse, Esquire is reminding its audience and itself how great it once was and what it should continue to aim for; it's cementing itself at a higher plane. Wired, are you paying attention?

If you thought this was cool, the new Esquire Classic just launched (http://classic.esquire.com/), and Nieman wrote a new, more current article on it (http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/how-esquire-built-esquire-c...).

Disclosure: Helped work on the new Classic site. (http://cantilever.co/)

This is a recent magazine thing - recycled news. I just saw a print magazine at Barnes and Noble with the cover "VE Day - Germany Defeated". Looked like a current magazine. Recycling is so much cheaper than paying reporters to find real news.

Esquire had famous writers in its glory days, so they have good content to recycle. They also used to have cute pinup pictures. Playboy was sort of an Esquire clone, but with sexier pictures, cutting into Esquire's market share.

> The standalone website launched in late March, with a twist: The full text of each story published on Esquire Classics is also sent out in a weekly email — the latest evidence that people’s inboxes are gaining appeal as a publishing platform.

My reading of NYT articles (as opposed to a page of links to an article, like their front page) comes from these three avenues:

  1. Their morning email to me.
  2. Links from HN.
  3. Going to their site directly. I almost never do this.

Note that I pay for an online subscription to NYT, but I still almost never go there directly. I like their article pages, but their link pages are redundant and messy.

I'll go so far to say that I wouldn't be a NYT subscriber if it hadn't been for their daily email (free) and HN links. Their general site never made me feel like I wanted to subscribe.

One of my favorite articles is from Esquire Classics. About the early days of the Silicon Valley: http://classics.esquire.com/wolfe-noyce/

I was slightly disappointed to find it wasn't about data mining the content. Still interesting though.