So, this is disappointing. In the course of doing some research for this post about Mitt Romney’s views on the Vietnam war, I unsurprisingly happened upon several links to the Globe’s multi-part, in-depth series on Mitt Romney’s life, called “The Making of Mitt Romney,” originally published in 2007. I wanted to check it out, and perhaps refresh my recollection of some details that I had forgotten.
But when I clicked the links, I found that they no longer went to Globe articles. What used to be the link for the entire series, http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/specials/romney/, now points not to a series of articles, but rather to a chapter outline for Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s book, “The Real Romney,” complete with “buy the book” links. And links that once went directly to the separate articles (there were 7), such as http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/specials/romney/articles/part1_side_2/, or http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/specials/romney/articles/part6_main/, now go to a blank page.
This is unfortunate for a lot of reasons. First, there are many posts (like this one at Daily Kos) that used those Globe stories as sources at one time or another. Because the stories have been removed, the posts no longer have reliable sources attached to them, so it’s difficult to know whether the posts are accurate or not. Second, those stories were an extremely useful resource about Romney’s life, and it’s a resource that is now no longer widely available. Presumably, all the information in those stories (and more, no doubt) appears in the Globe reporters’ book about Romney, and one assumes that’s why the stories have been removed from boston.com – it’s hard to interpret the “buy the book” links on the chapter outline page any other way. Third, it just seems like poor form to remove articles from a newspaper’s website simply because they happen to overlap with the content of a book that a couple of the paper’s reporters would like to sell more copies of.
The “Making of Mitt Romney” series is still available in the Globe’s subscriber-only archives.