I'm sure that the problems are very complicated. Bbut my feeling is that NFB
knows that it is making false promises that it cannot keep. It gets a great
deal of money from each state in order to produce Newsline in that
particular state. For example, it gets a hefty percentage of money set aside
for services for the blind in New York state because it is saying that it
provides all of this material. And, by the way, I think it does better with
The New York Times than with some other papers. However, it seems like when
I've gone looking for articles because I thought it would be easier to read
them on Newsline than somewhere else on the web, I've often not found them.
They have The Atlantic. Since I uusually want only one or two articles, I
thought it would be easier to read it from Newsline than downloading it from
BARD. But when I tried, I had the same experience, the article in which I
was interested, wasn't there.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Paul Wick
Sent: Tuesday, June 28, 2016 9:18 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: NFB Newsline mythology
Miriam,
I use newsline literally every day to read the New York Times, and the part
of my local paper that makes it on the service. It's essentially the same
problem you run into; unless they have a cooperating newspaper/magazine the
newsline content is otherwise scrubbed from websites so for example my local
paper might have on the typical day one quarter of the articles and up on
Newsline. I've spoken to Bob Watson, and he says it's an issue with the
algorithm they use, and it's not in the newspapers business interest to help
them out. I imagine mother Jones would feel differently.
Best,
Paul
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 28, 2016, at 4:09 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
assume that what people download to their phones or streams is the same as
I don't use Newsline that much. When I do, it's usually to read New
York Times book reviews on line. Every once in a while, an article
seems truncated or not there. That happened a lot a few years ago when
I was looking at The Guardian and discovered that Newsline omitted
some of the Guardian opinion pieces that I was seeing in other places
on the web. But so many articles come to me through email digests
with links to them that I don't depend on Newsline. However,
yesterday, on Democracy Now, there was a story about Shane Bower's
Mother Jones article on his under cover work at a private prison. So
I looked for the article in Mother Jones on Newsline. I found the
link, went to the article, didn't look at it, but went to the link for
it to be emailed to me. What was emailed to me was the headline and
about 2 sentences. So I asked NFB about it, specifically, if people
didn't check to see that the articles on their website were complete.
I sent it off by email to them and got a response from Bob Watson, I
think, who said that they don't always get the whole article when
there are hyper links and then he sent me, what he thought, without
bothering to look either, was the article. It was about 10 sentences.
I have since found it just with Google, asking for the Mother Jones
Article on private prisons. It has 5 written chapters, as well as some
video. But I've read part of it and saved the rest in a word document
so I can finish it at some point. It is 65 pages. I'd say that
Newsline is misrepresenting what they can do, at this point. What they
do is fine. But if they represent themselves as providing a magazine
or a newspaper, and then are only able to give a skeleton of some of
the articles, they should be aware of this and tell their readers. I
Miriam
